Financial & Travel Musings

You might think that you’d need to employ some highly paid computer consultant to soup up your online profile but these days that’s simply not the case.

For one thing you need to remember that a consultant may well come with a wealth of experience behind them but on the other hand they’re only “yours” for a fairly short period of time. The DIY approach means that you get to gain experience with an seo tool yourself. Sounds complicated? Sure, it sounds complicated but that doesn’t mean that it is complicated as many of these tools are very, very easy to use.

Where you’ll generally need to sit back and do some thinking is with the results of these tools running over your site. That said, even here it’s a lot easier than it used to be and definitely isn’t something to be scared of.

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Although you can pay a whole lot of money to some consultant to soup up your website, there’s an awful lot of free seo tools knocking around which can go a long way to checking out what needs doing (if anything).

Free doesn’t mean low quality either. There are excellent tools around to analyse the keywords on your site and compare it with those of your competitors. In years gone by that would have cost your serious money but these days very good tools are around to do it free.

In fact there are a whole raft of excellent free tools. The problem is working out what to do with them, what the results mean and what you can do to correct any problems that are thrown up. Take, for example, the incoming links. Although more is better, how many is “enough”? That depends on what your competitors results are (you can use these tools on them as well as on your own site). If you don’t have “enough”, what do you do about it? That’s easy too: just subscribe to one of the many directory listings services and stand back as the incoming links start rolling in.

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It hardly seems like a week since we were getting seriously annoyed with the UK court system but it is.

This is quite a busy time for us in a lot of different areas and for a variety of reasons.

Since we weren’t too pleased about the approach taken by our UK hosting service re the above, we took the opportunity to move the key blogs over to America where the First Amendment gives writers and free speech generally a whole lot more protection than the UK does in some areas. That was a surprisingly seamless transition but has had the effect of seeming to change the composition of our readers for reasons that aren’t readily apparent at the moment (it’s not the geotargeting of searches as that usually doesn’t affect blogs that much).

That move has had the side-effect of creating another blog for us back in the UK should we want to use that though we’ve not thought a whole lot about that as yet.

Separately from that we’re starting to gear up for John starting school here in September. It seems like a long way ahead at the moment but already we’ve a couple of appointments at the school in May relating to that.

I’m still plugging away with the Child Development course (ED209) which seems to have ramped up the quantity of work required of us over the last few weeks. At the moment it’s almost as though it were a 90 point course rather than a 60 point one. I’m still currently sticking (just!) to my schedule which is running 4 weeks ahead of the official calendar but I can’t see me keeping up that lead much longer if the quantity of work doesn’t go down a little. On that front, the next book is on children’s learning of language which I did a lot of during the English course last year so, in theory, that should be easier to get through. What it has taught me is to investigate further when comments on a course say that it’s “hard going” as this one did. Fortunately, next years course doesn’t have comments like that!

Tomorrow’s a public holiday here so we’re heading off somewhere or at least hope to if the weather is reasonable which, at the moment, doesn’t seem too likely (after all, it is a public holiday so what do you expect?).

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