SEO Cork

 Getting your site to rank on Google is difficult and needs lots of work.  Just having the website is part of the puzzle.  Having an SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) plan is a key part of a Cork business' plan for SEO Cork domination in their area.

It is usually a tiered plan of content, media and technical expertise.  Hiring a company with digital marketing expertise and the SEO knowledge will help.  Grange Web Design does this and is a company you can rely on to get improved rankins through a steady pace of work and SEO planning.

Search Engine Optimisation is the process of improving your ranking on the Google results pages

Approximately 50 percent of all internet traffic is organic. People who do not know about your business will not arrive to the website so SEO planning is important.

Kill Paper

This morning I sat down at my desk and looked at a scrap of paper that I had there that basically said Stop Sign on it scribbled.   Next to it was a phone number and that was it.  I had no idea what it was related to.  However since I started using Evernote this is happening less and less as I made a conscious decision to become more and more electronic with my notes and data as I move around a lot.  I also have started to use Dropbox more and more as I am collaborating with more and more people.  The secret however is consistency and developing a filing and writing style that allows you to keep your life both work and social organised.  Time is precious these days and having lots of dirty post-its and scribbled notes just does not help you make the most of your time.

My goal is to be 5% more effective this month through use of tools and effective note taking.  I am also now using the Pomodoro technique to focus on improving my project note taking and overall approach to my work day.

Firefox 8 is Released

I left Firefox some time ago when I started using Chrome as I liked the light ue of Chrome over the cluttered (mostly caused by me of course) mix of add ons that had made it quite a best to use. But now there is a new release available that disables add ons when you install it and that is something that attracts me from the start. might give it a whirl or perhaps wait for Firefox 9!

Dropbox

Dropbox is by far one of my favourite tools these days. It is easy to use offers cloud storage and is perfect for sharing on projects with friends. David Pogue wrote an excellent article on this recently that shows how it dropbox can be used for writing a book. Check it out on http://www.dropbox.com

Upgrade Your Browser Today - Its Free!

I notice more and more these days that there are more and more browser versions now spread across the market.  From the dreaded IE6 to the latest Chrome or Firefox.  this means that you may see different things depending on what version you have.  It is a simple task to keep your browser up to date.  I tend to stay one version behind the latest one available to allow me be up to date but not with a browser that may show times that others may not see.

I am a firm believer that browsers should expire like bad food.  If you had a car for 10 years it would be on its last legs but there are many people out there with browsers of that age that should now be long gone.  

Upgrade today - it costs nothing and you will be amazed if you are a few versions behind at the feature set available.

Switch Off Friday

Today is switch off Friday.  Resolve to move away from any technical device. phone or laptop.  Put it down.  Avoid the TV.  Grab a book put your feet up and develop the powers of concentration that tech can often take away from yo.  I was reading about the Pomodoro technique recently and its premise is to do 25 minutes tasks without interruption.  I think it is great and even find this hard to keep with.  I have terrible focus in the past number of years and I firmly blame spending too much time in front of a computer.

I Alt-Tab, flick from pager to page, pound out a quick blog and forget where I was.  I wrongly call it multi tasking but in the end it isn't it is just doing a lot of things poorly.  There was a lot to be said about VT100s where you had one screen and had to tap away and changing focus took a lot of time to do as it involved many combinations.  

Take a break and look at http://www.pomodorotechnique.com/  for information on this fun and valuable method of concentration.

iPads Galore

I know now for sure that the tablet is here for sure.  I was in line to board a plane last night and I was third in line.  All three of us had iPads.  First person was watching a movie.  Second person was playing Sudoku and I was reading a book.  Not an Excel spreadsheet in site.  There is now endless opportunities for companies to develop apps and tools for such devices and this area is exploding.  Banks funnily enough are the furthest behind and must be rushing to catch up.  Mobile payment methods for in store are also galloping along and soon (as in the next 6 months) we will see a plethora of apps for smartphones that will allow you to use a code to pay and it will be billed like a debit card to your account and a proper receipt sent to you via email like in the Apple stores in the US at the moment.

Now off to open my App book.

Open Office May Be for You

A friend of mine was asking me the other day if I could get here a copy of MS Office.  I pointed her to Open Office which at version 3 is well worth downloading if you do not have desktop application for editing.  Plus its free!!

Useful Links

• Download Open Office
• Youtube Overview

Bon Iver - When No Tips Go With The Music

iOS 5 Problems

All around the world all you can hear is the busy download of people downloading iOS5 and Blackberry users retrying their servers.  Such a sweet sound for Android owners.

500 Mhz

I was speaking to a friend last night and he told me that his laptop had 500 Mb of memory and he was very happy with it.  He explained further.

He did not

- Download anything
- Surf the net too much
- Wrote assignments on it
- Used it for light email
- Didn't engage in social media so didn't have any of the apps or other bloatware

And finally he said that it worked nice and fast for what he used it for.  He didn't need any techy tips to improve his PC Speed as basically he treated His machine as an island.

However for the most of us this isn't the case and even for the most cautious you can quickly bloat you memory usage and disk space in a very short time.  I have started using external memory to try and overcome this and I have a self imposed ban on downloading the next great application.  I have also migrated a lot of my work to the web using Google Docs and where possible do not save items locally but put it on the above external storage.

The more naïve user however can go on download sprees and this is to be avoided.  Think first what REAL use you can make of the tool or download before using .  Admittedly there are a lot of useful download but they are hugely outnumbered by a lot of useless crap.  So beware and go to the island.

Best App In A While

I use several Apple devices and have been frustrated for some time by the lack of a decent App for Facebook.  This is now corrected as of Oct 10th and the new app is really well designed and a huge step forward.  Good apps encourage you to use them and this one will have me on Facebook a lot more than in the past with its clean interface.  What amazes me is what took them so long.  Facebook is like a virus these days it is growing so fast and love it or hate it looks like it will continue to dominate for some time to come.

The End of Printing As We Know It?

Soon there will be mass migration of love to the new iPhone 4S and with it people will discover that in their hands now they have a very powerful device that is also a pretty powerful camera and video recorder.  If you look back even 5 years (an age in Internet and technology time) most entry level cameras and smartphones didn't even posses a fraction of this power.  As a result even more photos and video will now be taken and the knock on will be the online sharing through social media and online free and paid storage site like Flickr and  YouTube.

I have an iPad and now use it exclusively for showing everyone my photos online or occasionally on the local storage and haven't printed a phot in an age.  I think it makes solid sense to set up both a Flickr and a YouTube account for your media as it is free and always on.  I envisage with the iPhone 4S that I will take much more photos and share them much more.  The quality of my iPhone 3 is terrible and I literally have hundreds of sub standard photos.  

I have seen the quality of the existing iPhone 4 and with the new 8 megapixel camera I think that it will attract the 3X crowd.  I am now sure why someone with an existing iPhone 4 would want to make this upgrade and sign up for a plan that would tie to them to a contract with a possible iPhone 5 in 8-12 months then coming out.

What are you going to do?

iOS5 Impact on Bandwidth

There is a lof buzz now going around the upcoming iOS5 and the hlevel of interest in it.  These servers are bound to be completly overloaded once it becomes available and lifehacker are even showing how you can get hold of an early update of iOS5

iOS5 will change a lot of online behavior with regard to music and photos at a minimum and will pose question marks around a lot of poor broadband download capability as people share more and upload and download to different devices.

Expect lots of complaints as people who may not have uploaded significant file sizes in the past encounter poor bandwidth and download speeds.

Empire Avenue Badge

Blogger Can Be Good For You

I have revisited blogger more and more over the past weeks a its new interfaced is so much easier to use and I now use email to post to it as well.

When I first started to use it over 4-5 years ago I wasn't really a fan bu Google have made it more attractive a place to post and it is now a far more flexible place to post content.  It is much lighter than Wordpress.com and though I do have several self hosted Wordpress blogs this is more a fun place to dump tips like this on technical items.

One of the new games / online tools that I have been using over the past weeks is Empire Avenue and is huge fun and it has invigorated my interest in many other social networks again.  One its main scoring features is online activity and I have revisited several of my social networks as a result of playing with this tool.

It has also opened me up to meeting many more interesting online people and expanding my knowledge of the power of social and using my network presence.

RIP Steve Jobs

I was awake at 2AM this morning doing some work as I couldn't sleep when I read the news online about Steve Jobs.  I was genuinely sad to hear it.  I like many millions of people became an a full Apple fan when the iPod came along and now I own the full iPxxxx range and all my kids have iPod touches.

I recalled when I was 12 a friend of mine had an Apple II as he had broken his leg and we spent the whole summer programming and playing games on it.  It was the age of tiny RAM and HUGE diskettes.  We thought we were kings of tech.  Since then I have worked with many operating systems and seen the evolution of Mac and PC and I have worked with many of the multinationals that came about as a result of the ideas of Jobs and Gates.

If it wasn't for that summer with the Apple it may never have happened.  I never met you nor would I ever had but goodbye Steve it is fair to say that there will never be someone like you again on this earth.

Steve Jobs - RIP

Tekky Tips Says goodbye to Steve.  RIP

So Much Social

 

Social is the name of the game these days and spreading the word is hard to do when you have multiple accounts.  But Tweetdeck allows you to post to Facebook and Linekedin with one Tweet reducing the amount of time you have to spend while distributing your message   Tweetdeck are now owned by Twitter so it is a stable and reliable platform and will get more features as Twitter expands.

to Download Tweetdeck go here http://www.tweetdeck.com

Browsers IE Losing the Race

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I was never a fan of Internet Explorer and the statistics that W3 show that IE is now falling behind Firefox and Chrome.  5-6 years ago the people in Redmond must never have thought this would happen and the shift in such a short period of time must drive them mental.  I use Chrome nearly exclusively and apart from a tendency to not like Flash it is a really light easy to use browser.  Prior to this I used to use Firefox but it has suffered from a bit of bloat and I admit I loaded up too many extra features that dragged its performance down.  However I a mreluctant to move back to it.

What browser do you use?