This article looks at the impact of a part of the Google algorithm called Google TrustRank, on the ranking of your site in their search engine. Although no-one except those high up in Google actually know the exact formula for their algorithm, there is generally a widespread consensus between search engine optimisation (SEO) professionals as to the existence of TrustRank, especially since it was registered as a Trademark by Google in 2006. So what is TrustRank and how can I develop it?

TrustRank comprises a variety of features which can contribute to your rankings in Google, and is aimed at removing spam sites from their listings, thus increasing the quality of the results they provide. They are just a selection of criteria which are used to automatically ‘judge’ your website, effectively calculating the authority and trustworthiness of your site. The other aspect of TrustRank is a manual editorial review by Google in determining what the characteristics of high quality sites in each topic are – other sites are then compared to the benchmark ‘seed’ website. In my opinion the five most important criteria for which we can influence are as follows… Read the rest of this entry »

Most of us spend a great deal of time reading, whether it be a blog, emails, articles, or news releases. Reading can occupy quite a lot of your time without you realising it – even if you only spend one hour per day reading, that adds up to a lot of hours per year! You might have heard about photo-reading or speed-reading, or heard what seem to be unrealistic claims about increasing your reading words per minute (WPM) to many thousands, and those that claim to read thick books in a few hours. Well speedreading can definitely improve your time reading, and for the mere mortal of us, even if you can’t make the 15,000 WPM, you can at least double your current reading speed if you follow some easy to use techniques, and practice with a fun free website application…

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If you work in a small or micro business with few employees, it is likely that you don’t have to do as many presentations as you would in a larger company. Delivering an effective and engaging presentation isn’t just something which you practice a few times at school or college and then forget about – you never know when they might come in handy. There are a variety of situations from networking events to delivering speeches to customer groups that require good presenting skills, and as with most things, practice definitely helps, especially with reducing nerves. Whilst it can be difficult to get all of your important ideas across effectively and in a structured manner in just five minutes, it’s by no means impossible. I came across a short 5 minute video narrated by Vera Hughes (very RP accent by the way) on the Videojug website whereby they describe the key features and aspects to creating and delivering a presentation of this short length. These can be summarised as follows…

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When designing a website, one aspect to consider is what colour hyperlinks to display on the website. It sounds like a trivial choice, with a few potential strategies to choose, such as…

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I’ve just discovered a handy (and best of all free) text replacement application which will help to save you time if you regularly type similar text. It’s called Texter, and is available completely free to download.

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Anyone running a PAYE (Pay as You Earn) scheme here in the UK will undoubtedly have been bombarded recently with requests and reminders for the annual P35 form, which is basically a summary of all your business’ PAYE activity during the previous financial year. You also have to submit a P14 for each employee that you employed during the previous year. The 19th May is the deadline for these forms to be received by the HMRC – you can send them a completed paper version, or you can file it via PAYE Online. Whichever method you choose, it needs to be there by the 19th otherwise they will fine you £100 for each month per 50 employees. How nice of them…

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This post is just to let you know that we are now entered in the competition for the “Best Business Blog” award from Blogger’s Choice Awards. The awards are announced in November in Las Vegas – if you like our posts and have found the site useful then it would be great if you could vote for us! Just click on the “Blogger’s Choice” icon at the top of this page and you’ll be taken to their site, where you can submit your vote.

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Working solidly for hours on end can sometimes be just what you need to burn through a significant amount of work in a short space of time. If you are doing work constantly, however, you’ll probably be spending that time working half-heartedly, and actually achieving a small amount. Some time off might be just what’s called for!

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We are pleased to say that we have submitted an entry into the group writing project / competition that has just been held at Problogger.net. The idea was to submit a ‘top 5′ article, as interesting and creative as possible. The competition lasted three days, and the winner is yet to be announced. The sponsor of the article was Chitika, who are offering a $1,000 cash prize. Thanks ProBlogger by the way for hosting the competition! The following list is a list of yesterday’s entrants:

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Is your business innovative and creative, delivering great customer service? If so then why not think about entering a new contest launched by UPS and IBM. As a celebration of UPS’ centennial anniversary, they are offering three prizes of up to $25,000 in cash to small buisnesses that have displayed the most innovation. The contest, named “Out of the Box”, also has a tagline “Does your small business think big?”, which ties into one of yesterday’s posts here that small businesses are the key drivers of innovation.

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