Nick Garner's Blog

I’ve closed the site for now… it may come back. It all depands on wether there is another trip

from the about us page:

As some of you already know, Kim and I are taking on a little challenge this Summer???

We have entered the Mongol Rally (see www.mongolrally.com for details) .. a charity rally which takes place each Summer. The challenge is to drive a car with an engine no bigger than 1ltr from Hyde Park, London to Ulaan Bator,
Mongolia (i???ve included a map for those of you who aren???t quite sure where that is). Thats a 1/3rd of the way around the world, about 10,000 miles, with 7 mountain ranges and 3 deserts along the way (oh and there isn???t much
in the way of roads after poland).

We have been kindly donated a 1998 Nissan Micra, 998 cc.. its a beast! and are entered in the rally (team name – micragolia) and underway with preparations (any one able to teach us how to change a tyre?).

We are doing the rally to raise funds for 2 charities – Mercy Corps, and Hopes and Homes for Children. (info about the two charities is at the bottom of this page)

In way of an entry requirement we need to raise a minimum of ??1000 for charity before we set off on July 21st.

Please Please sponsor us!!!!!!!!!

You can sponsor us online at our just giving pages..

Mercy corps – www.justgiving.com/micragolia

Hope and Homes for children – www.justgiving.com/micragolia2

Additionally, if any of you are involved with business or companies who may be interested in sponsoring our team please get in touch with us, in return we can offer advertising space on our car, website publicity and (if we get round to organising it) team kit. Please contact us via the email ad.. team@micragolia.com

PLEASE SPONSOR US! Its a crazy challenge.. and a really worthwhile cause.

Thank you!
Nettie Kelly & Kim Wetherall

???Mercy Corps supports rural communities to meet their economic and social needs, helping individuals, families and communities to become more self-sufficient, diversified in their production, and better linked to local, regional and national markets???

???Hope and Homes for Children work in countries including Romania, Ukraine, Kosovo, Belarus and Moldova/Transdnistria, focusing on closing down the state institutions and removing children from the terrible conditions in these centres. The children are reunited with siblings, and where possible placed with their biological families. Other children are relocated to small family homes, which provide them with a loving, stimulating environment enabling them to reach their full potential. ???

Another day, another great post from Arron wall!

the post http://www.seobook.com/bloggers

and a great video from one of the authors of boingboing.net about how to write a discriptive seo friendly blog headline.

this is a very interesting tool

http://www.bad-neighborhood.com/text-link-tool.htm

it scans a given page and uses its algo to work out wether the links on that page are going to spammy sites.

As a web Dev/SEO guy, one the biggest problems I have is browser incomatability. As you may know, different web sites look different depending on whicih browser you use and internet explorer 6 is a bad offender when it comes to how it interprets CSS. So the trick is to have multiple browsers on your PC , which gives you the ability to design something compatable across firefox, internet explorer 7 and internet explorer 6.

On the fly tool (add in a URL and go) HERE

Download old verisons of internet explorer HERE ( I found this link on About.com and downlaoded the software, so its safe)

And make sure you go HERE for instructions on how to run both internet explorer ie6 & ie7 together

Yes ! every SEO’er needs to be on the ball! and to do that you will need to read HUUUUUGGGGEE numbers of relevant blog posts. So I thought I would share my RSS list with you and share this very useful site to help you read them faster !

Speed reading – tips and tutorials on speed reading HERE

For my own part I can get through a 350 page book in about 1 hour. I find the trick is to just let it subconsciously ‘soak in’ and as by magic I know what the book was about and I can recycle the ‘learnings’ from it

My OPML file for your RSS reader | My RSS list:

I thought I would share some thoughts on why blogging and seo are so connected…

I have always thought search engines were fairly bad at understanding what is good or bad content – it goes back to an idea in zen and the art of motocycle maintanance about quality. I.e. you can’t define quality. Certainly from a search engine algorithm perspective, how do you judge the ‘qualty’ of a particular site or the content in it?

Obviously you can assume more links into a site is more, but then spammers can do a site with 100’000 links in an afternoon – so within reason that idea doesn’t hold water.

So how about having humans do the quality control for the engines ? i.e. if a link comes from an authority blog, then maybe it does have currency, after all it has been quality checked.

And this is where i go to blogging and seo. Blogs ‘wash ‘ and ‘filter links, engines pick up on this distinctive footprint and if you have plenty of blog references and youre seo’d properly, then you will rank.

I really believe engines need bloggers for quality control.

Of course there is the question about why blogs don’t do as well as they should on seo. My take, is that by their architecture, they are just not built right for search engines.

As you know, engines dont like content churn, it means they can’t grab on to anything. Also they like a pyramid internal links structure, which helps them work out which pages are the most important within a site. Blogs dont do this structure at all well…

so you have to do a lot of hacking and manipulation to get a reasonable spread of phrases up there.

So if you sort out your site SE, get involved in the conversation, then in time you will rank.