Wordpress SEO Expert

Improve your Google ranking with Peter Mahoney, 20+ years SEO & Wordpress experience

You probably don’t need Microsoft Office

by

You probably don't need Microsoft Office Wordpress SEO ExpertThere’s a reason people abbreviate Microsoft to M$—it’s incredibly expensive.

But it gets bought out of habit, because it’s something most computer users have been using for over a decade, and surely the most popular product must be the best, right?

Something that has long annoyed me about the computer industry is the way the stack the deck when it comes to needing the newest thing.

Case in point: the latest version of Office comes out. You head down to the store to buy it, because they have this new fancy “x” on the end of the file extensions and you want to make sure your files will play nicely with most other people.

Whoops, your old operating system won’t work with it. And your computer is too old to run the newest version of Windows, so why not just buy a new computer?

It’s got more processing power than the average simian brain, produces more colours than were previously known to science, and runs faster than a cheetah on heat*.

Or just put this process in reverse—a new computer, with a new OS, needs a new version of Office.

And why can your old computer NOT run something as simple as a word processing program? Simple: they bloat it.

They stick in fancier looking buttons, more help files, extra layers of stuff you’ll never even know about, and the only reason for doing so is to sell you a newer version of their product.

But if they didn’t, the old system would probably last you for years doing just what you need; Internet access, word processing, and email.

Enter OpenOffice (and it’s fork, LibreOffice). It’s an Office suite with everything you need; word processing, spreadsheets, presentations—and it’s free. It’s maintained by a community of skilled volunteers who are dedicated to seeing computing be an open experience, not one based on finance and money making for a few huge companies.

Best of all, it’s files are compatible with Office anyway. And it will open Office files, so you don’t need to recreate anything you already have. It doesn’t need massive amounts of processing power because it’s built to perform a function, rather than sell units.

Increasingly my client’s of mine are sending me files that have been made using OpenOffice, so the uptake is good.

But if you’ve not tried it out already, I highly recommend you do. It’s an example of what online communities can achieve. It’s also very, very awesome.

OpenOffice.org

* I have no idea if Cheetah’s run faster when on heat. Or indeed, if they do experience “heat” like domestic cats. Feel free to let me know!

I can make you an awesome, SEO’d personal online brand

by

It’s true.

I spent much of last year involved in making personal brands for people to improve their search engine rankings, industry positioning, and overall getting them in more clients and more revenue.

On the back of my 17 years web development/design experience, my decade long history of helping people with their social networking, and months of testing and improving my system, I’ve created a personal branding product that will do wonders for you, your reputation, and of course your income.

Currently it’s only being offered through People Per Hour (PPH), but watch this space–when I’ve got a few more of these under my belt you can expect this package to cost over £700.

Right now it’s just £167!

“i thought you bought 30000 followers on twitter what happen to it”

by

It’s true. A couple of months ago I bought 30,000 Twitter followers off ebay, just to see if it was a strategy that was as bad as I expected it to be.

With my sample of one (after all, I’m the only person I know of who’s done this) I had, unsurprisingly, mixed results.

On the positive, I did notice I had a much steadier stream of new, legit followers flow in after I did it. I suspect I was right in my thinking that people who looked at my Twitter profile would see I had a lot of followers, and therefore be more inclined to follow me themselves—trusting me as a known opinion leader.

To the negative, I felt dirty. Plain old like I’d been rolling around in pig filth. Friends and clients would notice and speak to me about how popular I was, and even though I was up-front about what I was doing, I always felt pretty sheepish about it.

Nonetheless, I was still pretty peeved to receive this tweet from “Kaz The Masturbator”:

Sure enough, they were gone. About six weeks after I bought them. Of course I can’t complain, it was sketchy to begin with.

Kaz the oneist was clearly a front, the dodgy seller’s way of telling me they’d taken back my purchase.

As an experiment, it was worth undertaking. And I’ll sum it up like this: I got what I paid for—a lesson. And while I may not be playing alone like Kaz, I’m certainly 30,000 followers more alone, and happier for it.

Warren Ellis on social media, my thoughts

by

Warren Ellis, English author and social commentator, wrote a wonderful post shortly before Christmas in which he discussed the end of the first wave of social media.

Twitter alters its terms of access to its information, thereby harming the services that built themselves on that information. Which was stupid, because Twitter gets fewer and fewer material benefits from allowing people to use its water. And why would you build a service that relies on a private company’s assets anyway? Facebook changes its terms of access regularly. It’s broken its own Pages system and steadily grows more invasive and desperate. Instagram, now owned by Facebook, just went through its first major change in terms of service. Which went as badly as anyone who’s interacted with Facebook would expect. As Twitter disconnected itself from sharing services like IFTTT, so Instagram disconnected itself from Twitter. Flickr’s experiencing what will probably be a brief renaissance due to having finally built a decent iOS app, but its owners, Yahoo!, are expert in stealing defeat from the jaws of victory. Tumblr seems to me to be spiking in popularity, which coincides neatly with their hiring an advertising sales director away from Groupon, a company described by Techcrunch last year as basically loansharking by any other name.

This may be the end of the cycle that began with Friendster and Livejournal. Not the end of social media, by any means, obviously. But it feels like this is the point at where the current systems seize up for a bit. Perhaps not even in ways that most people will notice. But social media seems now to be clearly calcifying into Big Media, with Big Media problems like cable-style carriage disputes. Frame the Twitter-Instagram spat in terms of Virginmedia not being able to carry Sky Atlantic in the UK, say (I know there are many more US examples).

This first wave, or cycle as he calls it, can best be described as one of ecstatic enthusiasm bordering on insanity.

His closing statement wonders if anyone regrets giving up their own websites in favour of just using social platforms yet. I bet the answer is yes, and I’ve been warning people against that for a long time. More on that another day though.

To focus on the core message of the piece—yes, he’s right. People have been so far up social media’s behind that they forgot to try to turn the lights on to check where they were.

And just where are they? At the mercy of a bunch or other companies who have very right (although very little market-mandate) to change their terms of service and take what you thought was yours.

Issues of content ownership and the like aside though, I’ve been waiting for this bubble to burst for a long while—because it’s time to simply accept social media, rather than jumping up and down on the sofa about it.

Is social media exciting? Of course. New technology, ways to reach your audience and methods of interaction always are. But they aren’t the be-all and end-all. Television still has exciting content. Radio programs can still blow my mind.

Once all the hype settles down, content becomes the clarifying point, sorting the overly excited from the thoughtful.

When approaching social media for any business purpose, look at it in the context of all your online work, sites, portfolios, information, etc. If you just think outside the box a little bit, you can have a very large and well rounded arsenal of online communications at your disposal. Which can all work together to improve your bottom line.

I’ve been waiting for a long time for people to realise that as exciting and useful as social media is, it’s one tool you have at your disposal, and you have many. Make them all work together, for you.

Think of it like this, there will always be new waves. And just watching them from the beach is no good, you need to ride them. But stay on top of them where you can see what’s happening around you, rather than falling in and finding you’ve crashed up on a beach with no David Hasselhoff in sight.

via Warren Ellis » The Social Web: End Of The First Cycle.

A new year, a new(ish) business model

by

I spent much of last year trying to work out how myself as a freelance web designer and developer interacted with mahoneywebmarketing.co, my company.

Ultimately the mahoneywebmarketing.co team will consist of several people, so it doesn’t seem right to have it so much based around myself.

But conversely, because people were interacting so much with me via petermahoney.com, I found myself preparing products to sell here, rather than just my time.

It was all getting a bit mixed up.

Over the next few days I’ll be doing a complete overhaul of mahoneywebmarketing.co to make it less about me as a person, and focus more on the products we sell. Online branding, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), Online community, etc. And this site, my personal brand, will be much more focused on me, my skills, my experience, my story, and of course, how to hire me for bespoke work.

Naturally the two sites will interact (in a very specific way) but all in all this is the culmination over my strategising and thinking for some time now.

A number of people have been asking for a solution to just this conundrum—”when you are your business, but also yourself, how do you best separate while integrating those two identities?”

I can’t wait to show you.

Prices are quoted exclusive of VAT unless expressly stated.

RSS

Peter Mahoney, WordPress SEO expert blog