Was I missed..?

Nope, but just to let you know I'm back, and there's nothing you can do about it.

Amazon

I've had a few days of too-ing and fro-ing following the screening of a documentary about the methods used by Amazon to provide the excellent service provided to customers, and the cost to it's employees. The documentary was filmed in the Swansea depot by an undercover worker using a hidden camera, and was frankly, shocking. Workers are employed for a 45 hour week at a wage of GBP7 per hour, rising to GBP8.35 for a night shift. On an average day each worker can travel 11 miles or more on foot,

Is writing such a big deal?

Don't worry, this isn't going to be a "writing is a piece of cake I don't know why you can't do it" type of post. Far from it. Writing comes naturally to some and far less so to others. I'm one for whom it was a real struggle. I always read a lot, which was a help, and I've always loved books, never having less than five on the go at any one time. This thrills my wife, who does nothing but admire the two whole rooms I've commandeered as libraries and the books under the coffee table, by the sid

Scammed? Tell me about it...

Some people here may remember that when I first started here I built a site to promote WA and to warn people about less than perfect "opportunities". At the time we were busy dealing with the walking wounded and battle-scarred refugees from Empower Network. However, the must be many more scams and pyramid schemes out tthere which deserve coverage. It would help me greatly, and possibly help many others if you were to briefly write about your experiences with something other than Empower Networ

Osmosis

Things have been going well recently. Surprisingly well, to be honest. I've been trying to analyse why. I analyse everything. I put the "anal" in "analyse". I am a detail-obsessed freak, which makes me such an annoying, yet perfect pedant. I can spot a misused word, misplaced comma or awkward sentence from 50 paces, unless of course, I wrote it. So this has led me to examine my recent successes and sudden popularity outside of the parameters of WA. All I appear to be doing is what I was doing b

Who chooses your keywords?

This is a very short blog to reinforce a point that Dom made in a reply to me not long ago. We were discussing my "accidental" ranking for a keyword I hadn't chosen, and I'm shamelessly nicking his reply, which was, "Google chooses your keywords". Whaaaaaaaat! We've all gone through copious training on keyword selection, including finding low hanging fruit and long tail keywords or key-phrases. If you don't know what I'm talking about then you've missed the most essential training, so hit the g

How to reply to a question.

Just a heads-up for newcomers. When you ask a question, the person who answers should hit the reply button on your question. His reply will then indent under your post. If you then want to reply to him, then hit your own reply button and your answer will appear under his. When ever you want to reply to someone in a long stream of answers, the best you can do is move your eye upwards to the first time you see the word reply, and click there. Your own reply will then appear at the end of the list

Keywords - Google vs Yahoo vs Bing.

The first search engine was called Archie (which is "archive" without the "v"). It was a pretty parochial affair, indexing a few FTP servers. The first REAL search engine was called Webcrawler, then came Lycos, which is probably the first one any of us can remember, along with Magellan, Excite, Infoseek, Northern Light, AltaVista and Yahoo. When Google came along in 1994 and finally adopted Goto.net's idea of selling keywords in 1998, it was set to rule the Internet. In fact, Google is rapidly

Giving it All Away

I've just read a very inspiring blog by Bob Calhoun: https://my.wealthyaffiliate.com/bob-calhoun/blog/success-in-business He speaks of the need... well, I'll let you read the article! It moved me to recycle some thoughts on a post I read last week, and responded to, in which the poster expressed concern about "giving too much away" on his website. We all have, or soon will have, our own areas of expertise. We'll guard these jealously, lest anyone absorb our knowledge and reduce or remove the ne

Latent Semantic Indexing - why it matters.

I'm here with my happy head on, so you can relax. You may have read my blog on Google Hummingbird recently, in which I pointed out how Hummingbird, Google's completely rewritten search algorithm, is a boon for writers and a horror story for people stuck with a traditional view of SEO. John followed this up with a different view which led to some debate in the comments section. Hummingbird has reached the point where good content will rank you and keyword stuffing will kill you. What I didn't do