I-COM

So I was doing a bit of research this morning in Google under the query "affordable health insurance." I got the following result: Enlarge image in a new window Now, bearing in mind that I'm searching on google.co.uk, I've been given 3 American sites in the top 5 - although on the whole the...

Well before the current credit crunch, 36% of managing partners responding to a CLT survey said that Marketing and Practice Development was the number one priority - ahead of financial management, technology developments, HR activity and general management...

I've just read with amazement an article in today's Crains about a Liverpool search firm CL5 that has been awarded a grant by North West Vision and Media to set up an office in Manchester...

I have just been reading on one of our law client's blogs about a recent ruling from the High Court which seems to suggest that bloggers' no longer have a right to anonymity...

We've been playing with xRank today, a tool from Bing that allows you to search for celebrities and brings up related results such as biographies, videos, images, shopping, popularity trends and any other range of available information...

Some people watch stocks go up and down, SEOers watch listings. One of the most watched sites is GoCompare. They advertise heavily on TV which drives strong brand awareness people know the GoCompare name...

When people find out I work in search engine optimisation I get two reactions. The first is confusion from people who have never heard of SEO. The second is disgust - from people who have. SEO consultants are like the used car salesmen of the internet, or so people seem to think...

Small businesses looking for their first professionally designed and developed website do not usually have a internet marketing expert on staff - or a web developer - and very often don't really know what things should cost...

If you want your business websites copy to appeal to your target market, you have to spend some time getting to know who that market is. Now, were not talking Robert De Niro-style method acting here...

Although it will be hard to believe for anyone who saw the queues outside many Mark & Spencers yesterday morning all looking to buy merchandise for a penny, the retail landscape is feeling the effect of a decline in sales...

Google has just launched a new tool within Analytics called Google Visualizer.It's really very interesting and allows you to plot various site performance results on a graph and then see how they've evolved over a set period.I did a little experiment on one of our client's results to try to test...

Apparently, and dont take my word on this, the internet is a big place (where this place exists is another debate entirely). Theres lots on offer; loads of sites all covering similar topics, pictures, videos, online shopping and so on, and so on, ad infinitum...

So I went to my first social media cafe last week. Manchester's version of London's Tuttle Club has been running once a month since the end of 2008, but this was the first one I've actually been able to get to...

Open-source is a development method for software that harnesses the power of distributed peer review and transparency of process. It promises better quality, higher reliability, more flexibility, lower cost, and an end to predatory vendor lock-in...

I was asked at a recent network event about what I would recommend (and what do we do at I-COM) to test how a website is converting...

So what is an Internet Marketing Expert? Is it a guy that says he is because he is in the first page around 6th position of Google.co.uk for the term "Internet Marketing Expert"? Dig deeper and you find out that he has not got a clue how he's achieved it!...

Ifeel slightly better for having had my rant on so called search engine optimising companies sending out spurious crap by email...

I know that I have ranted about this in the past and even my Operations Director Mike Blackburn has recently blogged about the same companyand their email approaches! This one though is not from the same Mr Kent. We now have a Mr...

I've just come across this 1994 promotional video about the internet from The Digital Equipment Corporation.I was at University in 1994 and remember using the internet to download games like the Prince of Persia...

As mentioned by Brand Republic last week, a recent study has shown that despite the reductions in online marketing spends during the last quarter of 2008, search engine advertisers have improved their ROI (Return on Investment) by 25% during the first three months of 2009.PPC (Pay Per Click) spends...

The web has been buzzing about Google Local Search being folded into non-local results. Never mind the inaccuracies of the results local search is currently delivering, the morass of information that Google is now serving for some SERPS is starting to create a real usability problem...

Recently we've seen Google dropping the index page of a clients site while leaving nearly all the other web pages in the index...

The web has been buzzing about Google Local Search being folded into non-local results. Never mind the inaccuracies of the results local search is currently delivering, the morass of information that Google is now serving for some SERPS is starting to create a real usability problem...

Three things that really get my goat day-to-day as we try to run a SEO business. In no particular order they are: Recruitment Companies - we must take at least 15 calls a day from agents looking to provide us with staff...

There's lots of discussion in the blogosphere about shortfalls in Google's local service, see this article from Blogstorm.The bloggers are complaining that searches for non-geographic specific phrases are now including local search results dependent on Google's best guess of your location...

I love of a bit of Twitter spam on a Monday morning! There's nothing quite so entertaining as to logging into email to receive three notifications that "internetmarketer" is now following us on Twitter...

There is now an ad service called Magpie which hooks up advertisers with Twitter users. The Twitter users get paid to post links in their Twitter streams and the advertisers get exposure on the social media site of the moment...

I recently blogged about my concerns for privacy as social media and lifestreaming become the norm. As Google launches its Streetview product in the UK, my concern about privacy has intensified considerably...

Yesterday I taught a training course for a new client about basic SEO...

The Christie Hospital, the specialist cancer hospital in Manchester, has lost £6.5m following the collapse of an Icelandic bank and needs the support of the local community in Manchester in order to recover the money...

Crains Manchester Business newspaper yesterday published its list of the top digital agencies in Manchester and surrounding towns. The list is generated by companies themselves submitting information to the paper, so it should perhaps be taken with a bit of a pinch of salt.....

I was recently planning a weekend away to Cardiff for a live event that I had tickets for...

A public relations fiasco erupted online for Ryanair a couple of weeks ago when a blogger found a bug in their booking system and wrote a cheeky blog post about it...

A recent study by Hitwise, the search industrys leading source of search behaviour data, reported that whilst the usage of one and two-word searches has declined, the use of three, four and five word searches has increased...

Being a football fan I've just gotta admit I found this funny when i saw it on our colleagues PushOn's blog - a search for Manchester City "MCFC honours list" gave this result: View full size image

It was a very wet night as I trudged towards The Northern on Tib Street. And cold. And windy. Did I mention it was wet? Yes. Ok, the scene is set. I knew what was going to happen. I was going to spend the next 3 hrs locked in a pub with 'long haired new media type' people...

I-COM believe in personal development, we like to give people responsibility for their own accounts as quickly as possible. Touch wood, this seems to work because not many people leave the business once they're here...

Matt Cutts, Google's spam cop and chief PR blogger posted a response yesterday to an article about "sponsored" blog posts. According to Cutts, paid blog posts are fine - as long as they don't pass page rank...