Yellow River

The super 1970 pop classic from Christy that became the Yellow Pages’ TV ad theme, reminds me of the importance of adding business details to yell.com – and it’s free and gets your business an entry in the printed version of yellow pages.

www.weddingbandsnorthern ireland.co.uk was continuing its upward progress with google, but despite being listed with Google Sites still came below a similar listing. Only visible explanation was that the other site’s google site website reference was to yell.com while wedding bands ni was to its own site. So we’re waiting to see the impact of listing with yell.com

Watch this space – courtesy of www.mca-ssociates.co.uk www.ingreatbaddow.co.uk and www.brazilband.co.uk

Moving on UP

Up to 29 in the charts for Google (using the URL in the post immediately below this one) and flying even higher for yahoo and bing (top 5), that’s the progress so far for www.weddingbandsnorthernireland.co.uk and the keyword phrase “wedding bands northern ireland”.

Also added a second page to that site to boost its content and the scattering of keywords over 2 pages to avoid over-egging the pudding. Included the site in my google analytics account, but reading back through my posts, haven’t yet tried adding it to yell.com, so going off to do that now.

Speak again soon.

[Talking about "Moving on up", M People's Heather Small's appearance on the Miranda Hart Show was just classic - but only if you'd watched most earlier episodes to know the context.]

The only way is UP!

Now here’s a challenge that just had to be accepted. The Only way is up! Especially since the site at www.WeddingBandsNorthernIreland.co.uk isn’t currently listed in the top 300 for the keywords “wedding bands northern ireland”. How do I know?
Just try it for yourself at http://www.searchenginegenie.com/google-rank-checker.html

So we’ll do nothing for a few days and just see how it goes, simply by linking it from the mca-ssociates.co.uk site and submitting it to a batch of search engines. Then we’ll be off and running. Watch this space.

I love, I love my Little Calendar – Girl

Wanted to add a really useful PHP events calendar to the ingreatbaddow.co.uk site to show today’s and forthcoming events happening in the village of Great Baddow. This was way beyond my long forgotten grasp of PHP date functions, so went a’googling and found a gem by Mitchell Harper at http://www.devarticles.com/c/a/PHP/A-Useful-Event-Calendar-Written-In-PHP/1/

Excellent tuorial from Mitch, but a few minor flaws in the code that proved elusive to track down. Responses to his article suggested that many others had, like me, spotted the potential but struggled to try to get it working. I persevered and it finally paid off! Many thanks, Mitch – I’m greatful for your tutorial’s guidance.

So here are a couple of the little secrets if you’re trying to get it to work on a linux server -

• “document.location.href” is a javascript object, so don’t forget to include the HTML <script type=”text/javascript”> before the goNextMonth and goLastMonth functions, then complete them with </script>. (Mitch does mention this in his text but I rushed past it in a hurrry to try and get his code working.)

• Seperate the data into line-seperated arrays on Mitch’s page 4 of 6 :-
  the MAJOR thing to note here is the use of “\n” instead of Mitch’s “\r\n” because it’s a linux server, viz. use
  $arrEvents = explode(“\n”, $events);

• I changed the coding slightly to use English date format instead of American and included an extra line of text for each entry in the text file so my loop became             for($i = 0; $i < sizeof($arrEvents); $i+=4)
  {
  // Get each part of the events date as an index
  // of an array
  $arrEventDate = explode(” “, $arrEvents[$i]);

  //echo “arrEventDate”,$arrEvents[$i],”xx”,$i,”<br>”;
  // If the month is the selected month then grab
  // the details of this event; changed to use month day yyyy instead of Mitchell’s American format
  //so using [1] in next line instead of [0] in his
  if((int)$arrEventDate[1] == (int)$Month)
  {
  $theEvents[$eventCounter++] = array(“day” => $arrEventDate[0], “name” => $arrEvents[$i+1], “desc” => $arrEvents[$i+2], “locn” =>$arrEvents[$i+3] );
  }
  } //end of for loop

• I also wanted to include this diary on every page on my ingreatbaddow.co.uk site, so for me it’s all in a PHP snippet that I include in each page. This left a minor snag of how to ensure the user stayed on the same page. So my goLastMonth javascript function became:                              function goLastMonth(month, year)
  {
  // If the month is January, decrement the year
  if(month == 1)
  {
  –year;
  month = 13;
  }

  document.location.href = document.URL +’?day=1&month=’+(month-1)+’&year=’+year;
  }

• and similarly for goNextMonth

• Hope this helps some other strugglers. The one sure thing is that you’ll learn a lot of PHP if you follow it through to the end.

 

It’s a Kinda Magic – PHP ini_set includes

Just a few thoughts and reminders to myself from working on my new website at www.ingreatbaddow.co.uk :-

• Was struggling to remember how to include a huge amount of HTML code (generated by ImageReady from Photoshop to handle rollovers) into a PHP program. Decided to simply save the HTML with a .php extension; delighted to find it worked – now that’s magic!
• You might well ask – why bother. Well there was an image being used for the main header on the page (using image because of the strange font chosen to give an “Olde English” look.
• To change the header image for each page on the site, the obvious answer seemed to be to keep all the main code intact and just include it in two sections – one above the image and one below and then just change the HTML for the image. It all seemed straightforward enough, except for telling PHP where to find the files to include
• now here’s the real magic – use the code

<?php ini_set(“include_path”,

“/public_html/mysitedirectory/includes/”);
include(“includes/rollovers1.php”); ?>

and Robert is your father’s brother!

 

Out of sight, out of mind

How appropriate to have a Level 42 song now that the great O’G has relegated my blog to position 42 in the SERPs. So this very brief post is simply to see whether another more recent mention of SEO Great Baddow will boost the chart position despite not actually saying anything. Or it may be that applying the density of keywords guidelines for a webpage also applies to blogs – in which case, Here ! Go Again – with SEO Great Baddow.

All in the name of research!

Tomorrow is a Long Time

Indeed it is Bob. My new year resolution of updating this blog daily has been blown.

However, on the positive side, I’ve set up a new website called www.ingreatbaddow.co.uk while I’ve been away. It’s got lots of info on the village of Great Baddow in Essex, including businesses, organisations and local history. It has come about due to the demise of the greatbaddowonline site and the owner of that site kindly donated much of his content to help me get the site started.

Anyway – while I’ve been away this blog has been dropping done the great O’Google’s rankings to be overtaken by MCA! So while I’ve been sitting on the dock of Ebay, the great one has promoted MCA to top of the pops for not just “SEO Great Baddow” but also “SEO Chelmsford”. Oh Happy Days!

So Don’ t Give Up on the G O’G – he’ll find you if you just Keep on Running.