Please use this form to let us know whether or not you can make it to our wedding. If you have any questions, please let us know and we will try to get back to you. Sign up for email updates at the bottom of this page.

If the form does not display, click ‘Continue Reading’ below -

We have reserved rooms at a local Premier Travel Inn for Saturday 21st May and arranged a fixed price for this, so if you’re thinking about where to stay give us a buzz and we can let you know the phone number to use to book rooms.

We are hoping to organise transport to and from the hotel so that you can all have a drink and not worry about driving.

If the Premier Travel Inn isn’t your cup of tea, we have a list of alternatives which are a little further away.

Wedding plans are slowly forming and we can now confirm that we have booked the church!

The date we have chosen is May 21st 2011.

We don’t want to give too many details away too early on (especially as nothing else has been booked yet) but it’s going to be held at a certain little village on the Oxfordshire Warwickshire border and we’re already hoping for some sun!

For those who will be travelling a long way more information about accommodation will follow later, so you don’t have to worry about organising it yet.

If you have any questions feel free to contact us.

Just a quick post, it’s impossible to keep this quiet much longer!

After 18 months at MAD Productions working as a Search Engine Optimisation Engineer, starting with almost no knowledge and spending the last 8 months carrying out research and development to improve the SEO strategies at my workplace I have now taken an exciting opportunity offered to me and accepted a new job offer!

I will be moving from working in the search team within an e-commerce company to working at a company that only does Search Marketing – Impact Media. I’m really looking forward to working alongside a larger number of search specialists and learning even more.

It’s time to plan a wedding!

Richard surprised me (and his family) while on top of a mountain during the family skiing holiday. The location was beautiful and the moment well picked – and he’d even managed to bring champagne up the piste!

I will be branching out this blog to include posts about our upcoming wedding, in addition to the search marketing content that is already featured.

For those in need of more details of the proposal…

Richard had managed the usually impossible task of keeping a secret from me and the majority of his family. He had bought the ring the day before we left, having to settle for a size J instead of an I as it was in stock at the time. He kept the ring in it’s box in his ski jacket pocket all week, and I didn’t even realise when I patted down his jacket whilst trying to find his phone during the week!

Rich waited till the last day we had on the slopes as this was when we were all skiing together – his brothers’ girlfriends had been in ski school for the rest of the week. We stopped for group photos on the top of a piste with an amazing backdrop and as we disbanded from the pose Rich knelt down and asked me to marry him. Of course I said yes!

Champagne was suddenly produced from the backpack that Richard’s brother Phil had been carrying and had inadvertantly mentioned that it was very heavy that morning without knowing that he was carrying Champagne! We popped the cork over the edge of the mountain and drank as much as we could handle, given that it was only 10am and we were at 2500 metres.

We haven’t got as far as any plans yet, but when we do, it’s likely to be posted here.

I work in SEO for an ecommerce website agency, over the last few months I’ve had the opportunity to develop the team’s strategies and work on achieving the best results for our clients. Through taking the opportunity to develop strategies I have been able to increase my SEO knowledge significantly and have thoroughly enjoyed the step up in resposibility and activity. We are now expanding the team and I hope to be able to start writing about SEO to make up for all the reading I’ve been doing over the last year!

I have also taken the opportunity to network with fellow SEOs on Twitter and have attended the recent BrightonSEO events. Through these I have met some brilliant people and been able to share and discuss SEO tactics and methods with others. There are a lots of people who have made me feel welcome in the SEO community, I’d like to give a shout out to several who have paid a significant role in helping me over the last 6 months – Paddy Moogan, Dan Harrison, and Pete Handley. In addition to those in the online world I also want to shout out Lisa Rhodes, who was working with me from the very beginning and spent many hours teaching me, answering questions and brainstorming new strategies.

Hopefully there will be plenty of SEO content added on here in the future, if you have any feedback please feel free to get in touch.

A Background to SEO -

To answer this question you should first think about your favourite search engine, and try to work out why it is that the results you get appear in that order, as well as why it is that these particular websites appear at all. Unfortunately there isn’t a simple answer to this, but I will try to briefly explain the major elements of search engines and from that explain what is involved in search engine optimisation.

Search Engines – There’s more to Google than meets the eye:

Major search engines show both paid adverts (named Sponsored Ads) and ‘Organic’ results. The organic results fill the main area of the results page and are nothing to do with a search engine’s monetary gain or the websites popularity – contrary to popular belief. In order to give you the best organic results possible search engines have to know what’s out there; to do this they ’spider’ websites and then apply an algorithm which has many factors and is used on the information that the spiders give to determine where to rank each website in the search engine results pages.

Search Engine Optimisation is the process used to encourage websites to be ranked higher in organic search engine results pages (SERPs). You may think that this sounds like SEOs are trying to trick you, but actually, good SEOs work by helping the end user find good quality content relevant to their search query. What should be avoided is the black hat SEOs who promote websites using methods of trickery to promote less relevant and more spam-like websites.

Can SEO Guarantee Good Results?

Answer me this – Can a Formula 1 team with the best car and best driver guarantee that they will win the race? Certainly not – but every effort is made to get the best results as often as possible and for as long as possible and that’s exactly how SEO works too. Thanks to Jeremy from White Hat Media for the analogy described at BrightonSEO in Feb 2010.

Any honourable SEO would advise website owners stay well away from any company or individual or attempts to guarantee specific ranks in major search engines; If you see the phrase ‘Position 1 in Google guaranteed in two weeks’ the best advice I can give the website owner in this situation is to run very fast in the opposite direction. Due to the black hats out there who are more about making money than helping website owners and internet users SEOs have come under fire for being dishonourable which has resulted in many SEOs coming together to try to create an SEO Accreditation System to prevent website owners from being fleeced.

Enough of our bad reputation – on to what SEOs do -

In order to appear in the top results in Google there are three key areas to consider; Code, Content and Connections. Thanks to Jamie Freeman from Message Digital for his presentation on the ‘Holy Trinity of SEO’ at Brighton SEO. Once you nail these three areas you have nailed SEO and can continue improving these to gain improved rankings and results from Search Engines.

Code -

All websites are put together using code, it sounds mysterious and impossible when you first hear this but it’s true! It works by giving specific instructions to your web browser about exactly how to display your website. Search Engines send spiders to read the code that websites are built from and the better websites are built the better results they can achieve. In addition to that there are certain important elements to optimise as part of SEO which will gain improved results, these include page titles and H1s (what you see at the top of your browser and the main heading on the page respectively). This brings us nicely on to…

Content -

If your website has no content it is of no use. If your website has content irrelevant to your targets it is of no use. If your website has a large amount of authoritative content about your target area which can help users looking for related information and products then you’re on to a winner straight away. It’s all down to common sense really. There are methods to ensure that your content is optimised for search engines and users at the same time, for example, rather than keyword stuffing (an out-dated and spammy technique) content should be well written and include relevant keywords because that’s what the content is about. However by using SEO you can ensure that you use the most effective keywords and target people in the best way.

Connections -

Not your next train, this is about what connects to your site and what your site is connected to – it’s not called the World Wide Web for nothing! It’s all about connections, and in this context connections means links. Quality inbound links to your site, an avoidance of low quality and black hat type links and overall a natural linking profile. Again it comes down to common sense, if people like your website and find it useful then they are much more like to link to it – the more people who link to your site the more people who will find your site and if you’re content is good and added to frequently, then this will increase exponentially alongside.

So I’ve covered the three main areas, now what? Well, that’s it really, or at least an overview. Look out for further posts outlining techniques used to optimise within these three areas and make the most of your website.