Another client
Well I’m please to say that I’ve just signed another client to my getmorecalls service.
I started the project over a year ago to SEO 35 websites to the top of google. I’ve now got 3 paying clients on a monthly basis that are getting lots of customers from their area contact them looking for the services they provide. check out Laptop Repair Belfast it’s a simple website but is ranking rather high in google for all the keywords my client needs.
I’ve got two cities that I’ll be hitting next month to take my total to 5 cleints. Then I’m going to scale it to 10 then 20. Ideally if I can keep 20 clients on the books for the next few years I’ll be happy. Will probably then offer a buy out of each of the sites at some point however I’ve also got a Video product luanching that I’ll be making avaaible on these sites over the the summer.
Things are looking up!
Nokia E72 Google Apps Soultion
Had a nightmare of a time with a client that upgraded to Google Apps. Their senior management team use Nokia E72′s this worked great on microsoft exchange however when it came to upgrading to Google Apps I was almost about to go out and buy new phones for them.
Turns our Google Apps was supported in earlier models of the Nokia E71 however there is a bug in the mail for exchange client inbuilt into the E72. You use it to sync contacts and calendar events but not email. Which if you ask me is crucial. As a work around you can use the IMAP client to set email up. However the is a bug in the IMAP client also! After about a week the client will bomb out and stop receiving emails. Anyway three weeks into this problem I had to come up with a fix. They were not going to part with their E72′s as they are only 6 months old if that.
The solution was to purchase Roadsync this is a 3rd part app that allows you to sync your google apps account with your Nokia E72. Now this blog entry might sound like I’m promoting the software but it really does work. All the other “solutions” to this problem are failures because of the bugs within the E72.
Google Cloud Connect & Citrix
Anyone using the two? I have cloud connect installed on my home machine. Going to run test in citrix see what happens!
You got your keywords?
After reading part one of getting to the top of google you should now have a list of keywords that you want to get ranked for in google.
What do we do with these keywords? Well it’s simple – include them in your website. Seems such an simple point but you’d be surprised how many websites do not have the keywords they are after somewhere on their website.
The top keywords should be at top positions in your website. For an example I will use the keyword “laptop screen repair”.
If I had a website or page within a website I was trying to get to the top of google for laptop screen repair. I would add this keyword to the front page of my site. This is what is known as “on-site page optimisation”.
You are going to optimise your onsite pages. The other form of search engine optimisation is surprisingly called off site or off page optimisation.
Anyway back to the keyword for onsite optimisation. Now these tips are a bit of guess work no one knows for sure what Google, Yahoo & Bing actually use to weigh ranking factors however these are the suggested things that help onsite optimisation.
1) The title tag: Include the keyword in your title tag for your page. The title tag is the HTML tag that gives you page the title. The title can be seen in the very top left hand corner of your webpage window.
2) Make your keyword the title or first bit of text on your webpage/site. For example I may have a “welcome to my website” blurb stating what my website is about and what I have to offer. You would include your keywords within the blurb.
3) If you have images on your website make the file names of these images a keyword. Maybe I have a picture of a smashed laptop screen. I would name the file laptop-screen-repair.jpg prior to uploading to my website. It also helps to set the alt tag of the image to your keyword also.
4) Content is king. Get a blog on your site – it does not actually have to be called “a blog” maybe just call it a news section or handy tips section – what ever works for the site. This section of your website should be updated as much as possible with content – text, videos, images, the more the better. Include your keywords in the content and link it to other pages on your site. Maybe I’d be discussing how to fix laptop screens, “to fix a laptop screen you really need to replace the entire screen so your not actually repairing the laptop screen but replacing it” I would link the text repairing the laptop screen to another page on my site that maybe went into more detail about this subject.
5) There are many other on site factors that will help you rank in the search results in fact the list is almost endless other factors which are playing a bigger part are things like page load times. If you are on a shared web server or have a slow connection from your web server Google will score you down for this so make sure you have a good server response and fast page loading times.
How to get to the top of Google
Getting to the top of Google depends on a lot of factors. Firstly your competition. What a search term are you trying or would like to be at the top? The search term or keyword as it is commonly known is the most important factor.
Who are you up against? Now most closed mind thinkers just want to see their business name at the top of Google. Well guess what – who is searching for your business name? Not many people. They are searching for the services or products that you offer. Concentrate on these terms. Make a list of the top 10 services you offer – these will become your keywords. If you are service a specific geographical area include that in the keyword.
For example, I am trying to become a Google Apps provider in Aberdeen that right there is my keyword.
Next post I’m going to tell you what to do with these keywords once you’ve come up with your list.
Google Apps Migration Day 6
I’ve had 10 users up on the new google apps email for 2 weeks now. At the weekend I added another 120 accounts to the domain. An additional 20 users were migrated over the course of last weekend.
I finally got my head round the Google apps exchange migration tool. You can actually use this in conjunction with the Google Apps Outlook desktop tool. However you must do the exchange migration before loading the desktop tool within the user’s profile. When you do load the desktop tool you must not choose to migrate an existing outlook profile otherwise it will essentially migrate the same data again.
There are a few things that still need to be automated within the Google apps migration process and a few bugs in the exchange tool.
The tool itself will only allow me to upload 5 users at a time – anymore than that and the exchange migration tool crashes on me – nothing recorded in the trace file.
As for the automated processes or even scripts which should be made available one major one is the dual delivery for pilot users.
140 pilot users is a lot of clicks to set up for dual delivery in active directory and it requires creating 140 separate exchange contact objects pointing to the Google apps test domain. I’m no software developer but there should be something made available for this process by google.
2nd part of automation would be a nice GPO template for the desktop outlook tool so I don’t have to manually configure it to the user’s gmail account.
Not only do I have to manually enter the user’s gmail account details, click to remember the settings and hide the sync status. I also have to set the default address book manually back to the GAL in outlook and set the Google Apps outlook profile to load as default with no menu choice. All very time consuming.
I’m getting there though and over the next 4 weekends I’ll have all 140 remote users on google apps. The next step will be to sync office user’s calendars and sharing permissions. However I do not think the exchange migration tool pulls this data through so I’ll have to manually set the permissions or get the users to re-do the settings.
Google have to develop these tools more if they want a bigger piece of the market share. The migration tools are limited and they need to be fleshed out with automation tasks highlighted above. I can see smaller organisations will easily cope with migration but for larger companies it’s a real challenge.
Google Apps migration Day 5
Well it’s been quite a journey getting this project off the ground. Finally transferred my first 10 users over to Google Apps.
The hardest part I’ve had is the amount of manual labour involved (not one of my strong points) Google have kindly released tools like exchange sync to make the migration a lot less painless for bigger companies. However it has one really bad flaw. Wht if the user still wants to use Outlook? Well you have to go down the Google Outlook Desktop Sync Tool. I’ve already been over this but if you using the desktop tool you have to manually configure it for your user.
There is no way to push it out and set it up automatically with no user intervention 
As an added bonus the company I’m migrating use citrix on which two of their metaframe servers are x64. Installing Google Desktop sync tools for outlook was a challenge in that environment. But I’m happy to say I’ve got 10 users on a production server now using it and guess what, have not noticed any difference. Apart from the fact that their global address book is empty. (I have to do the manual transfer of all 140 users before the GAL fills up) The other chicken/egg problem I know I’m going to run into is calander events and shared calanders. When I move someone that has access to another users calander on the odl system I know I’m going to get a phone call. Luckily due to the time of year lost of people have annual leave still to take as it’s the end of the tax ear next month. This will spare me some headache as I’ll be able to transfer them over whilst the are off. Maybe it’s just as well this whole thing has been delayed!
Anyway the migration is happening over the next 6 weekends. I’ll post updates of this project as they happen.
Tablet with WiDi (wireles HDMI)
I’ve always liked the idea of a tablet PC (aka ipad) but have never purchased one. This is mainly because they don’t have proper keyboards and are all touch devices. I see them more like entertainment devices.
Anyway the “killer” app for any tablet would be Wireless HDMI I suspect. Basically you’d be able to hit a button / or gesture on your tablet pc and the display would be beamed to your TV. How cool would that be? I’ve been wondering why this has not been picked up yet. Well looks like Intel finally have got a prototype of a WiDi tablet.
I think there will be a much higher adoption rate of tablets once this technology becomes common. They’d be excellent for trainers/conferencing. And my bedroom! Instead of a DVD player hooked up to my TV I’d just be able to pickup my tablet and choose a movie – stream if via my tablet to my TV.
Google Forms, date picker = another fail :(
Was exceited about the google forms within google Apps. Went to transfer my first form over to googel forms only to find that there is no date picker option!! What’s up with that it SO basic.
Google docs file association Google chrome = fail
So i’m playing around with google docs trying new things out. One thing I wanted to know is if I could somehow assoicated word/exel docs on my desktop with google docs.
Turns out you can by downloading and installing the google firefox toolbar. Works like a charm but there is no support for .docx / .xlsx only the older versions of word/excel.
Hmm not great so I go and install Google chrome thinking that it would be a bit more up-to-date.
guess what ? there is no support what so ever in google’s own browser for google docs file associations on your client machine.
FAIL
