Hard Web December 2007 Newsletter

Hardweb Christmas 2007 Newsletter Part 5

** Merry Christmas!! **

This email newsletter can be found on the web at http://www.hardweb.com.au/dec07newsletter.html

Hi Everyone!
My very best wishes to you and your families for a safe and enjoyable Christmas holiday season!

I will be at my home/office and working throughout but may be away from the office a bit more than normal.

I would like to express my deep gratitude at having such great clients who in most cases become good friends. I have enjoyed myself immensely this year and judge 2007 to be the best year of my life!!

Thanks mainly to my wife Sue, my clients You, and somehow striking a good balance of continuous learning at work (to keep the customer satisfied!, and to keep up with the web) and having fun in my other life (real life!)

I would also like to say that I have a lot of room for improvement in some areas of my business and if you have any concerns or even helpful suggestions I would appreciate your feedback (I definitely realise that some of my email communication can be too technical and wordy - woo even boring, heaven forbid!) - also too many (things in brackets) and "inverted commas" and exclamation marks too!!

I am happy this year to have found a cheap and reliable website host called www.godaddy.com ($5/month great specs!) and if you would like to change from InfoTech or GCWeb or your current host I can help you do that.
I have no particular recommendations for a good ISP which is a shame, I still use ADSL from Bigpond but their service is quite poor.

Umm that's all I can think of...I have a few deadlines approaching so thanks again, have fun at Christmas and see you soon!

David and Sue

"Gold Coast web design"	NineMSN(Aus)	Google	Google (Aus)	Yahoo	Yahoo (Aus)	MSN
Initial Search	11th	15th	10th	11th	11th	34th
March 2005 (a week later after tweaking)	5th	2nd	2nd	19th	19th	9th
Sept 2005	15th	2nd	1st	25th	24th	8th
Jan 2006	11th	1st	1st	12th	12th	7th
Feb 2006	6th	3rd	1st	12th	12th	6th
Sep 2006	4th	1st	1st	60th	13th	13th
Big changes in search engine land MSN is now called live.com and all of the search engines are showing "sponsored results" above the "organic results" which is a bad and confusing trend for the web designers like me who want to get good search engine rankings for clients whom I would assume don't want to pay through the nose to appear at the top of the search engine rankings. I will now include how many so-called sponsored results appear above the natural or organic results. The other bad thing is muddying the waters regarding the difference between the end of the paid results and the start of the organic results - that is not good. As far as usage the engine most people use for searches on the internet in Australia is Google.com.au (72%) and then Google.com (17%) , according to this SMH article anyway, unfortunately live.com and yahoo.com are slippping into insignifcance. The numbers below in [] square brackets are how many sponsored results above the organic results. In general my results have slipped since I haven't done much optimisation tweaks for a while.
"Gold Coast web design"	live.com (aussie)	Google	Google (aussie)	Yahoo	Yahoo(aus)	live.com
Dec 2007	17th [3]	7th [0]	6th [1]	9th [2]	3rd [2]	29th [3]

warmest regards
David Thatcher
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HardWeb for web design
thatch@hardweb.com.au
www.hardweb.com.au
07 5526 2939
0401 352 269
Home/Office Address
-- 25 Savoy Drive --
Broadbeach Waters Qld 4218
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Go here for the fourth letter about Search Engines and also transfering registrars
Go here for the third letter about Search Engines and also CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)
Go here for the second letter on Search Engine Optimization
Go here for the first newsletter about Search Engine optimization
Go here for another newsletter about mail outs, keeping a list and offers of tutoring
go here for a newsletter about icons
and here for a newsletter about how to do a signature and an offer about coloured scrollbars.