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Things to avoid with marketing agenciesPresentation; social mood mappingAlloyfish brand development. {Part 2}Dealing with Black Hat competitorsAlloyfish brand development. {Part 1}Ethical and Effective Link BuildingGood is not good enoughImage Search OptimisationLink Baiting - an introductionAJAX, the mystery begins

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Sunday 20th April 2008
7:47pm

Presentation; social mood mapping

I thought I would post up this video because it's very interesting. Although probably not the future of search engines, it's a good example of internet based experimentation and the applications of these ideas can be found from arts to social mapping and opinion measurement.
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Tuesday 1st April 2008
1:15pm

Alloyfish brand development. {Part 2}

The form of a fish was stripped down to create a simple geometric form based on three dissected squares. The different parts and colours satisfy the requirement for the likeness different parts to make up an alloy. The following image shows the basic transition from concept ideas towards the final graphic.
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Tuesday 18th March 2008
4:42pm

Alloyfish brand development. {Part 1}

I get asked about this fairly often so I thought that I would write a little bit about why we chose to use Alloyfish as a name for our company. When looking for company names, we literally had hundreds of ideas, and also we decided that we wanted www.ourname .com if possible to give a professional and established feel, and also buy .co.uk equivalents. We played with a variety of names which were rejected for various reasons, the names which met the domain name criteria and had 'something extra' reached a later
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Wednesday 25th June 2008
5:07pm

Things to avoid with marketing agencies

Beware of online marketing companies who... Promise particular search engine positions, often very high or not specified for which terms. They just can't promise anything of the sort, and is a classic sales tactic of less scrupulous companies. Charge levels for a monthly fee for SEOIt just doesn't work this way. Although easy for their accounting and billing it generally leads to, and is based on poor value SEO work. SEO will generally involve a initial lump of work, then some specific link finding/brokering & placement or well placed content generation over the course of time.
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Thursday 27th March 2008
1:27pm

Dealing with Black Hat competitors

Complaints about unfair tactics being used by competitors are certainly not uncommon.  Black Hat SEO techniques do work and they are able to deliver great rankings.  This leaves those of us who depend upon White Hat SEO feeling frustrated and angry.  Fortunately, there is a solution in most cases as the strength of Black Hat SEO is also its greatest vulnerability.
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Tags: black hat SEO

Thursday 24th January 2008
1:10pm

Good is not good enough

"Every success is built on the ability to do better than good enough", or so the saying goes; and as sayings go that one will go far.  Good enough was only good enough when you were the only game in town and that town only had one horse.  Even then, good enough was never really very good. Today's world demands excellence.  Every sector can be neatly divided between excellence which generally has the lion's share of the market, and good enough which bumbles along just about making ends meet.  Gone are the days in which you could sell good-enough at the price of excellence based upon a lack of competition.  Welcome to the global marketplace where there is competition for everything, and your competition may well be paying just pence an hour.  Good, cheap and fast; pick any one to target as a market advantage, so long as it's not cheap.
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Monday 7th January 2008
8:58am

Link Baiting - an introduction

Here at Alloyfish we've mixed feelings about bait, but there's one kind of bait which we unanimously support: link bait. Far from being a tasty treat containing a barbed ticket to the deep frier, link baiting is a positive way of engaging with the wider internet community whilst raising the profile of your site. See this extract;   "As much as you find your flea-ridden begging and wildlife chasing cat adorable, I cannot stand seeing it climbing into my garden.  You have never asked permission to use my garden for exercising your cat, and if you cannot control your cat then you need to keep it locked.  His next visit will be his last.  I have a large
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Monday 18th February 2008
5:04pm

Ethical and Effective Link Building

Links are the 800lb gorilla in every search engine optimisation (SEO) proposal.  As professional optimisers we would much prefer if links were entirely unnecessary; in theory a good site, presented well, should rank well. Links matter and anyone who suggests otherwise is wrong.  It doesn't matter if you're starting a small hobby site or a large corporate site, your search engine rankings will suffer enormously if you solider on without garnering any links. I put the word ethical in the title of this article for good reason; building links can be achieved through a vast array of
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Sunday 13th January 2008
12:00am

Image Search Optimisation

Your site probably has plenty of images, at least it should. Images really pull a site together, so long as they are relevant. For most of us, the images we use are licensed from other people - this means that you aren't the only one with them. Image searches don't like to show duplicate images. They only show one source for one image. This means that to get your image listed, you may need to use some SEO sense: Size distinguishes images - offer the images scaled to sizes other than the original. Not only does this show you have different images, but it means you show up under images searches for small, medium and large images.
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Tuesday 18th December 2007
11:15am

AJAX, the mystery begins

Let's talk about true and false.  Ah, basic boolean?  No, not exactly.  AJAX is one of the most common buzz-words in website development today.  True.  Most web-developers are able to write AJAX.  False.  Most web-developers who create fancy 'AJAX-effect's know how to write AJAX.  False. Pick up a book on AJAX, and often as not it will start off by telling you that the key to AJAX is 'this' framework or 'that' library.  Ooops... that's not teaching you AJAX, that's teaching you how to use a tool for setting up dynamic interaction.  The AJAX was written by the guy who created the framework or the library. What's so special about AJAX?  To be honest, nothing.  It's elegant; but what it gains in elegance it loses in both speed and support. More true and false.  AJAX is the only way to set up asynchronous communication with a server.  False.  AJAX is the name for things which aren't Flash but look like Flash.  False.  AJAX requires ActiveX support to run on Internet Explorer, the disabling of which has long been highly recommended to all.  True.  AJAX is fast.  False
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