Posts

Saw this on the news, reckon this is just the beginning...

Tough one, we're all getting old and having the cheek to live longer. The bill to support this gets bigger, people will never squirrell away enough money so whats the answer?

Turn people out on the street, euthanasia, matrix style battery farms (literally and has my vote) or the country foots the bill by either local or central Government tax rises.

The young and wealthy will obviously vote no. The poor and the old will vote yes. 

NHS seems to be crumbling when it comes to Social Care and looking after old folk. Drastic change is needed, huge rethink, changes in attitude and delivery. But the one thing everyone does agree on is the NHS needs a huge cash investment. Question is where from? Back to bankrupt Britain or put up taxes?

I do think though this should be centrally managed and planned rather than adhoc decisions from local authorities who have some dubious track records depending on area 

So if you are wondering what on earth is a Google crawl budget, fear not.

Every website wants to show up in Googles search results and to enable this, Google has something called a Google Bot. This is just a bit of code that zips round the web hoovering up web pages to display in Googles search results.

Sometimes it's called a spider or web robot. 

How often and how much time the Google bot spends hoovering up your web pages is called your "crawl budget" as the Google Bot crawls all over your website.

You can see how much Google is crawling your site or even amend your crawl rate by logging into your Google Console. If you have never used your Google Console, it's time to start. It's free and gives lots of valuable information about the health of your website and what Google thinks about it. It's fairly straight forward to set up, just follow the prompts, but let me know if you get stuck.

Once logged into your console, you will see a menu on the left hand side. If you scroll down to the Crawl folder and expand it, you will be able to see any crawl errors for your website.

This gives you a chance to see any problems Google has identified with your website. The next tab down is Crawl Stats.

Here you can see how many pages the Google Bot is indexing from your website. For us, you can see where we launched our new site, which has a much better structure than the old one, with the Google Bot hoovering up around 250,000 pages a day.

Now your site is likely to be much smaller, but as you update content then you are likely to see pages getting regularly updated. For pages which remain static then it may be 3 or 4 months before the Google Bot revisits. 

When it does land on your site is dictated by your Crawl Budget. There are a myriad of factors that cause this, from how often you update your website, the speed of your website, any problems with your site, popularity and a whole host more.

For a definitive study about Googles crawling habits, and how to influence it, there is a great post by Jennifer Slegg - Google Crawl Budget.

There are also some great tools out there that can help analyse your site and resolve issues such as Deep Crawl and Screaming Frog. 

Back in your Google Console you will be able to see how many pages Google has hoovered up and put in it's index, ie will be displayed in the search results.

Ours again shows the results of our recent upgrade and the number of pages being indexed. But this is a valuable reference point because you will want to make sure the majority of your pages are being displayed in Googles index. If they're not, then this will point to problems with your site, or individual pages.

Tackling and understanding things like crawl budgets and indexing can seem daunting, but if you are responsible for marketing your website, then take the time to become familiar. Spotting problems in your search console can save you all sorts of headaches later on.

If you have any questions, problems or want to know more, just comment below.

Very topical! I can see Mr Putin as John Travolta 

It's nice to get a new scam for a change. This time it's the Insolvency Service, Clive's obviously run off the credit card

If you get one of these, as usual don't open any links, delete, move on... 

Blimey, good question and forgot about this post 

So what is the latest? I'll confess that the initial push ended with the last post, so any Social Media growth is now organic. Our MLS stuff grows very well, particularly now it has dedicated attention in the form of Rachael. But our Trusted Trader social media is in need of some digital TLC and have a plan in place.

But waffle aside, scores on the doors.

20 July 2015
FB 511, Twitter 178 followers and Google Plus a spectacular 6

19 Jan 2017
FB 673, Twitter 302 followers and Googe Plus... drum roll... 12

Hi Kathryn

I'm afraid this is as old as the hills and a long established business scam that won't go away. You can get a flavour of the history from a post that started in 2011

Charity and Police Magazine Advertising SCAMS

For some reason the North East is the home to these scams. Over the years we have actively fought them, worked with Trading Standards and the Police, but they are like a multi headed beast and re-appear months later under a new name.

Trading Standards and the Police have their hands tied trying to chase these scams, mainly from reduced resource and reality you can't really stop it.

Only way it will stop is for business owners to wise up, but unfortunately with thousands of brand new businesses every year its rich pickings, as someone who fell for it myself 10 years ago, there are plenty of naive and rooky business owners 

In nutshell though, never agree to anything from a cold call, do 5 mins worth of research and if interested, phone THEM back. If you can't, they won't give you a number or try pressure sales, hangup and move on.

Just need to somehow communicate this to every single new business owner and this scam will naturally die. Unfortunately looking at the date of my original post, it shows no sign of dying off anytime soon... 

Aha, so does that mean it's OK to have a men's lounge?

IMHO what a load of feminist cobblers. Time to move forward, the days of the little woman at home managing the house and looking after the kids while hubby went to work are long gone. Most families having working parents and gender is no barrier now for advancement or achievement. 

There is a biological reality that women give birth and are more likely to postpone or give up careers,  maybe from maternal instinct or necessity, this will always skew stats, from number of CEO's to number of MP's. But there are plenty of examples now of high flying mums delegating responsibility to either partners or childcare.

Gender stereotypes still exist, stuffy gentlemens clubs may linger on, but like the Empire of a different age, these attitudes will die off with the older generations that still foster them.

Youngsters leaving school now aren't shackled to the past. The brightest and best will always succeed regardless of background, gender or race. We don't need percentage targets of class, gender or ethnic background. Just the smartest people driving industry, business and the country forward.

It's a tough one. Package holidays tend to revolve around sun and cost. Few of us would have considered a security risk assessment for more obvious and popular destinations.

But no doubt this has now changed for a lot of people. Looking at the information coming out of the inquest regarding poor response times from security and law enforcement agencies is also worrying. Can we attribute blame to the holiday companies? I doubt it, they are serving a need and people vote with their wallet and feet.

Will attitudes change though? I've always wanted to do an overland 4x4 trip from the UK, down Spain, Morocco then heading south through Africa ending up in South Africa. It'a path well trodden by plenty of 4x4 enthusiasts during the 80's and 90's, but would I want to go now? Previously the worst encounters were border control bribery which you allowed for as it's accepted, weather, breakdowns and wild animals.

Now you would have to run the gauntlet of terrorist groups, kidnap and murder. This modern interconnected world is starting to look less appealing as more destinations seem to carry more risk than is acceptable for a family holiday. Cornwall anyone?

Hi there. This is something I've also been looking at, and currently looking at Zoho CRM as we use other Zoho stuff which works well.

But came across this list which may be useful, lists all the CRM players with reviews. Covers freemium, opensource and professional solutions.

Top CRM Software

Wahey get you! A PA  I'm jealous!

Sounds like a brainstorm and delegating to the PA is a great idea. Unfortunately matey patience is a key thing, but with help from the museum I'm sure you'll crack it.

Let us know how you get on or if you need any help.