And, invariably the answer comes back - forget about keyword density, don’t worry about onpage SEO, don’t keyword stuff as it will get you banned - just write for your visitors, good quality content is what counts - mmmmmmmmm - maybe!

Unfortunately it’s not the visitors who get you on the top page in the first place - it’s a piece of software!

It’s a piece of software that follows certain rules - the main one being to ascertain the focus of the page and site.  And how does it do this?

By looking for repetitive words, similar words, linking words, pages with similar words, linking out to sites with similar words, sites linking to you with similar words!

It’s all about the words.

This site has the top spot for  Ben 10 Bedding, (showing google’s text only cache) and has been for some time, and I don’t think it’s inline for any literary awards this year

You could write the most definitive, interesting article and only mention the subject once  - but that’s not going to get you diddly, unless you have some  major, relevant high PR sites linking in ( with the correct anchor text, of course.)

Google might well have human quality controllers who go in and check the suitability of pages and who look for well written, focused, relevant content - but I reckon, only for those high revenue sections and only when they reach the upper echelons of the search engine - you have to get there first, by fair means or foul.

Also, if you have that stickiness factor and visitors keep coming back and spending time on your site without hitting that back button because you have great content, that will certainly help you achieve your goal of staying in those coveted spots - but they’ve got to find you first?

So, by all means, sit down and spend an hour writing that interesting, relevant, quality content - and then spend the next few days checking you’ve included enough keywords - but not too many, the anchor text, the H1 titles, the meta titles and meta description,  the inbound links and the outbound links, the blogs, twitter and facebook links - and then, don’t forget to  investigage those sites already ranking for your chosen keywords - which, maybe, you should have  gotten round to first.

Then you can sit back, relax and bask in the warm rays of your well written content - fingers crossed!

It’s been no secret that we’ve had a difficult 12 months at Children’s Rooms, I blogged about this last year -here

Approaching Christmas we quickly filled the new units with new lines and some cracking bargains thanks to the negotiating skills of Dave and Ourkev and the festive season was incredibly busy (we did see a downturn during the Woolworths fiasco though) but the New Year Sale proved even more popular.

The trend has continued throughout the year- thankfully.  Thanks to Darren and Carolyn being so capable, Dave and Kev have had plenty of time to source new suppliers and, even more important, the time to  go and see them and forge beneficial relationships - there’s a lot to be said for face to face contact in this electronic age!

By February it was obvious that if we were going to take advantage of the multitude of excellent deals that we were being offered we would have to start looking for larger premises.

And boy, did we strike lucky.

Not only is the warehouse much closer to home (Ourkev can easily! cycle there) it’s nearly twice the size at roughly half the price.

We also qualified for a £5000 Legi (Local Enterprise Growth Initiative Grant), so we were able to install a mezzanine floor and a second office.

Our landlords, also local folk, are incredibly nice, very accommodating and helpful. (and luckily  have a variety of other warehouses and business units in the area, which we could be taking advantage of in the near future ;))

We’re now fully moved and in the process of creating the best use of the available space - not an easy task, but we are getting there, allthough the amount of accumulated dust and debris is awesome.

Part 2 - Our Knight in Shining Armour - coming soon

Bearing this in mind it was pointed out that it would have been better to create one new url and 301 the old page directly to this, and then wait untill the new page was indexed correctly and then split the page - made sense.

May 21st - Sooo - not being scared of changing stuff willy nilly, I set about deleting the new pages and resurrecting the old page

It took approximately a week for the old page to be reindexed and today, for the term xxx bedding, it shows in 6th position, secondary to a 404 page, (another long deleted page, which Google has resurrected for this term - go figure).

For the term xxx toys, Google is now showing pageB (now deleted) in position 6 - so this bodes well for when I do eventually split the page.

We shall wait now for Google to realise her mistake and stop using 404 pages for my main term and reinstate the old page to it’s former glory - fingers crossed.

I shall keep you informed.

So, rather bravely or stupidly (depends on the outcome!) I decided to take one of my main revenue pages and split it into 2 different sections - I’ll not say which one, ‘cos I don’t want any outside influences effecting it.   The character pages do lend themselves  to being split into bedding and bedroom accessories  and  toys and games pages,  and without any changes to the actual layout or content.

• Tuesday May 12th split the page and created 2 new pages - pageA/bedding-bedroom-stuff  and  pageB/toys-and-games
• 301′d (permanent redirect) the old page to pageA
• included both new pages in Google sitemaps
• deleted the old page from my server and Google sitemaps
• kept the old page intact on my computer, just in case!

• Tuesday 19th May - the old page has disappeared from Google
• pageA cached on 15th May, but not showing in the serps
• pageB not been indexed at all
• for the term xxxbedding, Google is showing an old, deleted page,  from a different character,  at No 6 (cached 14th May), which leads to my 404 page,  which only has the keywords in the index - go figure
• Allkids is not showing for any of my other previously relevant keywords, pertaining to this character - sweating slightly
• I decide to recreate that old deleted page and change the meta title and description to xxx and a simple explanation with a link to pageA - probaby a knee jerk reaction and on retrospect not really useful!

• Wednesday 20th May - for the term xxxbedding, Google is still showing the other old character page, but now includes pageA below it, in the indented position -good.
• for the term xxxtoys, Google is showing pageA (which has a link to the toys page) at position 8 - pageB still not indexed.

It will be interesting to see how this pans out over the next few weeks, will my new pages simply replace my old page and regain all my favourite positions and keywords - and hopefully increase them or will the mighty Google Sandbox kick in, and after initially ranking well, will disappear for several weeks/months before slowly creeping back up to that first page.

I shall keep you posted.

It seems ages since our 40th Wedding Celebrations back in January - seem to have added another couple of years and well on our way to our 50th.

Back in 1969 when we were just bairns and trying to find a cheap shoestring to pay for our wedding, we certainly couldn’t afford to pay overmuch for the ring, but we found a nice 9 carat gold ring in Leeds market, and it served it’s purpose for 40 years and as the years progressed we added pretty engagement and eternity rings - I do like nice jewellery.

But as our anniversary approached we (yes WE) reckoned it would be nice to push the boat out and invest in some really nice bling to adorn that aged finger - I would have loved Dave to get a matching ring - but he’s not jewellery sort - which meant I could look for something that little bit special ;).

I spent hours and days and weeks trawling through diamond jewellery websites - I knew I wanted platinum, diamonds and elegance, but it’s quite difficult to get a feel for something like this by looking at images. We eventually decided to visit the jewellery centre of the UK - Hatton Gardens in London and booked our train tickets and hotel - surely I’d be able to find what I wanted here.

Just before our journey I came across Scifinds Blog about Purely Diamonds on the A4u forum and, obviously, followed the link - what a revelation - this is how diamond jewellery sites should show their wares - loved this wedding ring and could have got a matching ring for Dave - but he still refused and then this - this is the diamond engagement ring I fell in love with .

If we hadn’t already booked our trip I would have ordered the rings there and then (and got 7% affiliate discount), but we decided to visit the showroom and made an appointment for late afternoon. We hit Hatton Gardens at lunch time and spent a couple of hours playing in and out, in and out of the various jewellery emporiums and saw a couple of nice wedding rings and were tempted occasionally, and one very very nice diamond engagement ring and nearly succumbed to the tune of £10K (I don’t think my original ring cost £10) - but we’d made that appointment and we don’t like letting folk down.

I am so glad we made the right decision - as soon as I saw the wedding and diamond engagement rings it was a no brainer - they were exactly as portrayed on the website and a dam site cheaper than anything in Hatton Gardens (still a Yorkshire lass at heart) - and the owner and his daughter were lovely people, very friendly and helpful - they rushed my ring through so I could show it off wear it for our 40th Wedding Celebrations.

The upshot is that I would heartily recommend this site to any affiliate who dabbles in the jewellery/ladies/weddings/gifts sector. The site is easy to navigate, the prices very competitive, the attention to detail excellent and the icing on the cake - the video shots are a clincher.

I had several further conversations with the numpties at customer service, who still insisted it was IMPOSSIBLE to resurrect my old/existing job number, and that I had to abide by their 7 day rule.  So I contacted Trading Standards who simply stated that I had given them reasonable time to mend my computer and Under the Sale of Goods Act, I was entitled to a replacement and I should use one of their templated complaint letters and send it to their head of customer services …..

when, lo and behold, I received an email from their online customer complaints section, who I’d emailed the day before  :-

Considering your machine is still within the first year of warranty, and the initial fault was not caused by accidental damage, the “6 week rule” does not apply. Instead, the “28 day rule” (a guarantee from PC World) is in force. Basically, this means that if repairs for a specific issue are ongoing for more than 28 days, the store of purchase will offer an instant replacement.

The difficulty in this case stems from the fact that the initial recovery problem was resolved after 26 days and thus marked as complete. The current difficulty concerning the wireless card is taken as a seperate problem, which is entitled to its own 28 days of treatment.

However, any 28-day-rule exchanges are at the store’s discretion, so it may be worth going back to speak to them directly. Everyone seems to have been caught up in the “6 week” view of things, when it is not even applicable in this circumstance. Considering you were technically two days outside of being able to claim a 28-day exchange it would only be in the interest of customer service for the store to consider this.

mmmmm - why have I paid £9.99/month for the last 11 months!!!

So, Dave trots off to our local PC World to see the manager, armed with a copy of my blog - and … Rob couldn’t have been nicer or more helpful, it was a pleasure dealing with him and his staff.  We’ve returned the offending base unit, exchanged it for another one and they’re going to do their best to recover my data from the backup drive and load it onto the new one - result.

We’re picking up the unit next week - then I’ll be phoning customer support to ask why I wasn’t told about the existing Guarantee,  that I really didn’t need PC Performance and I think I was sold it under false pretences ……….

But it was the quietest on display and that is so important to me - and I purchased the PC Performance Plan for a mere £9.99/month which would ensure that if I had problems with this computer then PC World would send an engineer out the very next day (as long as I rang before 10 am) to fix it and if they didn’t fix it I’d get a replacement - so that had to be worth it — didn’t it!!!!

Everything went hunky dory for 10 months and then one day it just stopped - no warning, no whirrings, no nothing - just - mmmm - nothing.

• Friday 27th February - called the engineers - after 10 am
• Tuesday 3rd March - engineer came a few hours later, changed the motherboard and the graphics card (I think), said it was fixed and started the recovery process. The recovery process failed - no working computer
• Tuesday 3rd March called the engineers
• Thursday 5th March same engineer called.  Spent a few hours fiddling with the computer, said it was fixed, started the recovery programmeand left.
  The recovery process failed - no working computer.
• Thursday 5th March called customer support to ask for replacement computer but was refused as PC World have 6 weeks to repair computer before issuing a replacement - c’est la vie  so visit arranged for Monday 9th -  HAD TO BUY NEW COMPUTER FROM COMET AS IMPERITIVE TO BUSINESS!!!!
• Monday 9th waited all day - no show.  Rang the engineers who had omitted to inform me that they needed to send for new recovery disks from HP and would rearrange the visit when they had received them
• Thursday 12th March - Thursday 19th March on holiday in Egypt
• Friday 20th March called engineers
• Monday 23rd received recovery disks through post, engineer visited with 2 more sets of recovery disks - ALL WRONG!!!! - engineer fixed computer, but said - and this is the important bit - THAT ANY PROBLEMS GOING FORWARD WOULD PROBABLY BE DUE TO PC WORLD SENDING THE WRONG DISCS and these being used in the ‘tattooing’ process!!!
• Wednesday 25th March computer working but wouldn’t connect to the wireless router - no internet, called support centre who gave help and support over the phone.  Tried all the various methods - no joy
• DURING THE NEXT 8 DAYS WE WERE EXTREMELY BUSY, HAD A BUSINESS MEETING IN LONDON, WE WERE ARRANGING FOR WORKMEN TO VISIT OUR NEW WAREHOUSING PREMISES, WE WERE INVOLVED WITH GETTING 2 NEW WEBSITES UP AND RUNNING etc etc.  We are very busy people running 2 very successful internet businesses.
• Thursday 2nd April called customer support who suggested downloading new drivers - downloaded new drivers - no joy - still no connection
• Monday 6th called support centre, before 10 am, to request engineer.  No engineer available for Tuesday and we had appointments Wednesday and Thursday. Friday was Good Friday and the start of the Easter Holiday Weekend, so the earliest PC WORLD could arrange a visit was Tuesday 14 th April - not good enough.
• Friday 10th April called customer support - who were working - to invoke the ‘cannot be fixed in 6 weeks’ part of the agreement and asked for a replacement product
•  THIS IS WHERE PC WORLD GET CLEVER.

‘Oh no’ they say, ‘because you haven’t been in touch within 7 days, this will be treated as a new problem under a new job number, which means that the 6 weeks period starts all over again  - WTF!!!!.

‘But’, I say, ‘it’s not a new problem, it’s because you sent the wrong discs and it could possible go wrong every other week, which means that I’m always going to have new job numbers and I’m never going to get this computer fixed properly - so just fix it under the old job number, then if it doesn’t work I can claim my replacement.

‘Sorry Mrs Forth,’ they say, ‘that’s absolutely impossible, we have to issue new job numbers because you left it more than 7 days, before contacting us’

‘But’, I say, ‘it doesn’t mention this 7 day gap in the contract, and none of the PC WORLD engineers have mentioned this to me either, so how was I supposed to know?’

They say ‘the 7 day gap is our policy and we don’t have to put it in the contract, so tough tittie (OK I made that bit up, PC WORLD didn’t say tough tittie)

So here we are - PC Word are adamant they will not replace my computer as it’s impossible for them to vary the 7 day rule, are adamant that they don’t need to put this in their PC Performance contract, and will only deal with me under a new job number.

I’m adamant that I’m not going to accept a new job number as it’s not a new problem, and that they cannot willy nilly state new terms and conditions without putting them in writing in the contract.

Obviously my next step is to send a written complaint to PC World and also contact Trading Standards, Watchdog, Small Claims Court etc.

This will take quite a time so in the meanwhile I’ll be placing a little ad on Google, which will appear every time anyone searches for the terms PC World and any related searches, which will link through to this blog - and below I’ve listed other disgruntled PC World users, who’ve posted on the internet - enjoy

Revues from Kelkoo - the customer service rating is interesting

Review Centre - customer service 2 out of 10

Dooyoo.co.uk - interesting reading

Shoddy custome service from PC World’s Tech Guys

PC Advisor -1

PC Advisor - 2

I will list more in time but I’m losing the will to live - which is where the conniving part of PC World comes in - how many digruntled customers simply give up, write it off to a bad experience and simply buy a computer from somewhere else?

ps - anyone wanting to know how to make those little adwords ads???

I’m a fanatical proponent of giving all males over the age of 2, by law, Omega 3 Fish Oils - the world would be a much better place, it would slash the youth crime figures, enable young boys to concentrate for longer than a nano second and make all males (apart from the out and out psychopaths* ) much nicer people to live with - in short the world would be a much, much better place.

We were discussing the addictive personalites, the awkwardness, bad temperedness!, and out and out orneryness of such folk and how I totally understood this as I was prone to this type of behaviour (big style) before I hit the menopause - I’m all sweetness and light now - ahem.

I’ve always assumed that my change in behaviour and my inability to stay angry for more than 10 minutes (it used to be weeks)  has been down to hormonal changes - when it suddenly dawned on me, that at the same time I started taking Evening Primrose Oil - WOW!!!!

IS EVENING PRIMROSE OIL THE REASON I’M SUCH A NICE PERSON NOW!!!
COULD I HAVE SPARED DAVE AND THE KIDS YEARS AND YEARS OF  TEMPER TANTRUMS AND PMS RAGES!!!
(I know you’re finding it hard to believe I was this person;))
SHOULD I STOP TAKING THEM TO SEE IF I REVERT  (Dave’s shouting NOOOOOOOO and quivering in the corner)

Seriously though - if you, or your wife, girlfriend, mother, grandma, lady next door, mate suffers from PMS then it might be worth force feeding them Evening Primrose Oil.

In fact forget Fluoride in our drinking water - it should be some sort of oil, be it omega 3, primrose or cod liver,- then everything and everyone would be hunkydory.

Now if I was a proper affiliate I’d have links scattered all over the place to Healthy Direct and  Holland and Barret - but, I think you should all hot foot it down to the High Street and get them today.

*apparently sychopaths can be indentified by their palm prints - they have an extra, or a missing line - can’t remember which - and how do I know this?

Plus I love hanging out with t’internet folk and I’m not fussy which area of expertise they’re in - affiliateers, merchants, networks, seoists, geekyists, techies - and all these were well represented.

The presentations were excellent, just wished some of them could have been longer, and I picked up valuable tips from most of them -I’ve been a twittering all morning and creating a focussed linking campaign (allbeit in my head for the moment).

Here’s a quick recap of the Think Visibility sessions I enjoyed (and those Dave attended, ‘cos I can’t be in 2 places at once - although I’m working on it)

Chriss Garrett - well I listened, here I am Blogging. Loved his sense of humour
Katie Lips - this is one for the future, certainly opened my eyes to the possibility of using mobiles and I-phone apps
Dave Naylor - always entertaining and informative, I’ve already got a savings account named Silver Bullet!
Patrick Altoft from Blogstorm - gave an excellent presentation on linking - very useful
Keiron - didn’t realise how well I was doing - cheers Kieron.  Certainly motivating for those just starting out
Tim Nash - Dave attended this one, and, apparently I missed the most entertaining 30 mins. and his blog is worth checking out
Tom Smith - had an interesting chat over dinner, ourkev enjoyed this one.

The bios of all the Think Visibility speakers can be found here - and it’s certainly  worth while spending some time reading through them, there’s some very sound information and tips.

The two evenings spent in Leeds, mainly at the Hogs Head, was extremely enjoyable.  Spending time with ‘old’ favourites - Kieron, Ray and Chris and meeting really nice (’cos most t’internetters’ are - not all, but most) new folk, especially Andrew,  is always a good way to spend an evening.

So thanks to The Hodge for arranging this, and I’m already looking forward to the September one.