“Cheap Oyster travelcards?” No, just one travelcard.

My current place of employment were nice enough to give me a company loan cheque to buy an annual Oyster travelcard, and then took a slice of the loan out of my salary every month, to pay it back, interest free. However, back in August, when I bought my annual Zones 1 and 2 travelcard, I was unaware that by the 5th of February, I would be relocating back to Gibraltar and the south of Spain, so now I have a good few hundred quid’s worth of soon to be useless Oyster travelcard in my wallet.

The remaining balance of the loan was £604, which, given there are 30 weeks left until it expires, works out at £20.13 for a weekly travelcard “equivalent”, compared to the standard £25.80. Would be happy to let it go for less than the balance as I’m just trying to recoup some of the money to put towards relocating.

Get in touch if you’d like it.

I’m looking for someone to fill an SEO job based in London. A bit of a background on the company:

• Based in Canary Wharf
• The world’s leading digital and direct media agency, with more than 650 professionals in 39 offices across 32 countries.
• Part of the second largest communications group in the world
• Fast growing, even in the current economic climate

A bit about the job, you should be proficient in:

• On and offsite optimisation techniques
• Coding in web languages
• Analytical analysis and reporting
• Development of proposals and presentation of such

The ideal candidate should also be proactive (I had to put that in, be thankful I didn’t include: “be a team player” or some other clichéd rubbish) and a team player (hahaha, I crack me up).

No, but seriously now, if you think you fit the bill, please leave a comment with your details and I’ll be in touch! There are plenty of perks in working here:

• We have a bar on the 9th floor, that serves booze, no joke, every day from 5pm. And it’s subsidised. Not free, but cheap, a lot cheaper than anywhere else within the square mile!
• The bar also serves proper coffee, all day, which is also cheap. Think at least half the price of a Costa or Starbucks, and it’s decent, non-instant stuff too (we all know SEO’s run on caffeine and alcohol)
• The rest of the guys here are all awesome, search minded people, just like you and me, and it’s nothing short of BRILLIANT sharing an office with them
• The Bolivian SEO guy buys you coffee and beer when he’s late for work, and that’s quite regular!
• Did I mention the bar?
• With the cheap beer?
• And the free jukebox?
• Which you can plug your ipod into?
• And the free pool table?
• AND THE BEER?

WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?

PUMPT! Quite a few people will have noticed the #pumpt hashtag begin to trend on Twitter earlier on today. Links to a webcam in a warehouse in South London began circulating, and suddenly everyone was watching SpaceHoppers inflate! The premise was simple:

• Tweet using #pumpt
• Watch spacehopper get inflated for a random number of seconds
• See your message on the big screen in the background

A video explaining the pumpt concept is below

Bolivian SEO is an ongoing office joke between myself and my (strangely) Bolivian colleague. Although a paid search monkey himself, and not quite as skilled in the art of organic search, he shows some promise and has often threatened to start his own Bolivian SEO Agency.

So, my good friend, consider this a heads up for when you do finally get round to starting up Bolivian SEO dot com, or whatever, I’m already in there ahead of you, by a long shot, and will be stealing all of your business!

Bolivian SEO? HAH!

Today, I found the following in my comments queue:

Many firms charge top dollar in order to produceresults that their clients can be satisfied with. SEO is a very complicated practice of using key wordsrelated to a particular subject or topic that a business orindividual covers. These key words can be found embeddedinto the meta tags of the website. There are many packages available through SEO consultants and Internet Marketing specialists that can be tailor made to suit your requirements…..

Not only was it attempting to link back to use[dash]seo[dot]co[dot]uk but it was also placed on a completely irrelevant post, on the Remembrance Day 2009 Logos.

These jokers advertise “Guaranteed Ranking” with a small “TC Apply” caveat in a nice star shaped “web-two-point-oh-arific” button and list, amongst other items, “Reciprocal links” as one of their “Advanced Bundle” features, as well as “Customized Monthy (sic) Reports” as a “Premium Bundle” feature. You openly advertise that you won’t provide reports on your performance unless clients pay a premium fee? Allow me to refer back and repeat myself, bunch… of… jokers.

Following a week of Sesame Street Logos, Google amended their logo to represent Remembrance Day.

Nice to see Bing joining in also:

Another Remembrance Day post, regarding the Mail Online’s refusal to honour the fallen.

Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset al-Megrahi is reported to have died. Al-Megrahi was released on compassionate grounds earlier this year, after claims he only had 3 months to live, suffering from prostate cancer.

Legal representative is denying reports that Abdelbaset al-Megrahi has died.

During a recent project involving a fair few languages for a large technology company, we came up against the fact that the local translation of an acronym, didn’t really make sense to the client. We therefore wanted to ensure that the client was happy (by including our target keyword) as well as we were targeting the localised keyword to ensure we caught the traffic. Our decision: include the local word, followed by the English acronym in parentheses, or brackets.

But does Google display them in the SERPs?

A quick search brought up nothing, so the power of the blog prevailed once more:

Image of SERP showing parentheses in page titles

And there you have it, Google WILL display parentheses in page titles!

What is one ivy log? And why should you care? The truth is, you shouldn’t, but you might do some time in the future.

One Ivy Log

is a concept for an SEO project we are currently working on in house. It won’t mean much do anyone outside of the WPP group, but for those within, you’ll need to attend the Lab Lunch on October 6th at 12 noon in the Cabot Square offices to find out exactly WHAT is going on.

One Ivy Log: Watch this space.

Google’s logo is missing another letter this morning. 10 days ago, one of the Os took a hike:

Today, as SEL reports, the L has gone missing:

Is this some sort of intergalactic spelling bee? O…L… Whatever next?