James O’Sullivan’s Blog

SEO, (Search Engine Optimisation) is absolutely crucial to the success of your online business. There’s a whole host of companies offering their SEO services and charge an arm and a leg to give you advice on how your website should be optimised. My best advice in today’s ecomonic climate is to save yourself some money and do it yourself. SEO agencies position SEO as a complicated science which only they understand. That’s simply not the case. SEO companies come in, do a check of your keywords, optimise your content, give advise on website structure and code, and simply rattle off best practices that YOU need to follow. After all this advice the SEO company don’t really “Do” anything! They give you the advice but it’s you who needs to do the work to implement their recommendations! It’s you that has to build up the in-bound links, it’s you who needs to update your code with meta descriptions etc, it’s you who needs to code up the short URL’s and so on. In my opinion I think it’s daylight robbery.

If you want to optimise your website just read Google’s document on how to SEO your website.

and if that’s too much check out the really useful SEO cheat sheet.

Follow this and you’ve just saved your self a pile of cash to spend on Google ads or at your Christmas party

If you’re lazy go ahead and waste your money on an SEO agency.

The clever folks over at reCaptha have come up with the brilliant idea of using old book style text in their captcha words. CAPTCHA ( Completely Automated Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart) is now widely used in websites when signing up for a service, it helps stop spam and bots from gaining access to a websites service.

These characters are difficult for a machine to decipher but humans are able to identify the words which is the idea behind CAPTCHA in the first place.  By using old book style text millions of reCaptcha users can help digitize old books. Building a captcha from scratch is not an easy job and reCaptha does a great job to take this burden away from those who would just like to add it as a plugin to our blog. However I wouldn’t advise the use of reCaptcha as your CAPTCHA tool if you have a critical web application with high traffic.
The web application will have to query the reCaptcha engine each time it’s loaded, which may keep your users waiting!
Pictures are also a nice way alternative to words when generating your CAPTCHA. But of course this hogs more bandwidth so let’s stick to black and white text for now!