Random babble by Paulh

Has to hurt a hosting business when you make the front page of Google news for a security breach.

Whats gob smacking is not that Fasthost got hacked but the terrible way they handled it afterwards. If they had made a better job of keeping customers happy after the hack then they wouldnt be stil making front page Google news with headlines like this

Customers are protesting over the measures taken by web firm Fasthosts following a security breach.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7131431.stm

It’s no secret that I now work for the marketing company managing the casino.com account. But if you had ever been to casino.com before today you will see why I never really mentioned it. The old site was an ugly affiliate portal, a throwback to 1998 web design, flashing banners all over the place, popups, and used a CMS that was a nightmare to use.

Well last night we launched the new casino.com site. No longer an affiliate portal, but a fully fledged online casino. I think the design is much better, and certainly stands out from its competitors. It’s been launched with very few of the features I helped plan, quite disappointing! Hopefully we can introduce these features over the coming weeks and months.

Part of the reason for the very basic site and lack of features is casino.com’s sister company dictating what software, hardware, and which developers we would use. Our requirements are very different from Mansion, and it is very obvious our requirements came 2^nd to theirs. Being an ex-developer I helped select the company we would outsource to, annoyingly we went with the company I rated least likely to deliver. As well as seeming very unorganised and inexperienced, the developers we went with only spoke English as a 2^nd language.- so communication was a little strained, not helped by all of the technical stuff being dumped on our content manager – ok call me an ass kisser but she worked miracles to get the site launched - while the rest of the company sat playing games and talking outdated marketing shite – but that’s a future blog post.

Well we’ve launched now, all be it without a working cms, and I am very excited, so presuming I don’t get sacked my job is to now make casino.com into the best online casino there is. Lots of features on the way, probably won’t get some for a couple of years lol. Oh yeah and I suppose I should do some SEO.

For various reasons we haven’t really publicised the launch, very embarrassing and frustrating if your job is online marketing - but company politics and all that.

Getting listed in Google news is not as difficult as many think.

Here’s how I recently got one of my companies sites listed in Google news..

1. Get some reliable hosting
2. Find a good content management system – I used wordpress
3. Create a nice design – we went for a design where the front page looks more like the Washington Post than a blog.
4. Install some wordpress plugins to improve usability like I did hear http://www.assertica.co.uk/top-wordpress-plugins-for-seo-and-usability/
5. To meet Google News guidelines the urls need to have a unique identifying number other than a date. This is very easy to change in Wordpress, modify the permalink structure from /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/ to something like /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/123%post_id%-%postname%/
   123%post_id% now gives our urls at least a 4 digit unique number.
6. Recruit some editors. Luckily I work with several content writers, who write superb content. You can find willing authors wanting to write content for your site if you look around. We now have people asking to write for us for free.
7. Post daily news. A story a day was enough for us.
8. Wait 3 months – surprisingly that was long enough for us.
9. Double check you meet the Google news guidelines http://www.google.com/support/news_pub/ things may have changed since you started your site.
10. Submit to Google news http://www.google.com/support/news_pub/bin/request.py and wait for a review.

Early days for us and we don’t have the resources to publish more than a few stories a day. Hopefully I can do follow up post in a few months on getting the most from Google news.

Recently ordered some books from Amazon for a bit of light reading whilst i lie on my roof in sunny Spain.

First book on my reading list is “The New Rules of Marketing & PR” How to use news releases, blogs, podcasting, viral marketing, and online media to reach buyers directly.

Theres a lot in it that most SEOs will know, but i am already learning knew things, had an avalanche of ideas sparked, and i’m only up to chapter six. Authors blog: David Meerman Scott