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Not related to what I usually ramble on about but I feel this story deserves to be told. Last night (Friday 18th Jan) at around 11:30 - 12:00ish in the family home we had a fire which started in the washing room at the back of the house when the clothes dryer overheated and went up in flames.

I had put two towels into the clothes dryer around 10 o’ clock so when I got up the next morning I could hop straight into the shower. Sometime in between half 11 and midnight while in my room I smelt smoke, seconds later I heard commotion from the others in the house. I ran down from the attic to the hall door and noticed that a) everyone (including the pet dog) was out in the garden in double quick time and b) a fire had taken hold of about 1/3 of the partition wall/roof between our washing room and sitting room. The wall that separates these two rooms had perspex windows so needless to say it would not have taken long for a fire to spread from one room to another.

Quick evaluation of the situation led me to conclude that it was an acceptable risk to try and put out or at least stem the fire myself before the fire brigade, who had just been called arrived. I ran back upstairs and grabbed a powder fire extinguisher as I was not sure of the source of the fire at the time. If the source of the fire had been electrical and I had started chucking water on it it would have made it worse, however if it was something else at least I knew powder would not make it worse. After opening the sitting room door I was greeted with thick smoke so couldn’t really see well, however I simply pulled the pin and tried to spray towards the base of the bright blur, because the fire was moving upwards on both sides of a wall the bottom of the fire one second was not necessarily the bottom of the fire the next so I then decided to just spray upwards to try and cover all the fire, it seemed to work well. It seemed the first fire extinguisher was empty after only 2/3 seconds, we had a second one on the landing window which I needed as the fire was not yet out. Thankfully after that one was emptied I was confident the fire was out, and by this stage the smoke was starting to get in my eyes and lungs and billowing all over the house so I didn’t stick around to investigate and left the house.

Two fire brigade engines arrived about 15 minutes or so later. There must have been about 20 guys, they all went in and made sure the fire didn’t reignite as often happens, they also checked for structural damage. Thankfully there was none and about two hours later we were allowed back into the house. The fire chief whose name was ‘flood’ (I couldn’t help cracking the joke that he’d be useful in the event of a fire) confirmed that the fire had started in the clothes dryer. He said that this was the stations second dryer related fire that night. He continued to say that in his experience dryers are responsible for causing more fires than any other household electrical appliance and that they must have their filters cleaned regularly so as not to overheat and catch fire.

When all the smoke cleared out and after seeing the damage properly we all agreed that it was not that bad and that it could have been a lot worse, the main thing of course was that everyone was OK, in fact the fire chief commented: “Another hour later and you’d all be dead” in relation to the starting time of the fire, everyone was settling down for bed when the fire started so we did not think his comment was just scaremongering, on the contrary his comment made us realise just how lucky we were.

As mentioned before the main thing in this (and any) fire is that everyone is all right, concerns about the property did and must come secondary, however considering the fire brigade took about 15 mintues (through no fault of their own - traffic, ramps etc.) to arrive I’m sure glad I had that second fire extinguisher as otherwise the whole house would have been gutted. Incidentally I ‘won’ that second fire extinguisher as part of a home safety kit during safety week in my company only a while ago. I’m convinced that if I didn’t win it my family wouldn’t have been going back into the house after two months never mind two hours. Needless to say we will be stocking up on fire extinguishers (and other fire safety equipment too of course) after this. In this case it’s important to note that everyone was out very very quickly (which we are all quitely proud of each other for) so fire extinguishers in this particular instance saved property not lives, next time they could save lives… if you have them, they definitely won’t if you don’t.

I’ve included a good few pictures of the damage below. Click on the descriptions to view the pics.

This is a view from the washing room. The fire started near the bottom right of the photo. It quickly spread up the walls and through to the adjacent sitting room.

This table is just in front of the partition between the two walls.

View from the washing room looking through to the sitting room.

Sut from the smoke settling on the kitchen table. Notice the finger marks which show just how thick the sut cover was.

The clothes dryer was the source of the fire. The fire brigade removed it and a gas canister from the washing room.

This photo shows extensive roof damage. The fire spread to the sitting room via the perspex windows which you can see in the bottom right of the photo.

View of roof damage in the sitting room. The natural colour of the roof is pure white.

View from the sitting room looking across at the roof and the burnt out windows/partition wall area.

This is where the washing machine and the clothes dryer usually are. The center of the picture is where the fire started out. The fire chief believed that the dryer had overheated and thus went up in flames.

This is a straight view from the sitting room into the washing room. I used the fire extinguisher from this position. I initially sprayed the bottom of the windows and then aimed towards the roof/top of windows.

View of roof damage from the washing room. The fire started in the clother dryer to the bottom right of the photo.

Roof damage just to the left of the source of the fire. Notice the melted light.

Two empty powder fire extinguishers. We had one in the house, the other one I ‘won’ in work. If I hadn’t had the 2nd fire extinguisher I believe the house would have been entirely gutted.

Today I’m going to offer a couple of paragraphs about how I do keyword research as part of any SEO work I do for clients. It’s very easy, it takes a fair bit of time but it is easy to do. I want to share it with you because I feel it will be useful for you and also I believe in 100% transparency and want my clients (and potential clients) to know that. Google too believes in 100% transparency as illustrated by the following paragraph taken from their What’s an SEO? Does Google recommend working with companies that offer to make my site Google-friendly?

“Be careful if a company is secretive or won’t clearly explain what they intend to do.

Ask for explanations if something is unclear. If an SEO creates deceptive or misleading content on your behalf, such as doorway pages or “throwaway” domains, your site could be removed entirely from Google’s index. Ultimately, you are responsible for the actions of any companies you hire, so it’s best to be sure you know exactly how they intend to “help” you.”

OK on to keyword research, a very fundamental part of any SEO campaign. I use a number of different online tool resources. I do not think its a good idea to rely on only one source of data as the simple fact of the matter is no one tool can ever provide you with 100% accurate data. That’s why I always tell my clients that the specific figures from these tools are not important, what is important however is the relativity of one keywords count with another keywords count so you can see in a general sense which one is more popular.

The three main sources of data I use are the Google Adwords keyword tool, the free keyword discovery tool and plain old Google itself. I’ll elaborate on these a little.

The Google Adwords keyword tool located at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal, allows you to see the average search volume of your keywords (and keywords which the tool deems related to your keywords) for a specific or multiple regions/languages. You could for instance get an idea of how popular a certain word is in the UK or how popular another word is in the spanish language worldwide.

, allows you to see the average search volume of your keywords (and keywords which the tool deems related to your keywords) for a specific or multiple regions/languages. You could for instance get an idea of how popular a certain word is in the UK or how popular another word is in the spanish language worldwide.The keyword discovery tool is located at http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html. This tool returns a figure representing the amount of times a certain keyword or keyphrase appears in the keyword discovery database. The KD guys claim to have a database of 36 billion web searches. Again the specific figures are likely to be inaccurate but it’s how they compare to each other that count not the figures themselves.

I’m thinking about signing up for a full blown account so I can program a tool in PHP or ASP.Net against their API to make my life easier (well the keyword research part of it anyhow :-)). I’ve found Wordtracker and the Yahoo/Overture keyword tool to be lacking a bit when compared to something like Keyword Discovery, so KD is ‘in’ at the moment. In fact my only beef with keyword discovery stems from the fact they scored straight F’s for geography, history (or whatever you want to call it) when they included Google.ie in the list of UK search engines which they apparently take data from.

On Google.com, I get the amount of competiting pages for a keyphrase to try to determine how difficult a keyphrase will be to optimize for. I don’t like many other tools and consultants simply type the phrase in and take that figure. This is wholly inaccurate because it returns all pages that just happen to have your keywords in them, they are not your real competition. I use a special allintitle:keyword1 keyword2 query which allows me to see how many pages are really about the same thing I want to optimize for.

I put all this data side by side in excel and then examine it. Clear patterns will emerge. Basically what I do be looking for is keywords which have a good amount of popularity but which are not super competitive. The next SEO consultant will most likely do things completely differently, it’s all really about what works for you. By the way and speaking about SEO consultants Dave Davis has released the latest version of his Google Global Firefox Extension which allows you to see what the Google search results that you are viewing look like from different geographical locations. This is very useful if you want to compare organic search results in different countries or if you want to see how your AdWords PPC campaigns appear in different regions.

These days I’ve been advising a lot of my clients to have their 3 or 4 core keywords present a couple of times not just on the page they are hoping to rank well for (most often the home page) but to also have occurances of them spread out over a couple of pages and thus in their site in general. What this does is allow Google to see a website as a whole with a central theme running through it.

Themes of course are nothing new to the search marketing industry, however many SEO consultants will still simply talk about page relevancy (sometimes referred to as keyword density) and not relevancy of a site as a whole. I believe themes are important to search engines like Google because ‘faking’ relevancy for a website is a lot harder and more involved than ‘faking’ it for a single page. I use the term ‘faking’ here to basically refer to optimisation of a sites content, which lets face it folks is unatural. This for Google all comes down to their desire to provide the best and most natural (and naturally deserving) search results.

A websites core topic or theme can also be established (or more correctly reinforced) by Google and the other search engines by examining component words of all incoming links to a site. Imagine for example akamarketing.com got 40 links distributed with 4 different anchor texts such as ’search engine marketing’, ’search marketing’, ’search engine optimisation’, ’search engine marketing Ireland’. Certain words appear constantly throughout all or most of these anchors and thus suggest that overall my site is about ’search’ and ‘marketing’ more so than it is about ‘optimisation’ or ‘Ireland’.

Taking themes into consideration when your conducting SEO for a website is not hard, personally I just like to use the ‘What Googlebot sees’ feature within the ‘Statistics’ section of Google webmaster tools located at http://www.google.com/webmasters/. The information here is from the horses mouth and as such is very accurate. Below is two screen samples for what Googlebot sees of akamarketing.com. The one on the left shows what words appear most often on the site, whereas the screen sample on the right shows the words which appear most often in external links to the site.

Most of my plans about what type of keywords I want akamarketing.com to rank well for revolve around SEO focused keywords and keyphrases as this is my area of expertise (alleged expertise :-)), so by looking at the above data to ‘zoom’ in on this core topic/theme I should (hypothetical of course as finding time these days is pretty much impossible) ideally be geting lots of backlinks with words like ’search’, ’seo’, ‘marketing’ etc. to sync with my sites top keywords (in terms of keyword density) and thus make my theme more ‘believable’.

Similarly if your site was to have certain words appearing often in its external links (on the right) but not in its overall content (on the left) then I would suggest adding more of these words on X amount of pages, assuming the words in your backlinks are indeed the words you are actively targetting (for the most part they should be). X can only be determined by yourself after looking at your own data and determining where your target words ‘rank’ (in terms of overall frequency of use) already.

While themes do not allow for direct optimisation of pages for specific words or phrases I certainly do think that Google (and many more search engines) use them to ‘confirm’ or ’reinforce’ their ’suspicions’ about the topic of a page and thus they affect where it will rank for its target keywords which overlap the overall website theme. Imagine for instance two sites, siteA and siteB, which sell garden tools. siteA and siteB both have only 10 links into their home pages with the exact phrase ‘garden tools’ in the anchor text, the component words for external links will be the same. Now say that Google sees the most frequently occuring words of siteA as ‘grass’, ’flowers’, ’soil’, ‘lawn’ and ‘garden’ in that order and the most frequently occuring words of siteB as ‘garden’, ‘lawn’, ‘tool’, ‘gardens’, ‘tools’ again in that order. All other things being equal (including keyword density of both home pages) I believe siteB will outrank siteA in Google for the phrase ‘garden tools’ and many related ones too as the underlying garden theme is more obvious in siteB. As usual your thoughts, questions and rants are always welcome.

It is estimated that 1 in 10 men worldwide are colour blind, additionally it is thought that 1 in 100 women are colour blind. If you design for the estimated 10% of users who are still on 800 * 600 resolutions well then why not develop with colour blind users in mind too?

There are three main types of colour blindess, and I’ll get to them in a moment but in an overall sense colour blindness relates to how some people cannot distinguish between certain colours. The graphic to the left (credit to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colour_blindness) shows how colour blind people see certain colours.

The three main types of colour blindness are:

Tritanopia is a very rare form of colour blindness. It revolves around the inability of a person to discriminate between blue and yellow hues.

Protanopia is a more common form of colour blindness and effects people who have a defective vision of red and confusion of red with green or bluish green.

Deuteranopia is the most common form of colour blindness. Deuteranopia also relates to the inability of a person to tell certain greens and reds apart.

Remember all colours are made up of certain percentages of the three primary colours, red, blue and yellow. This means despite the fact that Deuteranopia (for example) relates to confusion of greens and reds it will ’show itself’ in many secondary and tertiary colours too as usually they contain some amount of green and red. In this respect classifying types of colour blindess as blue/yellow or red/green can be slightly misleading.

What does this mean?
The fact that some form of colour blindness effects a relatively large proportion of the population means you must factor this in when designing your website. If you make extensive use of colours to differentiate between different elements on a page, the page may become unusable by some visitors. You should therefore follow the advice of all the accessibility gurus and be certain not to use colours alone to convey important information. Practical tips to implement this might include:

Use high contrast colours next to each other in your designs. Black text on white background works best.

Specifically try to avoid using red and green next to each when the colours are significant within?your designs.

If you must use any hues of?red and green next to each other always provide a textual cue too.

Make?important text stand out not only with colour difference but also with bold, italics, underline etc.

Follow the above but also ‘vet’ your designs as outlined in the next paragraph.

Tools to ‘vet’ your designs
Take a screenshot of your site and grayscale it in your favourite graphics program. Does it still look good (and work) without colour?

Run your URL/screenshot through Vischeck. Vischeck is a way of showing you what things look like to someone who is colour blind. The tool is free and is located at http://www.vischeck.com/vischeck/. The URL mode is a bit ‘flaky’ particularly if your site makes extensive use of complex CSS, flash, javascript etc., so if you have the time (make the time if you don’t) I recommend taking an screenshot of your designs and running graphic mode instead.

Run your screenshot through the Etre Colour Blindness Simulator tool. This tool is similar to Vischeck.

Run your URL through the Wickline.org Colour filter tool located at http://colorfilter.wickline.org/. This tool is similar to Vischeck.

How do Irish web design companies fare?
I decided to run a couple of screenshots from some?well known?design houses around Ireland through the Etre colour blindess simulator tool to see how they got on. As Deuteranopia is the most common form of colour blindess, this is the condition I have opted to simulate. I decided to test Continuum, Fusio, Red Sky, Arekibo and Webtrade. I won’t put screenshots for them here as they pretty much all passed with flying colours (pun intended :-)). I don’t know if this means they designed with colour accessibility in mind, my choice of test sites was brutal or they fluked it.

One pair of ‘before’ and ‘after’ screenshots which I will include below is for Continuum. Continuums’ site uses plenty of colours via their primary tab analogy navigation so their site is particularly susceptible to ’shortcommings’ as far as colour blinded users are concerned. It’s good to know however that their site passes with ‘flying colours’ (sorry I couldn’t resist using that one again…). The regular and Deuteranopia simulated screenshots for the Continuum home page are below. Although some colours appear similiar they are not beside each other in the tab navigation.

How can I tell if I’M colour blind?
There are a couple of online colour blind testing tools available. It should be noted however that due to the hugh variations in screen resolutions and colours that these should not be considered a replacement for proper medical diagnosis. Two tools I’m aware of include the one located at http://colorvisiontesting.com/online%20test.htm and the Ishihara one located at http://colorvisiontesting.com/ishihara.htm

As always your thoughts and comments on my posts are greatly appreciated.

Typed in ’search engine’ into Google.com today instead of ’search engine optimisation’ by mistake and noticed that Google itself is not in the top 10 results. Google.co.uk currently comes in at 17th. The Google.com homepage has only one occurance of the word ’search’. It does not contain the word ‘engine’ nor does it have a meta description tag with either of these words present, infact it doesn’t have a meta description tag at all. Similarly Google.co.uk does not have the word ‘engine’ or a meta description tag, it does however have an extra occurance of the word ’search’.

Guess it shows that true to their word Google does not manually alter results, additionally it shows that people most likely link to Google with the word ‘Google’ as opposed to ’search engine’ or ‘Google search engine’. Dogpile seems to consistently come in near the top across the major engines.

One thing that annoys me and amuses me at the same time is when companies offering certain Internet services quite obviously haven’t got a clue about the service their offering and or haven’t got a clue how to sell themselves. As an example have you ever seen a company claiming to offer web design services whose own site looks absolutely awful? I have. I mean come on, how does a web design company expect to make credible claims about its design expertise if its own web site looks like something from 1994?

Tonight I came across a similar case where a company who offers search engine optimisation solutions from their website clearly haven’t got a clue about SEO, I can judge this from their HTML title tags as well as one or two other elements of their site. The company in question is Pixel (not to be confused with Pixel Design). Below is their 20+ word title:

Web Design Ireland - Pixel Website Design and Development offers professional web design services, logo design, e-commerce and content management systems. Dublin, New York, Kilkenny.

Those that know anything about search engine optimisation will tell you straight off that this title is far from optimised. Do they think ‘cracking’ the New York market is going to be that easy? Not only a bad title, but one that is present on every single page of their site. Having the same title on all pages is a fundamental optimisation mistake and thus any company that makes this mistake hasn’t got a clue what it’s doing as far as SEO is concerned. Hell would have to freeze over before I would hire this company for Internet marketing of any kind.