Hi there all, I just wanted to check to see if any of you were going to SES London the year? The schedule looks really good, with some good speakers, and presentations. Line up includes:

FireflySEO are happy to announce the first in our forthcoming series of free seo Tools, the FireflySEO HTTP Viewer otherwise known as Header Response Tool. Version 1 functionality includes:

I'm sure you've heard the story, one of your potential customers has had a website for many years, they want to come over to your seo and hosting service and work with you but their present hosts are holding them to ransom. "Pay us £XXX amount of moolah or we won't release your domain name, will take your website offline and stop your email". Hardly what any company owner wants to hear!

We abhor this sort of treatment here at FireflySEO, and whilst we recognise that bills have to be paid for services rendered, there's no excuse for this sort of behaviour when someone simply wants to move hosts.

Well all the bubbly has been drunk, the memories of too much turkey and mince pies have been washed away, and we are faced with another year of Search Engine Optimisation. So what exactly are we going to do with ourselves this year?

Well, as some of you have been asking us this question, we thought we would give you all a brief synopsis.

I have been discussing with my business partner the possibility of expanding our video posts this year, as such we plan to release a series of search engine optimisation videos. For the ladies out there, I'm sorry to inform you that we had a toss of the coin and I lost. I guess I shouldn't be so hard on myself, some people tell me I look a bit like Easy Rider.

Call me a daydreamer, but I’ve always thought it would be just fantastic to work with some companies in Whilster Blackcomb, BC, Canada. For those of you who don’t know, Whilster Blackcomb is officially the best ski resort in North American and has been voted by many people as the best ski resort in the world. For a ski junkie like me then it’s my idea of paradise!

How does it fair with my other passion though? What is the search engine optimization market like? Is there a vibrant and alive seo industry based in Whistler BC? Is search engine optimization Whistler alive? If so its something that FireflySEO would like to tap into which is part of the reason that we have written this post.

I guess the first place to look is at demand. Well, come-on, surely this one is a no-brainer. There has got to be a huge amount of demand for search engine optimization in Whilster Blackcomb. I mean it’s a ski resort, which means they have an abundance of restaurants, bars, hotels, guesthouses and shops. I guess getting a warm lead with one of these businesses could be the tough bit though. Most of them are owned by larger brand names, businesses, hotel chains or in deed the massive conglomerate Intrawest. Saying this we have done lots of work with hotel chains over the years and have got in with the likes of Stakis and Best Western already as such the author would like to think that we are better placed than most to approach these businesses.

Way back in 2003 when we launched our shiny new company, it seemed that very few of our clients had heard of Search Engine Optimisation or the benefits to be obtained by 'following the rules' laid down by the likes of Google, Yahoo! and the other search engines. Looking at strategies at the time to gain search engine results, it seemed that everyone was using automated tools to gather reciprocal links from endless directory pages, and all of the frowned upon black hat techniques were being used by webmasters to promote their clients websites, such as background coloured text stuffed with keywords, doorway pages, hugely overstuffed metatags and a complete lack of the overall search engine optimization picture.

Vancouver, a city that I love. How can I get to live there? Well Vancouver is a fantastic city, of-course its not with out its problems, like all cities. But unlike most cities, in the authors view, Vancouver can offer one of the best life styles on the planet. Nestled right next to the Pacific ocean and the beautiful coastal mountain range Vancouver is situated well for a morning snow skiing up at Grouse followed by an afternoon at Harrison, water skiing, fishing or just relaxing in the hot springs. Truly, my idea of paradise!

So then seo, how is the Search Engine Optimization market in Vancouver. Is there room for an ambitious, growing and experiences seo company all the way out West in the beautiful city of Vancouver. Well lets face it, FireflySEO has been around for some time in the UK and we are not about to jump ship in search of a dream. It is of course imperative that we continue to service and offer the best service possible to our UK seo customers. As a partner of FireflySEO the author must be honest and say that the though of opening up FireflySEO Canada based in Vancouver is certainly going to be top of the must do list for 2008.

Having recently carried out a full domain name change I wanted to share some of my finding on doing a full domain 301 from one site to another with you. In theory the practice of 301'ing a full site to another new domain is simple in practice however its a little bit more complex and involved than it might at first seem.

Doing the 301's themselves is ofcourse not to difficult. You can either do them:

1. by writing a series or mod-rewrite or ISAPI rewrite rules, depending on your server
2. Write out individual 301 redirects from one URL to the new URL using the 301 redirect command in .htaccess or equivalent.
3. Write them into a header function in code PHP, ASP, .NET or whatever called before everything else which returns the appropriate header.