24th Aug 2009
After a crime spree that began with the rise in popularity of the CCTV camera, Groucho Marx has now become Britain’s most wanted criminal with at least 33,000 crimes in London alone. Video of Marx performing a multitude of crimes is abundant at almost all retail stores around the country and leading Retail groups are calling for Marx to be captured at all costs. It is estimated that the former comedy legend costs the UK economy £1.4 billion per year. …more
21st Aug 2009
Previously it has always been thought that the Scots exist only to dislike the English despite being almost completely dependent upon English tax revenues to subsidise their own economy. Now it seems they have turned on the US with the release of a nasty man who had been involved in the killing of a lot of people by blowing up an Aeroplane over Lockerbie. Killing 270 people, 189 of whom were American. …more
20th Aug 2009
Labour were uniformly patting themselves on the back last night after another successful hoodwinking involving education standards and the rising number of utterly useless children being ejected from their extended kinder gartens, otherwise known as ‘colleges’. As losing is not allowed under strict labour guidelines, all children are ritually handed out an ‘A Star’ and told to go to university where they can finally begin a process of preparing them for the real world. …more
24th Jul 2009
Surely just being British can’t help your search engine optimisation?
If you look at the current emerging markets – primarily China and India – they have a lot of advantages; namely low cost labour. But what they don’t have, is a good command of the most important language in the world of business. This isn’t a slight on the good name of Indian or Chinese education – but the truth is it takes years and years to fully understand the ins and outs of any language. This is particularly true of English, which is constantly expanding.
Telecoms and banking giants outsource their telephone-based servcies to Asia, and in order that the call handlers have a good grasp of the kind of colloquial English they are likely to encounter from Brits and Americans, they put their workers in front of various English language soap operas. But the truth is that these operations have had limited success – with many UK corporations eventually deciding to use UK-based call centres as a marketing tool (think NatWest).
The advantages of knowing a language inside out are even more pronounced when it comes to SEO. You have a few seconds to convince someone to hang around on a website; if this home page reads like it has been copywritten by someone who doesn’t have English as their first language, it’s going to turn potential customers off straight away. Equally, understanding how UK English or US English is used by people is essential in being able to making a website respond effectively to these searches.
People who optimise websites with a full grasp of the English language have a distinct advantage. And Brits have a direct line to the biggest web-based market in the world – the USA. No wonder some of the most successful SEO companies in the world are based in the UK.