Sure, you can invest in faster computers and printers. You can train staff to be better at shuffling paper around. You can even work longer hours to plough through the heavy workload. But none of that is ever going to address the underlying issue for many workplaces: UK business is ossified.

Companies that have been around for decades will have formed working processes and procedures over the years, most of which may well have been cutting edge at the time they were conceived. However, time marches on, and companies have a tendency to become locked into A Certain Way Of Doing Things.

Legacy systems, procedures and thought processes build up within any business. Long established and large organisations – such as those we see in banking and insurance – tend to disproportionately be victims of the gradual drag on productivity that comes from relying upon the same old process decade after decade.Changing the direction of one of these behemoths is akin to turning the Titanic.

But just because a thing is difficult, that does not mean it should not be done. A good example of this might be the financial services sector.

Financial services in the UK have grown over the past 50 years, however, the back-end IT systems have been slow to change and adapt. There are indications that investment in back-end IT has not been sufficient across the sector. Some banks may still be relying on systems that still contain elements dating back to the 1960s.

Banks have been investing, just not enough. And not in the right areas. One of the best – and most difficult – investments any business can make is to take a view on how best to work, and then to build systems and train staff to deliver that best practice. But it’s difficult to start projects that creatively re-imagine business processes in large organisations where stability is valued.

With a new breed of ‘challenger’ banks snapping at the heels of the incumbents, now is actually the time for the old school financial institutions to take a good look at how they work. Between 2010 and 2013 the challenger banks grew from 4% of the market, to 7%. A phenomenal growth when placed in the context of the traditional reluctance to change banks.

Instead of trying to keep decades old systems going, the challenger banks can start with a blank sheet of paper to deliver the best ways to do business. Offering better service based upon modern purpose-built systems is partly what is enabling their growth,

The brute force approach to delivering productivity (working longer hours with systems that are not fit for purpose) is not a sustainable strategy. It’s time for big business in the UK to drive productivity by embracing change, using modern tools and techniques, and pro-actively searching out improvements rather than waiting for disaster to act as a cue that change is overdue.

This post was first published by me on LinkedIn.

Gotta get down on Black Friday?

Christmas-time capitalism keeps many retailers going for another year, but squeezing deals into such a narrow time frame can have social consequences. There is no doubt that the people literally fighting to take advantage of Black Friday deals are increasingly likely to be amongst the most disadvantaged within our community.

But it doesn’t have to be a mad scramble for the best deals. The major retailers have records of our individual spending habits going back years. Through loyalty card schemes and personal website accounts they already know when we splash out and what we look for deals on. They know our eating, drinking, reading and watching habits. In short, between them, there is nothing the retailers don’t know about us.

The big trade off we make when giving up this priceless personal data is what we are meant to get in return. In some cases we get points to spend on products, in other cases we get vouchers off our next shop. Occasionally, just occasionally, we might get sent an offer that’s so clearly tailored to our historical purchasing habits that it’s scary.

Contrast this with the scatter-gun approach of Black Friday.  Retailers stock up physical shops with special offers, and place a limit on the deals to be had – either a time limit or ‘whilst stocks last’. The offers are available on a first-come-first-served basis so Black Friday fails to reward regular customers in favour of a smash-and-grab system that is biased towards those who don’t have to go to work on that particular day.

With all our personal shopping data at their disposal, surely the retailers can find a better way to run their Black Friday deals? Couldn’t they nurture loyalty by offering their regular customers tailored offers? Imagine Black Friday being the day when a book of vouchers lands on your doormat that are tailored to you. With a few killer deals, and a few nice-to haves. And maybe the voucher codes can be used both online or in store?

Perhaps an example would help put this in context.

I bought a games console at Game a few years ago. They must know this because at the same time I signed up to their loyalty card. So Game know I have a PS3. They know I bought an extra controller pad for it, and they know I bought the remote control for watching DVDs and Blu Rays with it. So it’s quite a serious gaming habit I have, but considering I bought the remote control, it’s a safe bet that I watch a lot of films on the PS3.

I’ve had thePS3 for just over 3 years –  about the time people spend with a console before looking for a new one.

If I were Game, I would have used the data they already have on me to have tempted me to upgrade to the PS4. Perhaps they could have thrown together a few console bundles  based on the buying habits of my demographic? Maybe a new PS4, plus a few games and an extra controller for a rock-bottom price? Throw in some decent Blu-Ray films? Maybe a trade-in deal for my old console? Something tells me that there are any number of thirty-something gamers out there who would love such an offer.

But no. All I got from Game this year was the usual scatter-gun e-mails (stop telling me about XBox deals when I’ve never shown a preference for Xbox merchandise!), and a website that seemed to be down more often than it was up. Which explains why I bought my new console elsewhere. I did still have some remnants of loyalty though. I did go in to Game to purchase some PS4 games, and having spent a not-inconsiderable amount I thought I’d rack up the rewards, but again I was disappointed with the single, painful pitiful point that my loyalty earned me.

On top of that I was told I’d missed out on a Black Friday controller deal, but if I wanted to I could now pay full price for a PS4 controller. The number of bloopers from Game this Black Friday just seemed to mount up. A creaking website? Stingy points levels? No actual rewards from using the reward card? If that’s how my loyalty is repaid, I’ll give it a miss thanks!

This example could apply to the clothing retailers that my wife frequents. Her account on the website of a well known high-street department store must be a rich mine of information. They know her dress size, and probably the age of our daughter. Why wouldn’t they put together some targeted offers for the sizable demographic that my wife is a part of (a mother who also shops for a young child)?

For all the talk about big data, retailers still have a long way to go to join up the dots. This isn’t a failure of technology. It’s a failure of imagination. I hope to see personalised Black Friday deals that are more sophisticated than the usual random marketing, that reward consumers for loyalty and that aren’t limited to a 3-day period. Until then retailers should see Black Friday as a double edged sword. Sure, it’ll boost short-term sales, but if the customer experience isn’t what it should be, people will take their business elsewhere, not just for Black Friday, but for the rest of the year.

Following a review of the Metropolitan Police  IT strategy the London Assembly Budget and Performance Committee has reported that:

The Met spends a lot of money on ICT, but most of it goes on maintaining old systems…

Failing to invest in new technology in turn means that the force is not working as productively as it could. Perhaps more uncomfortable though is that:

The force has not had a coherent ICT strategy for years and senior leadership in this area has been lacking.

This not an uncommon problem in with IT projects. Many people take pride in being luddite, wearing IT illiteracy as almost a badge of honour. This attitude is changing given the proliferation of gadgets like smartphones and iPads which are gently nudging people towards greater confidence with technology in general.

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) also has problems according to the National Audit Office who points out that DWP wrote off £34m spent on implementing IT for the Universal credit system, and that in handling the project DWP was beset by:

…weak management, ineffective control and poor governance…

and that:

Throughout the programme, the department has lacked a detailed view of how universal credit is meant to work.

If you don’t know how a business process (in this case, Universal credit) is meant to work, should you really be building IT systems to support that process?

My final example comes from my home town of Reading, where a hospital booking system for Royal Berkshire Hospital:

…has been plagued with problems, taking staff up to 15 minutes to navigate their way through multiple screens to book routine appointments and leading to severe backlogs on wards and outpatient clinics.

What’s the problem with public sector IT projects? Thanks to the transparency of Government we know the problems include spending money maintaining dated systems, not defining requirements properly and building systems that don’t meet needs. That’s what’s wrong with public sector projects. Not all that much different from some private sector projects then?

Lets take the launch of the new Xbox One console. As a replacement for Xbox 360 much was expected, but Xbox fans got more than they bargained for. Two key features of the Xbox One quickly emerged as the most controversial aspects of perhaps any console launch ever.

1. Xbox One had to be connected to the Internet to be able to play games, even single-player games that didn’t have Internet connection as a central element to the game (think Metal Gear Solid)
2. Gamers would only be able to trade in their physical game discs at “participating dealers”

Both measures can be seen to have benefits for the gaming industry, and Microsoft. But the backlash from the gaming community was immediate and unrelenting. Why should I be forced to connect to the Internet to play a game that is largely played offline? And if I want to trade a game with my friend down the road, shouldn’t I be able to?

It took Microsoft about 10 days to reverse the policies that had been touted as major launch features of Xbox One. The gaming community had spoken and Microsoft’s damage control was unequivocal, “Your feedback matters” we were told, as the Xbox One team tried to recover from a PR disaster that was destroying goodwill.

Microsoft simply could not ignore the howls of derision of the millions of paying fans upon which their gaming business rests. For a new console to be succesfull, you need to make it appealing to millions of people. If you don’t, and they don’t buy your hardware, games creators and publishers will quickly move to other platforms to launch their wares. Gaming is a simple yet brutal business. Just ask Sega.

Whilst Microsoft “did a 180” and reversed it’s position, the damage was done. Sony revealed the PS4 to great aplomb, and commentators where left asking why Microsoft has such a startling lack of corporate business sense and empathy for their customers?

Meanwhile, somewhere across the span of the behemoth corporate hierarchy, another Microsoft announcement was made. With no fanfare or showmanship. Few people know or care about it, but the decision by Microsoft to kill off TechNet is no less threatening to future of Microsoft in the corporate sense than placing ill thought out restrictions on gamers.

TechNet allows IT professionals use a huge range of Microsoft software for legitimate purposes, and for a reasonable price. Normally this means that vendors, trainers, bloggers, freelancers and such like can download and test Microsoft software for specific projects. These projects could eventually see the roll out of Microsoft software to huge user base installations, or support the Microsoft eco-system by allowing IT professionals to learn new products as and when they need to.

The removal of the TechNet service will, in fact, affect a small population of Microsoft customers, perhaps even a tiny proportion of their corporate customer base. But these people are the ones out on the edge of the envelope. The tinkerers and the experimenters. The thought leaders and strategy shapers. Microsoft has done nothing less than undercut the thousands of Trojan Horses that sell Microsoft products into the enterprise.

I understand that Microsft offers time-limited trial software. However some projects start, and stop, and start, and stop again as an organisation switch focus across multiple projects.

A single-shot 30 day trial won’t cut it for everyone. And not everyone is a software pirate. We want to pay for the damn software, but not before we know it does exactly what we need it to do. Which is no small task when we consider the sophistication of enterprise level software.

Sure, Microsoft points to alternative subscription package and methods, but none of these give the traditional TechNet subscriber what they want, namely:

1. The ability to test unlimited Microsoft software in our own “test lab” environment – and this could be a single box on a desk, a Virtual Machine, or a full-on network of machines
2. A price that does not assume budget is boundless

Not too much to ask?

But unlike with the Xbox One, Microsoft doesn’t seem to be about to reverse this decision. Which is a shame, because they are making it harder for the innovators to, well, innovate.

It’s hard to predict how many loyal customers Microsoft will shed once TechNet is laid to rest. One thing is for sure: the goodwill TechNet was worth to Microsoft is now eroded. Hundreds, if not thousands of Microsoft customers will now see a valid reason to seriously look at alternatives to Microsoft software. Once those experts start to look at other vendors, who knows what possibilities they will see?

With the Xbox One launch, Microsoft made it harder to play games. By dropping TechNet Microsoft is making it harder to do business. I know I’m buying a PS4, how about you?

The article is a distillation of Somers’ experience in the web development industry. From the UK perspective he makes the development job market in the US seem very appealing; signing bonus? Perks? Freedom? Respect? Somers’ remarkable – and wonderfully written – article does highlight issues around the perceived value of a development team.

There seems to me to be a difference between what something – or someone – costs, as opposed to the value that is derived from it. I may own a car that could achieve 45 MPG, but it will only ever achieve that value if I drive it in such a way. And if I’ve paid the cost of a car that can achieve 45 MPG, but through my own driving techniques I only get, say, 38 MPG, then I’ve failed to maximise the value that car could have brought.

Relating developers to cars might be a funny analogy to make, but the value to be had from developers is not entirely unrelated to how those developers are put to work. If developers are set to work on a project that would never have delivered value, that is not a general indication that those developers are worthless.

In that light, Somers’ makes claims deserve to be explored outside the confines of a purely investment-led looking-for-a-quick-ROI-with-exit-strategy.

“Most of what we’re doing is putting boxes on a page”

On the face of it, developers do spend a lot of time putting stuff in boxes. I can see where Somers is coming from and the point he is making.

As a developer Somers is paid to cram his head with the minutiae of magical coding constructs that enables him to shift text and images across the world, from a database in the cloud all the way into a box in a web browser being blasted into the retina of a teenager gawking at Rhianna’s latest escapades.

Whilst this is true for web sites oriented towards public use, I’m sure that if Somers had experience of developing web-based business applications, such as an insurance aggregation site, risk management systems, systems designed to manage billions of pounds worth of intellectual property, or a KPI dashboard for a group of hospitals, he’d probably concede that there is a huge amount of work around getting the workflow and process right to support – or even change – how a business does business.

Web based business applications still dredge databases to put text and images into boxes on a web page, but the business rules and workflows applied to that data are often complex and deeply fascinating.

A decent business system can mean a huge difference to how individuals, and ultimately organisations, perform. The speed and quality of web-based business systems can mean the difference not just between profit and loss, but literally between life and death. And when you think in those terms, it becomes less easy to trivialise the work of web development teams.

“Cheap, fun, and about as world changing as creating a new variation on beer pong”

Developers can and will spot business model flaws from 100 paces. They don’t always know this from experience, but because they know some other company tried this or that thing and it didn’t work.

But sometimes a management team commissions a project for something beyond financial reasons. A business project does not have to change the world to be successful. Making an incremental change to an existing system and gaining more experience and knowledge through a particular project may well be a stepping stone to something bigger later on.

As a developer I once worked as part of a start-up business that had some great backing, a great team, a great business plan, but which ultimately failed to stand on it’s own two feet.

Years later it was a pleasant surprise to discover that, a disproportionately large number of the people who worked with me in that business had gone on to found their own web-related companies.

This, I thought, was no coincidence.

We hadn’t changed the world, but we’d gone through a shared set of experiences that changed our own perceptions of the world. Working through the Dot-com bubblewe saw at first hand that it was possible to raise huge sums of money, bring a talented team together, produce good work, and still fail as a business.

Business, like life, and the stock market, is not always a continuous upward curve. There are ups and downs, Once you have lived and learned through that up/down experience, changing the world becomes just as much about changing yourself and the way you work, along with the way your organisation works.

“If you’re not technical, you’re not valuable”

Somers is self-admittedly coming from a narrow technical perspective here. When we look at a business overall, it’s not technical skills that are particularly scarce.

I think we only need look at one example to disprove the theory that pure, unadulterated and laser-focused technical talent is king. And that example is Steve Jobs.

Famous for dropping out of formal education, taking drugs, and being as concerned about the creative process as the technical possibilities, Jobs helped to build not just one, but  at least 2, and arguably 3 successful companies each based around different technologies and creative processes.

Jobs was a master at placing people around him who could sustain his vision. It’s no secret that Steve Wosniak was the technical genius behind Apple’s early success. AtNeXT Jobs was supported Avi Tevanian.

Knowing the value of creativity, Jobs also had a successful partnership at Pixar withJohn Lasseter, and most famously at Apple with Jonathan Ive. Imagine that. A major hardware and software company drawing  inspiration from a creative, rather than a technical expert?

It’s possible not to be overly technically focused and yet to produce world changing products. The value of Steve Jobs – and I’ll concede that his is a rare case – was far beyond his knowledge of circuit boards and hard drives. It was the vision and leadership that Steve Jobs had, and the vision he inspired in others, that was the key to his success, and the success of the companies he ran.

“I could put the whole of my energy and talent into an article, everything I think and am, and still it could be worth zero dollars”

I can really empathise with Somers on this one. When I put my heart and soul into some documentation, or a white paper, or whatever, and the response is more of a ‘Meh’ than a ‘Whoa, you really thought about this!’ then it can be dispiriting.

But actually, what I’m doing at work is distilling,  compiling, analysing and helping to adjudicate over the ideas that are already out there in a business. I provide roadmaps for business change and the technical implementation of that change.

There is room for creativity in that I could – and often do – suggest new, more efficient ways of working, and that’s the value that I can add as a Business Analyst. A developer does get those opportunities, but by the time discussion reaches the developer, some core principles have likely already been laid down.

I take a lot of inspiration from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It’s a great book that’s commercially successful to boot, but the story behind it’s publication is an illustration of how different people assign different values to the same thing.

Zen and the art of Motorcycle Maintenance was rejected by 121 publishers. It was only at the 122nd time of asking did it’s author get the support and recognition he was looking for. Somers would prefer to be paid for writing articles than code. But just because he isn’t succeeding in his dream job right now, that doesn’t mean he won’t succeed in the future.

The final (business) analysis

So given all of this, what are coders worth? Even though I have a few issues with his reasoning, it’s hard for me not to agree with Somers; he knows he’s giving people what they want because he’s getting paid handsomely to do it.

A newly minted venture – which seems to be the type of companies that Somers is discussing in his article – has different priorities from a mature business. It may need to offer better than average salaries and perks to attract the right talent to an unproven venture. In some cases it needs to get to market fast and iterate quickly. The coders in these businesses are laying the organisational equivalent of a new nervous system using tools of their own choosing, for Somers this is Ruby on Rails.

A mature business, though, has already proven it’s stability. It may attract talent by pure brand draw, and can demonstrate a track record of products or services. It already has a nervous system in place, one that could be sprawling and sophisticated, and which uses a range of tools and frameworks that collectively are beyond the ken of a single coding guru.

Maybe coders are worth whatever organisations are willing to pay them. But the value derived from coders is as much based upon the organisation itself as the amount of awesome the coder is capable of delivering.

On the consumer side of 4G the potential for streaming video is obvious, but that’s not the limit of 4G possibilities. Mobile gaming will offer huge opportunities for creativity once data transmission speed and maintaining reliable network connections become less of an issue. Augmented reality (AR) applications should also enjoy growth as real-time data becomes faster to acquire and display.

But it’s not all just about consumers. Enterprises stand to benefit from 4G if they can meet customers’ needs and – almost literally – do business at the speed of thought.

Faster data transmission – supported by agile business processes – could mean the difference between closing a sale and losing the lead. That’s why organisations like SugarCRM are really concentrating upon making their software available across mobile platforms. If you want to discreetly update contact information and make notes on a VIP just after you spoke to them at an event, mobile is the only way to do that at speed in real time.

Beyond CRM use, dedicated applications and faster connections are combining to enable innovative and sophisticated solutions. From complicated financial transactions, to delivering custom course materials to students, to paperless electronic systems, there has never been a greater for greater speed, or greater thought about how to use that speed.

Speed, security and connection stability are not the concerns they used to be for mobile applications. At Icreon UK our clients – and their customers – are beginning to expect a new generation of mobile optimised applications that deliver a fast and fluid experience not so unlike what they get when tethered to a desktop PC .

4G is a confident step forward, and there is no doubt that it will enhance our mobile experiences. For business to capitalise on this infrastructure upgrade they must avoid being caught up in the hype and concentrate on building or using applications that deliver real benefits beyond being able to download Word documents and PowerPoint presentations faster.

This article was first published on the Internet World blog

I recently started getting back into SEO in a serious way. Years ago I used to be elbow deep in SEO but I guess as you move away from development the nitty-gritty of SEO becomes less critical. But lately I had cause to get back involved with SEO for a project and whilst the basics of SEO haven’t changed much, the tools and peripharal techniques have moved on in the past few years.

The plethora of tools that have become available to SEO fanatics since I first started optimising for search engines has exploded, and that’s great, especially if you want to (shock! horror!) actually measure the impact of your efforts. But whilst some of the tools available have changed, the basics – for me at least – have clearly stayed the same.

Attitudes to SEO have always intrigued me and in my experience many organisations seem to spend a hugely disproportionate amount of time agonizing over SEO when compared to the potential payback on other marketing activities.

I’m not saying SEO isn’t important, it is, but it is also unlikely that SEO, even in a global economy increasingly dominated by new media companies, will make or break your company. Think about how you first heard about Hotmail, Skype, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, in fact, the vast majority of successful companies that you deal with on a day-to-day basis, and then think about how important SEO was to you discovering that company.

My guess is that SEO didn’t play a huge part in you discovering many companies, but that’s not the same as saying that SEO is useless.

SEO should only ever be a part of an overall marketing mix. Spending a disproportionate amount of time focusing upon on a single aspect of what you do – like SEO – to the exclusion of other things that you should be paying attention to – like social media, like a nicely designed website, like, maybe offering great products and services and making sure your customer is delighted with what you do for them – is not healthy.

That being said, I’ve compiled together some tips. Some of them you might even agree with. Enjoy.

1.    Decide the keywords you want to target, but first research potentially popular alternatives using the Google Keyword Tool.

2.    If you don’t already have a domain name you are tethered to, try and get a domain name which contains at least one of those keywords that you thought up earlier. Don’t sweat it if that’s not possible.

3.    When writing content, write for people first, search engines second.

My gut instinct is to even ignore attempting to optimise blog articles for SEO. It’s too easy to get caught up in the long grass of probably useless technicalities like ‘ratio of keywords to content’ and ‘ratio of HTML to content’. Just write something interesting and compelling. I’ve written my own fair share of out-and-out link bait, but if you are trying to apply a magic SEO-friendly formula to content to garner better SEO rankings, chances are the content – and it’s underlying message – will suffer.

Not enough people realise that simply writing good content is one of the best SEO ‘tricks’ you can pull.

4.    Unless you have a large team to support you and lots of time to spend, don’t register multiple domains and build apparently separate websites trying to get a spread of keywords.

Of course, huge conglomerates do build multiple sites on multiple domains all the time, but that’s all part of a larger marketing plan. For instance, Sony has a dedicated Playstation site, and a separate dedicated PSVita site. That’s reasonable, and transparent.

Unless you have a lot of resources, building multiple sites on multiple domains will stretch your time and resources to breaking point. Truly authoratative, successful and respectable people and organisations don’t hide behind multiple different fronts; they present a single unified and ethical presence on the web, like Martin Lewis over onhttp://www.moneysavingexpert.com/

5.    Get a Google Analytics account. Measure what your site does and what effect the changes you make have. Learn from the experience. Repeat as required.

6.    Get a Google Webmaster Tools account to analyse what kinds of things you might want to fix or change on your website. Learn from the experience. Repeat as required.

7.    Get a Google Adwords account. Even if you don’t want to spend money advertising on Google. Use the Keyword Tool to figure out what keywords you should be targeting.

8.    Speed is a ranking signal. One quick way to speed up your site is to use caching. If you use a Content Management System like WordPress, you should be able to find a WordPress caching plugin to help speed your site up. I’m sure there are equivalent cache plugins for Drupal.

9.    If you aren’t able to find a caching solution suitable for your particular CMS flavour, or your sysadmin is anal and won’t install it for some obscure reason, or you are running a larger, enterprise scale website, consider using a Content Delivery Network, like CloudFlare, which offers a free account to get you started, and has some security benefits too.

10.  Optimise your HTML code. Get rid of extreaneous code. Not just in the name of speed, but also in the name of elegant code.

11.  Make sure your HTML code is valid, W3 Validator is probably the best free tool to use, and make sure you check all your site pages, not just the home page.

12.  Optimise your CSS. This will increase your chances of having valid CSS that works across multiple browsers and, if you optimise or reduce CSS code, it could also speed up your site. Luckily, W3C have a free CSS validation service.

13.  Optimise your JavaScript. Sometimes new versions of old scripts are better optimised, so maybe they work faster and across a wider range of browsers.

14.  Remove old scripts/tools. This can be a difficult one. It might be that you have lots of old JavaScript on your site which you used for something or other in the past, but don’t need right now. Remove that old code.

15.  Stop using frames. Just stop it. Yes. Even those natty <iframe> tags. Frames are the spawn of satan.

The search engine robots that come and crawl through your site used to not be able to get past those frame tags and into the content, nowadays they can, but a direct link from a search engine results page into a web page that should be contained within a frame set will be confusing. Plus. frames are just bad design anyway.

Here is an excercise that will highlight how useless frames really are. First. List your top 10 favourite websites. Now, list how many use of those 10 sites use frames. Not many, huh?

16.  Keep Flash to a minimum. By all means have a flash minisite, or a Flash game or interactive element. But don’t go overboard.

I love Flash as much as the next guy, but unless you have a recognised brand or lots of money to spend on advertising, avoid building your entire site in Flash. Sure, Google can index Flash to some extent, but why make it difficult unless you are making a real statement?

17.  Get canonical. Just like in Highlander, there can be only one. One version of your website that is. SEOmoz has a good article on Canonical redirection.

18.  Check your links work with Xenu and/or Screaming Frog. Fix any ‘404 File Not Found’ errors.

19.  Check that there is no duplicate content on your site – this includes multiple pages with the same meta tag content, not just the stuff that people read. Google Webmaster Tools will help with this.

20.  Get a corporate Facebook page. Be active on it.

21.  Get a corporate Google+ page. Be active on it.

22.  Get a corporate LinkedIn page. Be active on it.

23.  Get a corporate Twitter page. Be active on it.

24.  You already know added good content is the best kind of SEO, but do you add it frequently enough? You still need to aim for quality content rather than just slapping up brief pieces clearly designed to improve your SEO rather than being interesting and informative.

25.  Contribute articles to other websites and try and get a short biography of yourself and a link back to your website in your article. This will build your inbound links.

26.  Have a Privacy Policy. You want to be authoritative? Then be responsible.

27.  Have a site map that people can read, because search engines will read it to and if it’s got links to at least your main pages, this will make things easier for the crawlers.

28.  Use deep linking to point people to those hard-to-reach places of your site.

29.  Cull content. Yes. I said it. This doesn’t count for blog posts, which you should leave alone regardless of if they appear to be doing well or not (they are a window into what you are thinking, and should form a consistent historical document). Use your Google Analytics account to figure out which pages are not getting any visitors, or which have high bounce rates then just cull them. Or if you must keep that page, consider changing it. If it’s not adding value, why not? But don’t forget to put a 301 redirect in place if you do delete the page.

30.  Get a YouTube account. Actively contribute towards it. Yes. This might take some effort.

31.  Optimise your robots.txt file. SEO Book has a good article on robots.txt files.

32.  Have social bookmarking tools on your site to make it easy for people to like your pages and quickly spread the word. Trending on Twitter isn’t exactly SEO in it’s purest form, but getting inbound links from other peoples social media accounts and articles linking to you can only be a Good Thing.

33.  Building quality external links is fine, but make sure to cultivate a wide variety. Don’t keep going back to the same well over and over again. Keep an eye out for interesting new sites, and niche sites that fit what you are trying to do.

34.  Add ‘alt’ tags to your images.

35.  Use heading tags, <h1>, <h2>, and so on. Make sure some keywords are in the headings.

36.  Make sure URLs are crawler friendly. That means not using underscores in directory file names, but using dashes instead. So, nothttp://www.somedomain.com/some_directory_name,but http://www.somedomain.com/some-directory-name.

37.  If you used Xenu to check the links on your site, you may well have come across a 404 Page Not Found error or two. If that’s the case, take a look at that 404 error page. Does it do something useful like direct users, or search engine spiders, to useful content in your site? If not, redesign that 404 page.

38.  Don’t use CSS to hide content from the human eye that you expect search engine robots to index. I’ve seen this on a few sites, none of which I grew to respect, or bought from, or ever went back to. If you are trying to game Google, what does that say about you?

39.  Monitor your website, know when it’s gone down. If it’s not available to you, it’s probably not available to Google, or anyone else. Take a look at siteuptime.com, but there are lots of site monitoring services out there.

40.  Your website HTML, CSS and JavaScript might be optimised, and it might pass all the W3 Validation rules, but is it an accessible website? If not, get back to the drawing board.

41.  Submit your site to DMOZ.

42.  Link to authoritative sites from your site. That’s right. Spread the link love. No man, or web site, is an island, and if Google can see you are linking to sites and pages with high authority and popularity, this reflects well on your site. Just don’t go overboard.

43.  Pick your site host carefully. It might cost more to use a respectable host but the pay off is that your site is more likely to stay live and you are less likely to be in a “bad neighbourhood”.

44.  Always sense-check, spell-check and grammer-check your content before it goes live. If you don’t have a team of content writers and editors at your disposal then just write the content. Do something else for a day. Then come back and re-read it with fresh eyes.

45.  Avoid dynamic URLs. The page http://www,somesite.com/page.aspx=1435867904 is less search engine friendly than http://www,somesite.com/contact-us.aspx.

46.  Avoid using the Meta-Refresh tag to re-direct users. This could be construed as a spammy tactic. If your content has genuinely moved then use a 301 redirect rather than the Meta-Refresh tag.

47.  Give files (web pages, images, PDFs) descriptive names, like, my-seo-ideas.pdf, rather than myseoideas.pdf. This is as good for humans as it is for search engines.

48.  Let woorank.com scan your site, it’ll give you a few hints and tips.

49.  Test your site with http://www.webpagetest.org/, it’ll show you where you can improve.

50.  Take a look at your own site, and those of your competitors in spyfu.com it could give you some useful information about keywords and competitors.

51.  Use Open Site Explorer to view your site and compare it to competitors, are they doing something you are not?

52.  Don’t make too many changes all at once. Make a few changes. Monitor and judge the results for a time, then make a few more changes. Making incremental (“little and often”) changes gives you the opportunity to understand better how important certain aspects of your site, and SEO strategy are performing.

53.  Confirm the authors of your website – in particular blog posts – using the rel=”author” tag.

54.  Confirm your organisation as the publisher of your website. It’s not too different from confirming the author.

55.  If someone is offering a sure-fire way to get to the top of search engine results pages, smile politely then take a step back. Then take another. Then another. You get the idea.

There you go. Don’t expect immediate results, keep trying, keep learning, keep updating your site and keep measuring your progress. Contribute usefull stuff to other sites and social media, but don’t dedicate so much time and effort to SEO that other marketing opportunities are lost.

It’s not rocket science. Really.

London itself has always been at the forefront of the application of new technologies in many areas, and it’s easy to highlight transport as an area where London has always benefitted from ingenious solutions – the Tube (150 years old and just had wifi retrofitted), Oyster Card, Congestion Charge, and Boris Bikes to name a few.

The term ‘smart city’ means different things to different people, but there is no doubt that drawing together some of the UK’s leading entrepreneurs, academics and business leaders into a single and focused group will have benefits for London, and will present great opportunities for both public and private enterprises.

The convergence of multiple technological paradigm shifts – such as the huge growth in mobile devices and applications, big data and cloud computing – coupled with the recent economic downturn and the resultant need for enterprises of all shapes and sizes to ‘do more with less’ could turn out to be a recipe for accelerated co-operation across public and private sectors.

It’s unlikely that the London Smart City board will spot The Next Big Thing. What’s more likely is that the board will be able to identify new ways to use previously disparate ideas, hardware and software applications.

The specific challenges that face London are not so different from the challenges that face developed cities globally -, a growing and ageing population, dated infrastructure, traffic congestion, and the need to reduce energy use. Re-configuring London to meet these central challenges will not be easy.

In recognising the need to consciously develop London into a smart city, our politicians could well be providing huge opportunities for entrepreneurs willing to take on large-scale problems and apply creative, sophisticated and long-term solutions to complex problems.

When building applications, we should do so with an eye on how they will ‘scale’, or grow over time. A smart-city has to be a scalable city.

Jump-starting a smart city ecosystem in London could lead to a halo effect of new ways of thinking being applied not only to those cities that are first to adopt new solutions, but also to component industries, not just technology, but healthcare, transport, education, finance and this could well scale from the local, up to the national and even international level.

Ideas that start in London have a habit of changing the world, and it’s great to know that London may well come out of the global recession as a world-leader in smart city thinking.

A version of this article was first published by icreon.co.uk

It shouldn’t be a surprise to me to see a smartphone in everyone’s hand, as India has been earmarked for massive economic growth. Even so, I imagine my own cultural biases were at play here. Actually visiting India has prompted me to directly address those biases, and doing so has given me huge food for thought in the process.

Getting a website ready for desktop, laptop and tablet-based browsing is usually the first thing on the agenda when thinking about web and application development. Get on any commuter train in the UK and you’ll see a range of smartphones, laptops and tablets being used for various work and entertainment purposes.

But what if the market is heading in a different direction? What if over the course of a few years, a large and growing percentage of global internet access will be via smartphone rather than through PC or tablet screens?

That would truly count as a paradigm shift, and it looks like it is happening.

In recent years, the rate of desktop and laptop sales has begun to slow down. At the same time, the rate of tablet sales is growing tremendously. This is pretty obvious stuff in mature markets like the UK and USA, but in regions like Africa and Asia mobile internet browsing is already becoming the norm (12.9% and 18% page views from mobile devices respectively, compared to 5.1% in Europe).

As we anticipate growth in the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) economies, so too should we anticipate more interaction with those markets via smartphones as the populations of those countries bypass what Europe and the US would consider to be traditional computing tools (such as PCs, laptops and tablets) and head straight for smartphones instead.

The move towards increased smartphone interactions is likely to cause a lot of headaches for web and application designers and developers, particularly as there is a push in the opposite direction – towards internet TVs – which will make it important to present a cohesive browsing experience across multiple platforms and screen sizes, from tiny handheld devices, to huge widescreen TVs.

Organisations that ditch their previously held biases – towards desktop-based browsing, for example – and which recognise and address changes in customer habits as they are developing are much more likely to succeed in a global economy. Conversely, relying upon an assumption that most of your potential customers are sitting at a desk somewhere in Europe, or using a laptop or tablet computer, will act as a strong disincentive for potential customers of your products and services in other markets.

Making a geographically appropriate investment in smartphone-centric experiences for customers – wherever they are based globally – will better position organisations to take advantage of new and growing markets over the next 5 to 10 years.

This article was first published on the Internet World blog here.

When the Internet was only just developing out of a primordial ooze of technology used in only a handful of research and educational institutions it was possible (just!) to see why people were reticent to take what they perceived as a gamble on a website. Few organisations were willing to take a punt on the Internet until long after it had proven itself.

Without a doubt, the days of underestimating the power of the Internet are over. It’s received wisdom that a website, along with supporting social media, is a critical sales and information channel for any serious business. First movers and fast followers that flashed into existence barely more than a decade ago – Google, LastMinute.com, Facebook – dominate markets worth billions and have a huge user base to tap into.

The mobile market has passed a similar tipping point. A mobile application is a proven way to extend brand presence. The continued success of the Apple app store – with a reported 20 billion downloads in 2012 alone – is proof enough, and that is before we look at the equivalent Android app figures and global mobile hardware penetration.

Of course, there’s no need to build an app just for the sake of it, but it’s certainly worth taking a moment to consider seriously if investing in an app could benefit your organisation.

From investor relations, to training and educational games, to full blown business and consumer applications that communicate with pre-existing websites, the range of mobile possibilities is both deep and broad, and 2013 will only see mobile become more central to the operation of a successful organisation.

When you start thinking about how an app would work for your organisation of course you will need to think about what particular features it will have, and you’ll probably find it’s not too difficult to come up with a few ideas of your own – that’s the exciting creative bit that energises everyone. But don’t forget that designing, developing and launching a mobile app may bring with it some new tasks and skills that you’ll need to get a handle on.

Some of the fundamental behind-the-scenes questions you might need to ask yourself should you be consciously debating the merits of extending your digital strategy into mobile include; how will you measure the performance of the application? Will it be by number of downloads? Will it be by the amount of sales driven through the app? Will it be increased awareness of your brand? Will the application improve relations with your customers and investors? Could it increase staff performance by, for instance, reducing data input errors or reducing the time taken during a sales cycle?

It’s natural to be wary of investing in a new technology – we call the early Internet adopters ‘pioneers’ for a reason. But mobile technology is far from ‘new’. Words like ‘exponential growth’ and ‘ubiquitous’ still apply to the Internet because of the rate of growth in mobile. People are spending more time engaging with organisations because mobile devices allow them to almost instantaneously access the data they want from multiple – sometimes competing – sources. It’s difficult to imagine a scenario in which a successful organisation would want not to be accessible from the palm of someone’s hand, when the rest of the world is.

This article was first published on the Internet World blog here.