One of the darker sides of web development is down time. The site owners don’t want it, the site developers don’t want it and most importantly the site users don’t want it. Unfortunately, however, it will happen. This is not a defeatist view or an excuse, it’s realistic.

An experienced software development team will know this and rather than bury their heads in the sand, they will be well prepared to deal with the consequences. It’s all about having the problem solving skills, tools and the right approach to solving the root cause of the problem.

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The majority of the web industry had, over time, come to the consensus that the keywords meta tag is not used by Google in ranking web search results. However, we’d never heard it from Google itself; that is until now.

Recently on the official Google blog they posted an article on just this issue and clearly stated that they do not use the keywords meta tag in web ranking.

It’s worth pointing out that while this is only Google and other search engines may well use the meta keyword tags, it only serves to enforce our own approach to search engine optimisation that meaningful content is key.

Strange how our SEO blog post that achieved number one in Google for that very search term has now dropped completely off the search results.

Certainly we’re not within the first 6 pages returned. It makes us wonder if the article has somehow been blacklisted for that particular term.

Even more strange is that we are number one for the term “number 1 in Google” – we didn’t even try to optimise for that search term. View screenshot.

Update (12/10/09)

It would appear that our article has been re-instated at the number one position. Amusingly above a new website that has appeared since I first wrote the original article with the domain name ‘numberoneingoogle.co.uk’

Location based searching is a hot topic at the moment with ‘location-aware’ browsing now implemented in Firefox and safari on the iPhone.

Whilst our old residence was beautifully hidden amongst the Surrey hills surrounding Cranleigh, it certainly wasn’t the most obvious place for potential clients to go looking for a cutting edge web agency. Even if it did proudly claim to be “England’s largest village”.

Now that Kyan has relocated to the busy town centre of Guildford we are up against a lot stiffer competition, with numerous other agencies now immediately surrounding us all competing to be top of the listing for terms like “Web design Guildford” and “Web development Guildford”.

Obviously we’re new in town so there’s a lot of work to be done, but a great place to start for any business that wants to show up in location based results is the free Google Local Business Centre (LBC).

Entry into Google’s LBC means that your business listing will show up in search results on google maps.

With the increasing popularity of location-aware mobile devices and desktop browsers utlising Google’s Location Services, optimising for local searches is more important than ever.

There is a vision of the future where browsing the web will no longer require third party plugins for videos and audio playback, that it will be native to the browser. All made possible through the adoption of HTML 5.

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Our article about optimising websites for search engines has now achieved number one status in Google for the term “Number one in Google” (View screenshot).

Read all about our SEO approach.

Good listings across multiple search engines can make or break a website, at Kyan we believe there are no real secrets to search engine optimisation (SEO).

Transparency with our clients is key, we don’t keep our techniques behind lock and key as we believe SEO is not just the responsibility of the web developers, but also of the content creators & writers.

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Cooliris (formerly known as PicLens) is described by it’s developers as a “lightening fast ‘3D wall’ that lets you browse thousands of images, videos and more with ease.”

Cooliris is installed as a browser add-on for Firefox, Safari or Internet Explorer and it works all over the web, including on google image searches, facebook, flickr, ffffound and numerous other websites.

Recently we implemented Cooliris into a stock image management system we’re building for a client.

They required an easy and quick way of viewing multiple images on the screen that supplemented the basic website view. Cooliris provided exactly that and wasn’t complicated to implement at all.

It essentially works by using an xml version of the page you are viewing. Cooliris can then automatically detect the feed via a simple rss link. That’s all there is to it!

Google alerts is a simple service that allows you to receive alerts on any Google search you want, whenever it is updated.

So when a new result is returned for your search, you’ll know about it without having to lift a finger.

Until just recently the alert was only available in the form of an email, fortunately however, Google have now syndicated the alerts into an rss feed.

The problem with the emails was that should you want to monitor a popular search term, with regular changes to the Google search listings, you’d be buried under an avalanche of emails.

The utilisation of RSS feeds is certainly a welcome change to Google alerts. Now we can all get back to monitoring Google for our favourite Search Engine Optimisation terms.

The web is buzzing with the news that Google have officially announced their own web browser and it will be released (in beta) today.

‘Google Chrome’, as it will be known, has been built from scratch, is free and is open source.

Google’s has said it’s intentions for the browser are for it to ‘drive innovation on the web’.

Highlights include:

• JavaScript Virtual Machine called V8 (faster javascript – open source)
• A process for each tab (So if one tab crashes, the whole browser doesn’t crash & better management of memory)
• Task manager to view processes (Allows you to see which website is using the most memory, downloading the most bytes and abusing your cpu)
• ‘Speed dial’ home page comprising of your most visited pages
• Google Gears is built in
• Smart search directly in the address bar (aka Omnibox)
• Uses a ‘Chrome bot’ on the google crawling infrastructure to test it works against the most popular sites on the web
• The browser runs inside a ‘sandbox’ with restricted permissions to make it really secure (It cannot effect your machine or it’s processes)
• Private browsing mode
• Automatically checks against known phishing websites (These are available in an open api)

For the full low down I highly recommend you checkout Google’s comic they released.

As the U.S. TV broadcasters switch over to digital tranmissions a great debate is just starting out…

Who gets to use the fuzzy white noise that’s left behind?

Google are campaigning for the redundant spectrum to be put to good use.

Most notably for WiFi 2.0

A longer-range wireless technology that wouldn’t be owned by any one company. WiFi 2.0 offers the possibility of, to quote Google, “Affordable, ubiquitous, high-speed Internet connections to all Americans, anywhere, at any time.”

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will soon decide on the future of the spectrum and whether it will be opened up. Google have started a petition and are encouraging everyone to spread the word via their YouTube channel.