I have always hated print screen and all that it stands for but until now it was the only way to go, until I received a junk email from those bods at PC World.

I found myself reading it against my better judgement, I was on the hunt for a new printer at the time and it’s thanks to PC World that I found Snipper. Good email marketing by them as I will make sure I read the next one for any more juicy tidbits

What does Snipper do? It snips any segment of your screen and allows you email it or save it for later use. No more full screen grabs, just snip what you need. To find it all you need do is click your Vista start button and type snipping into the search bar.

One little snip for man, one giant leap for Microsoft.

Open up Google and search ‘NASA’. You will be presented with the listing and underneath nestles a brand new search box!

In reality this is only a shortcut to what you can easily achieve any way making use of the - keyword site:nasa.gov - parameter but for the millions of us who don’t know how to use advanced search correctly, this heralds a step in the right direction.

This only seems to occur for some of the really big sites at present. We serve a number of huge UK sites at the moment but alas it seems that this latest change is US only. If anyone finds a UK site with the added search box, please let me know.

Well done Google! This is (for once) a truly useful addition to the SERPS.

What am I talking about? Well in the UK we have slight Google issue, namely we don’t know which one we should be using. Around 17% of Brits use Google.com when searching for a UK based website. Nothing wrong with that, except the small fact that it doesn’t return the same results as when you search the same phrase in Google.co.uk.

hmmm! A small geo targeting issue methinks and one that Google should get ironed out as soon as possible. It makes life that wee bit harder for us UK based search agencies.

Let me explain.

.com domains are international domains, not US domains (sorry America). The US does have its own domain .US but it’s a bit crummy and not many people like to use, unless its creatively - delicio.us anybody?

That means that many UK companies own .com domains and have them set to target the UK in their Google webmaster console. If we want to search for American websites we should be using Google.us no?

This is confusing for our searchers who are led by brand name. Not only that but browsers likeFirefox come with the search bar configured to Google.com

Come on Google sort this out now! It’s hard enough for our UK businesses to succeed on the search engines without our cousins across the pond muddying the waters with irrelevant results. A simple redirect is all it takes to retain quality and consistent UK search results.

When was the last time you felt like taking your dog to the vet in Michigan as opposed to the vets around the corner? Slackers.

EDIT: As I published this I realised that google.com is now redirecting to google.co.uk when typed directly into the address bar - the problem still remains when you use the IE or Firefox search bar, which most of us do.

So I spent days and hours slaving over a new site and making sure that it worked in Firefox, IE6, IE7, Safari et al and heard the news that the IE8 beta was available for download. I rushed on over to the Microsoft site with a mixture of excitement (lord knows why? I think I need to get out more) and some amount of dread to download the latest incarnation of the much maligned browser only to find that when I tested my lovingly crafted site on it… well.. let’s just say some colourful expletives were issued forth. The site looked terrible… busting out everywhere, and the funny thing is I knew it was going to happen, but kinda hoped it wouldn’t… you know, just for a change.

Realising countless others would be having the same trouble on this day of days I turned to the all knowing Google for advice, and some simple clicks later I had myself a piece of code which promised to solve my problem. And thankfully for my sanity it did. Simply inserting the following <meta http-equiv=”X-UA-Compatible” content=”IE=7;FF=2;OtherUA=4″ /> into the head of every page made my woes disappear and had my site looking how I intended it to look. Phew, thank you Google and panic over…

Well, not quite as I then went into a frenzy of checking all my other sites to make sure they weren’t also similarly ‘IE8′d’, you heard that expression here first folks… although luckily for me they were all fine, bizarre. So my first experience with IE8 went rather disappointingly exactly how I imagined it would, after which I simply closed it down knowing it will only be used in the future to check my future projects compatibility with it. Sorry Microsoft you lost me to Mozilla Firefox a long time ago, and from what I saw yesterday that’s not going to be changing anytime soon.

What about all the other browsers?Are you really bothered about them? Well if you are, we know of a smart little app that makes your new design watertight.

Browsershots allows you to test your website in multiple browsers. Just visit the webpage, input your URL and wait for a couple of minutes. Unfortunately we can’t be held responsible for you putting the monitor through the window when you realise IE6 and it’s box model has stuffed you over again.

Oh the life of a web designer….

Check out the sample results page for a sneaky peak at the kind of stats available.

35% of British adults polled said they would prefer not to receive such directories. That equates to some 17.5 million unwanted directories, that’s a lot of waste paper.

Other results showed that 51% used the internet to source local business services and 67% trusted word of mouth referrals the most.

Professional search engine marketing companies actively work to increase trust and authority for their clients, knowing full well that word of mouth travels fastest of all online. Review sites are as popular as they have ever been and are an important stage in most searchers buying cycle, mine included. It is important that your business or brand is well represented online and that any negative publicity is balanced.

It just goes to show how much life has changed in the UK, usually we like to try and hang on to our national identity; red phone boxes, pounds sterling etc. but when it comes to having half a tree under the telephone, we seem happy to move on. Good news I say.

At the research stage a searcher can afford to be very generic and will maybe search a single keyword i.e widgets. This will return a vast amount of information for the user to browse. This browsing in turn leads to a more educated searcher.

The same searcher may call up a search engine later in the day and now search for aluminium widgets, recalling their earlier factual finds. As they narrow down on the widget they want, their search phrase can and will become more accurate. The user knows that by being more accurate, only the most relevant pages will be listed. Their final search may be cheapest pocket sized aluminium widgets.

That phrase is known as a long tail key phrase and is defined by us here at Uberhype as a 3+ word search phrase.

So how does this relate to your online widget shop?

By performing long tail keyword research, we can target in on these phrases and optimise your website accordingly. Your website needs to sell and long tail searchers are typically also known as converters. They have done their research and are ready to buy.

Long tail phrases are by their very nature undersearched when compared to the generic alternative but they deliver a far more targeted customer to your website and the competition for search engine places decreases exponentially. This means we can optimise internal website pages to target long tail widget phrases, leaving the homepage to target the generics and deliver you as much widget related traffic as possible.

A solid internal linking strucure and folder structure is imperative to maximise rankings of internal pages, poorly optimised websites stand little chance of competing.

Next time you enter the buying cycle, pay attention to your searching habits. You’ll fit in the same box as everybody else. When chasing conversions, laser targeted long tail keyword optimisation is the way to increase profits.

• Multiple Home Screens - Cool feature is this. You can now have as many home screens as you like. By holding your finger on a logo, the screen begins to shake and you can then move apps around or by pulling the logo to the left or right, move it onto another home screen entirely. You access the new home screens with a little swipe to the left or right.

• Bookmarks on Home Screen - To complement your multiple home screens, you can bookmark your favourite websites straight to the home screen. This feature is integrated into the Safari browser.

• Maps Upgrade - Hybrid maps now available. Another cool feature is that with one button tap, the map will zoom into your present location.

All good upgrades and has stopped me from wanting to unlock my iPhone for the time being at least, maybe this was Apple’s intention?