Adamok.Net - SEO UK

Google launches Chromebox

2012-05-31T00:03:00.000+01:00

Google working together with Samsung has launched and upgraded laptop, called the Series 5 550 and the Chromebox, their vision of a desktop computer. It is available for $329 on the Google website.

Tough phones from JCB

2012-05-20T12:04:00.000+01:00

One of our friends recently got a new phone - an iPhone 4. She was really excited and spent hours downloading apps, listenign to music, taking pictures - you get the idea. Well, one day, like a lot of us, she was in the toilet doing her business when the phone suddenly rang and you might have guessed what is coming - it slipped and dropped into the toilet.

This is not a unique scenario - in fact, according to an article on the Phones 4 U website, "Majority Of Water Damaged Mobiles Dropped In The Loo".

Anyway, after a few moments of hesitation, she promptly rescued the phone from the loo, turned it off (it was still working), wrapped it in loads of toilet paper and prayed. She did not take insurance and it was a costly monthly contract.

She was fortunate, after a thorough cleaning and drying, the phone was working perfectly. Hopefully, she has learnt from this mistake and would not be taking further calls in the toilet in the future.

I have never dropped phone in the toilet but old Sony Ericsson K770i lost it's camera function after my wife dropped it.

I once had a really tough which was waterproof as well (the Siemens M35i) and though I am not into adventure sports or working in construction or any occupation that involves a lot of rough work, it would be great to have a phone you would not have to worry about constantly.

Yesterday, I noticed a billboard advertising JCB mobile phones -called the Toughphone range. I never knew that JCB made mobile phones as well and was intrigued. Going through their website, I found out that they have 7 phones ranging from the basic Tradesman,which is waterproof and dustproof and is said to be the World's first floating phone to the Pro-Smart, which is an Android powered handset with 800MHz processor and expandable memory up to 32GB. With a 3.2 inch HVGA touchscreen, the phone also has a 5MP Camera plus front facing camera.

The Pro-Smart is water resistant and dust resistant (tested to IP67). It has a talk time of 550 mins and standby time of up to 360 hours. I am wondering how much the phone weighs as they have not provided the info on the site. It does look a bit bulky and not for everyone. But it would be great to stand out from the crowd of sleek iPhones and the like. The phone sells for £334.99 with free delivery.

Samung Galaxy SIII launched

2012-05-05T20:40:00.001+01:00

One of the most eagerly awaited mobile phones is finally out and No! it's not an iPhone. It's the Samsung Galaxy SIII.
It will be available later in stores this month. No info about price though.
I haven't had the chance to get my hands on one as yet, so here are some reviews:

Using an Applicant Tracking System

2012-05-03T13:40:00.003+01:00

Guest Post
by Toney Naorem

You have to agree with me when I say that life has become a lot easier with the internet. Businesses have several tools at their disposal to make their processes simpler. Highlighting one such function - HR managers and other recruiting professionals are also using various new tools to assist them in finding the right candidates.

An Applicant Tracking System (ATS) is one such tools that can help effectively manage and assist HR in hiring the right candidates. Some of the benefits include:
1. Saving time and money
2. Easy to implement
3. Archiving your hiring process for future reference.

Today many ATS are available and one of the simplest ones I have seen is Recruiterbox. It’s an online application that allows small companies to receive and manage job applications. It is currently the preferred applicant tracking system for companies such as Skyscanner, Groupon, Codecademy, Stripe and many more.

The app allows companies to receive resumes from multiple sources to its platform - from where they can be managed and sorted easily, and decisions can be made as a team. This includes auto-forwarding of emails and attachments to Recruiterbox, and sharing internal notes and scheduling interviews on its platform.

Using Recruiterbox, companies can promote their jobs to social networks and job search engines. The company also can have a dedicated careers micro-site where all your jobs are published. Imagine how useful it would be if all the recruitment was managed from one place, and the company wouldn't have to worry about its inbox being clogged by resumes, attachments flying back and forth, and useful information hidden beneath a pile of email.

Some of the other tools are Zoho Recruit, Simplicant, Unrabble, Jobscore, Theresumator and many more. Now it’s up to you to decide which one fits best with your company.

SEO is a slow and tedious process

2012-04-30T13:28:00.000+01:00

updated: 1 May 2012

SEO work should be an on-going process and not a one-off project. A lot of people expect to see immediate results and this is possible sometimes. For example, I won a SEO challenge organised by the Wangcyber forum. This was quite easy as the keyword Melayu Boleh was not very competitive.

Moving up too fast may not be good
I personally believe that the best SEO strategy is to build links incrementally, keep making regular updates and try to move up steadily. If the site moves up too fast, it will set alarm bells ringing at Google HQ and might be penalised (I have seen this happening in the past with sites moving from PR4 to 0 and completely disappearing from results).

If you hire a good SEO expert or SEO company, you should be able to see improvements in your search engine results after a month (of course, improvements depend on the competitiveness of rankings).

Keywords help but not much
Some people seem to think that SEO is all about adding keywords in the title but I personally think that the effects are negligible. If you do not believe me, you can try adding keywords on your web pages and see whether they are able to move up 10+ on search engine results. I have found that Tags on the site, key words and the number of updates do matter. However, link backs are what makes the biggest difference.

Page rankings and social media
Search rankings and results are based not only on the links to the page but also the page rankings of the sites that link back. The higher the Google page rank of the site, the better.

Do not forget to link from social media: Twitter, Linkedin, Myspace, Google +, Facebook and Pininterst. This is where my strength lies because I have several thousand followers on my social media, even higher than several companies who do it commercially.

To conclude, I would like to stress that SEO work is a slow and tedious process and it is indeed very hard to show substantial improvements for certain keywords in just one month, unless it is very unique and not competitive.

O2 broadband finally comes through

2012-03-29T15:58:00.000+01:00

I take back whatever I said about O2 in the past (read here).

Flashback a couple of weeks:

We had speeds of around 2Mbps and we were thinking of changing providers after staying with O2 since 2009. Then suddenly one fine day we got disconnected for a whole day and when we finally got reconnected, the speeds were at a snails pace - then the service became intermittent going on and off. I complained to the O2 customer service several times, and it seemed to work for a while then the connection would go bad again. I have to say they were really patient and trying out various things but it didn't seem to work. Finally one day, one of their people called me to say that the problem might be with the line and to connect my line provider (which happens to be BT) to check it out. I had been having crackling noises on the phone for a long time and had assumed that it was normal. Called up BT and their customer service tried their best to help me as well but apparently the line test came out OK. They offered to send their engineers but I would have to pay if there was something wrong.

I had finally made up my mind to shift to Virgin and get rid of both BT and O2 when the O2 people called me up last week to say that they would like to send an engineer to check our line.

Today:
The guy came today - he was from the BT outreach service and he found out that there was indeed something wrong with the line. He changed the line and sockets and I finally have speeds more than 1Mbps. Nowhere near the advertised (Maximum) speeds of 20Mbps but I am not complaining, I am too happy to get connected without getting cut off every few minutes.

iPad drop test video

2012-03-20T22:00:00.001Z

Apple fans look away.

What a waste!

Social Bookmarking is The Easiest Way to Advertise Your Website

2012-03-18T22:39:00.000Z

Guest Post by Kain, who goes by the alias kash2u

After reading the title the first question that may come to your mind is: what exactly is social bookmarking?

Social bookmarking refers to the process of saving bookmarks to a web site or web page and tagging them to social bookmarking sites. These sites are popular and convenient ways to store your favourite sites. You can also share your link with friends and send them to search engines. Other users can also easily find your web site via tags on these social bookmarking sites.

These sites are usually free - you can submit your site and can share your links to the others for free. Normally in these social bookmarking sites you can save your link publicly but you have the option of saving these links privately.

You have to be aware that some sites are NoFollow while others are DoFollow. Of course, it's better if you submit your site to the DoFollow social bookmarking sites. So that your bookmark may be crawled quickly by the major search engine. Submitting to NoFollow social bookmarking sites means not that they don't have any value. However, the NoFollow sites might increase your your site's Yahoo backlink score.

Be Creative
There are millions of web pages on the net and visitors will only click your bookmark if it is interesting to them. So make your bookmarking title more interesting - be creative, so that the user are attracted to your bookmarking title.

Social bookmarking allows you to share your link in a professionally way to the other users. Normally, Social bookmarking is the a place where thousands of user can create their personal account to add their bookmarks. It is ideal if the social bookmarking site allows you to insert keywords so that other users can easily find links related to their specified bookmarks.

Laying down roots

Social bookmarking lays down the roots for establishing and promoting the value of your website, article post or video. Users are also able to vote for a bookmark. So the more votes you get for your bookmark, the more valuable it becomes. Thus, Social bookmarking gives a resource credibility. Most of the social bookmarking networks will also highlight those profiles with the highest votes.

Once you register with a social bookmarking site you become a part of that community. You and all other members are there for the same thing for which you signed up. It is essential to develop a close relationship and communicate with the other users.

Fiverr.com is one of the places where you can buy social bookmarking service for only $5. So go over to the site and open a free account. Then buy my Gig 100 manual social bookmarking for $5.

Author Bio:
kash2u is a seller Social bookmarking service provider at Fiverr.com. He provide manual social bookmarking at Fiverr.com for only $5.

The new Apple iPad 3

2012-03-08T22:17:00.002Z

Updated 10 March 2011: A friend pointed out that the new iPod is not called the iPod 3 - it is simply the "new" iPod.

The "New" iPad 3 is finally here with an amazing display: 2048x1536 resolution, 44 per cent greater colour saturation and 3.1 million pixels — in the same 9.7-inch space.

It also has a 5MP camera with ƒ/2.4 aperture and a five-element lens allows you to take clear photographs and 1080p HD video.

Prices start from £399. Now are you kicking yourself for buying the iPad 2.

Launch of the iPad 3

Official video

SpareOne - the mobile with self

2012-03-06T00:49:00.001Z

One of the interesting mobile phones to debut at this year's World Mobile Congress at Barcelona is the SpareOne mobile phone . The phone is powered by a single AA battery (based on Energizer® Ultimate Lithium AA battery, included with phone) and the manufacturers claim that the phone if unused, will last for 15 years. It also has an amazing talk time of 10 hours.

However, I a not sure whether the phone's talk time will last for 10 hours as claimed after 15 years because no one has left it lying around unused for 15 years.

I am just kidding - this is one amazing invention and you wonder why no one else thought about it before. Of course, the SpareOne is a no frills phone, meaning no touch screen, no internet and no camera. However, it has a built in torch and can automatically transmit it's location, making it a ideal spare phone to keep in in your car or house for use in case of an emergency or natural disasters.

This could be a great phone for use in rural areas and for those who love outdoor activities with limited access to recharging points.

The phone starts shipping this coming March.

The amazing iPad 3 concept

2012-03-01T12:02:00.000Z

Not sure whether this is a true Apple concept as we all know how secretive they are with their product launches.

Found this video on YouTube of a concept featuring border to border display.

LG Optimus 3D Max review

2012-02-29T10:36:00.000Z

A hands-on review of the LG Optimus 3D Max.

But do you really need 3D on a mobile phone? Anyway....

Nokia's 41 MP sensor camera phone

2012-02-28T02:47:00.000Z

I believe that the phone I have been dreaming about is finally here.

The Nokia 808 PureView comes with a crazy 41 MP (Yes! that's right) Carl Zeiss lens with Xenon flash. It also records 1080p Full HD video (with LED video light) with up to 4 x lossless zoom.

Apparently the 808 is also has the world’s first device to include High Amplitude Audio Capture which allows you to record distortion-free audio at levels of up to 140 dB.

The phoen has a built in 6 GB internal user memory which can be expanded up to 48 GB with an external microSD memory card to store all the pictures and videos.

The phone has a talk time of 11 hours and stand by time of 465 hrs, though I guess this is if you decide to use the mobile only for making and receiving calls, in which case, you do not need this phone.

Check out the full specs here.

Perfect bathroom upgrade for the geek

2012-02-21T18:54:00.003Z

I was in the bath today morning and looking around I realised that our bathroom is desperately in need of a complete makeover. Looking for inspiration I went to the Ikea website and even though I am a big Ikea fan, there was nothing exciting. Anyway I somehow reached a site and scrolling down the home page the words rechargeable LED mirrors, caught my eye.

I was definitely curious and I found out that these interesting bathroom mirrors from HiB have built in LED lights and require no electrical installation. The mirrors include a rechargeable battery pack which can be easily removed from the side of the mirror and charged with the supplied mains adapter.

I found out that a single charge will give an average battery life of around a month since the mirrors use energy efficient LED bulbs. They are safer and cheaper alternatives to the standard wired-in illuminated mirrors and what a great way to instantly transform the bathroom.

Buffalo Drivestation 1Tb

2012-02-13T00:45:00.002Z

In September 2010 I bought a TOSHIBA Ultra Slim External USB Hard Disk with a huge 500GB storage.

Well, It's taken more than a year but the Toshiba is almost out of memory as well.

Looking around, I came across the Buffalo Drivestation 1Tb USB2 External Hard Disk Drive on Play.com for £79.99 with free delivery.

Yes, I bought it.

Nothing fancy as you can see from the pictures and not that portable either. Furthermore, I need an external power source as well. However, I am not complaining.

I just plugged it in and my PC recognised the drive immediately. So far it has been reliable and file transfers between the Buffalo and my PC is quite fast. Now I want to see how fast it takes to fill up 1 Tetrabyte of storage.

Minority Report tech becomes reality?

2012-01-14T13:44:00.000Z

Check out the video of Samsung's Smart Window. Maybe a while before the tech from Minority Report becomes a reality but we are getting there. Several sci-fi teach has become a reality in our lifetime.

Hottest gadget accessory of 2011 - Beats by Dr. Dre

2011-12-27T01:17:00.001Z

No! The hottest gadget accessory is not the multicoloured iPad covers or your Wi-Fi signal detecting T-shirt (though I would love to have one).

The hottest gadget accessory this year are the headphones. And I am not referring to just any headphone but Beats by Dr. Dre headphones. I first noticed them in some celeb pictures but now I see them everywhere.

Pic by MB-one (Alexander Kaiser)

I noticed a couple of University students with the phones hanging around their neck and asked them what they liked about the phones. Their reply: "They are cool!"

They do look nice but they are definitely not cheap. For example one of the best selling head phones on the Apple store is the Monster Beats by Dr. Dre High Definition Wireless Bluetooth Headphones which costs £249.95. However, according to some of my techie friends, its' just a fashion fad and you can have comparable or better quality headphones for lesser, for example, the Sennheiser MM400 Bluetooth Headset (in comparison to the Beats headphones), only costs £184.95.

Check out the list of the best budget headphones on the Stuff website.

TomTom Vs Google's Navigation app

2011-12-19T03:07:00.001Z

update: 20/12/2011

Car navigation systems maker TomTom has been experiencing a slump in sales and has recently detailed plans to cut around 10% jobs globally. A major reason for this is attributed to the development of GPS enabled mobile phones and more specifically the Android phones which come with Google's turn-by-turn Navigation app.

The major advantage of the Navigation app. over TomTom is that it is completely free. Furthermore, maps are updated more frequently and the updates are free as well.

I bought my TomTom One in 2007 and upgraded the maps in 2009. As I wrote in one of my old post, I was thoroughly disappointed with the new map. Several post codes were missing - including some which were present in the older map.

Quite recently I was going over to a friend's apartment here in Coventry and like several new builds, I could not find the address on my TomTom. In the end I had to use my Samsung's Navigation app. It was a bit frustrating a couple of time when the map lagged behind and I had to slow down a couple of times. However, it did get me to my friend's apartment in the end and even showed me a picture of the building when I arrived.

All Satnav makers including TomTom and Garmin are going to face some serious challenge from Google in the near future and I feel that offering frequent and free updates to their maps might be one way to retain their customers.

Grand launch of the Nokia Lumia 800 in London

2011-11-29T19:04:00.001Z

Nokia teamed up with Drive Productions for a spectacular 4D light show projected on Millbank Tower in London's South Bank to mark the launch of the Nokia Lumia 800.

Watch the amazing video:

And behind the scenes:

Samsung Galaxy Nexus: 1st with Android Ice Cream Sandwich

2011-11-27T01:13:00.006Z

The World's first smartphone with Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) is finally here. Ice cream Sandwich brings together features from Android Gingerbread (phones) and Honeycomb (tablets) - BTW, don't you love those tasty sounding names.

The Samsung Galaxy Nexus comes loaded with some amazing new applications including a facial recognition system to unlock the phone and Google Beam – which allows simple content sharing using built-in NFC (Near field communication) (updated: 29/11/2011)

The phone is powered by a 1.2GHz dual core process. Thus I was curious as to what that would mean for the battery. Well Samsung claims that the phone has up to 1060min (2G) and up to 500min (3G) Talk Time and up to 290Hours (2G) / upUp to 270Hours (3G) Stand-by Time- which is not really impressive.

It features a contoured screen with 4.65" HD Super AMOLED display and 280 x 720 External Resolution. The 5MP camera with LED flash offers fast image capture, panorama shot and HD video recording.

However, was very disappointed when I found out that it does not have a SD card slot and you only get 16GB internal storage to store all your data.

Fast and accurate typing with the Sony Ericsson Experia Pro

2011-11-16T01:40:00.001Z

It's not new but I just found out that that the Sony Ericsson Xperia™ Pro was found to be the fastest and have most accurate typing according to usability tests carried out by an independent test institute, beating the HTC Desire, Nokia E7 and Blackberry Torch.

This Android 2.3 Gingerbread powered smartphone (dimensions: 120 × 57 × 14 mm) comes with a slide-out QWERTY keyboard.

It has a 8.1MP camera capable of recording HD videos and a front-facing VGA camera as well.

For those who love to listen to music on their phones, the Xperia Pro has 31 hours of music listening time.

The Xperia Pro is available in three colours (Black , Silver , Red) and is available on Amazon UK.

For more information visit the Xperia Pro features/ specifications page.

Christmas gift ideas

2011-11-04T14:51:00.004Z

You know Christmas is near when you start receiving Christmas Secret Santa emails in your inbox. For those who are not familiar with this western tradition, you are randomly assigned a person -whom you are supposed to give an anonymous gift. This usually comes with an affordable price range and gives you the flexibility to give and receive gifts without spending much. However, I often have difficulty choosing a gift, especially if it is for a lady.

Fortunately there are several online stores which help you with greats ideas and tips for Secret Santa gifts. The "Find me a gift" site has gifts suited for different personalities. Not surprisingly, I ended up on their Gadget page and were delighted that there were so many affordable yet fantastic gifts and novelties ranging from voice recording novelty mugs (£9.99) to the Flip Mino HD Camcorder (£19.99).

Check out the site, I am sure you will find something you like. I do need a camcorder (Hint Hint!)

Update (20/12/2011): Apparently the camcorder was very popular. It is no longer listed on the site.

The Nokia Lumia 800

2011-10-26T15:59:00.002+01:00

The Nokia Lumia 800 with the Windows Phone Mango OS was launched at the Nokia World event at London along with a few other models.

The phone has a smooth curved glass, 3.7" WVGA AMOLED touchscreen and powered by a 1.4 GHz processor (single core).

Key features include:

8MP camera with Carl Zeiss lens and LED flash.
Can take HD movies (720 pixels resolution) with 30 frames per second playback.
Comes with 512 MB SDRAM memory and 16 GB storage memory. I was surprised when I learnt that there was no slot for micro-SD cards. However, I learnt that users would have 25GB of free SkyDrive storage.

Some people were not happy that it also does not have a TV output though I wonder how many people would use that particular option. The phone also lacks a front facing camera.

The Nokia Lumia 800 is available in 3 colours, viz., Cyan, Black and Magenta.

You can preorder the phone on their website and it looks like it would be cheapest on the Vodaphone network (£99.00 cost for the phone and £33.50 monthly or free for £36.00 per month (both on 24 month long contracts).

Hear what the designer have to say:

The JBL MS-2 - for a better listening experience

2011-10-12T14:07:00.002+01:00

Some great news for audiophiles who love to pump up the volume on their car stereos. The groundbreaking JBL® MS-2 car audio accessory from HARMAN International Industries automatically tunes your car stereo to improve the listening experience from portable music players and smartphones - making it the perfect iPod, iPhone or Android™ smartphone accessory.

Small enough to fit in a shirt pocket and really simple to use, the JBL MS-2 uses digital signal processing to create clearer, more powerful sound from existing speakers in any car or even at home (with a 6-volt DC power supply). Once connected all you have to do is press the Setup button and the JBL MS-2 will automatically tune the tonal balance, bass impact and sonic clarity across a car’s existing speakers.

The JBL MS-2 has a suggested retail price of $239.95 in the US. Not sure how much it will cost here in the UK.

Amazon launches Kindle Fire

2011-09-29T04:08:00.001+01:00

Features:

7" color toughened touchscreen, anti-reflective treatment, 1024 x 600 pixel resolution at 169 ppi, 16 million colors.
Dual-core processor
Size: 7.5" x 4.7" x 0.45" (190 mm x 120 mm x 11.4 mm).
Weight 14.6 ounces (413 grams).
8GB internal storage
Free cloud storage
Over 100,000 movies and TV shows
Comes withe the Amazon Silk cloud-accelerated browser - supports Adobe Flash
All in one email app
1-year limited warranty and service included. Optional 2-year Extended Warranty available for U.S. customers.

The Kindle Fire will be released on November 15, 2011 and is now available for booking at $199 on the Amazon.com.