As we've just gone through the process of expiring and renewing some of our domain names, here's a quick guide to the domain renewal process that we've gone through to both expire and renew our existing domain names. Why do I have to renew my domain name? Simply put, you don't actually own a domain name, you only ever lease or rent it. For a ".co.uk" domain name, the lease is just two years but some other domain names (such as a ".com" or a ".net") can be leased for up to ten years. Personally, I think it's better to use the smaller amount as it means if you no longer want the domain name then you are not paying for it for x number of years after you have actually finished with it. It also gives the opportunity for someone else to use the domain name if they have a new purpose for it. Usually what will happen is that once you start approaching the date that the domain name renewal is due, your domain registrar (we use 123-reg.co.uk) will contact you to notify you that your domain name will be expiring soon and that you should renew it as soon as possible if you want to keep it. I think I received renewal emails with 45, 30, 15 and 7 days to go until that notice was due but this may vary depending on your registrar. What happens when I reach the renewal date? Well, you won't actually lose your domain name, however within 30 days of this expiry date your website will actually stop responding to that particular name so anyone visiting your URL won't actually see your website. Your domain name will then go into a state known as "domain suspension" which will last for another 60 days. During this time, your domain name still won't respond to any requests but you are still recognised as the "owner" so you can still renew it at any time and it won't be released back to the public. How do I renew or expire my domain? This really depends on the domain registrar that you use, however both of these tasks should be relatively simple. For the renewal process, our domain registrar simply allows us to go through the initial payment process and we just enter our details to automatically renew for another two years. If we want to expire the domain we have a couple of options:  

In a very clever move, Google have published a list of Twitter accounts that they frequently use to keep users updated about their products and services. Why is this move clever? One of the main uses of Twitter for many people is the real time search that it offers. With the recent problems in Iran, Twitter showed just how useful it could be in getting news out to people quickly. Google, I think, have realised the benefit of this and whilst they have been "twittering" for a while they haven't really publicised it that much. Now, with the post that shows all of the Google twitter accounts, they've essentially tapped into the market share that Twitter have been gradually taking away from them (in the past, Google seemed to be pretty much the first and only stop when you wanted to find out something urgently). Not only can people now find information via a traditional web search in Google, they can now use Twitter which will actually return results that Google have posted up to Twitter! I think that's a great marketing strategy as they really get the best of both worlds... What do Google "Twitter" about? There's a wide range of different Twitter accounts that Google use, but some of the main ones that interest us are: twitter.com/Google - our central account twitter.com/Blogger - for Blogger fans twitter.com/GoogleNews - latest headlines via Google News There's even a Twitter account for jobs at Google if you feel like a new challenge!

Google have released a handy little gadget that you can use on your website to allow users to get driving directions to your office (or any other places that you wish to enter) and embed it in your site with just one line of javascript. What does the Google Maps Driving Directions Gadget do? The Google Maps Driving Directions Gadget allows a user to enter their starting point via a small textbox inserted into your page, select a destination point from a list of designated end points and then view both a map and text instructions on how to get from one point to the other. First, you have to go to the gadget setup page and enter a pipe separated list of end points: Then, enter the title of the gadget along with the size and border colour that suits your website. Click the "Get the Code" button and a simple line of javascript will be generated that you can place in a suitable place in your site. e.g an example of what is generated for the above image looks like this:  

Yahoo Search Pad has just been rolled out by Yahoo, and is designed to help you collect and collate internet research that you are carrying out. What is Yahoo Search Pad? Yahoo Search Pad is described by Yahoo as a tool to help you "organise research on the web". They put up a sample video of the search pad a while ago where you can see how it automatically detects that you are performing some research and asks you if you would like to take notes on the subject. They also have an official announcement on their Yahoo Blog which goes into detail of you you can:  

Here's a collection of 44 Top SEO Blogs that we regularly visit for some great tips and tricks for Search Engine Optimisation.

Google appear to be testing out a new search page that doesn't give the user the option to perform a search local to their home country. It also seemed to be only testing this out with Google Chrome and, as far as we can tell, it doesn't appear to have been documented anywhere. What does the UK Search look like? When we were doing some local search testing last week on search engine rankings, we used Google Chrome as one of the browsers to test with (as we hadn't used it to log into any Google Accounts). One strange thing that we noticed through was that there appeared to be no option to perform a Google UK search. Normally, there are two radio buttons that allow you to choose between performing a "whole web search" or just "pages from the UK": However, when we were trying these tests, this option was not available and we simply got the page rendered without those options: Another odd thing was that within the actual search results, at the bottom of the page, was a link to effectively perform the same UK search by filtering the results (see the "Show only results for United Kingdom" link in the image below): Why is this UK Search being omitted? We're not sure whether this was Google just testing an update the the actual layout of the page, especially as we only saw this behaviour in Google Chrome and not Firefox, Opera or Internet Explorer. However, another angle could be that they are actually intending on rolling this change out for functionality rather than layout/styling and that they think it's better to initially show results from any site rather than UK based sites even if you are a UK user. This decision could actually have a quite a big impact on how we, and our client's websites, rank in the search engine results page (SERP), especially as there has been talk recently that there have been US based results actually overtaking and pushing UK sites further down the rankings.