Thanks Everyone
Posted by David WhitehouseAs many of you know I recently got married, I just wanted to give a big shout out and thanks to everyone that came along, for all the kind words and gifts.
I also wanted to just thank a few of the people who helped make it special.
- Discerning Images, the photographer from York – Rob did a spectacular job and was very easy to get on with.
- Also if you are looking for a wedding venue, I highly recommend The Old Deanery in Ripon as a wedding venue in North Yorkshire – I hardly had to worry about anything the whole day! Their wedding organiser, Simone, did a great job!
- Also thanks to Rob Hutchinson from BGN events, who provided the disco – sadly it was good weather and a lot of people spent the time outside!
Cheers to everyone for making it the perfect day for Montarat and I.
Update: Wedding Photos
If you would like to see the wedding photos and order any prints, then please check out the photo album here, username is david, pw is david.
Good Job There WordPress (and the Page Peel Plugin)
Posted by David WhitehouseThe plugin after-the-deadline/after-the-deadline.php has been deactivated due to an error: The plugin does not have a valid header.
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The plugin google-news-sitemap/apgnsm.php has been deactivated due to an error: The plugin does not have a valid header.
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Plugin activated.
How Bad Health Is Driving Me Towards the Health & Fitness Industry
Posted by David WhitehouseComing out of university in 2004 I started working on my first business, an ecommerce site which I wrote from scratch. Looking back on it, it was terrible – but I managed to make a few sales (at a loss) and then unfortunately I had to stop due to health reasons.
Ever since then I have become obsessed with trying to regain my health, sadly with very little progress. I found after many years of the NHS being great, that when something serious comes along and that they can’t figure out exactly what is wrong, instead of persevering, they tend to just give up and even go as far as accusing you of making it up!
So I tried other things, over the years I’ve seen a number of physiotherapists (certainly more than 10), tried doing various sports including karate, swimming, running, biking & basketball as well as weights, pilates, yoga and stretching. I’ve also seen numerous chiropractors, including an upper cervical chiropractor in London and a cranial chiropractor in Headingley, as well as the local chiropractors and osteopaths in Ripon and Thirsk, I’ve also tried bowen therapy, Thai massage, acupuncture.
I’ve spent thousands on health professionals, and probably hundreds or thousands on exercise equipment and gadgets – my family joke about me almost having a home gym. I’ve bought ebooks on various different conditions including carpal tunnel syndrome and thoracic outlet syndrome and done stretching programs online. If you are looking for some decent things to try, I highly recommend selfcare4rsi.com for diagnosed RSI conditions and BodyMindResources.com for general improvement of aches and pains (especially back pain) – both of these sites have produced excellent results for me, the first fixed my condition for a week and the second improved a lot of my aches and pains.
I’ve become obsessed with posture, reading up about all the different muscles in the body and how they work to improve or worsen your posture and what actions they do. I’ve probably isolated and stretched nearly every muscle in my body (sadly not all needed stretching and not all of them needed strengthening). If you are interested in finding out more about specific muscles and how to exercise them, plus details about common postural problems, weaknesses and inflexibilities then I highly recommend exrx.net.
I’ve also tried resting, for months.
Overall the most success I have had is from stretching and from very painful massages.
Since working in SEO I often get chatting with the various health professionals, they usually ask what I do for a living – some know what SEO is, some don’t. In the past few months I’ve worked on AVA Physiotherapy with Andy, working at helping him target the local area, through SEO, AdWords and some copywriting skills. I’ve also been helping Zach Clark setup Perth Life Fitness, although it is going slowly as he’s in Australia – it isn’t finished yet. And now I am helping out Madeleine Harvey with her site (not that I am complaining, I’m getting a free massage)!
Anyways, all this has inspired me to do a little guide for health and fitness professionals so they can improve their web presence and get more leads through their website! Guide to follow soon (if I’m not too distracted or in too much pain).
Deep Tissue Massage
Posted by David WhitehouseI went for my first massage with Madeleine Harvey yesterday after work, and I must say I was very impressed. I’ve had a lot of massages over the years, but the first thing that shone through with Madeleine is that she really does have passion for what she does. Despite doing various stretches and having a few Thai massages recently, Madeleine seemed to pick up on a number of muscles which were causing problems, as well as some which may be referring pain down my arms.
Unlike many massages I’ve had, Madeleine has obviously done further training than most, as she was able to massage parts of my neck, which many therapists avoid (rightly so without proper training) and also my chest – which many therapists seem to neglect.
Interestingly she also seemed to have a reasonable knowledge of SEO, and had even heard of WordPress!
If you do have any aches and pains and you live in the harrogate area, then I highly recommend you visit her. Her site is www.mharvey-massage.co.uk.
My “BIG” SEO Theory
Posted by David WhitehouseOk, so this is just something I noticed, it isn’t based on any tests or studies, it is just from observing the SERPs and link profiles a lot, that and what I believe is common sense.
Ok so lets look at things from my perspective, say I would like to get my good friend and colleague, Paul Carpenter, to rank for ball spoons (which I’m sure he will soon).
Lets say I wrote blog post after blog post with the keyword “ball spoons” linking to his homepage, now I don’t know about you lot, but I reckon Google might just cotton on to the fact that all these anchor text links are coming from the one blog and treat them as “1 vote” for relevance.
Reading some of the old Google patents, one of them mentions that they calculate page rank and relevance separately, and then combine them together somehow. Anchor text links are a relevance factor – so isn’t it possible they only consider one unique anchor text link to a URL from a domain?
e.g. If I did 3 blog posts with “ball spoons” linking to Carps, Google would calculate the page rank passed for 3 links, but only the relevance from the anchor text once. Or would they count it 3 times?
This might explain why I’ve not seen much increase from using the same blogs to link to the same URLs with the same anchor text – but then significant jumps when I get something as simple as a reciprocal link.
I have no idea if this is correct or not, and I have tried to think up tests for it – I even attempted one, but unfortunately it failed at the first hurdle (I couldn’t get all the URLs indexed). Does anyone else think this may or may not be the case? Or does anyone have any evidence pointing in either direction? Or can anyone even think of a way of testing or refer me to any previous tests?
Update: In SEOMoz’s 2009 Search Ranking Factors, the highest factor was anchor text and the third highest factor was diversity of links. This theory could possibly explain those ranking factors.
My Father, Peter Whitehouse
Posted by David WhitehouseI don’t often mention my father, but I happen to be very proud of him, he’s probably the reason why I am so obsessed with owning my own business one day! He (and my mum and their business partners) built up a large business with offices across Europe, the company renamed from Express Terminals to Express Group in 2006, I happened to be working there during the re-brand. He’s retired now (kinda), but I found this the other day, and I just thought it was worth sharing. It really is a reminder of how fast technology changes and how quickly you can get things moving if you put your mind to something.
In case you can’t read it, it says:
Making that break…
Computer engineer Peter Whitehouse has swapped his daily car drive across the Pennines for a morning jog and a brisk walk to work.
Peter, 42, grew tired of commuting daily between his home in Ripon and his work place in Salford – a 160 mile round trip.
He’d also had a burning ambition to run his own business. So with a little help from his friends – and his wife Linda – he launched Express Terminals in the North Yorkshire town a year ago with £5,000 and a second hand Volvo.
Now he’s at work within minutes – to a business of his own which has netter a first year turnover of £300,000 with a £1m target for next year.
The computer printer repair company now employs five engineers an administrative clerk and intends to take on more staff this year.
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