What's up! The Silkstream blog

As some of our customers know, earlier this week we had to invoke our website hosting disaster recovery plan. We have performed several rehearsals for this contingency - but this time it was for real.

I've finally got my hands on the new iPhone 4. I'm not usually an early adopter but since stupidly falling asleep and leaving my old iPhone in a minicab (a long story) I've been obsessively using the stock updater (on O2's website) to hunt one down.

Having a high bounce rate is normally a cause for concern. But sometimes this metric can be misleading, as we've recently discovered with one client's website.

I managed to get my hands on an iPad a day early, Apple finally deciding we had waited long enough and started allowing the pre-orders to be delivered.

This week Google has started to show brand suggestions within its search results! I read about this yesterday and wanted to share it with you because it directly relates to the article I posted last month about the "importance of brand within search marketing".

We are receiving more and more enquiries from businesses who are trying to rank in Google for extremely broad sets of keywords - they have even bought domains which are composites of keywords! There is a perception that this will somehow make their website appear at the top of the rankings.

I received another letter recently from a company called the "Domain Renewal Group" which notified me of a domain name we own that's due to expire. I must stress, the letter may not be a scam, however it could appear to be misleading.

Yesterday I attended the inaugural IT Leaders Forum, hosted at the impressive Imperial War Museum, London.

If your website contains event information, reviews, people / company profiles then last weeks news that Google has announced support for microdata for use in rich snippets should be music to your ears.

I can't believe March is upon us already! It seems like only yesterday we were planning our strategy for 2010 (which included sending more newsletters!) and here we are with our Spring update already – it won't be long until we see the marvellous Kate Humble gracing our screens again. I just wanted to take this opportunity to mention a few things that should be of interest to you.

You can hire the best SEOs in the world and have more website traffic than you can shake a stick at, but if your visitors are not converting into sales, then something needs to be done. Here's our top 10 tips for improving your website conversion rates: