Plenty has been written about search engine optimisation. Here we will comment on a related topic, namely keeping your website in a good position. The algorithms used by popular search engines can change by more than a hundred times a year, with the consequence that your placement can go up and down quite dramatically. We want to try to keep it up with some consistency. In the case of accountants in Carlisle, obviously we are the new boys, but our snippet says “come and look at our website and all the technology we use” in a way that other listings do not. We don’t mind being one or two places down the pecking order behind huge firms of accountants, but we do want a stable placement in the expectation of our snippet getting seen.

 
Daniel Defoe was the author of The Complete English Tradesman. There are chapters in the book on the subject of reputation and credit. Let’s just suggest what sort of advice he might give today to Greece. I think he would say that the priority is simply to stay open for business. Greece has a lot of income from tourists, so all tourists, but particularly German tourists, must be made to feel welcome. They must at all times be able to withdraw cash from any ATM. They must not be plagued by civil commotion, beggars or anything else. We all know Greece has problems, but they must not be inflicted on a principal source of revenue.

 
Businesses in difficulties are making the news again. The solution of cutting jobs is not likely to do anything to improve customer service, which means that we are looking at a reason for the next round of problems, and so on. A similar example is a railway chopping its branch lines. That means eliminating the feeders for its main lines, so less traffic on the main lines, paving the way for yet more cuts …

 
For various reasons, I have looked at many accountants’ websites over the last year or two. I have to say that there is a trend for accountants based in Cumbria to have nice-looking friendly websites compared to accountants outside the region. In fact, I might just be one of the laggards here. Keep it up!

 
Yet another big company listed on the Stock Exchange has reported a loss. Actually, there has been only a modest fall in trading profits, but this sets off a chain reaction. The premises that the company trades from are only worth the expected future revenues from the trade, and a fall in profitability implies a fall in expected future revenues and therefore a fall in the value of the premises. Often this fall in the value of the premises swamps everything else, and it looks as if the company has made a huge loss. This is what hits the headlines.

 
Let’s say you were out, and you come back to find on your caller display that somebody has telephoned you, but who?  Do you know that you can just type in the telephone number on Google, and often you will find out something about your caller. It might not be complimentary!  If you suspect that a company called “Dodgy Trading Ltd” is a scam, then try searching for “dodgy trading ltd scam” to see what other people say.

 
Most websites are found through search engines such as Google, and there is a big industry engaged in search engine optimisation (usually abbreviated to SEO), which means placing your website as high up the Google rankings as possible. Today (27th April 2015) Google is changing its software in favour of websites which it judges to be mobile phone friendly, which may come as a shock to some businesses which have previously relied upon high placings to get custom.

 
Let’s say that a business doubles its prices, and the customers have no choice but to carry on buying. The business is now richer, but the customers are poorer. Total wealth of the business plus the customers stays the same. This is the zero-sum game where gains and losses add up to zero.

 
If you think that someone owes you money, then it is advisable to put your claim in promptly. Delaying your claim by seventy years is a bad idea. Lawyers have a standard saying for this, which is the heading of this ‘blog.

 
but if you are running a business, you might like to try looking at yourself from the outside. At least keep a file showing your product literature, your website, how you are accessed in typical searches, your entry in Yellow Pages, and so on. Try to co-ordinate everything. Watch out for spelling mistakes. For example, if I am looking for an accountant in Carlisle and I search Google for “accountant carlisle” at the moment, I can find two spelling mistakes in the first two pages (as of March 31 2015), being made by accountants large and small. What do you look like on Google Images?