Forest Software

Web, SEO and IT & Business Advice for the Smaller Business

Monthly Archives: February 2010

Reading Time: 5 minutes

Last updated on April 13th, 2015 at 02:33 pm

Throughout my working career I have worked in many offices (one of the “perks” of being free-lance for nearly 25 years) and during this period I have come across several instances of bullying at work.

The definition of bullying at work is not that much different from bullying anywhere else but it is when someone tries to intimidate another worker, often (but not always) in front of colleagues. Typically it is done to someone in a less senior position than the bully – it’s odd but not many people seem to bully their bosses in my experience.

For example in one company I worked for, the bully constantly undermined the staff working for her (taking it in turns to “attack” each member of staff), invented targets that were not possible to reach and would not listen to reasons why, attempted to divide the staff so that they would each think that they were alone and had no friends and resorted to yelling at people if they dared answer back – I saw several of the staff in tears as a result of the bullying and witnessed more than one person leaving the company as they felt that this was the only solution. Continue reading

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Last updated on May 7th, 2024 at 02:39 pm

As someone that talks to SEO clients and monitors many small business forums I am constantly amazed by the number of people that “want to be top of the search engines” but have no idea what phrases they want to be top for.

When pushed for examples of what they would like to be found for I often get replies such as “my company name”.  It comes as a bit of a shock when I then say to them that the point of SEO is to attract people to a clients site that have never heard of the company but are looking for a service or product that they provide.

The next answer is more often than not that the client wants the site to be found for a single word such as “tax” or “cleaning” (both actual examples).  When asked what type of tax (VAT, Income tax, Council tax for example) or what type of cleaning and where, there is a silence at the other end of the phone.  Using the cleaning example I go on to ask if the site is about cleaning a car, cleaning windows, office cleaning, commercial cleaning, street cleaning and do they want clients in their local area or further afield (and if further afield how far – if the client is based in the north of Scotland for example and the site belongs to a cleaning company in Devon how cost effective would it be to send a cleaner 500 miles to clean an office) ? Continue reading

Reading Time: < 1 minute

Last updated on February 21st, 2010 at 12:49 pm

Welcome to the new Forest Software blog, in the past we have run an external blog with the occasional posting, now we have a brand spanking new blog.

Our blog will contain articles about two main subject areas, both aimed at the smaller UK business, if there are any subjects that you would like to see covered please contact us by using the link at the top right of the screen.

The first subject that we will cover is that magic grail of search engine optimisation (SEO) or the techniques you can use to get your website to the top of the search engines for those phrases that are most important to you. 

The second subject will be advice for the smaller business, this will range from advice about IT, through articles about finance and insurance right through to the more general things that we in the smaller business worry about or come up against on a day to day basis.

We may even add the occasional “fun” article about things that may or may not be directly related to your business.

We hope that you enjoy reading our blog as the saying goes “if you enjoy reading please tell others, if you do not please tell us”.

About this blog

Over the years we have published many articles based around the questions that we get asked from small businesses relating to marketing, SEO, general business advice and other subjects.  You can find a list of related articles grouped by subject below or can even search for a word or phrase or browse our recent articles.

We hope that you find our articles useful.

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