Some mornings I wake up and find nothing but good email in my mailbox. Some mornings like today I wake up and find my inbox full of blog comment alerts which I have to moderate.

To all the blog spammers out there who think they are being really clever. You’re thick as planks.

This blog runs on Wordpress. The template is the standard Kubrick template. By default on this template on Wordpress all links in comments are appended with the rel=”nofollow” tag. You won’t get pagerank transferred and you wont get search engines visiting your site from ours. In fact, because of this the link means nothing at all unless one of our readers happened to think your comment was worthy of a click-through and a visit to your site.

But hang-on, get past the nofollow tag and then you’ve got to get past moderation. That means with a single click I can approve or send your comment to oblivion. No comments get onto the blog without my approval. So your 10 minutes of adding spammy links to my site are undone in a couple of seconds.

There are ways to post decent comments. Read the post. Think up a good reply or point to note then write it down. Don’t put your link in the comment box, put it in the proper URL box. Give something that at least looks like a real email address. If readers like your comment they’ll maybe visit your site.

So Mr Cial1s Spampot I hope you’re glad you put me in a great mood on a friday morning. I look forward to reading your next comment.

PageRank is Googles ranking system and one of the means Google has to rate pages is by the number & type of inbound links. Links to your site will increase your rank, however the amount it will increase it by depends on several factors: how highly rated the site is that is linking to you & how many other links that site has made. Similarly, having good internal site links from page to page will maximise your PageRank score, as will having many additional pages of good, relevant information.

Links to your site will generally increase rank by some amount, however some links from your site could cause your site to be penalised by Google. If the site you are considering linking to has a PageRank of 0, do not swap links with that site. Do not use link farms as a means of increasing inbound links, not only is this contrary to Googles stated aims when setting up the PageRank system, and therefore likely to be deliberately penalised by Google, but you cannot control what other prohibited tactics that site may use, such as hidden links, gateway pages or use of your email for other purposes (spam). Use of such tactics by a site that you link to can lead to you being penalised too – whilst they can change their site address quickly with no loss of business, you will have a site you have no doubt invested a lot of time & energy in.

Google will also rank higher, links that are relevant to your site. It uses “sophisticated text-matching techniques” (source: http://www.google.com/technology/index.html) to determine which sites are relevant to your own. In addition having relevant, useful links will naturally increase the volume of traffic to your site, independently to the search engine listings, and if found to be useful to visitors should help to naturally increase the number of inbound links into your site.

One way of starting to build up links to your site is to set up a links page. Choose carefully which sites you would like to swap links with. These sites should have good quality services and/or information, which would be relevant to your sites visitors. One way to find out what other people think may be relevant links to & from your business would be to identify a highly ranked competitor & see who links to them & who they link to. Whilst we would not suggest that you then duplicate your competitors’ links exactly, it can give you an idea of what kind of businesses to approach, perhaps in your local area, as well as identifying sites that link to several competitors & who may well be reviewing businesses such as yourself, and be happy to include you in that review.

If approached by another site & a link swap offered, we must urge a certain amount of caution, similarly if approaching another company to offer a link swap, be aware that they will also regard your approach with caution. As previously mentioned, not all links are good links, and relevant links from high quality sites are much more highly rated, so when approaching a company to offer a link swap it is important to address that request individually – do not use a stock letter. Detail why you think linking to your site would be useful to their clients & vice versa. If the site would be genuinely useful to your clients, then put the link on your site regardless of whether or not there is a reciprocal link.

If a company offering a link swap approaches you, first check that site out thoroughly. Download Googles browser add-on & check the others sites PageRank, a rank of 4 or above is good. Sites with 0 PageRank on their home page must be avoided – a 0 PageRank usually means that the site has been penalised by Google. It may also mean that the site is linked badly & the Googlebots cannot read the site to rank it. You can check Google to see if the site is listed at all. Either way the link is unlikely to prove useful to you, so only link if the sites information is excellent & truly useful to your customers. In addition, ensure the links page on the other site is connected to the rest of the site & therefore readable by Googlebots – the site map will clearly show if the links page is accessible. Check the age of the site on the “who is” information, if the site is over 6 months old then it is likely to be more highly ranked by Google, and also by dint of having already lasting six months, are more likely to be a useful link for longer. Check if the other company’s site seems honest: Are there any hidden links?; Is the information they provide accurate and in good faith?; Is there any hidden text or ‘gateway’ pages? If you are happy with the site, swap links!

It is worth checking with new customers to see what drew them to your site, if you find that one particular link or type of link proves particularly valuable to you in terms of new custom, it may be worth offering to swap content with that site as well as the swapped links, i.e. each would host one page of information about the others site/services. In effect a full-page advert – in permanent publication!

Once you have a worthwhile, informative links page you can start to build up an online network of businesses with mutual interests. This can be based on location, for example it can be useful to link to businesses in your local area if your services are location specific. If your services do not depend on location however it may be more beneficial to link to companies for other reasons. These online communities will grow naturally beyond a certain point.

Whilst you can optimise your site & encourage the right kind of links, the aim is not to ‘trick’ the search engines into giving you better listings, but to attain better listings by offering a better & more relevant site than your competitors. It is very difficult to say exactly how much one link or change to your site will improve your listing as PageRank is not a direct rating of your site – it is rated on a ‘grade curve’ so it is relatively easy to raise your sites ranking from low to good (from 2/10 to 4/10); very difficult to raise it from high, to very high (from 8/10 to 9/10); and virtually impossible to raise it from very high to highest (from 9/10 to 10/10). As we have mentioned, if you choose links based on what will be most useful to your customer & not solely on what will improve ratings, it is likely you will achieve what Google wishes to encourage with it’s PageRank system –useful, coherent networks of mutually beneficial sites.

Since its creation in 1994 the internet has expanded into a vast network of information. Over the years search engines have developed ways to organise this content bringing the user the web page that best fits their search.

Over the past few years a large percentage of businesses have developed some sort of online presence. But with more and more sites giving information it is not always easy to find the correct page or if you’re a business, to be listed for the correct term so that people can find you.

The biggest concern for online businesses should be compatibility, you need to be compatible with Google, Yahoo and MSN. Search engines run on information, if you want to be listed for a keywords then you need to make it very clear that your web page is about a specific subject. Your page needs to stand out among the thousands, if not millions of other web pages competing for that keyword. But it is not enough any more to just make a page that matches keyword algorithms you need to show the search engines that you page is popular with other people. Google and other search engines look at who links to you and what they say about you. What other people say about you is important to Google as it is a second opinion on your site the more second opinions google can see about you web page the more relevancy it places on you web page and it content. This is called link popularity or PageRank on Google.

Internet technology is evolving enabling more people to post their information, for the world to see. Blogger is a personal publishing program where a person or business can post their information, what every that may be, from a political soap box to holiday pictures, if you want to share it blogger will allow you to do it easily. Similar software exists in the form of Wordpress (powers this blog) and Typepad. But now Blogging is becoming main stream with industry professionals writing what amounts to a newspaper columns, online. These blogs put across the ideas and information that are related to their industry, linking to the information that interests them and may interest people other like people.

The scope for blogging is vast. If every blogger links to like bloggers, then a vast network of information is created with a wide array of views and ideas. This is where you can take your place, put across your view of the world as you see it, your business, your interests, your information. If your in business it is likely you will have an area of expertise or knowledge that other people could benefit from. This information can then link to your services and products. It is also likely that you will have a good knowledge of the information related to your industry. The wider the range of information you display the greater the segment of people that will be interested in what you have to say.

You might think you do that already with you web site but usually websites have quite a narrow view looking at just the business information. Static content is rarely updated and is of interest to only a select range of people, for a short period of time. A blog section to your site create fresh content and can look at a wider area of interest while advertising your business. Through this information you can keep customers or clients informed of the latest development in your field or launch new product link to related news and even syndicate you own news to the rest of the web via RSS feeds.

If you don’t look towards blogging the chance is that you will be left behind in the information race. Your competitors will release better information and capture a greater share of the market. Start your blog now even if it is just to post press releases. If you don’t already do press releases then this is your chance to start.

One of the main aims of a blog is provided a starting point for peoples information search. From the users point of view you are removing their need to search for relevant information as you have done the work for them. You will also benefit from being able to tilt the information towards using your services.

Using RSS feeds means that you will be able to release articles to the web and any interested users. RSS can also provide your site with fresh information form other sites.

The Google rumours I posted about last time turned out to be nothing to do with RSS, but instead were referring to a new service called Google Base which apparently contains some kind of classifieds service that some people claimed was getting ebay a little jumpy. To be honest though, ebay is so big that no rival service should make them that jumpy, even amazon’s. I’ve tried to log in to Google Base with my Google account but it’s still a locked door. I guess we’ll find out more soon.

Google are drip-feeding us another way for site owners to get their content into Google, designed to complement site crawl and Google Sitemaps. My guess is an RSS submission service. Google are tinkering more and more with RSS - yesterday I saw syndicated news showing up on the right hand side of my Gmail account rather than the usual Adwords adverts.
It is still just a guess, but anyone who is still languishing with a site that never changes should be looking at how to provide up to date news content and of course an RSS feed. The way the web is being presented to us is changing and soon you’ll have to look hard for static, never-changing sites while fresh, constantly-updated sites will be in your face all the time.

In a further affirmation of how much interest the corporate world is paying to the subject of blogging, Google have launched Google Reader. It works much like My Yahoo! or Newsgator etc. It’s very easy to use and after having set it up I’m seriously considering moving completely over to it rather than filling my hardrive with posts through Omea Reader.
The idea is that you can find then subscribe to any RSS or syndicated content, whether that is news, blogs or just site update feeds. Google has been slow to catch up with Yahoo on this, but they now seem to be taking blogging very seriously which leads us to think that perhaps everyone with a vested interest in the web should start finding out about it and taking it seriously. Blogging, RSS and syndication is now here to stay and it will only evolve from here.

Jim Boykin over at Jim’s Blog has a really good post on how SEO has changed over the years. In reality it exposes just how naive search engines were only a few years ago, and how algorithms have changed to work towards higher quality search results that are harder to manipulate with dodgy techniques. It exposes the need for your SEO company to keep on top of things and change strategies as search engines themselves change.

Talks are going on between the government and the BBC to determine just how much extra they can charge us for a TV license over the next few years. It’s all pretty standard stuff, improving digital services, more new programming etc. Standard until you find out that one of their plans is to build a search engine. It was buried down at the bottom of the digital services highlights, but the did mention it on BBC Radio Scotland yesterday. They clearly want a slice of Google’s pie. Who pays for this pie? The license payers of course. Now Google has taken years to develop, is completely free and is in my view the best search engine there is. I’m sure the BBC search engine will take years to develop, will probably cost a mint and is unlikely ever to be as good as Google. Why? Google do search. BBC do TV and radio. Stop stepping on toes BBC. Next thing you’ll be telling us the search engine business model is paid inclusion. HA!

Every now and again someone contacts us with a single online page that they want some number one listings for. If we can’t do it we’ll say so, and in a case like this one on Jim Boykin’s blog I’d struggle not to snigger if I was replying to that request.

Wordtracker have put together a pdf on how the world’s top SEO’s would market vegetarian dog food. Ultimately it’s just a big pitch for Wordtracker services, but I don’t mind that because it’s one of the best tools on the market. Well worth a read.

http://www.wordtracker.com/keyword-research-guide.pdf