Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is one of the fastest moving industries I have ever been involved in, yet one core activity seems to consistently dominate – link building. Even though link building methods and trends change, the basic principle remains the same. How can you maximise the effectiveness of your link building campaign and future proof your link building strategies for 2010?

Obtaining Links from Highly Respected Pages

The key to effective link building depends on you being able to identify high ranking sites that might host a link to your site, whether they are business directories or other websites. Factors such as Google Page Rank will play a smaller role than in previous years, but still give a good indication as to Google’s opinion of the site. A small handful of good links from some very highly ranked and popular sites will always be more effective than hundreds of links from unpopular ones with no page rank.

Making the Most of Social Media

As social media plays a more central role to SEO, all those essential inbound links from your Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Reddit and Stumble Upon accounts will start to carry more and more clout. Google often uses your article’s success with the native users of social sites when deciding how to rank it for the broader masses.  Clearly and article with 157 Diggs is going to have wider appeal and is likely to be more popular than one with 3. Google pays keen attention to these, making it important for you to get involved in social media in 2010.

Keeping Your Links Context Relevant

An often overlooked factor in any link building campaign is the relevance of your site to the linking one. Links that offer further information about a topic will not only conduct better traffic, but will have a greater impact on your SEO.  Keep your links within the same language as your site, and find reasons why people will benefit from your link.  For every product and service, there is usually a fan base, or enthusiast group waiting to be tapped in to. Are there any popular forums or discussion boards relevant to your products or services? Perhaps you might place an add in an online magazine for your industry? Sometimes the way to do this, is to post a comment and get involved.  Many free sites and comment systems allow you to include a signature, or a website URL in a profile or comment. ( Be sure to check the site terms and conditions, as different webmasters will place different rules around promoting sites! )

Maximising Your Naturally Generated Links from Good Content

A website with useful and informative content will naturally pick up inbound links that other users add. It is easy to convince yourself that this is down to others, and cannot easily be influenced from your site itself. But there are some simple rules that will help you maximise this area. All you really need to do is consider what you can offer people, which they cannot easily find elsewhere. As an expert in your industry, this might be anything from inside product information, industry news or practical tips about a product or service. If you can think of at least one type of person who would benefit from this knowledge, then write it! More content is always a good thing.

Be Aware of Creative or Hidden Link Building Opportunities

Often there are neat sites which you can obtain links from easily. Does your domain have an entry at www.aboutus.org? Have you a review on www.reviewcentre.com? There are also domain information and company information sites that are readily indexed by Google, and by taking five minutes to create an entry for your company or website, you will be generating some more informative, permanent back links that will improve the profile of your website.

In a nut shell, link building is almost a science in itself. You cannot go far wrong, provided you don’t add any links from spam websites, or websites of a different language.  By keeping mindful of where you might add links to your site – and never losing sight of the people who would benefit from this, you will maximising the effectiveness of each and every link added and contribute to the structure of the web itself.

Today, Google announced a recent ‘sophisticated’ GMail attack on their servers from China. They claim to have uncovered evidence that the goal of the attack was to access the private GMail accounts of Chinese human rights activists which have long been a thorn in the side of the Chinese government.

A Pivotal Moment for the Internet

I believe this recent clash between Google and China will mark a pivotal moment for the Internet itself. From a political standpoint, we will see the cooling of already chilly relationships to all-new sub-zero temperatures. Google’s next move will leave a lasting imprint on the history of the Internet itself. In today’s official post, Google reminded China that they were not happy censoring results in the country – a move designed to appease the Chinese government some time ago. They went on to say they will revisit this decision, and the broader idea of all their operations in China:

These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered–combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web–have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China

Google’s message could not be clearer – they are considering withdrawing from China altogether. I hope this is not the case, and I will certainly be watching Google’s next move with baited breath.

Taking a break from my regular search engine optimisation musings, today’s show and tell will cover the finer points of some of my favourite iPhone Apps. I will be listing my personal favourite apps, covering the Internet and network debugging, remote desktop access, telnet and secure shell command consoles, SEO and website ranking tools, web database access and more. In my opinion, these are iPhone Apps that every self-respecting web developer, SEO consultant and network engineer should have!

Network & Internet Debugging & Discovering iPhone App

Ping (Mochasoft) is a great iPhone app for debugging any network. The lite version if completely free and does exactly what is says on the tin, you can ping or trace to any other. If you splash out and get the full version you can to a ping sweep which is a great way to discover and identify all devices connected to a particular subnet. The full version also comes with a telnet console.

FTP and File Sharing iPhone Apps

Files Lite (Fresh Apps) is a great ( and free!) app which allows you to map your iPhone folder as a virtual drive on your computer. The bonus, is it will also open and read your Microsoft format files : Word Documents, Excel Spreadsheets and so on. I Also find that FTP Lite is a nice, simple, no-nonsense App that turns your iPhone into an FTP server.

Remote Desktop iPhone App

To help manage Windows IIS servers (or if – like me! – you just like being able to set your computer doing something without having to get up from the couch!) then my first choice would have to be Mocha VNC. It provides a very responsive remote desktop service for your computer, and will happily handle multiple displays and works on many different systems including Linux, Mac OSX and Windows. I found it useful to reduce the colour depth to 256 colours to make it even faster and can be effectively be used across the web, not just on your home wi-fi connection.

Telnet, Secure Shell (SSH) & Terminal iPhone Applications

If (like me!) you practically live in terminal consoles and command line’s, then either: : iSSH (Zinger-Soft), SSH (ThroughPut Inc.) or TouchTerm (jbrink.net) should float your boat. Obviously you are somewhat limited as to the available space on the screen, and I personally like iSSH. Although it is more pricey than the others, it supports several protocols including xterm and even supports colour (making it more advanced than the one Microsoft ship with their operating systems!

MySQL Web Database iPhone App

MySQLi is a fantastic MySQL App, completely free, it will allow you to update an arbitrary database on the web, provided you have all the connection information.

SEO & Website Ranking iPhone Apps

Pokeseo ( John Christiansen ) is a neat little tool which allows you to check your web rankings for a key phrase in the 4 top search engines. SenseEarn ( Hans Schneider) gives you a neat way to view your AdSense account history and track your visitors activity. Some of the code which Analytics relies on in order to draw all graphs doesn’t work properly on the iPhone that’s where Analytics App ( Inblosam LLC ) comes in. This app allows you to connect with a clean and straight forward interface and track your visitors activity on the move. SEO Automatic ( Leon Huang ) is a great tool for tracking your websites position for as many keywords as you wish. SERPS ( Hans Schneider )was also quite a neat little tool, which will not only track as many keywords as you like in Google, but will allow you to select which language version of Google you test each phrase in.

Yes, the iPhone is truly a device that grows around you. I even found out today, that if you visit the Google homepage and click the link to activate local services (below the search bar), all your Google local searches will use your location to find the right shop, restaurant or bar near you.

How Does Design, Layout and Usability Affect SEO?

Just what kind of impact does your website design have on Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)? It’s easy to think of your layout and usability as totally unconnected with your search engine rank, but the truth is that all of these factors play a subtle but important role. Getting the visit is the first obvious step. But keeping the user on your site and encouraging them to browse your products is an essential part of SEO which will have a direct impact on your average time spent on site and therefore your search position. By following this simple checklist, you can be sure to use your design to maximise your SEO and chances of making that conversion into a sale!

No Second Chances for a First Impression – Establishing Trust

They say that a book is judged by it’s cover, but this is also true for your website and products.  Most people will have decided whether they feel comfortable purchasing from you within the first 30 seconds, before even browsing your site! First impressions are not only important to be taken seriously in your industry, but are especially important for businesses taking payments online. You are asking potential customers to trust you with their credit card details, and even the slightest doubt in a customers mind can cause them to look elsewhere. Be mindful of your industry, take a look at competitor websites in your industry. How does yours measure up? 

There are a number of neat ways you can further bolster your first impression. Could you include testimonials or positive feedback somewhere within the pages? Are you approved by any major dealers, trade organisations or perhaps have any awards, logos or stamps of approval which might be tidily included in the design of your pages? Perhaps you have worked with a particularly big client which the public might recognise. All of these devices can be used to give your website professional feel.

Behold! A Call To Action! Just How Usable is Your Layout?

Remember that your website is here to server a purpose – we want your visitor to pick up the phone or write an email and place an order. Just how easy is for them to contact you? Are your contact details clearly visible on every page? Remember that it is just as easy for a visitors to click back as it is for them to click ‘contact us‘ in the menu!

Navigation plays a key role in the usability of your site. You may view your website on a day-to-day basis, so it makes sense to you. But people have a very short attention span on the Internet, and the easier you make it for them to find what they want, the longer they will stay! Perhaps you could get a second opinion from a fresh pair of eyes that does not regularly view your website? Take all feedback very seriously!

Greater numbers of links between pages are almost always better to include than too few. If you discuss a topic in the text itself, don’t be afraid to include links to relevant pages when you use important phrases (even if these pages are already linked to from the navigation menu itself!). Think of your website as a shop, the more connectivity you have between paths, the better your traffic will flow. Do not rely exclusively on your navigation menu!

Avoiding Any Barriers

I often see people attempt to control this first impression with a ‘welcome’ page (or ‘splash page’) which is usually displayed before the homepage. It may seem like a good idea, but pages like these usually present an extra barrier for search engines to get around, and it moves your products one extra click away from your customers! Also, a lot of traffic will not enter your site from the ‘front door’, but will land on an inner page, making the whole thing rather pointless. There are some exceptions where this extra page might be helpful – multinational companies or businesses with multiple offices may wish to direct people to a particular branch or language website. Or perhaps just different departments of a very large company.

Bear these points in mind when next reviewing your design and you’ll not go far wrong. If in doubt, simply give your website to someone else to test and listen to their feedback carefully. As we enter 2010, I predict we will see a lot of new websites as companies prepare for the new year. If it has been a while since you last did some interior designing, perhaps now is a good time to consider a website revamp?

Cyber Monday was set to be the busiest online trading day of the year. While the jury is still out at the time of writing, analysts are anticipating this year will set new record highs with an estimated 95.5 million people spending a staggering $900m online. Puzzled? I know I was. It seemed to run counter to everything my senses told me was happening around me … there is a recession on, don’t you know?

But after some careful thought, I realised it actually made perfect sense. The Internet offers more choice, operates faster and more efficiently, ultimately ensuring that sales are less expensive for most businesses to make. In a recession, why wouldn’t everyone turn to the Internet to do their Christmas shopping? The added bonus is not having to depend on the British weather, nor negotiate your way though hordes of people to grab yourself a Christmas bargain!

The Second Busiest Online Trading Day … Ever!

But this is no isolated spike, either. Early data from research firm comScore suggests that yesterday was actually the second busiest online trading day in the Internet’s history. Sales are up 15% on this time last year, which was itself a new record, beating the one set in 2007. Despite my television constantly reminding me how gloomy the economic world is behind my curtain, it is clear that a vast chunk of these sales have not dried up … they have simply moved to the web.  This is a trend we can expect to see continue for some time.

We are now in December, with only 24 days until Christmas.  It is very easy to lose focus of our goal once the short-term flurry of activity has died down.  It is tempting to walk away with the message that: ‘Christmas is becoming an Internet thing’, rather than taking a step back, and seeing the bigger picture which indicates a steady migration of business to the Internet, year upon year.  As a search engine consultant who spends his life matching patterns, I can tell you that Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is for life, not just for Christmas! 

Quite a number of people ask me to optimise them for seasonal phrases to ensure they are able to catch a lot of the holiday traffic. This makes perfect sense on the surface – but in reality – SEO itself responds quite slowly and is probably not the best tool for the job. The smart person will be investing in their website now, carefully manoeuvring yourself ready for Christmas 2010.

The Most Effective Way to Target Seasonal Traffic

Does your website have a blog or news section? If not, you should probably look at getting one installed. This is an increasingly popular self-promotion tactic that will allow you to post news about your seasonal promotions and offers. You will find search engines are far more responsive to blogs and news which will prove more effective at capturing your slice of the seasonal traffic. What about your websites page structure? Could you add more information pages to your site, or improve your websites page structure to allow for better quality traffic? When was the last time your website had a face lift? Trends in programming techniques on the web are constantly shifting. A few years ago it was acceptable to use table structures for the design, but this has become a tactic that is now frowned upon.

If you have an SEO consultant, then perhaps it would be worth having a chat about web development work that will help you get more out of your online presence in the long term? Rather than a sudden reaction to short term trends, this is best done in response to the gradual trend which shows the Internet is likely to play an increasingly dominant role in our shopping habits in 2010.

The world is constantly changing, and nowhere is this happening faster than the Internet. One growing trend is the number of people taking advantage of social media to promote their businesses and products. Yet so many people have trouble understanding how social media can benefit them, particularly in small to medium sized businesses where budgets are tight and time is a rare commodity you can’t afford to waste. If you have heard people talk of Twitter, blogs, Youtube and Facebook but have no idea how this would fit into the context of your industry and business, then read on! This post will reveal how some simple, free (and, quite honestly … fun!) tactics can be used to really enhance your search engine optimisation (SEO) and business profile on the web and how you can ensure your time is spent effectively.

 

How Blogs Can Work for Your Business

An increasing number of people are blogging for business, why? Well, firstly search engines love rolling content and news pages. Unlike static web pages, the benefit of a news or blog section comes from the regularly updated content and steady stream of informative articles. The great part is you can write about anything that takes your fancy, provided it is somehow related to your industry, business or products. Although you may not realise, you probably have a wealth of knowledge which the average Joe Public would need to do some serious Wiki-ing to unearth. By gradually releasing little bits of this knowledge on a regular basis, you will give search engines a very good reason to see you as an authoritative source of news and will quickly find your articles ranking well for related search terms. Blogs can be used to announce the launch of your new products, perhaps offer a review and some customer feedback or advice, or it might cover events happening in your industry or even company news. Whatever your niche, try to think about your customers and imagine what type of information they would find useful. Provided you can think of at least one type of person who would be moderately interested, you should write it!

Blogging Opens the Twitter Door

Once you are comfortable adding to your blog, the next logical step is building up your company’s official Twitter account. Twitter is so easy to use and so effective at promoting websites that some people often accuse it of being one giant spam machine. The goal is finding as many genuine followers as possible, each of who will see any updates you post. You can post short snippets of news, or links to articles in your blog. Each time you add a new blog entry, be sure to copy and paste the address of your new post into your Twitter update bar with a little text describing the article. It becomes a source of clicks for people who are interested in the headline, and there are some fantastic Twitter applications appearing that will help kick-start and manage your account. Twittgeek.com will automatically follow people based on a keyword you choose. The great thing about this is that it ensures your message reaches people who have Tweeted about this topic in the past and are most likely to be interested in what you have to say.

Social Media SEO, Social Bookmarking and Article Back-links

There are some great sites out there besides Twitter that you should be submitting each article to, instead of building links for your site itself, you will be building links for your individual articles. Each site has a certain ‘knack’ to really get the most out of your social media SEO, but all are very easy to pick up and you will often find you get used to them by simply using them. A lot of SEO experts will slate digg.com because ‘power users really need to digg your article to really feel a big effect, but there are other advantages – Digg articles themselves will often rank very quickly in Google separately from your site, and when enough people click through from your Digg entry through to your actual blog entry, eventually Google will see it should be recommending your blog page high up, and will often ‘flip’ the URLs, giving you a chance to rank for some quite competitive terms if your article is an interesting enough read. Reddit.com entries will generally not rank very well in Google, but has a fantastic number of users and does not insist on categories, allowing it to become a neat little traffic source all of it’s own. Be sure to give your articles a full description here in the ‘extra text’ section. You can submit either blog entries or entire sites to Stumble Upon, and it is worth finding several relevant categories for your article if you can! There are other generic social bookmarking sites such as delicious.com, diigo.com, Yahoo Bookmarks and Google Bookmarks that are worth using.

Making Facebook and Youtube Work For you

Facebook now allows organisations and companies to open up official Facebook accounts. This is something else that is quick to do, and quite a lot of fun. Be sure to make all employees are members of the group, so that all can contribute to your Facebook profile. Also, be sure to link back to your site and post any links to articles here too! Similarly, some may find themselves in industries where they have videos that might be uploaded to Youtube. Remember, that plenty of people use YouTube on a regular basis, and it would be worth including a link back to your site from the description of each YouTube video you post. You can also embed videos from YouTube into your site fairly easily.

Why Social Media is Best Done Yourself

In a nutshell, there are some more expensive SEO companies who will provide the social media side of SEO as part of the service. But my advice would be that social media SEO is something best done yourself. Why? Well, only you have the industry insider knowledge and deal with your customers on a regular basis, and will therefore understand them better than any SEO consultant. It is also completely free to do your social media SEO, and allocating just one hour each day, or perhaps a couple of hours each week is enough to really see a noticeable impact on your SEO.

There are so many different considerations when building a new site: getting your branding and colour scheme right, creating a usable layout and navigation. These are all important, but there is one little chap who often gets completely overlooked. How you break up your information and content across pages will not only determine what type of visitors you attract, but will also have an impact on the time spent on your pages themselves, and therefore the success of your search engine optimisation (SEO) itself.
 

Understanding Your Audience Through Keywords

When I’m sat at home watching TV, the advertiser doesn’t know me from Geoff. I’m only here because the scheduled program was of some interest. Outside of this, potential advertisers know very little about me. This is where the Web is utterly different. Each visitor who lands on your page, came from somewhere. Think about it: If they came from a search engine, then we know their intentions will lie behind the search terms they entered into Google. If they followed a link, then it is likely they saw something on the referring site which led them to believe we can help them out. We already understand something about their desires and purpose and by applying just a little tracking data we might be able to better understand what really makes them tick.

Using Google Analytics to Guide Page Structure

So what does this have to do with page structure, SEO and how you break up your content? Well, I like to imagine each page as an island. While they may share a common purpose and phrases, each will deal with a slightly different topic and can therefore be used to target different searches. Each page needs to be targeted towards a particular audience. Lets suppose you are a plumber who performs everything from central heating to plumbing repair and boiler installation. It would be very tempting to lump a all this information together under a general page ‘services’ which might include lists of statements.  By simply breaking up the different services across pages, and padding the content out with text you will have more room to optimise each page for variations on themes around their target optimisation phrases and this will allow you to deliver highly relevant content, which in turn will improve your bounce rate and therefore the success of your SEO as a whole.

Identifying Content That Works for Your SEO

Looking through your Google Analytic data for low bounce rate phrases people found you for will help you work out which visitors were receptive to your content after entering their search terms. You might refine the optimisation of each page to remove or rephrase terms that have a high bounce. One or two bounces is quite normal, but if you’ve had five or ten visits and have a bounce rate over 75%, this might be caused by optimised search terms that are either slightly ambiguous or perhaps a little vague. It might even be nothing wrong with the content itself, but simply the message includes too much information that is not relevant to your search visitor, who might wrongly conclude you could not satisfy their need because they simply didn’t read far enough down the page! If you add content to the site regularly, keeping track of your tracking data will also help you identify demand for a particular topic and allow you to pitch information you know will work.

Deciding When a New Page Will Help Your SEO

The questions to ask yourself are surprisingly straight forward: “What type of audience is this message aimed at?”, “What will this audience be looking for?” and “What sort of action do I wish to encourage from each type of visitor once they find this page?”. If you allow these questions to govern the structure of your site, you will never go far wrong. If content is king, then how you divide up your Kingdom will determine how effectively each page can work together and will improve the overall quality of your SEO.