Anyway, moving forward, I have created a new list of websites that every SEO should know or at the very least is aware of.

1. http://www.seomoz.org – seomoz have not held back over the last year and 9 months, most notably the addition of Linkscape and Rand’s constant travelling have done nothing but push this company to the top of the industry.

2. http://www.linkdiagnosis.com – this website has also come a long way since I first started using it back in early 08, this link analysis tool is actually quite accurate although the results are only taken from Yahoo, link building can be very effective using this site

3. http://www.twitter.com – Twitter was a must in my previous list and it’s a must now. Any budding SEOs can learn a lot from following some of the leaders in the industry and seasoned SEOs can get a lot of good stories aggregated straight to your twitter home with absolutely no effort.

4. http://www.wolf-howl.com – A search blog with a different stance from many other industry leaders, not always agreeing with Google tactics and methods Michael Gray provides a good contrast in perspective and a sometimes light hearted Friday afternoon read.

5. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com – The official Google webmasters blog, there’s always a lot of activity happening over at the big G, it pays to keep on top of developments.

6. http://www.huomah.com/dojo – I can’t stress enough how good this website is, recently voted as number 1 for the “best paid subscription SEM community” by readers at Top Rank Blog. I’ve spoken to Dave (the ninja boss) many times and the amount of SEO he knows is scary!

7. http://www.sphinn.com – Sphinn is the equivalent to Digg for anything search related, the community has continued to grow over the last few years and although some recent technical decisions have caused some negative chatter – it still feels ace.

8. http://www.seobook.com – Aaron Wall has been in this business a long time and SEO Book provides great resources for SEOs around the world, I especially like the tool “Rank Checker” for snapshot views into ranking performance.

9. http://raven-seo-tools.com – The Raven site provides excellent SEO tools in the form of benchmarking, I used the site in it’s early days and it’s continued to get better and better – solid SEO blog too.

10. http://www.seo-browser.com – It’s important to know how search engines view your website, using SEO Browser can easy display what’s working and what’s not, very useful for performing site audits.

11. http://www.youtube.com/user/GoogleWebmasterHelp – A lot of good SEO questions have been answered by Matt Cutts and co through the video format on YouTube, great watching, even if you just want to find out what T-shirt colour Matt wears.

12. http://www.avivadirectory.com/strongest-directories – Link building from authority based directories does still hold SEO value – fact. Aviva Directory created this list a while a go but many listings are still valuable, decent bookmark to have.

13. http://www.google.com/insights/search – Alas another Google link but extremely important for identifying keyword opportunities on generic and local based levels, although take a pinch of salt with the data provided.

14. http://searchengineland.com – one of the most important search blogs online with great insights and in depth discoveries, it would be rude not to include these boys.

15. http://www.hobo-web.co.uk/seo-blog – This website has grown in authority and reputation over the last few years with much deserves. Constantly providing good SEO blog posts, free e-books and valuable insights, you’d be crazy not to be subscribed to this blog.

16. http://www.seounique.com/blog – I felt the need to add my blog on the list because I do run tests which may provide insights, I’m by no means like the others on this list but I’d appreciate the signup to my feed!

17. http://www.seroundtable.com – Great site for breaking SEO news stories or developments within the industry, plus they have great resources and a forum

18. http://www.bruceclay.com/blog – Solid SEO advice and one to keep on top of.

19. http://www.reelseo.com – Video SEO is something that’s been “around” for a while but never implemented to the full potential. Learn how to maximise this at this great site.

20. http://www.mybloglog.com – Essential for bloggers and online community builders.

21. http://technorati.com – I don’t think I need to explain why you should be aware of this site, news is information, knowledge is power.

22. http://econsultancy.com – An absolute must for any internet marketer. Community content, breaking stories, industry insights and a gazillion more things related to SEO.

23. http://www.seodesignsolutions.com/blog/ – I’ve been in contact with Jeffery for a long time and his blog has never stopped producing quality SEO insights, theories and discoveries over the last 20 months, I suggest those of you who aren’t signed up do so!

24. http://www.google.com/analytics – This is quite an obvious one really, analytics packages are the backbone to any good online marketing campaign as they show the results and RIO for campaigns. The positives include extended insights and functions, landscape benchmarking, in depth data breakdown and its free!

25. http://socialmention.com/ – Brands are becoming more important in natural search and from social aspects, this website helps you monitor brand mentions online through various channels, best thing about this site – it’s free, unlike competitors.

So the reason for my post is to share with you my observations from a recent batch of link building I completed. Most of you will probably already know what’s included but if you have a UK based client you may find this post has some value.

1. Domain Value – I have compiled a list of domain names based on results from link building and their direct effect on rankings for UK based sites:

Links from .ac.uk are similar to .edu links to our American friends and drive massive amounts of trust and authority. Links from .co.uk websites are also extremely valuable for link building in the UK, not only because of the localised domain but the content and language is usually more relevant. Surprising results show that .com links hold considerably less value than an equally matched .co.uk domain, when I say “less value” I mean less impact on UK search.

2. Anchor Text – A year or two ago I would have said keywords in anchor text is a must but I have to say there’s less weight on this factor than their use to be in the UK. I realise that Seomoz recently released the 2009 ranking factors but in the UK brand terms in links still deliver a very healthy amount of link juice which I’ve seen massive rankings boosts from. Although I must say this is based on domains no younger than 12 months old, any younger than that there would probably be a different outcome.

3. Negotiations – I’m going to start sounding rather old now but “back in the day” emailing webmasters for links worked well, generally because SEO was not really as widely known. However there is a misconception that this tactic will not work now due to the increase in web knowledge from website owners. Well let me tell you this is still the best method to build links anywhere, out of 40 emails sent to prospective sites I setup 15 links for free to sites including .gov and .ac.uk with an average PR of 4. Of course it’s all about finding the right sites but that’s the fun no?

4. Impact – This is kind of a gray area in the link building world, how long will it take my new shiny link to boost my rankings? Well usually it depends on when the bots crawl the link and add the update to the index, a good indicator of this was recently announced whereby it was mentioned Page Rank is a measure that is used to determine how often Google will visit a site. Essentially sites with a higher page rank will pass value to you quicker.

5. Directories – You can still get some great positive movement in rankings by identifying directories which are based or targeted for the UK. Firstly the domains are mostly .co.uk which provide good link juice and the content is often localised (which can bring in added benefits for local search). Admittedly the directories that hold the most value in the UK often have a review price but there are other gems out there if you look properly.

Since twitter has been snowballing in popularity more brands are quickly diving into the “twitter barrel” in hope for some kind of brand value to pour out. Lots of businesses are “doing twitter” just because someone sitting in a nice empty office at a top of a tall building says” it’s what everyone else is doing, why aren’t I?” I won’t get sidetracked and explain what I think a brand should do on twitter but I’ll quickly explain how “MoonFruit” and “Mpora” have influenced twitter in a major way.

Essentially MoonFruit and Mpora are both brands, they both came up with a simple idea to attract people to start tweeting (or posting) about their brand, in particular – their competition give-away. MoonFruit started first giving away a free Macbook Pro every day for 7 days straight, the rules and method of deployment were simple – twitter about the brand and include the tag #moonfruit. Everyday a winner would be selected at random from, method unknown, but probably looking through the twitter search engine somehow.   Being the first major contest like this to actually gather pace was probably down to the ease of entering, simply click on a button and you’ve entered, of course as well as notifying all your fellow friends about MoonFruit too.

MoonFruit got very big very quickly and actually topped the twitter trends for a while (even when Michael Jackson had recently died), however before the end of the competition the phrase #moonfruit was apparently removed by twitter or somehow sandboxed. Now although the competition was very popular the chance that they will ever be able to reach the top trends again looks unlikely, but like many I now know of the brand MoonFruit, so kudos.

Now my second case study is for a brand called Mpora who used the same strategy, I of course got hooked like many others by the chance to win, yet again, another Macbook Pro. However Mpora used a much more aggressive approach to the promotion which in my personal opinion has harmed their brand.

So, what did they do? In my eyes they got greedy, they started the competition like MoonFruit but quickly introduced the rule “more tweets gives you more chances to win”. They notified the winners at 5pm UK time every day, for the hours leading up to that point – Mpora would establish themselves in the top 10 most popular trends. However, like many I started getting minute by minute updates from Mpora themselves, pushing just about anything on their site to get as much traffic as possible. Very soon my twitter looked like the screenshot below:

The last thing I want in my twitter feed is for someone or some business to start spamming their services at me. So anyway, why has this harmed the brand? Well I for one got very bored, very quickly of seeing #mpora popping up everywhere – and although judging by traffic estimates from Alexa and Compete their campaign seems to have been a success. I wonder how many other people out there like me who quickly stopped following the brand during the competition and now consider them to be something to avoid in the future – food for thought.

The graph below shows an increase in traffic rankings in alexa while the competition was running:

The graph below clearly shows that the term #mpora was only popular at times near the result of the winners:

So no doubt there will have been some traffic being sent to both these sites but if brands continue to use such tactics to engage potential customers and increase brand visibility only bad things can happen (i.e. spam association).

It’s kind of obvious that having a targeted keyword in your domain name is going to help you in some respects in terms of rankings. However there are other indirect benefits of choosing a domain name with keywords included in them.

Natural links

These natural/organic/golden/mythical links which are generated over a long period of time are the ones Matt Cutt’s and Google say will bring the most value to any website. It just so happens I agree with them (lucky Google), however if you run a small to medium sized website they are often few and far between. Ideally you would hope that the anchor text given out of generosity would contain your desired keywords, however if your company/domain name does not contain any keywords then the likelihood of this happening is very small. If your domain name is keyword driven then guess what – you’ll probably get a bunch of desired anchor text links naturally.

Directory listings

Now it’s fairly easy to get into most directories, except a few high value ones which have certain criteria’s for listings. One such common listing must is that your website anchor text be your website or company name. Bad news for the majority of websites out there as you are probably losing a little bit of value by having your brand name as your anchor text. However if you have desired keywords in your website name then your anchor text is much more appropriate to the phrases you’re trying to target. Of course directory owners have the right to refuse your listing, but the majority which come with a sign up or review fee will gladly accept such a method.

Blog Links

As many of you will know or should do, the most common referrals in a blog posts are:

• Joe blogs at Website name

• Source: Website name

• Website Name

These phrases are generally used the most by bloggers (not necessarily SEO bloggers) to describe a finding online or to point to a recommended resource. So it really does pay to have keywords in your domain name as the amount of targeted natural links you will acquire will be much larger than if your domain/company name has no keywords associated with them.

1. House the content in an appropriate folder i.e. mycars.com/tyre-information/ – include keywords in your folder name that accurately represent what’s included inside
2. Make sure the pages are accessible from your HTML sitemap, this is important to help the pages get indexed quicker
3. List the files in your XML version of the sitemap
4. Make the content area accessible from your main navigation too, this will add the extra layer of visibility to your content area and show the search engines it’s valuable enough to warrant a link from your main menu.

Now the content itself will help your website’s performance for a number of keywords depending on the number of pages you add per strategy. However if there are particular pages on your site you’d prefer to rank better than others then make sure you use this next tip. Link to your targeted internal page in each new section of content. So highlight a relevant keyword in each page and create your link in the body of the text, this will directly pass most of the value and page rank to the targeted internal URL, boosting rankings for your already existing page. The diagram below shows how the value is passed between your new and existing pages

As mentioned this is a very simple strategy that does work with established websites to get new long tailed traffic and to help increase current web rankings.

For those that are unfamiliar with Robots.txt, this is a text file that should sit in the root of your websites directory. The Robots.txt (RT) file controls what the search engines can look at and index throughout your website. It’s surprising how often I find clients not even aware that such a file exists. Is the RT file the responsibility of an SEO strategy or something much more?

First off I always recommend that clients have a RT file on their server, even if they want all their pages indexed, it’s just good practice to have this file in place. For me it’s the “I am being good” file, for spiders and search engines, I believe that having such a file in place you get a very miniscule amount of positive value. Based on my experience I have seen websites indexed quicker on a larger number of search engines versus websites that don’t use it.

For larger organisations multi channel marketing is often carried out covering PPC, SEO, Affiliate marketing and Direct Marketing. When such activity is carried out, the tendency for duplicate content and unfriendly landing pages is sometimes an issue. Not to mention when tracking you ideally want your data to be segmented into appropriate channels so mixing a combination can lead to unreliable results.

For example I am a strong believer in PPC landing pages and SEO landing pages being handled differently, essentially you are after the same goal; usually this is involves a conversion of some kind. PPC landing pages work best when kept short, including clear defined actions and some smooth looking graphics. SEO landing pages work best in rankings when there is sufficient content added to this formula. So where a RT file can help is that it can block off an entire directory from being indexed, meaning no content will be duplicated and the results captured will be from two separate marketing channels.

A great resource to learn more about Robots.txt files can be found at robotstxt.org

Some examples on the types of robots.txt files:

Allow everything to be crawled:

User-agent: *

Disallow:

To disallow everything from being indexed:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /

To exclude specific folders from being crawled:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /PPC/

Disallow: /Affiliate/

I work on SEO for a number of clients in the travel insurance industry and I started to notice strange listings appearing in the top 10 results. At first I assumed it was Google testing something out, I researched the competitors to see if they had received a sudden impact of link juice, which they hadn’t. What startled me was that some of these websites had very few links in comparison to the usual “top dogs” of the industry. Added to that the actual content on these pages was not great usually and the listings looked completely out of place an irrelevant.

What I did notice was that the sites were .gov or a brand I recognised through other marketing channels, i.e. TV, direct marketing etc. As it’s probably been a week since this update has occurred (I don’t care what Matt Cutts says, this IS AN UPDATE). The random brand websites making an appearance seems to change daily and only one or two websites actually change on the first page, however pages two and three are moving all over the place.

To give you an example of what I mean about this update, look at the screenshot below, displaying the top 10 UK results for Travel Insurance, I have highlighted the term travel insurance to show which listing doesn’t belong in the results.

Now I’m sure this will calm down a bit over the coming weeks but this makes ranking for the smaller brands and sites that much harder and the bigger boys seem to have it easy – More to follow.

Areas to keep an eye on that I will investigate:

• Brand anchor texts
• Brand mentions
• URL anchor texts
• Domain age
• Brand Universal Search

Quite basic tips I know but to get maximum results for image search it does require a strict process which must be maintained to achieve best results.

Image location

• Don’t save your images in an external location (like an image hosting company)

• Don’t save your images in your root directory (i.e. www.domain.com/photo1.jpg)

• If you have a small to medium sized website I would recommend keeping you images in a separate folder named “images” i.e. www.domain.com/images/photo1.jpg

• If you run or maintain a large website or an e-commerce website then managing images should be more categorised, for example:

www.domain.com/images/cars/blue-car.jpg

Image naming

• Quite obvious but make the image either gif, Jpeg or Png  format

• Use targeted keywords that give accurate representations of what’s in the image

• Using your targeted keywords as image descriptions may up your on page keyword density but this does not portray an accurate representation of what your image is.

• Common image naming structure:

http://www.domain.com/images/keyword1-keyword2.jpg

• Bad image naming structures:

http://www.domain.com/images/photo1.jpg
http://www.domain.com/images/cars/catid29876.jpg

Image placement

I have created a mock to show how I would choose my image placements for a page trying to optimise for Bill Gates + Microsoft. Based on experience image optimisation only really helps when you make the images as relevant as possible to the content you are writing about.

Image Tag

An example of a good image tag (Alt tag) would be:

• <img src=”images/bill-gates.jpg” width=”100” height=”100” alt=”Bill Gates”>

An example of a bad image tag would be:

• <img src=”images/photo1.jpg” alt=”Microsoft’s Bill Gates Microsoft”>

Like I said this is quite basic stuff but think it’s important to be reminded of it at times as I for one have been lazy at times and have not always followed this out.

Without benchmarking how would you determine the success of a strategy? You need to capture results for whatever metric to be able to show how your SEO initiatives have affected your clients website.

Some examples of SEO metrics I use to assist with reporting and monitoring performance are:

1.    Keyword Rankings
2.    Search Engine Traffic
3.    Referral Traffic
4.    Direct Traffic
5.    Cache Dates
6.    Index Percentage Penetration
7.    Time on Site
8.    Page Views
9.    Time of Visits
10.    Day of Visit

How to perform Benchmarking?

The only accurate method of benchmarking in my eyes would be manually. Ok, this may be time consuming on resources but accuracy matters. Obviously some of the metrics I have discussed above can be captured effectively by Google Analytics which has the awesome price tag of free. However when tracking keyword positions over major search engines there are alternatives to doing the work yourself.

I have used the following three pieces of software, all with positives and negatives but in case you are unfamiliar with them I’ll give you a short piece about each.

Authority Labs

These guys are the new kid on the block if you will – I originally picked up on this resource by Raven SEO’s blog. It’s a web based system which allows you to add domains with each of the keywords you want to benchmark for very easily. The software will even provide you with recommendations of keywords if your own keyword strategy is not available. Then every 24 hours data is updated, and will show you any increases and decreases over Google, Yahoo and MSN. A great little feature which I love is the graphical representation of keyword progress over time, you can see very easily influences that you might be implementing taking effect. They offer a free tester with limited keyword tracking and they have a tonne of features in the pipeline so I suggest you guys check it out.

Rank Checker

Rank Checker is a Firefox extension free to download by SEO Book. This tool is great for estimates – you can add as many domains and keywords as you like and you can check over a number of different territories for Google i.e. you can see differences between Google.co.uk and Google.com. Depending on the number of keywords this tool can take a while to give results but when the checking is finished you can download a CVS format of the results which will display all data each time you have benchmarked. Like I said this tool is great for estimates, I find the ranking positions to be quite inaccurate at times, so I wouldn’t recommend using the data for reports – but for monitoring this is great!

Web Position Gold

These guys have been around for a long time and it shows with the level of detail that can be obtained by this bit of kit. It’s the most expensive (although you can take advantage of their free trial). You can enter virtually unlimited domains and keywords and get pre designed reports at a click of a button showing all kinds of keyword activity and recommendations. It’s a bit tricky to get started but once you get a complete understanding of how it works, this is a necessity for any SEO.

One thing we do know is that if a good SEO gets their hands on your website or specific page you will see positive results. What I’ve been doing is benchmarking when the changes take place in Google and whether the changes are positive and negative.

The Google update test

I optimised around 50 pages of a website I own that I initially setup around 3 months ago, the Meta data, page tags and content was not optimised at all. I created a strategy to optimise these pages, the actual content of these products were products i.e. one product per page. I changed the following:

1.    Optimised the meta data
2.    Included keywords and alternative keyword phrases on page
3.    Optimised the images on the page

I had read somewhere that updating large numbers of pages on a website all at once could lead to a possible penalty, although I have never seen this I thought this test would help determine this theory.

I benchmarked data over a six week period on Google, based on individual pages and their targeted keywords, which had been optimised.

Week 1
Around 80% of the pages actually increased rankings in the first week with around 15% remaining the same and only 5% dropping rank

Week 2
In the second week there were some more keyword increases and very few positions dropped – a good week all round.

Week 3
In the third week it was the complete opposite, just over 85% of the keywords dropped below their original ranking with 5% remaining the same and 10% increasing

Week 4
Huge increase of positions, now around 70% of the pages I originally optimised are ranking well above their previous position with many on page 1 or 2. Very few position drops from original positions but there were some.

Week 5
Not much movement between keyword positions but 30% of keywords have improved from week 4, 80% remain the same with around 10% dropping slightly.

Week 6
Final week and only one page has increased from week 5 while 2 pages dropped slightly, the rest remained the same.

Time for some graphs:

The first graph is has been taken as an average from over 40 optimised pages over the period of 6 weeks so visually you can see the update life cycle.

The next graph shows five randomly selected keyword behaviours over the 6 week period

The final graph shows another 10 randomly selected keywords and their position changes

Google’s Page Update Life Cycle

Yep, think that’s what I’m going to call it! Anyway I’m aware that this lifecycle of position changes probably goes on for a bit longer but the data over the 6 week period was the most active. This is something that I’ve seen many times before but have never benchmarked for such a test. It’s also worth mentioning that you do see position changes before Google has re-indexed the optimised page.

So if you go about updating pages of your site don’t worry if they go all over the place for the first month or so, if they have been optimised correctly then you should see some kind of improvement.