In February last year I created a list of 25 websites every SEO should know, I must admit the basis of that blog post was intended as link bait which did happen to deliver. However I did also receive a lot of negative comments regarding what I had included, looking back on the list I can now see why.

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.

Sitemaps are an aspect of web design that has been around from the very beginning. The ideology is simple; create an accessible area of the website whereby users can navigate to any one area of your site architecture easily. A lot of web designers see these pages in the same way a builder would see four walls, a floor and a roof – they are part of the infrastructure and should not be ignored. While this is sound advice the reason and benefits for SEO may not be so transparent.

A sitemap can be a very powerful platform for SEO and I mean VERY powerful and yet it is so simple and often overlooked. Matt Cutts recently asked the question, which would he choose, an XML or HTML sitemap? He chose the HTML sitemap because both users and spiders can use the data. See the full video below:

Now the real benefit of having a good sitemap is the ability to make pages throughout a website accessible to the search engines. Most commonly great chunks of valuable content are hidden away in areas of a site which may seem to follow “SEO protocol”, in terms of URL structure and on page optimisation but for a search engine spider the content is hard to find.

An example of this would be on an e-commerce site whereby the structure follows homepage > category > sub category > products > content.  In the eyes of search engine spiders they have to crawl 4 levels before they can reach the juicy information/content and although Google are getting better at finding content (i.e. Caffeine) it can still help enormously by reducing the number of “obstacles” in their way. The theory is that by including a sitemap accessible from the homepage then Google will only have 1 “obstacle” to have to deal with before finding direct access to the rankable content.

Now to make a really effective sitemap for SEO it requires a little more methodology and architecture. It’s commonly thought that Google will take notice of at least 150 links on any one page before they start losing interest and move on to another area of a website. So for large websites that have thousands or even tens and thousands of pages it’s just not going to work including all your pages on one sitemap page.

So what’s the solution?

The most effective way to deal with high volume content websites is to create separate sitemaps for each website section. This deals with a few issues, firstly your main sitemap page will not go over the maximum number of links therefore all pages will be crawled and given value. Secondly the search engine spiders will still be able to access your deep content much easier than the normal way i.e. homepage > category etc.

The diagram below illustrates how a sitemap can be structured to ensure content can spidered.

For more information Rand explains well why this is an effective SEO technique:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-flat-site-architecture

For those of you thinking – how does this help increase my rankings? Well pages that were not previously indexed will now become listed therefore helping you rank for new terms. Acessibility really is the key here, internally and externally.

The final little treat for those of you that have taken the time to read the entire article; the anchor text used in a sitemap does seem to play an important part in terms of assigning value to those pages. This works on the same method as internal linking, assign keyword relevant descriptions to links in sitemaps and you will see better results than not doing so – tested and proved!

Ok guys, I have been link building for many years now but don’t always get the chance to practice the art as much as I’d like to, mainly due to my more strategic based role at my current job. Call me crazy but I do actually enjoy link building and I think you have to if you’re involved in the job, it’s a buzz to setup quality links for a client at absolutely no cost then watching the impact these links have on the rankings.

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.