I have comprised a list of sites that should be well known to anyone working in seo / web design for 2008

1. www.seomoz.org/blog – Great blog, great seo tools
2. www.searchengineland.com – Up-to-date search news
3. www.sphinn.com – social bookmarking for internet marketing
4. www.mixx.com – a friendly alternative to Digg
5. www.stumbleupon.com – One of the best social bookmarking sites
6. http://forums.digitalpoint.com – Webmasters forum
7. www.sitepoint.com – Another great webmasters forum
8. www.technorati.com – Promote your blog
9. www.mybloglog.com – A must have for blog communities
10. www.twitter.com – A great way to communicate with your audience
11. www.linkdiagnosis.com – A great link analysis tool
12. www.google.com/trends – See how trends in Google look
13. http://answers.yahoo.com – Great for providing traffic
14. www.sitemaps.org/protocol.php – Learn about sitemaps
15. www.ventio.se/seo-tools/google-position – Still in beta but good SE tool
16. www.wordtracker.com – Great keyword performance tool
17. www.seologic.com/webmaster-tools – Another source of good seo tools
18. www.backlinkwatch.com – Backlink analysis breakdown
19. www.avivadirectory.com/strongest-directories – Quality directories
20. www.internetmarketingninjas.com – Expert seo advise
21. www.wikia.com/wiki/Wikia – A wiki alternative
22. www.miniajax.com – Some great free Ajax scripts
23. www.sxc.hu/index.phtml – Free royalty free images
24. www.cssbeauty.com – CSS community
25. www.seounique.com/blog – Well I had to put my site in here!

Since one of my friends Skyped me and told me about a new SEO tool “Linkdiagnosis” I’ve been researching in to websites to see if I can find and correlation or trends with SE positions. Part of Linkdiagnosis’s features shows backlinks with page rank and “strength”. I’ve been analyising how this is determined and it seems to be a combination of links pointing to that page, the age of the domain and the page rank assigned.

What I did was look at the term “SEO BLOG” and took various websites to find the data, plus seounique of course!

Here’s what I found:

I looked at 6 websites and noted their rankings in Google UK:

1. www.wolf-howl.com
2. www.estebanpanzera.com
3. www.seodisco.com
4. www.yooter.com
5. www.seotao.com
6. www.seounique.com

Using Linkdiagnosis I made a note of the total strength number of the domain, number of registered backlinks, plus took a screen shot of their PR distribution.

1. Wolf Howl

Google UK Position = 1
Strength = 772
Number of Backlinks = 3404

2. Estebanpanzera

Google UK Position = 9
Strength = 124
Number of Backlinks = 227

3. Seo Disco

Google UK Position = 10
Strength = 161
Number of Backlinks = 142

4. Yooter

Google UK Position = 20
Strength = 211
Number of Backlinks = 376

5. SeoTao

Google UK Position = 23
Strength = 11
Number of Backlinks = 141

6. Seounique

Google UK Position = 100+
Strength = 36
Number of Backlinks = 341

As you can see by these results, strong backlinks still seem to be the key in good search rankings (by strong I mean strength not page rank), especially with a good use of anchor texts. The anchor text seems to even make up for number of backlinks and quality of these backlinks when it comes to specific keywords. SeoTao has low link strength and a low number of backlinks but those links often contain the words “seo blog” in anchor descriptions, this strategy mixed with a good domain age obviously produces good SE positions.

What seems to a nice discovery about this tool is the ability to find strong backlinks that carry weight in terms of strength. After looking for a few hours it’s obvious that good blog posts that become popular and are linked too, hold a lot of weight if you comment. So as well as being friendly to people it pays to say!

Ok, so those of you that are regular visitors to Seounique may or may not have noticed a few blog changes happening. For those of you who are not aware of my changes:

• Added social bookmarking buttons after each post
• Added a contact page (roll on the spam)
• Added an advertise page to offer spots on my “Top Spots“
• Updated blogroll and included “Seo Blogs”

I hope all these features will help with the usability of the site and make performing actions that little bit easier. As to why I have started to add “Seo Blogs” to my blogroll is quite simple. Nothing in this world is free as many people know (not all) and I have a list of around 20 seo blogs I visit on a regular basis which part of me thinks I should link to. As much as I would like to send them over a little complementary link juice I just can’t justify it at this point. Although 2 sites that have given to the site in different ways will now be positioned on Seounique.

I will only be linking to SEM or SEO blogs as thats what my readers find interesting, so no gambling yada yada…

If you feel like you could offer something to the site (however little) and join in with my sometimes rambling discussions then let me know and you could see your link here.