As you will all know by now yesterday saw the third PR update in 2008 and we are only in April. The majority of webmasters will care more about SERPS more than PR but if you monitor your site enough you will see some correlation involved.

A few months ago I entered the “Yicrosoft Directory” competition at SEO Noobs dot com, although I didn’t win I implemented a some standard SEO practices on a standard Wordpress theme and built up under 100 backlinks with 3-4 variations of anchor texts.

Now what is strange is that on reflection on the new update I looked at my site which I hadn’t touched in months or even accessed. To my surprise the little green bar was displaying a PR4, I then proceeded to look at the PR for the top 4 sites under “Yicrosoft directory” and their page ranks were all 4-6. Quite high I’m sure you will agree for websites that are only a few months old about a subject that was made up. This is also not the first time blogs and websites have received high PR updates on young domains.

Now what I believe Google to be doing here is ranking based on an industry level. Say for example you want to rank for a competitive term such as “bank loans” – you may have a 3 year old domain, 50k backlinks and an SEO friendly website, however you still only have a PR of 3 or 4.

Matt…what are you talking about – explain yourself immediately?

Ok, stay with me here – If you have a new keyword phrase, as we all played for (Yicrosoft directory) then out of all websites competing for the term the distribution is shared.

For example:

“mortgages”
• Position 1 - PR 6
o Backlinks: 3 Million
o Domain Age: 2001
• Position 50 – PR 4
o Backlinks: 6,000
o Domain Age: 1996

“Yicrosoft Directory”
• Position 1 – PR 6
o Backlinks: 2,000
o Domain Age: Feb 2008
• Position 50 – PR 2
o Backlinks: 273
o Domain Age: Feb 2008

I know I have only used 4 examples here but you can see the PR’s match but what doesn’t match are the backlinks and domain ages.

So I guess what I’m trying to explain here is that for your website to rank well in the SERPS and achieve a high PR in competitive industries is a lot harder than on less searched terms. Although this conclusion is far from revolutionary, it does explain why new websites and blogs are ranking highly in Page Rank. To me this indicates the up most relevancy and value of a link to your industry or service, random PR links may not be as valuable to you if they are not directly related.

1. Research your keywords – use online tools to check search volumes and competition. The higher the search volumes the harder it will be to rank well, but the more traffic you will get if you rank well!

2. Make sure your page content matches your Title descriptions and Meta data. The titles and Meta data should be as accurate as possible to describe the content.

3. Ensure your H1 tag contain your most desired keyword.

4. Make your H2 and H3 tags contain other important keywords that perhaps you could receive long tailed traffic from (must be relevant to industry).

5. Highlight occasional keywords and phrases in bold to add emphasis for visitors.

6. Look at your source code, see what content the spiders will see first and add value to this content, for example; if it’s a link – add a keyword / phrase, if its copy – add keyword or phrase to sentence.

7. Add keywords to your link descriptions within text copy, avoid “click here” and “read more” descriptions, but again make it relevant to the destination.

8. If you use any references to external websites also provide a link pointing to the source, this adds credibility to the content.

9. A sales page will not help you rank for a keyword, be informative and provide good detail on a page, include a click to action to your sales page if necessary.

10. Do not over use keywords in your individual page content. I have seen pages include a 3 keyword phrase more than 30 times on a single page and be placed 3 pages behind websites with 10-15 keywords on.

11. Make your content readable for your users not just the spiders, after all it’s the users you want to impress.

12. Include your targeted keyword and phrase in the first sentence – although there is no real proof this helps I personally believe it does.

13. When writing around images or using images to backup your copy, give an accurate description of what the image is for or what it refers to.

14. Be sure to add your companies address on the site, either on the contact page or elsewhere.

15. Don’t use text under 8pts to write your main copy - no one enjoys squinting (yes I know my text is quite small).

16. Use recognisable fonts – not everyone has the same font’s as you!

17. Make sure you don’t duplicate content throughout the website; each page should be unique, excluding the navigation etc.

18. Include keywords in Alt descriptions of images but don’t stuff them silly people!

19. Use http://validator.w3.org to check your website once the copy is added.

20. The best way to write good SEO friendly copy is to use your common sense more than anything. Be your own judge on what you think visitors will want to see, at the same time remember that spiders and bots do need to see your target keywords to make you visible in the searches!

More value has been given to the ownership and authentication of domains as of late. Just a few years ago and a basic HTML sitemap would have been substantial enough to keep the search engines happy. Times have changed and with it comes the era of XML valid sitemaps. I always create a XML sitemap for clients, doing this helps the search engines identify pages within the website that perhaps have endured indexing issues.

So what do I do with my sitemap once its uploaded?

Once your shiny new sitemap is live and uploaded to your root directory of your website you need to let the big boys know where it is. Google, Yahoo and MSN all have their own form of a “webmaster console”. This console is an area where you submit your sitemap to each search engine, you will also need to add a random HTML file or add a line of Meta data to your index page – this is just a bit of protection against people trying to hack your data – it validates that you own the domain.

Once your sitemap is submitted and you have validated that you are the rightful owner of your domain you are open to a world of knowledge about your domain and its performance. Each console has varying features, undoubtedly Google offers the most (as you would expect) but each is useful in its own way.

The locations to each console can be found here:

Google - http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools
Yahoo - http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com
MSN - http://webmaster.live.com/webmaster

For a more detailed explanation of sitemaps visit Google’s page: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=34654

If you are lazy and want a sitemap created automatically then visit this site: http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/

Sorry to everyone that reads SeoUnique for the delay in the next post, I have just been so busy with new clients and proposals. In fact creating so many new proposals for clients got me thinking about this blog post.

How do you market SEO?

Depending on the brief or tender it does require a certain level of individuality per client. However in a meeting earlier today my boss gave me this word “appetite” to play with, and to a point I think it is important when trying to sell SEO as a marketing channel.

What has SEO got to do with as an appetite?

Well, how hungry are you clients for success? As many of you will know, a tender or brief can come in at different stages of a build; it could be the initial setup, possibly the client has tried some SEO in the past and now has a taste, or perhaps the client has never heard of SEO before until they read about in the latest edition of “How to be successful online”.

Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that by creating a proposal that describes SEO as a way of filling up the clients hunger for success can be an effective way to bridge the understanding as to the methods involved in such a marketing technique.

Take their needs as an appetite and give them levels of satisfaction with a price!

I have been contacted by an AOL source who has just informed me that AOL is just about to close a deal whereby they will take possession of Social networking site Bebo with their 40 million worldwide memberships!

AOL plan to reclaim their leading position in social media which will help their overall online strategic position. AOL value Bebo as a “true pioneer of the social web” as it’s the leading social network in the UK, as well as being ranked No. 1 in Ireland and New Zealand and No. 3 in the US. They plan to enlarge their current visibility to a staggering 80 million unique users worldwide which few other social networks can reach.

This move by AOL is a rapid international expansion and will surely make the other major players in the industry take notice.

Remember you heard it here first!

• I did get this info before the official release by email
• The total price is around $850 million dollars