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

Ok, I have seen many seo myths being posted and blogged about recently, I think it’s safe to say the myths have been busted in most cases. So let’s have some seo truths!

Truth 1: Including keywords in your domain is an advantage – Domains that include the targeted keywords in them will be marked as more relevant than domains that do not. In my personal experience, the shorter the domain with the relevant keyword – the better!

Truth2: The title tag is one of the most important tags on a web page – Apart from the title tag being one of the first pieces of content to a user the relevancy of the title tag to the page content is vital. Creating unique title tags per page relevancy will give the search engines an accurate idea of what to show when a search is created. Ideally you want to include your targeted keywords at the beginning of the description.

Truth 3:Creating image descriptions will improve traffic – this is 100% true. It has always been a good guideline to include keywords on “Alt” descriptions of images but doing this in a savvy way can really lead to a good increase of organic traffic.

Truth 4:You can use a paid links strategy – After the not so recent shake up with the penalties associated with paid links some people remain confused about this. It is perfectly fine to buy links for traffic and not for PR, you just have to be a bit wary when doing so.

Truth 5: Using “nofollow” tags will keep your page value within your domain – I know some bloggers and website owners are say “boo-who-sucks-to-you” but if you keep the link juice within your domain and don’t leak it to 3rd party sites – your link juice will be higher and this will reflect in your serps.

Truth 6: Black hat methods do work – I was a bit apprehensive as to whether or not to include this. Personally I have never used black hat seo methods but have clearly seen many highly placed competitors of different industries doing so with good results. I would not recommend anyone to do this, but until Google and other search engines open their eyes a little bit more, people can still get away with it and make a lot of money!

Truth 7: Good quality links still hold a lot of influence in terms of SE rankings – Putting every aspect of seo aside, the more highly trusted incoming links you have, the higher you will rank in Google and other search engines, its that simple.

Truth 8: Broken links will affect your SE rankings – I have worked with various clients sites and a common trend is that Google especially will flag these broken links. Certainly achieving very high rankings for competitive keywords will be impossible until they are fixed.

Truth 9: Using fresh new content will give you additional traffic – If you create regularly updated unique content you will see that content initially ranks very well indeed in Google for a period between 2-7 days. Creating posts containing long tailed keywords will provide an additional stream of traffic from your targeted ones.

Truth 10: Seo is here to stay – as long as there are search engine with organic listings, there will always be seo, no if’s, but’s or maybes!

I want to take this opportunity to say I recently attended a social event after one of the days at SES London 2008 - minding my own business chatting away to fellow SEO enthusiasts I noticed a guy (Mr X) standing rather close to me at the bar - in a patronizing tone he “wanted to get to the bar“. No please, no thank you just annoyance that I was slowing down his drinking ability.

Through the night I saw this guy sucking up to the Google and MSN representatives (that looked utterly bored with Mr X) as he proceeded to tell them how to do their jobs and how great he was. One of my friends proceeded to tell me that Mr X was infact head of SEO for a well known Online Casino company. This information immediately clicked in to place as to why this guy had been swanning around for the last 3 hours believing he was only one step away from the big man himself.

Back to my point, I was by no means stalking Mr X - please bare this in mind! Outside I heard him boasting to some other disinterested people how he only used “Blackhat all the way” to get the “best results“. I did at that point want to “whitehat “his ass fairly sharpish.

Instead I found out what the exact URL was and started my analysis of the site (the next day). The site had keyword stuffing all over the place, their backlinks were so obviously all paid for, the anchor text did not change at all - 100% one phrase and where was this douche ranking? Well 2nd of course (grrr), as many of us bloggers and site owners keep receiving penalties from Google for the occasional “suspicious” link or two - sites that must make hundreds of millions of pounds can get away with it by the looks of it (old news I know)!

I’m not blaming Google but when the evidence against a site looks so obvious, why doesn’t Google do something about it?

Anyway, not to be outdone by Mr X, his site has been reported for every Blackhat evidence I could find - bit “snitchy” I know but all this could have been avoided by saying one word - “please”. Google get to work PLEASE!

Being asked to take part in Hobo Web’s discussion based around keyword density got me thinking about this blog post idea. As I mentioned in the discussion I don’t believe in keyword density, too many times I have seen competitors with barely any visible on their pages. So what is important with keywords?

Well some of the basic seo rules apply here and just by following them, usually gives you the edge over a competitor that doesn’t.

I performed a search for “Link building methods” on Google UK and the following results were displayed:

As you can see my page is top, for the following these three rules:

1. Include the important keywords at the beginning of your page title
2. Include the keyword in the first line of the body, or in your page description
3. Include the keyword in your URL

I did the search again for my Yicrosoft Directory contest entry:

My Entry:

I have used this method for a while now and although it’s a common understanding to include the keyword in the URL, I see bad keyword usage in the title tags and in the page copy a lot of the time. Making the search engines understand that your page is relevant to the search query is key!

I have been looking closely at the relation between new blog posts along side my primary targeted keywords, even if they are not directly related. It’s safe to say that if you right about a subject i.e. “Page Rank” then for a week or two you might see some temporary search engine position increase for that keyword.

What I have seen over the last few weeks is that if you write a popular blog piece then non direct related keyword phrases can also achieve a boost. On the 4th of February I wrote a successful piece of link bait – 25 websites all SEO’s should know. I received plenty of additional backlinks and got around 8k unique visitors as a result.

The week that followed I naturally saw an increase of organic traffic as a result of the post, but surprisingly I found myself at position 6 on Google for the phrase “SEM blog”. Since that discovery the position has since moved down a bit (to the second or third page). In that time frame I received around 600 unique visitors for that term alone. That phrase is not mentioned at all in the original post and the backlinks I received did not use the phrase as an anchor – so why an increase in a keyword phrase that has not been targeted?

As well as an increase in backlinks and blog posts the post was heavily visible on social networks, bookmarking sites, which lead to an overall increase in my blog traffic. By writing a post on a related (although not directly associated) topic can lead to your blog/website achieving an overall increase in search positions. My total organic traffic increased by around 30% for a period of 2 weeks.

To me this just adds to my argument that websites in 2008 should use the blog platform more than ever to help with organic listings.