Understanding where your client sits in an industry landscape is just as important as the SEO that is implemented. It’s this kind of analysis that shows how achievable it can be for a new websites to achieve success and by what measures. Clients have repeatedly asked me how long will it take to achieve good rankings? Well you could use a selection of research tools to look at the landscape, the search volumes, the competitor activity without looking at competitors individually but looking at this data won’t give you specifics.

Now from the clients brief you should understand what your client does, what products or services they sell and their USP. From this information you should be able to establish your core list of keywords, these keywords are usually the top performing keywords (the hard ones!), use the search engines to benchmark the top 5 competitors in Google, Yahoo and MSN – depending on your client you may need to look at foreign or international search engines to produce an accurate list.

So you will have a list containing he “big guns” as you will. Next you need to find out what your “clever competitors” are doing. Use keyword suggestion tools to find any highly searched keywords that could be used by your client (in website copy) and find the top 5 competitors of those terms.

You will see a lot of correlation in competitors but this is to be expected, now to get a more precise understanding of who’s doing what! I always use the following metrics and suggest you do the same:

1. URL
2. Title Tag
3. Meta Description
4. Meta Keywords
5. Homepage header tags
6. Total backlinks
7. Domain age
8. IP address
9. IP location
10. Registration details
11. Page rank
12. External links from homepage
13. Key backlinks
14. Most used anchor texts in links
15. Page rank distribution
16. Percentage of link types

Using this data from 20 or so competitors will give you a clear understanding as to what works in your clients industry online. You will see how many links and the kind of quality you will need to match, you will find additional keywords that may have slipped the net, plus more competitor insights! When deciding on keywords it much more than simply looking at what is “Googled” a lot and targeting that keyword.

Google have been clear and expressed their feelings about paid links. We all know we shouldn’t do it, it’s against the webmaster guidelines, you can get penalties and even removals from the index.

I will put my hand up and say I have dabbled in buying links, if you’re talking to an SEO who says they’ve never done it then they may be fibbing (or they have only been doing SEO for a short period of time).

We all know the following:

• Buying links for PR is not allowed
• Selling links to pass PR is not allowed
• Buying links to manipulate the SERPS is not allowed
• Excessive link exchanges are not allowed

There is of course the snitch form report a paid link form by which members of the law abiding public can notify Google if they detect any paid links on a web page. Google can then take their appropriate levels of action towards the websites in question.

Besides from the awesome report a baddie form Google uses variables in their algorithm to detect paid links automatically. Webmasters often leave a trail when adding paid links, be it through code comments, stupid ad placements, link relevancy, backlink increases and trends over time – heck there’s probably a hundred more factors.

Now, to get to my point, in 2005 there were a recorded 60 million blogs worldwide so you can imagine the 2008 figure could be close to 100 million. My preferred method of blogging is Wordpress; it’s simple, easy to setup and pretty damn search engine friendly. So say 40% (my personal estimate) of all blogs worldwide are run using Wordpress, that’s 40 million blogs all with the option to use their “blogroll”.

For you that don’t know what a blogroll is, it is a widget that can be used on blog themes that displays links that you can add through the CMS. Although you can get plugins that change the link relationship to NoFollow, it’s not a popular choice. To be honest why should you change the relationship? If you like websites and think they add value to your website, bloody link to them.

I can’t help but think that there must be hundreds of millions of links all originating from blogrolls alone, a good percentage of these will be paid links, purely because it’s easy to setup and harder for Google to recognise the link, i.e. it won’t have the same characteristics as say a footer link. Unless you are building too many links, using the same kinds of anchor texts, how will Google know your links in the blogroll are genuine or paid? (site relevance must also be a factor).

How Google will react to the continued war on paid links?

My guess is they will discount all blogroll links entirely, either by looking at the website code or making a deal with the blogging software companies and making the default setup NoFollow. I know it sounds rash and perhaps this is the ramblings of a tired man coming to the end of a long hard week? Who knows…

Just over a month ago I decided to start looking at click tracking using heat maps. Heat maps track the mouse movements and clicks on a page which can help with usability. I found a free one here http://www.labsmedia.com/clickheat/index.html by someones recommendation. The install was easy and the data started pouring in. Now I kept this running for a good month before deciding to remove the code from my site. The data was useful and I was grateful to the site by providing good content – right? Well not at all unfortunatly, as I decided to look at the code “through the eyes of a search engine” using SEO Browser I noticed something odd.

As you can see there was a link appearing to the search engines, now sometimes I get a bit of flack for having a short term memory but I would remember adding a link at the top of my own blog right? So to investigate further I looked at the site, no visible text.

So I obviously checked the source code too, nothing visible either.

So looking at the source through Plesk I located the header file for the blog where I had originally included the tracking code and to my surprise a little piece of code had appeared!

This was swiftly deleted with stern presses of my keyboard. I looked at other websites I had once used this tracking for and sure enough a succession of hidden links popped up, most IT related or Russian links.

I do warn people not to use these guys at all costs. I consider myself lucky that I wasn’t penalized by the search engines for this even though it was not my fault. I think I was more annoyed that I had been leaking link juice to these random websites for a period of time!

The other side of the coin suggests this method is obviously working for them and it was not detected by Google at all – guess the guys at the “Big G” should download a copy and try it out lol!