Just goes to show how respected websites like Facebook, Digg and StubleUpon have become. To my surprise, a colleague pointed out to me that the esteemed BBC website is now displaying social book marking icons for each article that is published.

The BBC website is like an SEO goldmine if you will, there’s fresh content (hourly), and you have RSS feeds, podcasts, videos and now social book marking.

Keep an eye out for what they do next people!

As some people do still consider seo a method of witchcraft here’s a small but effective tip for you and before you all start thinking “I know this, it’s obvious!” I still see this being missed throughout particular “seo companies” clients.

Anchor Text

Anchor text is a term you will hear a lot in the world of seo. Anchor text is the text used when creating a text internally or externally from your website. For example, if you have a 2 page website about cars (it’s an example, humour me) then the actual text you use to link each page together is called “Anchor text”.


So on your website you have a link labeled - “Click here to visit page 2” – this is your link and the actual words used count as your anchor text. The page you are linking to has lots of content about cars but because your anchor text has no mention of cars you are not utilising anchor text fully.

What some people don’t realise is that using good anchor text inside your website helps with your overall seo “score” of your website. It’s easier to navigate therefore easier for the Google bot to visit your websites pages. So ideally if you are linking to a page about cars have “Quality car repairs and car information” – this is making that particular page more relevant than “Click here to visit page 2” which will do absolutely nothing for your seo work.

This practice should always be used for internal links and external links and also with images. It’s these phrases an keywords that should match with the content of your website and that’s what Google picks up on!

Hey, your account is temporarily unavailable due to site maintenance. It should be available again within a few hours. We apologize for the inconvenience.

That’s the message that I’m becoming all too familiar with every time I try to log on to Facebook. Earlier this week I was unable to logon to Facebook for almost an entire day, what’s the problem with this I hear you asking – will my life end if I don’t see what “mood” my friends are in or perhaps a long lost brother will “request” to be my friend. Well obviously not, but this isn’t the point, this happens at least once a day for me now.

I read from the “London AM” paper that Facebook had discovered a bug whereby users could now access “private” pages from other members. Well I have to say it – but who cares! The information on Facebook is hardly going to start WWIII - they are just photos and if Facebook can’t fix such a small problem in one big hit they need to start employing people who can work fast.


Believe it or not there is money to be made through Facebook and social media websites. You could obviously pay an extortionate amount of money to have your “flyer” displayed a few thousand times but initial feedback from advertisers says that the return rate was very low.

How do you generate free advertising on Facebook?

A simple way to generate interest in your product or service would be to create your very own group or start discussions in related groups. This rapport gains the trust of potential customers which obviously allows you to earn some potential cash. Don’t forget you have the option to include a link to your site from these groups. The link itself will do nothing in terms of SE rankings but you will generate traffic from it. I would say seounique.com receives around 10-20 unique visitors per month from that free link. It may not seem enough but if you gain just one order it’s completely worth it.

Whatever Facebook is doing they are loosing the trust of its users. There are too many applications, pages are too busy and Facebook has more downtime than up, sort it out Mr. David Nicholson.

SocialStream is a project created by the Carnegie Mellon University’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute, and funded by, wait for it…Google! The main goal of SocialStream is to unify all social media sites to one area. This would include features such as being able to update of all of your networks activity (i.e. friend request, personal messages etc)

What will this mean to existing social media websites?

Well social stream is still in development but is still on the horizon. My personal belief is that you join a particular social media site because you like that particular web layout or navigation or special feature that no-one else has. I suppose if SocialStream can manage to create a good, easy to use functioning website then they might be on to a winner.

What will this mean to Facebook and Myspace?

As Google is funding this operation to help reach western users we can expect big things, however Facebook and Myspace are like your hometowns. You get settled, know the area and have all your friends nearby so implementing a system like this might not work to Google’s advantage. The thought of having to integrate all of your social media sites sounds, in theory, well hard! Unless they can perfect an easy to use system that does it all for you I can’t see SocialStream kicking off.

Whatever the result you can bet Google will make sure SocialStream won’t be a complete failure. Watch this space.

Over the past few weeks webmasters all over the world have all had one thing in common.Checking their beloved websites page rank. Yes - that’s right, it’s that time of the year where Google updates everyone’s page rank. Webmasters have predicted that the date of the Q3 page rank update should have occurred by now, internet related forums are full of debates and rants on why the page rank has not yet happened.

So what’s the big deal with Page Rank (PR)?

Well, in short, page rank is a number Google assigns to your website that is supposed to represent its importance. This number (in theory) should represent how Google picks its websites when displaying search results. So if you have a website selling “cars” and your page rank is only 0 or 1 then don’t expect to get many organic hits from Google. However if your websites page rank is 7 or 8 then you should expect to be at the top of search phrases for “cars”.

Is page rank that important?

Well, in our experience we say no. We did a small test over a period of three months whereby we spent absolutely nothing, that’s right nudda! Instead we looked at some of the other ranking factors that Google uses to rank websites in searches. Areas such as content and coding were top of our agenda. We created keyword rich content and followed the seo rules when creating the Meta tags etc.

So what were our results after 3 months?

Shocked to say the least! We found that our new seo website was on the first page of SERPS (search engine page results) for quite a lot of important keywords and we spent nothing! Below are a small list of some of the keywords we feature on the first page of Google for:

1. Dmoz explained

2. Alexa explained

3. Advance white hat SEO

4. Buying pr text links

5. Buy high PR directory submissions

Conclusion

In conclusion we feel that page rank is over hyped by webmasters that sell their links at high prices, just because they have a good PR. If you are looking to sell the links on your website then we hope you get your desired page rank (within reason) and make lots of money. If you don’t hit your target, don’t panic, it’s not the end of the world, just remember content and good coding will bring you the results for free.