PageRank Sculpting and "PageRank Juice"

PageRank Sculpting is a search engine optimisation technique that manipulates the flow of PageRank "juice" as one page links to another page.

At its very simplest, the theory goes that a link to a page counts as a vote for that page. If a page has lots of links to a lots of different pages, then the value of the votes are diluted, making each vote worth less.

PageRank Sculpting utilises the "nofollow" attribute on selected links, thus instructing Google that it should not pass any "link juice" to pages that aren't important.

Typical use of the nofollow link attribute might be on links to your Terms & Conditions page, or your Privacy Policy, or your Accessibility page. You aren't keen to have these pages rank well in the search engine results, and so you don't want to pass any link juice to these pages from your Home Page.

But you could also use Page Rank Sculpting to try to focus deliberately focus link juice on your most important products and services, at the expense of other links to pages on your site.

Page Rank Sculpting takes quite a lot of planning and effort, and so what you want to be asking yourself is is it worth it?

Maybe, maybe not.

• For most small business websites, having a well planned site will naturally give the same effect as deliberate Page Rank Sculpting. You are likely to have links to the content that is most useful to your visitors. You are likely to have fewer links to less important stuff. And you don't link to the irrelevant stuff.

• You might be better off using your time instead to generate great content, or work on getting links from high quality, relevant sites.

• If you try to be too clever using the nofollow attribute, then you risk damaging your visibility in the search engines if you get it wrong.
  

• And Page Rank Sculpting is only of secondary importance to the main focus of your search engine optimisation: content and reputation.
  

• A good example of where Page Rank sculpting is appropriate would be a large e-commerce website where a category page will have multiple links to the same product page: a link from the picture of the product, another link from the name of the product, and finally an identical link coming from "Product Info". Using page rank sculpting means you would tell Google to ignore 2 of those 3 identical links, and focus all the link juice on the one link, thus making it more important.

How Much Do Internet Marketing Companies Charge?

E-consultancy have published their annual Digital Rate Card Survey, and it makes for interesting reading both for clients purchasing Internet services, as well as for agencies looking to benchmark their fees.

Small and medium sized businesses still dominate the digital marketing sector, with more than half of all agencies having fewer than 10 employees:



A relatively small proportion of digital agencies are located outside of London, with the Midlands being relatively poorly represented:


The daily rate for Directors of online marketing businesses outside the South East averages £802 per day:


The report includes daily rates by agency size for a number of different roles. For small agencies the average daily charge out rates seem to be averaging around the £575 mark:

Technical roles: £577
Online marketing strategists: £575
SEO consultants: £588
PPC consultant: £572

And finally, digital marketing remains a high growth sector with agencies projecting to grow their turnover by 28% year on year in 2008.

Ashley Friedlein, CEO of E-consultancy, comments: "With 11% of UK agencies reporting growth of 100% or more, year-on-year, optimism within this thriving sector is well-founded.

Can Google Index Flash? Yes!

At long last, Google has announced that it can index Flash content.

Until now, websites built in Flash were notorious for being invisible to the search engines. Flash content was a "roadblock" - a big black hole that the search engine spiders couldn't index.

All that is changing with Google's new algorithm that finds textual content in your Flash SWF files. That means Google will be able to index textual content in your Flash files, as well as see and follow URLs and links.

And as a result Flash results will start to appear more commonly in the Google search engine results. In particular, the "snippets" of text that appear in the Google search results are likely to be more relevant and compelling.

Yahoo! will also be taking advantage of this new development, but poor Microsoft is once again Billy No Mates and hasn't been let in on the indexing party. Silverlight, and all that....

In principle, existing Flash sites do not have to make any changes in order to start the indexing process. But with regards to search engine optimising your Flash files, Adobe's press release says, "As with HTML content, best practices will emerge over time for creating SWF content that is more optimized for search engine rankings."

Keep in mind that Google will not be able to index images in the Flash, nor text that is displayed as an image.

Read more in Vanessa Fox's overview of this new Flash development.

Plural vs Singular Keywords

Is it better to use the singular version of your keyword, or is it better to use the plural version? For example, will I get more traffic for the word "laptop" or "laptops?"

The answer, of course, is it depends. There is never a one-size-fits-all answer to selecting your key phrases.

Hitwise produced a very interesting analysis comparing the top 10 key phrases containing the word "laptop", excluding branded terms. And they conclude that the use of the singular or plural versions might indicate different buying behaviours.

Phrases like "cheap" and "free" appear prominently on both versions, but Hitwise identified that for the top phrases:

• the singular version was more commonly used when looking for laptop accessories like batteries, bags and cases
• the plural version contained stronger buying singles, like "laptops UK" or "pink laptops"
• the singular version also contained plural qualifiers like "laptop computers"

And when analysing which phrases then resulted in searchers going to a shopping website, Hitwise concluded the plural version generally drove more visitors to ecommerce or buying sites.

You might conclude that the plural version would be best for your search engine optimisation strategy.

But if we look at the Google Trends data comparing laptop vs laptops, we see that more than twice as many people in the UK are searching for variations of the singular as compared to the plural versions:



So what is going on? This, of course, is the Long Tail, users searching on literally thousands of variations of your keywords, for example "light weight laptop" or "finger print recognition laptop."

So what might we conclude from all this?

• compare the search volume of your specific phrases, for instance "laptops uk" vs "laptop uk" and build your content and linking strategy accordingly
• but do not overlook the broader keyphrases that encompass the high quality detailed searches your propsects may be using.

Planning for a Domain Name Change

Changing your website domain name is a big deal.

Changing your domain name will result in immediately losing your rankings in Google, even if you keep the same content on the new domain name.

Cold Hanworth Forge teach blacksmithing courses, and found that their website was generating lots of course bookings. But the site was old, and the time was right to have a new website that the business could be proud of.

As part of their web makeover, the business owners were advised to get rid of their successful www.teachblacksmithing.com domain name, and use a brand new domain name with their company name in it instead.

And when the new website went live, their site disappeared from the Google results. Whereas they were previously in the top 10 for all their keyphrases, they now languished way down on pages 9 and 10 of the results.

And most importantly, they discovered their training bookings dried up.

The disaster was all down to changing their domain name.

We had a very quick discussion, Bob reverted back to his old domain name, and straight away he was back to getting bookings on his lovely new site direct as a result from regaining his high rankings in Google.

The mistake Bob made was not to plan for his domain name change. But to his credit, he spotted the problem, and quickly tried to figure out where things went wrong.

Google has provided a useful checklist for changing your domain name and they readily acknowledge that domain name changes are not easy.

And even when you have a member of staff dedicated to managing the changeover process, it will still take months (potentially) for your site to regain its rankings in Google. Take a look at TKG's blog where they document their domain name changeover process.

There are times when domain name changes are desirable or inevitable, and just like any change in your business marketing, success is all in the planning.

Google Documentation

Want to understand how Google works? Want the information straight from the horse's mouth?

Google have just produced a very useful PDF booklet called Making the Most of Your Content: A Publishers Guide to the Web.

It's excellent. Read it. Even if you think you know it all already, read it.






Warning: Geek Alert

I found this on Matt Cutt's very useful posting discussing Google's improved documentation. Lots of Google goodies in there of a technical nature, including robots.txt, IP delivery, nofollow, and quality guidelines

Check your website rankings

Where does your website rank in the search engines? On the first page? On the second page? In the top 20 pages?


SEO Book's Rank Checker is a free utility that allows you to type in your key phrases, and then quickly reports where you rank in Google.co.uk, as well as Yahoo! and Live.

If you're interested in where you rank internationally, RankChecker will let you know your web rankings in most of the search engines worldwide.

And if you save your settings, and then RankChecker will run the report for you automatically on a weekly basis, or whatever frequency you prefer.

It is only available as a Firefox extension, which means you need to get Firefox, and then download the extension.

Comprehensive instructions are available on the download page, so I won't repeat them here.

Do remember, however, to:

• change the Google default to co.uk if appropriate
• tick the box to Don't Use Google personalised results, which skews the results to your personal searching prefernces, which probably favours your own website
• set the delay to be a second or two between searches
• save your search settings to use them again later
• turn on the automatic search reporting for your weekly report.
  

Optimising Images

When I talk about search engine optimisation, I tend to focus on text. Words. I think of Google as a text processing engine. However, today I want to talk about optimising images for search.

Google, of course, offers the ability to search for images, and it can be a highly valuable way of driving visitors to your website.

Looking at my own statistics, I can see images.google.co.uk is driving nearly 20% of the referral visitors to my website. And one image on my site in particular, a Sunday Times logo, is driving a large volume of visitors.

My assumption is that if your images are contained in a page of content that is highly relevant, then you can convert visitors to customers on your website. And hence this blog is an experiment in optimising an image for the phrase "optimising images" and I'm going to wait and see what happens in the search engine results.

So, what steps do you need to take to optimise your images for search?

First, check to see what images from your site that Google is already indexing. Go to Google's image search and in the search box type in site:www.yourdomain.co.uk. Google will display all the images in the index:





Optimising images for search follows many of the standard steps for optimising content on any of your web pages:

Give your image a keyword rich file name. Consider putting dashes between the keywords in the file name. Notice the image at the top of this posting is optimising-images.jpg

Use the ALT tags correctly. That means using descriptive text in the ALT tag, that will contain the key phrase you are optimising for.

Embed the image in a relevant web page. Place keyword rich text immediately before and after the image, putting the image into context on the page. Indeed, the entire page should be optimised for the phrase the image is targeting.

Create internal and external links to the image, again with keyword rich anchor text in the links.

Enable Google Image Search in your Webmaster Central account. Google Webmaster Central gives you a wealth of valuable information about your site, and one setting is to enable Google image search on your website.

Include keywords in your image. Include labels in your image to describe the components or what the image is. Folk using Google Labeler (see below) are likely to respond to the words in the image.

Participate in Google Labeler. Google Labeler is a service on Google where you add labels (or keywords) to images on the web. It takes the format of a game: it pairs you up randomly with somebody else playing the game and you match each others keywords to describe each image. Match each others' keywords, and you get points. Curiously addictive, I'd recommend you give it a go.

I'll keep you posted to see how well this image does, or does not, rank...

Find Your Top Ranking Keywords

Where does your website rank for your key phrases in Google?

What phrases are you ranking well for, whether you know it or not?

And what phrases are your competitors ranking well for?

SEODigger is a free utility that shows you those keywords that trigger your site in the top 20 results for a Google search. SEO Digger maintains a database of keywords and search results that can help to assess and plan your search engine optimisation activities.

The free, unregistered version analyses a single page of your website and provides you with a list of high performing key phrase, the key phrase position in Google, and some rough and ready WordTracker and Overture data showing you the search popularity of the phrase.

It is worth taking the extra step of signing up for the free registered version because it will give you rankings of all the pages on your domain, rather than just a single page.

Taking my own business as example, I can see the key phrases in Google SERPs (search engine results page) order, in other words the phrases I'm ranking position 1, position 2, and so forth:

However, if I click on the WT column to sort the data on the popularity of phrases as measured by the WordTracker data, I can see where I'm ranking for those valuable phrases that people are actually searching for:


And what is very interesting to note (and is confirmed by my Google Analytics data) is that it's the blog postings that is helping with the rankings, in this case the article I wrote about The Answer to Life, The Universe, and Everything.

As always, these services do come with a bit of a health warning

• the data will not be current - it is a snap shot of the search results when the database was last compiled. My searches today was delivering data last retrieved in February. Nevertheless, it provides a useful benchmark.
  
• the database does not include all search phrases. You can add your search phrases to SEODigger for inclusion in the index.
• the WordTracker and Overture data is, at best, unreliable.

This article is one of a series of postings about SEO tools that you might find useful.

I have a list of new services I'll be reviewing for you over the next few weeks, and suggestions are welcome.

In the meantime, why not take a look at some of my previous reviews:

iWebTool Collection of free SEO tools
Quirk SearchStatus toolbar
Free Web Tools
SEOBook Keyword Research Tool
Website Grader Review
Backlinks Checkers
Good Keywords Tools, especially KeyWordPad

Get a Good Name on the Web

Getting a great web address is important to small businesses - and I was very pleased to be interviewed in a recent domain names article in the Sunday Times.

It is not that hard to choose a great domain name. Choose a name that is :

• memorable
• consistent with your brand
• easy to type, which usually also means short
  
• and if possible, consistent with your search engine optimisation efforts.

We know that British buyers prefer .co.uk domain name because it suggests the company is local, or more relevant to their needs.

And I don't like dashes (or hyphens) in domain names. I think they are awkward to pronounce, and look like spam when typed. And usually looks like you use dashes because somebody else has the name you wanted.

An entire second hand domain name industry exists offering to sell you an existing domain, as well as waiting to steal yours out from under you nose if you forget to renew your name.

Search Engine Optimisation and PPC Training

Just a quick reminder that I am teaching two courses that might be of interest:

Search Engine Optimisation: 31 March 2008
Learn how to improve your rankings in the search engines, and get more visitors to your website.

Pay Per Click Training for Small Businesses: 4 April 2008
Learn how to spend less money on Google AdWords advertising, and get better results.

Removing Pages from the Google Index

How can you remove old web pages from the Google index?

I have a client who was advised by some cowboy search engine optimisation company to create lots of web pages stuffed full of spammy repetitive keywords.

He now knows this is a bad thing, and has deleted the pages from his site.

But the old pages still appear in the Google index. He's been told there is nothing he can do about it.

Google will automatically remove dead pages from the search results as part of the indexing process. Pages with 404 messages (not found) or 410 (gone) will eventually be disappear from the index and the search engine results.

But this can take time.

The quick solution is to use Google's Webmaster's Remove URL's tool. It can be used to remove any content that you don't want appearing in the search results. Google says the removal request typically takes 3-5 business days to process.

The Google Webmaster toolkit is full of useful utilities for optimising your site, and learning about your site performance in Google.

Keep in mind that it might be best to simply update the offending page and let the spider re-index the new content.

You might also want to keep the content on your site, and just block Google from indexing it using appropriate meta tags and the robots.txt file.

The URL removal tool does just that: it removes the page entirely.

And remember that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Humans don't like spam, and neither does Google.

Googlebomb: George Bush is a Failure

Who is a failure? According to Google, it's George Bush:


Yup, Googlebombs are back.

A Googlebomb is a deliberate effort to force a website to the top of the search results for an inappropriate phrase by manipulating the inbound links.

Quite simply, there will a significant number of websites sending links to the White House having anchor text with the concept of failure in it. This is an example of such a link: failure.

A year ago I wrote how Google was diffusing the Googlebomb phenomenon, but clearly it lives on. Google occasionally will diffuse a Googlebomb, removing the hapless site from the top of the rankings.

It probably isn't simply a case of anchor text any more, but also the context and relevancy of the articles pointing to the White House. And there have been some genuine White House failures here and there, eh?

What does this all mean for us as small businesses?

You need to get links to your website containing keyword rich anchor text. Typically, inbound links will have your company name, or your website address as the anchor text.

Your keyword rich link will say Search Engine Optimisation Nottingham instead of Hallam Communications.

Website Grader

Just how good is your website?

Website Grader is a free tool which evaluates your website on 5 broad search engine marketing factors, giving you a succinct score out of 100.

It's quite a nifty little tool. And of course I like it because my site scored a respectable 93%.

It takes into consideration approximately 20 sets of factors, grouped into 5 broad categories:

1. On Page factors, such as Title tags, meta tags, Alt tags, and readability
2. Off Page factors such a Page Rank, frequency of spiders crawling, Alexa rank, and inbound linking
3. Blogosphere including Technorati rank
4. Social Mediasphere which means social bookmarking on Digg and Del.icio.us
5. Conversion to sales, checking to see if you have forms and an RSS feed

It can provide you with a useful overview of your search marketing efforts in one easy to read report.

And thanks to Pete over at Hoop Media for the suggestion.

SEO Training Courses

One day search engine optimisation training course:

Friday, 22 February (2 places remaining -book a place here)
Monday, 31 March - book a place here

If you need a practical and concise plan of action to improve your web rankings in the search engines, then this is the course for you.

This is not a course for absolute beginners: we are assuming that you already have a website, or you may be planning a new website and that you understand the basics of how search engines rank pages.

This is going to be a fast paced day, and it includes as much SEO knowledge as you can stuff into your brain!

Spam Link Requests

There are unscrupulous search engine optimisation companies out there, and you must recognise their behaviour, and avoid them.

One tactic that is still going strong is selling a link building service that comprises sending out bulk spam link requests. It's bad practice, but lots of small businesses are still falling for the con.

Here's an example of what one looks like:

Why are spamming link building services like this likely to do more harm then good?

• they are using software that scans through the web, scraping up random email addresses to generate link requests. Fundamentally you are paying the SEO to generate email spam that harm's your company's good reputation
  
• you are actually paying them your hard earned cash to get utterly irrelevant websites to link to your site
• they are probably getting links from sites that are never going to generate a single click or enquiry to your site
  
• they are getting links on "Links" pages that have dozens or even hundreds of other random company links
• and you are certainly going to do more good linking to them then you are ever going to get in the link back

And my personal view of the particular company selling this service?

The SEO company sending the spam mail has a website Google Page rank of big fat zero.

They are hiding behind a post office box address and an 0845 number.

The SEO company has been reported as a spammer by Scamdex an email scam, fraud and phishing resource

And other people are complaining about the SEO company's idiotic link building activities

So, if you are considering using one of these services be sure to check the SEO company's reputation, and the kind of practices they use.

And don't ever reply to any of these link reciprocating requests!

Most Popular Posts of 2007

The New Year is a great time to review the performance of your website.

In terms of visitors, I must confess my posting about the John and Anne absconding to Panama had an extraordinary response, with more than 2,500 people reading it in the first 24 hour period. It shows the value of writing topical postings!

I'm evaluating the response to my blog articles in order to guide what I write next year. There are a number of different measures that I am considering:

• the number of times the blog posting was read by unique visitors
  
• the number of times the blog posting was a landing page meaning it was the first page people saw, for example from a Google search
• the response to my email newsletters
  

But in terms of my Internet marketing content, my most frequently read postings in 2007 were:

1. Analysis of the differences between American Google and UK Google
2. Google Analytics versus Web Trends for web statistics
3. Google Checkout's free credit card processing service
4. Free Web Tools
5. Writing for the web: readability tests (2006)

It was quite a different story if I look at the click through rate from readers of my email newsletter. Keep in mind these results will be skewed so that my recent articles will have higher click through rates because the number of subscribers grow month on month. The most popular postings for the newsletter subscribers were:

1. How to search engine optimise your PDFs
2. The importance of Meta Tags
3. Spammy Google Adword Advertising
4. My recommendation for the Best Internet Marketing book
5. A great keyword research tool

And finally, there are some older postings that reliably drive traffic to the site:

• Doodle for Google (2006)
• Internet Usage in the UK (2006)
• Networking via the mains (2006)
• The Google F Word (2005)
• Ten Top Blogging Mistakes (2005)

New Internet Marketing Training Courses

I am teaching two new courses which may be of interest:

Pay Per Click (PPC) for Property Developers
How to spend less money on Google Adwords advertising, and get better results. Find out how landlords, BMV buyers and sellers, and property investors make more money by using successful Pay Per Click advertising on Google, Yahoo and MSN.

Learn How to Optimise Your Website
A one day Intermediate level course showing you how to improve your website rankings in the search engines. 22 February. Loughborough Innovation Centre, just 2 miles from the M1.

Optimising PDFs for SEO

The major search engines can read and index the contents of your PDFs, so be sure to use these best practice optimisation techniques to get your PDFs ranking well in the search engine results.


First and foremost, you need to follow the golden rules of search engine optimisation when optimising PDFs:

• write keyword rich content based on your keyword research
  
• use keyword rich headings and subheadings
• give your PDF a keyword rich file name
  

Next, apply these additional techniques when optimising PDFs:

1. Don't use Photoshop to make pretty PDFs - you need to be using a text package, like Word, to create PDFs the spiders can read. If you end up creating one big image file, then all the content will probably be invisible to the spiders.

2. Use the Document Properties to add keyword rich Title tags. The Title Tag will display in blue in the search engine results and help visitors to click on your content. Here you can see a PDF in the search result with a meaningless Title ("Fiches Danstar let av03"): click on the image to make it bigger!



3. Put a well written, optimised sentence at the start of the PDF. It is likely that this text will display in the search engine results page under the blue title as the description of the document. Using the example above, you can see the two lines of text in black in the search results come from the initial text in the PDF: (again, click on it to make the image bigger)



4. Include keyword rich links back to your website inside your document. These links will help the internal linking within your site, and are especially useful if another website puts a copy of your document on their site. If you're using a free PDF maker, you may not be able to create keyword rich anchor text. I use PDF X-Change Pro to make keyword rich links.

5. Create visible keyword rich links to your PDF from pages on your website that get crawled regularly by the spiders. Good internal linking can help the spiders to find the PDF content.

If you want to read more about optimising your PDFs then read:

Eleven Tips for Optimising PDFs for Search Engines
Make your PDFs Search Engine Friendly

Unsung Heros: Meta Tags

Once upon a time Meta Tags were an important part of your search engine optimisation activities. But no longer: very few of the search engine spiders even consider Meta tags when indexing your site.

But you ignore Meta Tags at your peril.

In particular, the Description tag plays an important role in the search engine results page. It is part of the persuasive call to action to searchers, encouraging them to click on your site.

Give your site a fighting chance in the results page, and write a good Description tag.

Note that Google displays the Title Tag in bold blue, and below it are displayed the two black lines containing my Description tag:





You can see your Title and Description tags by using the View | Source option in your web browser.

And finally, remember those two black lines of text in the Google search engine results might come from your DMOZ entry, or from some relevant text extracted from your site.

Internet marketing: what to read

Keeping up to date with latest trends in search marketing means a lot of reading. Here are some suggestions to help you burn the midnight oil:

If I only have time to read one thing, it is my Search Engine News subscription. It's a monthly update, comprehensive, authoritative, practical, of what's new in in the world of search engine marketing. I'm afraid it does cost real money, but with the dollar so weak, the price tag of US$144 for a whole year amounts to less than 80 squid. Warning: this website looks big time American cheesy spammy, but the quality of the subscription is excellent.


If you are looking for free info, then blogs has to be the way to go. The BigList of SEO and SEM blogs by TopRank lists more than 400 blogs. Awesome, in the literal sense of the word. It's arranged alphabetically which can make it difficult to get to grips with, but it is a great launch pad. It is interesting to note Danny Sullivan's Sphinn is the editor's pick; Sphinn is getting a lot of profile, but it wouldn't make my personal top 10.

Along the same lines, take a look at AdAge Power 150 media and marketing blogs.
You won't go far wrong if you pick a few to read out of the top dozen or so.

Happy reading!

Free Internet Marketing Conference

I'll be speaking at the eBusiness Club Internet Marketing conference taking place on 14 December at the lovely Nottingham Belfry Hotel.

It's going to be a brand new Search Engine Optimisation presentation - so you won't be seeing any of those same old slides (but you may hear the same old jokes...)

Topics to be covered on the day include:

• Online Branding (mystery speaker, but somebody awesome)
• Getting the most out of your Pay Per Click budget (Ann Stanley)
• Getting other people to sell your stuff using Affiliate Marketing (John Kirk)
• Improving Your Search Engine Rankings: what's new, what works (Susan Hallam)

Internet Marketing Grants

• Could the use of Internet Marketing transform your business performance?
• Do you want grant assistance to help to pay for training, consultancy, or equipment?
• Are you looking to develop new markets, implement online marketing technologies, or improve your overall business efficiency?

Business Link are offering the Business Transformation Grant which is available to small businesses across the East Midlands region. The grant can provide 50% funding for both consultancy and capital projects up to a value of £10,000. The capital grant will usually be in conjunction with mentoring, training, or consultancy.

Of course the grant funding isn't limited to Internet marketing. But this is my company marketing blog, after all. And as a Business Link Quality Assured supplier, you may be able to get grant funding for my consultancy and training services.

The process involves meeting with a Business Link Business Support Adviser. After an initial review, if your business is likely to qualify, then you will carry out an in-depth diagnostic which results in an Action Plan. Appropriate elements of your Action Plan can generally be funded on a 50/50 basis.

Get in touch if you want to discuss your project with me.

You can contact Business Link East Midlands:

phone: 0845 058 6644
web: www.businesslink.gov.uk/eastmidlands

Free Web Tools

Free web tools are always a popular topic - whether you are planning a new site, or just tweaking your existing site.

Here's a round up of some of my favourite free web tools:

Keyword research tools help you to discover the best phrases for both SEO and PPC campaigns. I have previously reviewed and recommend SEO Book's Keyword Research Tool.

Research your competition using the Google Toolbar and Alexa Toolbar. For those Firefox users amongst us, I strongly recommend SearchStatus toolbar. And don't forget to research your competitors in DMOZ to see what categories they have indexed themselves in.

Promote your branding or logo with a favicon, that little icon that appears when I bookmark your site, or when your address appears in a browser. Try using Dynamic Drive's Favicon Generator.

What colours are safe to use in a web browser? Your Pantone colour might not display safely, so use Lynda's Browser Safe Colour palette when planning your website design.

Do you have a sitemap? You can use the free XML Sitemap Generator to scan through all the pages of your website, and create either an HTML or XML sitemap, no charge.

Is your website bloated and overweight? How long does it take your website to load? Websiteoptimization.com's free speed test will analyse your site, and tell you how specific ways to improve your site.

Have you done a check of the quality of your website code? Or better yet, check the quality of the web designers quoting for your shiny new website? W3C's quality assurance tools will validate your HTML, look for broken web links, as well as check out your cascading style sheets (CSS).

How well do you write? Check out how hard it is to read your web copy using this Readability Testing Tool. And whilst you're at it, check out whether you are using your keyphrases in your copy using a keyword density analyser.

iwebtools has a great collection of tools, including a spider simulator, Page Rank predictor, bank link checker and loads more

And last but no means least, take full advantage of Google's free tools:

• Google Analytics provide high quality, free statistics
• Google's Webmaster Central is a toolbox full of statistics and diagnostics
  
• Google Alerts is a great way to spy on your competition, or manage your own reputation
• Google Checkout is offering free credit card processing til 2008
• Google Mashups lets you plot your own data on a Google map
• Get all those essential Google toys in the Google Pack: toolbars, Google Earth, Picassa....
  

I'm sure you have other free utilities, let me know!

SEO Training

I'll be running my next Search Engine Optimisation Training course on 8 November.

This one day course is ideal if you have taken the first steps optimising your website, and want to learn more.

It will be a fast moving update on what's new in search engine optimisation, including:

• inbound linking strategies
• blogging
• localisation
• Web 2.0
• keyword analysis and tools

Full details are available on the SEO course flyer (PDF).

Just drop me an email to book your place.

Google Spam Violation Notifications

Google have updated their Webmaster Central service to alert you of spam violations in your website. You will be notified of pages that have been removed from the Google index, the reason why, and how you can get reconsidered for inclusion.

The new Message Centre in your Webmaster Central account will contain correspondence from Google in the event that Google has spotted some hidden text or other violation on your website.

Currently, you need to be a verified owner of the site and logged in to your account in order to receive this information. Google are planning to resume sending out email notifications shortly.

The spam violation service had been around since 2005, with notifications provided via email. But with spoof messages flying around, Google decided to halt the service.

Once you have made any necessary corrections to your site, then you need to go through Google's Reinclusion process. I think it is well worth noting that Google asks what search engine optimisation (SEO) company you are working with that led to the violation:


Tell us more about what happened: what actions might have led to any penalties, and what corrective actions have been taken. If you used a search engine optimization (SEO) company, please note that. Describing the SEO firm and their actions is a helpful indication of good faith that may assist in evaluation of reconsideration requests. If you recently acquired this domain and think it may have violated the guidelines before you owned it, let us know that below. In general, sites that directly profit from traffic (e.g. search engine optimizers, affiliate programs, etc.) may need to provide more evidence of good faith before a site will be reconsidered.

How fast is Google?

How long does it take for your site to make an impact on the Google search results?

3 hours.

Last week's little experiment optimising for the phrase SEO Lincolnshire Rutland gave some rather outstanding results. It has been a very interesting example of the efficiency of Google spidering.

The blog posting was ranking in third position in Google within three hours, and took top position within 24 hours.

As of today, just one week later, seven of the top 10 positions are occupied with various scrapings and permutations of the posting. An interesting technique for crowding out the competition. Although I'm not very happy about the scrapers.

Nevertheless, do NOT lose site of the fact this is not a great phrase to optimise for, nor is it a competitive phrase that requires a lot of hard work.

But I do have had other anecdotal reports from clients who see just how fast the Google results can change, including this lovely testimonial from Caricaturist Richard Ellis:

I would just like to thank you for the advice given at your course.
I have to admit it took me a little while to getting the job done,
but once I had put some of your suggestions into practice,
my site soared from page 6 to page 1 of the Google organic rankings
in the space of three days!
This has to be one of the best investments I have ever made.

And many thanks to Guy Gregory who let me know just how quickly the blog posting was being picked up by Google.

Google stops reporting supplemental results

It has been a busy summer over in GoogleLand, with a number of changes to report.

Google is no longer letting us know which of our web pages are in the Main Index, and which are relegated to the dreaded Supplemental Index.

Using the command "site:www.putyouraddresshere.co.uk" still shows you which pages Google indexes, but the Supplemental Results label has disappeared.

If you need a refresher about supplementals, take a look at my posting on Google Supplemental Results.

The Google blog explains the change as being due to improvements in crawling and indexing, leading to fresher and more comprehensive indexing.

What Google also explains is that there is still a Supplemental Index but the distinction between Main and Supplemental is narrowing. At this stage, the Supplemental Index may be about 3 months out of date, but Google are hoping to reduce that to just one month out of date.

There are calls to restore the Supplemental Results information in Webmaster Central, but we will just have to wait and see.

In the meantime, it is one less bit information for you to digest, or indeed obsess about!

Internet marketing books

Lazy summer holidays on the beautiful Chesapeake Bay means plenty of time for ... catching up on my Internet marketing reading.

This summer has provided a bumper crop of excellent books. My recommendations for you:

The New Rules of Marketing and PR provides an excellent practical overview of the opportunities offered by digital marketing. As a marketing technology geek, I don't think the rules are very "new," however my husband high jacked my copy and left it littered with post-it notes marking its clear and sensible ideas.

Actionable Web Analytics: Using data to make smart business decisions makes web statistics palatable. Internet marketing is really a numbers game, and if you want to improve the performance of your website, then you need to listen to what the stats are telling you.

The Long Tail: Why the future of business is selling more of less is described by the CEO of Google as "brilliant and timely." Enough said.

Wikinomics: how mass collaboration changes everything will appeal to those readers who enjoy words like "paradigm" or "manifesto". I've admired Don Tapscott's writings since the 80's when he wrote about Office Automation, and in this book he applies his knowledge economy thinking to the collaborative online world.

SEO Lincolnshire Rutland

How hard can it be to rank number one in Google for the phrase Search engine optimisation (SEO) Lincolnshire Rutland?

I've stumbled across a big bold claim for ownership of the number one position for the key phrase "SEO Lincolnshire Rutland". And having just returned refreshed from my summer holiday, I'm ready to rise to the challenge.

More accurately, in the spirit of August doldrums, I've decided to run a highly unscientific, juvenile little experiment. You might even want to play along, too.

This cheeky little blog posting serves as a test to see how high ranking, how quickly, and for how long, this blog postings ranks for the highly specific (or "long-tail") phrase "SEO Lincolnshire Rutland."

For those of you looking for a deeper underlying message to this experiment:

• Is this a worthwhile phrase to use in an SEO campaign? How many potential clients are searching for that obscure phrase? My initial keyword research shows pretty much nobody.
• Is there genuine competition for this phrase, or is it likely a simple campaign would get high rankings relatively easily?
• And most importantly, are highly specific results like this representative of the the kind of SEO positioning small businesses really need?
  

I'll keep you posted of the results...

Mobile phones and the web

I'm a bit of a Luddite when it comes to mobile phones and the web. But that's all changing now, as I am experiencing what really looks and feels like the web, on a real working mobile phone.

My daughter has a new Sidekick, a mobile phone with unlimited Internet browsing on a monthly contract. It looks like this:



And it overcomes most of the objections I had to the old mobile web:

• it let's you look at the whole real Internet, not just some motley collection of WAP pages
• it actually looks like real web pages
• it has a screen my 40-something year old eyes can read
  
• it has a real (if tiny) keyboard
  

The first thing I did was look at my own web page, and I was pleased to see it looked pretty good on the Lilliputian screen. Why? Because all along we've been beating the valid code and accessibility drum, and that makes it work.

And having avoided the mobile marketplace for so long, there is lots to discover. Its been a real eye opener catching up with the rest of the mobile world, and here some reading I've been doing in anticipation of developing a new workshop:

• What are people searching using their mobiles? Cinemas, supermarkets, pizza, hotels, and... Halfords. You go figure. Take a look at m-spatial's local search brands.
  
• Work we all need to do