I came across this great graphic which gives details of what exactly happens every time you do a search on Google. The graphic is a great bit of link bait for PPC Blog who produced it, sure, but it’s a worthy bit of link bait and a firm well done from us. Here it is (click to enlarge (and zoom) and get your specs out):

There’s a lot more than five but I’ve covered the main ones which we see here at SearchQuest on a regular basis with new clients who’s sites have previously been “SEOd”. And the bad thing is, they keep coming up again and again.

The SEO world are starting to do a great job at outing these failures and we think it’s great to see bad SEO so wilfully publicised. It is the firm responsibility of the good SEO agencies out there to educate their clients and their staff on what the best approach is to achieving success on-line. If you educate your clients (and the potential ones) then that client will stick around a lot longer, trust us!

Duplication and Same Site Competition

Duplicate on page content is the biggest rookie error but it’s not just restricted to on page content. Title tags, descriptions and keyword meta tags can all suffer from duplication. If you duplicate these you’re basically competing pages on your website against themselves and wasting opportunities to target new keywords. If you have two pages which seem to be targeting similar keywords then make sure their long tail variations are different at the very least.

If you have issues with pages that are duplicated then there are a number of ways to resolve the issue (canonical tags, blocking pages etc) but by far the easiest way to solve the issue is to 301 redirect the duplicates to the main page (usually the one that sits highest in the site architecture).

Forgetting About the Long Tail

Long tail searches are often untapped and badly researched by SEOs. Long tail searches should make up a vast majority of most websites search traffic. Some sites might benefit more from the short searches but for your average Joe Bloggs website the long tail searches will lead to the most conversions. That’s because they are more specific request and therefore indicate commercial intent.

Do your keyword research fully and come up with groups of keywords which show the best long tail variations on your main keywords. Then use these variations cleverly in your title tags, headings, links and on page content.

Site Architecture that Doesn’t Make Sense

A site should be structured with two things in mind… the user (primarily) and the search engines second. Usually if you think about the user you’ll end up with something that makes sense to the search engines as well. You hear the phrase “flat architecture” quite a lot but that only really applies to small sites. “Flat architecture” basically means making every page link to every other page. However this is not something I’m a fan of.

You do not want to have your best pages hidden deep within your site. When it comes to what keyword a page targets you should be thinking about adding the most competitive keywords to the top level pages and as you work away from the home page you can start to target less competitive keywords. This is because the top level pages are generally the most linked to pages and will therefore have the most link power.

Forgetting About the Snippet

I love snippet optimisation and experimenting with what works best for click throughs but a lot of SEOs take no consideration of how their on page changes will effect the appearance of a site’s listing in the search results. Don’t stuff title tags with nonsensical keyword groups. Don’t write description tags that aren’t appealing and grammatical.

Also, keep track with how Google especially makes changes to the snippets they display. I’m thinking about rich snippets here especially.

Over Optimisation

Hhhhm. A tricky one! How do you over optimise and what’s the limit? Well, I’d love to tell you exactly how you over optimise but then a lot of that comes from instinct. If you follow the search engine guidelines you’ll be OK but as soon as you cross into spamville then you might not be so lucky.

The big error usually comes from link building. Using the same anchor text over and over again is the biggest mistake. People don’t naturally link to your site with the same keyword over and over again. It’s just not natural and therefore obviously trying to game the search engines.

With regards to on page over optimisation, keyword stuffing and excessive internal linking can all lead to problems. Less is sometimes more!

Since 2004 Facebook has continually expanded and come to dominate the social media market. In it’s path it has left one completely destroyed MySpace, which was for a while considered to be the shining light in social media, and now it seems Facebook could be challenging for Google’s crown as the overall lord of the internet.

Facebook already has a higher number of daily page views than Google and more active users than any other website in history. They also have access to the greatest user generated quality scoring system on the planet; with their “like” option next to absolutely everything that appears in the news feed. Google uses links to judge a quality of a page. But the problem with links is this… most people don’t have a website and far more people have a Facebook account.

So it would seem the field is set for one all mighty battle between these two giants.

What Facebook are Doing Wrong

In my opinion Facebook are no where near Google (at present) when it comes to taking over search. They have announced in their blog that they will start using the “like” button data to start creating a better search facility but until they address some other issues having better quality search results won’t mean a thing.

iFacebook Please?

The main problem that I see with Facebook is it’s lack of ability to keep people on the site for anything other than socialising. For a start, where’s the Facebook home page option? They really need to take a leaf out of the iGoogle’s book and create something which gets people straight onto the site from the moment they open up their browser. I’m sure there are many people with their home page set to Facebook but that home page just doesn’t offer the same advantages of iGoogle, the BBC, or even Yahoo.

Search Result Page

Terrible, for want of a better word. Currently we have three results from Bing with an option for more results on the Bing site. They need to scrap the Bing identity, it was (IMO) a failed re-branding process by Microsoft which Facebook should remove themselves from. And if the guys at Microsoft have any sense they should let them go down that same line.

Facebook Apps

Another aspect that keeps people in the Google camp is the extra services that they provide; Gmail, Calender, Reader etc. These are all great applications that ensure people stay on Google. Facebook apps and the whole Facebook apps system is nowhere near challenging these Google services. What about an official Facebook mail service, with support for external accounts? What about a nice diary app which integrates well with my iFacebook (see above) and also with my other friends diaries. And please start some regulation on the app spam which is currently putting me off ever installing a new app.

Business Spam – No Thanks or We’ll Leave

There has obviously been a rush of people jumping on the Facebook band wagon when it comes to promoting their business. However, I feel this is a big mistake for Facebook to let happen. The reason Facebook is popular is the ability to interact with friends without getting spammed to hell. The problem that Facebook have is that they are on a tight rope. If something else comes along which is cooler then they could find themselves “MySpaced” in no time!

Facebook Advertising

The scope for advertising on Facebook is amazing. The ability to target highly specific demographics and the sheer number of page views makes it (IMO) a far superior platform to AdSense. But, at present the whole ad integration design on Facebook pages is poor. They look cheap, unattractive and they never really reflect my interests which suggests the delivery/relevance process needs work.

In Conclusion

IMO, the first thing that Facebook need to change is the design of the site. It just doesn’t seem scalable to me as it is now. It’s too fussy and “framed”. I’d go for an align left design which could potentially free up width and space for more interaction with apps. Get the apps process sorted and create some great ones which help people run lives and business and integrate this all with a iFacebook home page which lets people customise what they see. Then get a nice “Make Facebook my home page” button at the top somewhere.

I’m sure others have an idea on what can be done to make Facebook better, these are just a few of mine.

In a previous post we touched on Search engine snippet optimisation and how to do it right but we felt there was a lot more that could be said about the title tag and it’s roll in internet marketing. Many SEOs don’t give the title tags of each page the time and attention that they deserve and as a result they end up not using them to their full advantage. As they are probably the most effective on page ranking factor that you can tweak to improve a websites search engine performance, this mistake can be costly.

Branding in the Title Tag

You may think that branding is not the most important factor to start with when considering the title tag. But we disagree. Branding is one of the biggest things you can do (when done well) to improve your overall web performance. If you can create a recognisable brand then you will receive more direct traffic, more click throughs in the rankings and more opportunities to increase ROI. And the title tag is a great place to advertise your brand.

A pages title tag appears in all sorts of places where a web user can see it; from the search engine snippet, to the top bar of their browser, to the tool bar at the bottom of their browser, to a directory listing or even a URL link from another site which automatically renders with the title tag from the linked to page (a lot of forums do this for example).

The way we brand our client’s title tag it is to add our clients brand name to the end. If the client has a name that is incredibly long such as “Simon Smith’s Sock Emporium of the West Country” then we will probably talk with the client about coming up with a more web friendly alternative (long brand terms aren’t the best for web marketing). So “Simon Smith” maybe a better alternative (keep the sock example and brand name in mind for later).

Keywords in the Title Tag

The most obvious thing that an SEO needs to do to the title tag is make it keyword rich. For the less knowledgeable readers out there; the title tag is a highly important ranking factor for most search engines, and is therefore one of the most important areas of a page where an SEO can place the relevant target keywords of a page. So the first thing you need to do is pick those keywords.

Keyword Research for the Title Tag

For the sake of clarity we’ll use the keyword “socks” as our example. Let’s say we have just created a new website for our client (“Simon Smith”) who sells a large selection and variety of socks. When we research the “socks” keywords we discover plenty of variations which range from the more common searches (one or two word searches which will usually be more competitive), right the way through to the “long-tail” (searches which contain 3, 4, 5 plus words within them and are usually less competitive).

Quick Tip: When you pick your target keywords for any page you should also be thinking about how competitive the site is (is it old, does it have plenty of links, is it already rocking the rankings) and pick keywords which you think will perform based on that and their position within the site. There is no point targeting high competition keywords with a brand new site unless you have plenty of money, time and patience to wait for that ranking to improve. Likewise, there is also little point targeting more competitive keywords on deeper pages as they generally have less ranking power.

We can’t stress enough how important it is to do this keyword research fully and painstakingly. If you’re doing keyword research and ending up with a list of 10 keywords then you’re doing it wrong. When we do our research we often end up with many 1000s of keywords and their variations. We always end up with short tail and long tail variations which can be placed in relevant groups. It is these groups which you need to assess when assigning keywords to a page and therefore it’s title tag.

Assigning Keywords to the Title Tag of each Page

Home Page Title Tag

In general a website’s hierarchy demands that you tier keywords by their levels of competition. So if we go back to our “socks” keyword example, what we probably want to do is target the top level page (the home page) primarily at the keyword “socks”. So, do we just add the keyword “socks” to the title tag and leave it at that? No! What we should also see from our keyword research are suitable long tail variations to pick up even more traffic and rankings which are far less competitive than the keyword “socks” on it’s own.

So we may spot “sock retailers”, “socks designs”, “buy socks online” or any number of other “sock” keyword variations which we can also assess (look at keyword data factors such as competition and commercial intent), choose and add to the title tag whilst still targeting just plain old “socks”. Lets say we way do all this and end up with three keywords for the home page “sock shop”, “Socks Online” and “Socks Quick Delivery” and we come up with the title tag (when added to the brand name we decided on earlier) “Socks Shop Online: Quick Delivery – Simon Smith”

Quick Tip: Go for keyword plurals if you can and it makes sense. Plurals generally include the singular as well, but not the plural. So the word “socks” is also targeting “sock”. (Although with our keyword example there probably won’t be many people using Google to find their lost sock, it’s usually tucked into the bottom of a pair of pants somewhere.)

Second Level Page Title Tags

With your second level pages you can afford to be more specific and use your title tags to target specific searches. Back to the “socks” example; we have a second level page on the site which is the “green socks” category so when choosing the title tag for this page we head straight back to our keyword research and check out the “green socks” group of keyword variations. From that we also see that “green socks for kids”, “green socks delivered” and various other long tail variations are being typed in. In the same way as the home page we can use long-tail keywords along side the more competitive “green socks” keyword to achieve more traffic and rankings.

So we will probably go for something along the lines of “Green Socks Online: Quick Delivery – Simon Smith”.

Quick Tip: You should continually be aware of every other page within your site and that you make sure not to duplicate title tags between two pages (e.g. if you have a second level site page all about “sock manufacturing” maybe you shouldn’t be targeting the home page at the keyword “sock manufacturer” as well).

Third Level Page Titles

It’s getting pretty obvious now so we don’t need to push this aspect to much. Third level pages are typically product pages or very specific so head back to your keyword research and see what you can find. In our example we might have a page linking from the “green socks” category which is specifically “green socks for men”. By this point you will probably end up with a title tag such as “Green Socks for Men: Quick Delivery – Simon Smith”. Obvious really!

Quick Tip: Blog pages are often a great way to use third level pages to target long term keywords. For example you’re keyword research may show that a lot of people are searching for “funny socks for Christmas present”. So, write a blog post about just that!

Title Tag Length and Format

What you should also be considering when creating these title tags is that the language you use can impact click through. You’re titles should be attractive, and this is even more important since the arrival of social media. For our example “socks” isn’t exactly the most exciting subject but you can still add elements to your title tag which motivate people to click. In our first home page title example: “Socks Shop Online: Quick Delivery – Simon Smith” we manage to incorporate keywords, long tail variations, positive conversion factors and branding to instil confidence and motivation in the viewer.

If you read our post on snippet optimisation you will have spotted the link to a great SEO tool from SEOmofo called the snippet optimiser. We highly recommend using this tool to make sure your title tags don’t exceed the ideal character length which (Google specifically) displays before it truncates.

Quick Tip: “&” (ampersands) are great for saving you some characters in the title tag. The search engines aren’t thick, they know it means “and”!

In Conclusion

Take into account all of these factors when creating your title tags and you can’t go wrong! But don’t make the same mistake as many and overlook how important the title tag is in the whole online marketing process.

Whether running a business out of the garage at home in the country or from an office amid the towers of La Défense, over the last few years internet marketing has become an essential tool. What the web does is to allow businesses to reach clients the world over, and at a very reasonable cost compared with offline integration into very diverse markets. For this reason alone, the biggest brands – from Pepsi to Hermès and American Apparel to Promod – have increased their online presence significantly, responding to the continual growth in the number of Internet users (over 11% annually) who are increasingly conversant with online shopping.

SEO (search engine optimisation) techniques enable you to benefit from organic traffic from local search engines so as to gain a high ranking on Google results pages, the upshot of which is a substantial increase in visits to your site. The most recent statistics show that 95% of searches entered into Google, as well as several other search engines, culminate in visits to the websites featured on the first search engine results page (SERP). More specifically, approximately 57% of searches culminate in a visit to the first site listed, 13% to the second, 9% to the third and only 4% to the fourth. Users spend around 160 seconds reading the brief description given by Google for the first search result, 130 for the second site, 80 for the third and a mere 40 for the fourth.

All of these figures demonstrate the importance of SEO, since these techniques are unique in being able to secure for a site that highly sought-after top ranking on Google. Businesses attempting to win over an international audience can easily employ these techniques as well as localise the content of their website, thereby targeting everyone in the world. Individually, Internet users all form part of different communities, each with its own particular preferences, habits and customs. This still has an influence on the way they make their decisions, perceive a product and surf the net. American women, for example, prefer sites that offer them downloads, whereas men have a tendency to disregard this type of content.

Localising Content and Design

Visitors to an online shop may buy something or they may not. The language of the site, however, is an important factor in the purchase decision. The majority of Internet users prefer sites that are written in their own language and this is also where they prefer to do their shopping, with over 50% of users only willing to shop on sites of this kind. This indicates that particular care needs to be paid to the content of a website; the translation of any site must take into account the differences between a language as learned in the classroom and that used on a daily basis in a given country. Selecting which keywords to use, for this very reason, should never be entrusted to automatic tools such as Google’s Keyword Tool. A professional linguist would be able to tell you whether car insurance naturally translates into French as “assurance voiture” or “assurance auto” for example, and come up with the most frequency search terms for your niche market.

The design of a website must take account of local sensitivities; thus, deciding which colours to use, for example, is very important. Internet users in the western world associate black with mourning, whereas white or even yellow has this significance in Asia; pink is generally disliked by most cultures, but certain niche markets swear by it and so on and so forth.

Localising your SEO Techniques

Once you’ve written your perfect copy and finalised the layout, the next step is to host it on a local server, since regional search engines have a distinct preference for regional sites. Similarly, the address (URL) of your site must be local and specific (e.g. www.mon-service.fr). Optimisation of the text and page headings, keywords, descriptions, etc. is vital, as search engines read this data and display them in their results lists.

Be careful to choose the most popular search engines for each country so as to focus your efforts. Yahoo, for example, has lost relevance in a lot of countries. Localisation of these SEO strategies will enable you to reach out to your audience: a lot of businesses use Pay Per Click offers, but this sort of advertising is very rarely read in some countries, including those in Central Europe. Link building campaigns, article placement and affiliation always need to be focused on your domain’s best sites.

Costs and Benefits

The most basic SEO techniques can ensure sustainable presence on the most popular search engine results pages.

This increase in the rankings is down to the adoption of link building strategies based on the content and authority (PageRank, Alexa, SERP ranking, activity) of the site and of the page which houses the link. In the past, businesses pursued this activity using social media (Digg, Facebook and the like) but found that this type of practice results in only a slight temporary increase in SERP rankings. Simple link building (e.g. exchanging links with sites in the same niche market as you) achieves good results when a regional site is launched, but its results are less convincing in terms of increased rankings, the stability of these rankings and the effort invested. Resorting to Pay Per Click is optional if the SERP rankings are very good, as organic traffic is far superior in terms of volume and number of conversions to that brought in by advertising. What’s more, it’s effectively free.

The costs associated with a strong online presence are of course a lot less than those associated with running international offices. The cost of setting up (and possibly translating) a website, along with hosting it, comes to less than 1,000 euros. Listing, however, is more often than not an ongoing activity. Employing one or several bilingual or multilingual SEO specialists is the best option for international businesses that favour online marketing; they offer stability, good knowledge of the business and loyalty.

Conclusion

By using these strategies, a business can easily set up and localise regional websites selling to anywhere in the world. Listing these sites will make them visible to some seven million people – that’s some seven million potential clients. Who could ask for more?

About the author: Christian Arno is founder and Managing Director of Lingo24, a UK translation company with over 4,000 freelance translators and a significant number of full-time home-based employees. Lingo24 has 120 full-time employees on four continents and had a turnover of £3.65m in 2009.

So, since the start of the year Google have been firing out loads of hints that there’s going to be a big shake up and that it won’t happen overnight. Previously Google have made big updates and changes to their algorithm very quickly and this approach has often come under fire web-masters out there. There have been several updates and changes that have taken place just before the Christmas sales period and this has left previously left many business with staggering losses over the festive period but this time Google didn’t make that mistake.

Noise from the SEO Community

In the last week we’ve noticed a few of the superior SEOs making comments about Caffeine now being live. We’ve been watching sites as well and we’ve been seeing some unusual results. How much of this is also combined with the Google design update is hard to tell. One thing is for sure, the design update and the Caffeine update are proving several things… One; that fresh content is more important than ever, which means user generated content with regular interaction is definitely something certain types of sites should look at; two, that website performance is more of an issue (e.g. page speed) and thirdly that branding is more of an issue than ever.

When we say that we believe “branding” is more of an issue what we really mean is brand awareness and we say “brand awareness” due to the almost inevitability that social media signals now a part of the ranking process. This is due to the huge chunk of user accreditation that social media plays which Google can use in the same way that it uses back-links. Most people don’t have a website, but most people have some sort of social media account such as Twitter, Facebook, MySpace or LinkedIn. So, it makes sense that Google use social media as another form of quality indicator.

In Conclusion…

So, some food for thought people… If we were to sum of the Caffeine update (and the general direction Google are going in) we’d say “there are a lot of web-masters out there who are going to have to kick it up a gear!”

So, a few weeks ago Google announced that Page Speed is now a ranking factor. But what does that mean to the real world website owners and seos out there? Should you be worried or is it something not to worry about? Well here at SearchQuest we’ve been monitoring our clients rankings and trying to relate that to the page speed of the particular site. What we’ve noticed is, in all honesty, very little.

From what Google have told us the page speed ranking factor shouldn’t affect most sites out there and it is more of a quality score than a relevance factor. In “street” terms, if you’re site’s page speed isn’t extremely slow then you won’t be affected in the rankings. However, when it comes to site speed, rankings are not the main issue; user experience is! And what Google have done here is very sneakily highlighted the importance of site speed for general usability.

Page Speed Tools for you to Use

Google have also gone the extra mile and released some tools to help us SEOs figure out what elements are making a page load too slowly. There are plenty of other tools out there for you to check out as well, all of which make figuring out how to improve your site’s page load a doddle.

From Google:

Google Page Speed Home

Google’s Page Speed Tester

From the rest of the WWW:

WebProWorld Page Speed Thread

YSlow – Yahoo’s Web Developer Page Speed Tool

PageTest – Web Page Performance Test

In Conclusion

Page speed has always been important and should be something a webmaster is aware of mainly because of visitor experience and usability. If a page loads slowly then you might miss that sale because the customer leaves, that has always been the case. But, Google have made a clever little move here which has brought that issue to the forefront. By making page speed a ranking factor this has forced webmasters, Seos and hosting companies to re-evaluate website performance.

SEO isn’t just about achieving high rankings for relevant keywords, obviously this is a crucial part of search engine success, but one aspect that many SEOs often forget about is the way your search listing looks to the searcher. If you stuff your title tags with too many letters and don’t create a well written, descriptive and enticing description that number one ranking might not be as lucrative as you thought it would be.

So here’s a run down on the elements that you need to think about:

1. The Title Tag:

In the Google search listings the title area truncates at 70 characters meaning anything over that will be chopped off and invisible to the searcher. So, as the title tag is what gets read the most (and initially) by the searcher you need to think about making it look attractive within 70 characters. The answer is not to stuff the title tag with 5+ keywords that end up looking like a mess. The answer is to spend some time making the title descriptive, keyword rich and grammatically accurate.

2. The Description Tag

In the same way as the title area, the description area has a limit of 156 characters at which point it will truncate. So, you need to get your message across in those 156 characters (including spaces). Unlike the title area the description tag does not hold the same ranking factor so keywords don’t play as important, however, keywords will also be highlighted in the description and this can add further emphasis to your listing. The description should also contain a call-to-action to further pull those people through the door.

3. The URL

As with your title and description the URL benefits from having keywords present (due to bolding in the search results) and from being descriptive and logical. The URL listing will give the searcher an idea of the structure of the site and what part they are about to click into. Unlike the title and description it is hard to keep the URL below a certain number of characters and Google will usually remove the central part of the URL between the root domain and the page name.

4. Rich Snippets

In the last 18 months Google have started introducing more and more extra nuggets of information into the search listing which we SEOs can take advantage of. The current supported coding format for rich snippets are microdata, microformat and RDFa. By using these coding formats you can display information in the search results about star rated reviews, people, products and organisations.

5. Branding

Google have given us plenty of clues that they like brands and the search listings are the perfect place to advertise your brand. If you can establish your brand as the one to be trusted within your particular industry then being listed at number 5 in the search results with your brand name can be more advantageous than being listed first.

So, there you go. If you want to hone your search listing even more then check out SEOmofo’s snippet tool. It rocks!

It’s only natural that you’ll want your website to appear high on Google searches or even in first position for a relevant search term. You might think that this is a seemingly impossible task, as a search for almost any term will usually show the top positions to be dominated by the websites of established companies with large marketing budgets. However, there’s no reason why you can’t have great search engine results too, especially if you make use of effective SEO techniques.

Inbound links to your website can work wonders when it comes to improving positions. However, it’s important to remember that link building should be ethical. There are plenty of link building techniques that are frowned upon by search engines such as Google so it’s best to avoid them, particularly as using them could result in position penalties being levied against your site.

Here we’ve outlined some of the best ethical ways to build links to your site without incurring the wrath of Google. 

Firstly, linking out from the websites of your clients is an excellent way to secure yourself some high quality links. Customers will often give testimonials and referrals of companies they’ve dealt with, so it’s worth asking a client who’s been particularly satisfied with the service you’ve provided if they’d place a link to your website on theirs. This can be beneficial in two ways, as not only will the link help towards improving your search engine ranking, but it also serves as a testimonial of that customer’s satisfaction with your service to anyone who sees it. Unfortunately, this is unlikely to be an effective way of targeting individual keyphrases and not everyone will have hundreds of cooperating customers.

Article distribution is a great way of establishing some inbound links to your site. This method will require you to regularly compose articles on a topic relevant to your business. These articles will then be distributed through various article directories where they can be read by people who have a specific interest in the topic you’ve written about. You can place links in these articles which will bring additional traffic to your site.

Commenting on blogs is a very popular link building technique, although your comments are unlikely to last long unless you bother to take the time to make their contents worthwhile. You will often see very generic blog comments such as “Very interesting article, thank you” with links placed in them, but many blog administrators will delete these out of hand. If you want your blog comment links to stay put then make sure you say something relevant and valuable, although due to the low quality of these links you will need to place thousands to have a measurable effect.

Entering your links into business directories is also common practice for the link builder. There are a number of different business directories all over the internet, many of which allow free submissions. You’re better off submitting your link to the more selective of these sites, as the links are likely to be of a higher value to your rankings than one placed on a directory that simply accepts any submission without editorial review. As before, the links this method produces are numerous but largely ineffective, and you should be wary of third party SEO firms offering these directory links as quality inbound links of their own.

Social networking sites such as Myspace and Facebook offer continually changing opportunities for digital marketing due to their own constant evolution. Their easy integration of blogging, discussion groups, private messaging and pay per click advertising combined with a user base numbered in the hundreds of millions encourages constant experimentation with new SEO methods and internet marketing in general. Your focus with social networking, however, should be on driving direct traffic rather than link building, as all the major internet players are keen to avoid MySpace, Facebook et al degenerating in to massive link farms and have taken steps to that end.

Ultimately, there is no shortcut to effective link building. Unscrupulous SEO firms and “consultants” will offer all manner of link building solutions to you but they will almost all boil down to link directory submissions or blog comments, techniques that can’t justify their price tag either through their effectiveness nor in the level of expertise or experience required to create them. When looking in to ethical link building options, please make sure that either your links are coming from established, page-ranked websites with plenty of relevant content (read more on latent semantics on Google), or that the firm you’re dealing with has the experience required to generate quality links from blog and article submission services.

Of course it makes sense for the parties to use every available facet to try and appeal to the public and the Labour party have also been running their own Google Adwords campaign as well. However, although it is vital for the political parties to maintain an online presence in an increasingly tech savvy Britain, whether or not using Adwords is the right way to go about this is open to debate.

The problem with using a service such as Adwords is that it can rapidly become very costly. The advertiser pays a fee to Google every time somebody clicks on one of these ads, so if you’re targeting a popular search term then it’s possible to run up a very large bill. Of course, you’re able to place a cap on how much you want to spend and limit the number of clicks you’ll receive each day. But, there’s no guarantee that any of those clicks will be from a genuinely interested individual. For example, Gordon Brown may be tempted to sit at home on his laptop repeatedly clicking their links, costing them money every time he does so. There are measures in place to stop this sort of ‘click-fraud’ from taking place and John Prescott was recently lambasted for urging people to do this through his Twitter account. So there are some obvious flaws with Adwords and similar pay per click Internet Marketing strategies.

The best way to give your online presence a significant boost is through effective use of SEO techniques, which in the long run are often cheaper and far more effective than pay per click advertising services. Of course, this doesn’t mean that Adwords and similar services are entirely ineffectual, but there are far superior alternatives and perhaps that’s something the leading political parties might want to look into if they want to win the vote of the average British internet user. I wonder if internet voting will be the next vehicle for the next general election, if this ever happens which does seem very probable the amount of votes that will be cast will increase significantly. I am pretty confident a hung parliament will not be the outcome.  your thoughts are welcome.