From an SEO standpoint, the importance of having a blog on your website is paramount. Having a well written, industry-related blog will not only contribute to earning your site a higher Google ranking, but it will also dramatically increase traffic and maybe earn your site one or two extra inbound links.

Blogs are also an excellent way to keep informed about what’s happening in your industry. Starting the day by checking the industry related blogs like Inside Adwords and TechCrunch have began part of many people’s daily routine.

In fact, the pressure to turn out a daily blog has become so great that companies have begun adding blogging onto the job specifications of their SEO strategists. Some companies have even gone to such lengths as hiring bloggers specifically for the task of writing blogs for the company websites.

The quest for rankings causes its own set of problems as the Internet becomes saturated with copycat blog posts. The danger occurs when bloggers copy other blogs and post it as their own. If you find an interesting industry blog at your favourite blog site the chances are that you will find at least three other blog posts that have copied the original blog verbatim and published it under another name. The pressure to blog can sometimes lead some to these black hat tactics.

Micro-blogging, which has always thought to be a useful social networking tool, has emerged to be a source of marketing potential as well.

Micro-blogging websites like Twitter, Jaiku and Facebook are excellent applications to get your ideas and news out fast. These websites can be used as tools to make industry connections as well as to pass information to these connections quickly and en mass. With micro-blogging, you can keep track with what your connections are doing and vice versa.

It is no wonder that Google purchased Jaiku in October last year.

The goal of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is to increase the visibility of your website by achieving a very high ranking in the SERPS (Search Engine Results pages) by ensuring the most pertinent keywords describing the content of your site are effectively used throughout.

The higher up the search results you appear the more likely it is that prospective customers will find and visit your website.

The latest Comscore data tells us that 91% of Internet users use search engines. Websites are a dime a dozen so being on page 2 is just not good enough. People trust Google to give them the top 10 options and rarely search further.

The world of SEO cannot be fully explained in one blog post alone, but just employing the basic principles listed below will make a difference to the performance of your website.

So how can SEO improve your website over that of your competition?

Here are the fundamentals behind any SEO campaign:

• The first and most important component of your site is content.

Your website needs to have relevant and original content that accurately describes what your company is about. Google will know if you have plagiarized content from someone else. The more unique, content-rich pages your website contains, the better chance your website has of achieving a better ranking.

• Keywords

You need to identify what keywords best describe your company or what keywords you are going to be using as search terms. Once you have done this you need to incorporate these keywords into the content (if you have not done so already) and metadata without overdoing it. You don’t want to run the risk of spamming the search engine. So write for humans, not search engines!

• Links

The third step is to identify which websites to partner with your site. The more quality inbound links your website has, the better chance you have of increasing your Google ranking and as a result, your inbound traffic. An important point to remember is that quality is better than quantity - it doesn’t matter how many inbound links your site has, what matters is their site ranking.

Adding a few outbound links won’t hurt either, it proves you know who else has great content, but not too many. SEO isn’t an exact science, but its best to keep it simple. What you want is a clean, easy to navigate, content-rich website that is relevant and does what it advertises. You want the client to leave happy, and if possible, having bought something.

Good SEO doesn’t happen overnight and despite popular belief, it isn’t free either. If you’ve done your job well your website will rank and you will have increasing incoming queries, sales, website conversions and blog comments.

Your website is an investment. SEO is there to help your website be better than all the other websites out there. With a little time and money it can be.

A colleague recommended that I take a look a free SEO tool available at http://www.websitegrader.com

If you want to do a quick SEO analysis of a website all you need to do is paste the URL of the website into the box provided and click at the bottom of the page. Within seconds you have a detailed report of the website which includes an on-page and off-page SEO analysis of the metadata, traffic rank, the date of the last Google crawl, Google rank, Blog information and readability level. The report even gives your website a grade.

The website grader is completely free and is a fantastic tool to test whether or not your webpage is looking the way it should be. It’s very simple to use and doesn’t contain a lot of jargon so even if you don’t know a lot about SEO the report will give you valuable pointers on how to improve your website.

I ran a test on the Clicks2Customers website and was pleased to see that we had result of ninety-five out of hundred. Our Google page rank is six and our blog and RSS feed earned our site some extra points. What was interesting to find was our traffic rank. According to http://www.websitegrader.com, our website has an Alexa rank of 256,529 which is in the top 2.14% of all websites.

Website Grader does give you option to track your competitors web activity as well which makes a very handy tool to have.

Thanks to Vinny for this one, I just had to post it almost as is - a great repository of CSS goodies, not to mention the rest the site has to offer:

CSS is important. And it is being used more and more often. Cascading Style Sheets offer many advantages you don’t have in table-layouts - and first of all a strict separation between layout, or design of the page, and the information, presented on the page. Thus the design of pages can be easily changed, just replacing a css-file with another one. Isn’t it great? Well, actualy, it is.

Over the last few years web-developers have written many articles about CSS and developed many useful techniques, which can save you a lot of time - of course, if you are able to find them in time. Below you’ll find a list of techniques we , as web-architects, really couldn’t live without. They are essential and they indeed make our life easier. Let’s take a look at 53 CSS-based techniques you should always have ready to hand if you develop web-sites. - http://www.smashingmagazine.com

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/01/19/53-css-techniques-you-couldnt-live-without/

So many times when I’m surfing the internet, perhaps via a Google search, I come across an ugly looking error page because the page used to exist that was indexed by the search engine. Immediately I push the back button and check out the other search results.

Surely it would have been better if they had created a prettier error page within their web-site

template to increase the chances of me staying at their website.

Websites evolve and get re-designed, URL’s change and search engines still keep the older websites URL’s indexed for a while. If a permanent redirect (301) has not been created for an older URL that is indexed in a search engine, you bound to get visitors landing upon an error page. So the choice is yours - Would it not be better create a customised 404 page which includes your branding as a safety net?

… Surely then you would not lose all your visitors trust as if you were sending them to the default ugly version that web servers generate.

I’m sure the web is full of resources on creating prettier customised 404 Error Pages.

Ah, copywriting. Who could imagine a better occupation than writing about some of the loveliest hotels in the world? Imagine yourself languishing in elegantly furnished hotel rooms of Victorian Grande Dames set in the lush forests of exotic islands. When I work, I picture endless white beaches that stretch out to eternity, framed by magnificent sheer cliffs and sparkling azure waters and palm trees. What could be easier than writing about luxurious international hotels whose names roll off the tongue like champagne and caviar?

Now imagine being asked to write about one hundred of these gems without using the words “elegant”, “lush”, “exotic”, “white”, magnificent”, “azure”, and “luxurious”. Not so easy anymore is it?

Thesaurus.com is a wonderful website but at the same time being a completely useless one. Take the word “beautiful” as an example. Type in the word “beautiful” and it gives you fifty synonyms of the word in the context that I need it and twenty of them are unusable. I can hardly describe a five-star hotel in New York as “nice” or “pulchritudinous” now can I? Yet I go back, time after time, with the vain hope that this time, I will find that elusive synonym that has evaded capture for my last forty attempts.
If you scroll down you find more interesting synonyms of the word, in their various contexts. In one case, the word “stacked” is an actual synonym for “beautiful”, as is “piece” and “hopped up”. None of this helps me in the least except to shorten my ever-looming deadline after my curiosity has yet again spurred my navigation ever onward.

Copywriting is a great job even when it does seem like the synonyms are winning. After all, I get to take a holiday to wherever I want to go every time that I sit down to work.

I was browsing the net today, as you do, and I came across an online marketing company that has link building listed as part of the formula to improve site conversions. This reminded me of the 298537634 (slight exaggeration) articles I have read that say link building is dead.

So who is right? Is the company I found online seriously outdated or are they making extra money by offering this additional feature to their unwitting clients? If it is the latter, well, kudos to them (If they can pull it off successfully – long term).

*This view is by no means shared by anyone else at Clicks2Customers and is solely the opinion of me.*

If they are just seriously outdated, well then some market researchers need a new job. But there is also the fact that they may have found a magic solution to make link building work properly. I mean, I started out at this company as a link builder, unless it is a one way link (they put your link on their site only) it’s pretty pointless.

I can see it working from an SEO perspective because it would improve the page rank (hopefully)…but I’m not sure why it would improve conversions. Unless of course by conversions they mean clicks to the site…but the company advertising link building is all about ROI so I assume it’s about making money and not just about the clicks. Then again we go back to the SEO point; their natural search listing could improve, so the site could indeed get more conversions. Sigh.

I was tempted to give them a call and find out what they had to say…but I did some more research into the link building matter instead. It seems link building is a big “yes”. Maybe I was thinking of reciprocal linking.

Either way, I found a really nice site. I specifically liked this post, they had some very good pointers. You could actually apply some of those principles to a lot of marketing practices. Or even everyday life. But that’s another story, and I think this post is finished.

Isn’t it great when you find funny little things like that that you could apply to so many different parts of life? I love this industry.

One of the recurring tasks of the ongoing work of running a website is managing your 404 Errors. And a rather important task this is too, because it does tell the search engines how well looked after a site is.

On Google, you can use the “site:” operator to find all your site URLs in their index -

http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Awww.africanpridehotels.com

however, it does not show you which URLs are broken. Yahoo! have taken this one step further by allowing you to do the following, using the same operator:

http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.africanpridehotels.com

What Yahoo! provides you with here is a TSV list of your pages in their index and more importantly, they list the pages that are not found at the bottom of that list - therefore your latest list of 404 URLs that need your attention!

This list of URLs can be added to your .htaccess file with rules for 301 (Permanent), 302 (Temporary) Redirection and that way you ensure the that your site audience, including crawlers, spiders and bots are able to find ALL of your content!

Thanks to Yahoo! for providing a full list in a standardized & downloadable format.