A really interesting video from Rand Fishkin on the new way of earning links, he draws some new ways of earning links not building links. He draws a side by side comparison between the two approaches

Old Methods of Link Building	New ways of link earning
link exchanges and reciprocal link	Cross referenced sites with link to genuine content
e-mail blasts seeking links	Social networking and getting to know people on-line
Buying links	Earning links by creating the type of content people want to share
Submitting to directories	Getting listed on heavily curated list which only take quality sites for a specific domain.
Article marketing or artical directories	Guest posting on a site that is picky about the topic and quality of posts that are made.
Links from guest books, blog comments and forums	Participating in real communities that are reliant to a topic
Mining competitors back links	Looking at what content is linked to on competitors sites and seeing who links to that content.
Private Website of links farms.	Build a network of influences and networkers on a particular topic.

This is quite an interesting list of new perspectives on how to earn Website links rather than direct link building. The challenge is figuring out how to put it into action for a particular site.

Post update the need for a new type of SEO consultant

The original post by Rand Fishkin has provoked some interesting discussion on Goolge Plus. It is clear that the role of SEO consultants is changing, from one of on-page optimisation and external link building to marketing via an on-line channel. This is a significant shift in the role of SEO in the marketing strategy. They need to be much more involved in how a business is represented on the web, how the content is presented and how communities are build around the content presented. This will be a major shift for many of the traditional SEO service providers who have processes aligned to bulk link building, often using off-shore resources for most of the work. Thsi new era for SEO is going to be very interesting for the next few years. 

I went to another search London meeting this week. The topic this time was

Technical Tips For 2012 by Craig Bradfod. Craig Bradford spoke about the technical tips you need to know for your website and you can catch all the recommendations on slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/craigbradford/searchlondon-tips-for-2012

Craig gave an interesting presentation. Although much of it was not new he stressed the importance of Google+ and author reputation. His advice was to find ways of encouraging people to plus on your site. This can have a dramatic effect on rankings of those logged in to google. Not only will this affect the results of the people who plus one your site but also their friends. He used the exile of David Beckham, who has 28,000 followers on Google plus. If David was to plus one your site then it would affect the results for 28,000 people.

Craig also presented some interesting research on the projects which have been consuming google resources. He showed that Google answers are by far the most likely project, together with rich snippets. In particulate he recommends inserting markup around video, so that is wills how up in search results.

Overall it was another fantastic event from search London, well done Joe

With the Penguin update reducing the value of many traditional links it has become more difficult to develop good quality links from article sites, directories and blog commenting. Most SEO seem to have moved on the guest blogging.

What is guest blogging

Guest blogging is where a blog owner agrees to host a post from you on there site. Often this might be a well know blogger who offers to contribute to a site. However more recently this has become one of the most popular SEO techiques. With blog owners often getting approched to host a guest blog. Often these offers of content can be quite poor quality, which have been used elsewhere. 

you should look for really good quality contributions. Good quality guest blogging has a couple of benefits for the blog owner and the author, but how can you tell if it is a good quality guest blog. 

Benefits for the blog owner

If the author has a good author reputation by Google, then this can be very positive for the blogger and the social search results for the blog owner. For more about social search read our earlier post on the power of social search and google. However as a blog owner you have to ask the following questions before accepting a blog post.

1.  Is this truly high quality content, has it got something unique to say?
2. Do I know this guest blogger, have they got a good reputation in my sector?
3. Are the a Google recognised author, and how many people do they have in there google plus circles?
4. Is it a unique article, search for the first few paragraphs, do they come up in the search results on other sites?
5. is this content relevant to my site and readership?

Benefits for the guest blogger

When accepting a guest blog then the blogger owner will normally allow you to include a few relevant links back to your site. This can be of benefit to your site however only if the blog owners site meets the following criteria.

1. Is the blog site relevant to my site?
2. Does the site have good quality content with good social sharing?
3. Does the site have a good page rank?
4. How frequently is the blog updated?

Guest blogging can be a great way of building your network and maximising the SEO of your site, but only if both the blog owner and author are interested in quality content.

Interested in guest blogging for SBSEO then just get in touch.

I attended the Search London Meetup this week and listened to some really interesting presentation by Lisa Myers, Founder of Verve Search and Paul Chaloner, Head of Social Media at Fresh Egg. Both had very interesting presentation on the future of search engine marketing and the impact that the use of Google+ will have in the future, but first a bit of a re-cap for those who are not involved in the in's and out of the search engine world.

What is Google+

Google+ is a social network from Google, it is a little a cross between face book and twitter. It enables you to share content with other people and friends much as you can do in facebook or twitter, although in the case of Google+ you add them to circles. As social network it's ok, but why would you want to put the effort into maintaining Goggle+ as well as facebook and twitter. Especially as so few people use Google+. I have just imported my entire address book of 3,000 people into my Google contacts and only about 150 people are on google+. The reason Google+ is important is it's impact of search results and the link is makes to the authorship of articles.

Authorship of Content.

The problem with Google search results is that the rankings can be influences by link building techniques and so SEO companies have got very good at generating backlinks to improve the ranking of a site. They want to move towards a more personal experience, were the person who makes the recommendations and writes about a site being great affects your search results. So for example is one of your friends recommends a restaurant or holiday the this will improve the chances of that it will appear in your search results. Even more interesting they are also interested in the authority of the person who writes and article about your restaurant. If a restaurant critic with a very strong reputation recommends a restaurant by writing about includes a back link that will be a very strong signal of quality.

Why will Google+ be important for Search in the Future?

To facilitate this Google have established rel="author" link between your web page and your Google plus profile. For now you just get a small profile photo in the search engine results, as shown below. This is significant because it will increase click though rates and indicates you are a trusted author. As time passes through this can be used by Google to identify has written about which website and the authority of the author in the domain. We think this will become increasingly important in determining search engine results. So if you are not on Google+ and have yet to set up rel=author, do it today.

 

When it comes to optimising your website, keyword and keyphrase research are a must for any business with a website and help form a solid foundation for your small business SEO stratergy. Although researching relevent keywords for your business may sound like a daunting task, it's actually a fairly straight forward practice that can help your website rise up through the search engine rankings and as a result, increase your websites online sales and turnover.

Businesses invest in letterheads, business cards, logos and of course their website, so optimising their website is a vital step and worthwhile investment to make towards enhancing your websites potential to drive targeted visitors to your website. Having someone that specialises in business SEO undertake this task for you can save you the time and can directly influence the future success of your small business website.

One of the first steps is gathering a list of what you think your keywords should be. This is quite often the first hurdle that trips people up as the majority of the time, people incorrectly assume what their keywords should be! On many occasions we see websites with keywords that are relevant, but are unlikely to be of any real benefit to helping generate traffic from search engine results. As an example, a bookshop might assume that the keyword "bookshop" should be their primary keyword, but in reality, how likely is it that a small bookshop based in Oxford would appear on page one of Google for the keyword "bookshop"? Quite unlikely with just basic on page optimisation! This highlights why it is important for people to consider what users might type into Google to find your business or service. "Bookshop Oxford" or "Oxford bookshop" are more likely search queries and will potentially help generate more traffic if these keywords were used instead of simply "bookshop".

Backlinks are the links that a website will use to connect people to their website. Therefore, there are a few reasons why the backlinks are important to the success of a company web site. The first reason is that some of the biggest search engines like Google will give the websites that have a good number of quality back links a higher ranking in search engine results.

Today Google announced over fifty changes to its search algorithm. Most of these are highly technical, beyond the comprehension of most SEO consultants.  Matt from search engine land says.

Google’s latest round of search quality updates is now available, and — at the risk of sounding like a grumpy old SEO — this month’s seems even more difficult to grasp than normal. There are a lot of words in this month’s list of 50 changes, but it appears to me that there’s not really a lot of explanation