A few Good SEO Articles

These different articles that I have highlighted were some of the articles that I read using my Google Reader. If you don’t have your Google reader setup follow the link – Google reader.

Web Tools

Nathan Buggia from Live had a whiteboard Friday with Rand Fishkin talking about the tools MSN make available for webmasters to help them achieve better exposure on MSN Live. These tools have recently been upgraded and give a wealth of good website information. They have a lot of good information that can be discovered about the internal and external links on a website. And the five little green boxes which represent page score are a nice visual addition to the tool.

MSN Live webmaster tools

Web Analytics

Google Insights was recently launched providing the ability to follow internet competitive intelligence that is normally reserved for paying customers of services like Hitwise. Google Insights allows keyword tracking and trending over time. It gives the ability to geographically drill into specific locations getting better user insight, for example Australia for the keyword Tasmania. There is a lot more information and it is definitely worth looking through.

Google Insights

Links and Linking

What is a good link and what is a bad link. Kelvin from “Apple Pie and Custard” lists eight metrics to be aware of when looking at the value of different links. He goes into more explanation but here they are.
1.    Pagerank
2.    No follow
3.    Domain age
4.    Domain extension
5.    Is it a rankings competitor
6.    Links to competitors
7.    Contextual relevance
8.    Outbound link count

Link metrics

Maps

The Google street view privacy issue continues. Vincent Cerf from Google made the following remark “there isn’t any privacy, get over it.” which is not going to help Google’s overall battle to justify the new street view service.

Google street view privacy

Page optimization

This informative step by step tutorial from Java Applet does a great job of stepping a novice through the traps of creating a HTML web page. It does not cover everything but if you are brand new to HTML and webpage creations it is a nice starting point.

HTML page creation

PPC: Pay-per-click

There have been more changes to the way Google deals with adverts on its adwords platform. Quality score has become more prominent since its introduction as it is used to calculate page loading time, and landing page quality. Recently Google announced that Quality score will be calculated at time of query which will mean it is more relevant. Google will be using this to help show internet surfers the most relevant adverts. Other changes for example bad keywords will no longer be marked as inactive have also been introduced.

PPC Quality score on Google

Social Search

Stumbleupon has recently lifted the limit of 200 friends. Stumbleupon is a great source of building traffic and friends to a website. With an increased quota of friends it is possible to use Stumbleupon even more than before to pick up some additional traffic as well as meet and gather a great network of new friends with no limits.

No limit on Stumbleupon

Web Marketing

When we think about the internet and especially social Web 2.0 sites like facebook , Youtube etc we don’t include sites coming out of China like Yobo and Wealink . However the sleeping giant that is China is stretching her muscles on the internet. A number of entrepreneurs have started copy cat websites as well as original web 2.0 social sites. With an internet population exceeding that of the USA, China is becoming an internet marketing place that cannot be ignored.

China Internet Entrepreneurs