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

There are two words that I would like to cover today. They were prompted by an article written by SEO-speedwagon. The two terms are Index and Crawling.

Crawling: “is the process of an engine requesting — and successfully downloading — a unique URL.”

What this means: Google, Yahoo and other search engines have the ability to surf the internet. To surf the internet they use a small program called a spider or robot. What these spiders or robots do is read different pages that they come across. They follow links to find the page that they read and that is one reason why links are so important. When they arrive at a page the spider starts at the top and reads all the content on that page. If a spider follows a link to a specific page and receives an error then the spider cannot crawl that particular page.

Index: “is the result of successful crawling.”

What this means: Once a spider or robots has read everything on a particular page it adds all of that information to what is known as its index. A search engine index is very similar to that used in a book. It is a quick reference guide as to where the information is and what it may be about. Once a page has been successfully indexed and made available when a search is performed the page will appear in the Search Engine Results Pages.

Problems that may be encountered when a spider is crawling pages are, it may be blocked by a robots.txt file or the server could be switched off or coding on the page may stop the search engines from reading the page correctly. There is normally a delay in time between a successful crawl and the page being displayed in the results of a search engine. This delay depends on the site and can be as little as a few minutes, for some sites that the spiders trust and access regularly for example a news site. For a new site without any page rank it could be anything up to a week before the page is available in the search results of Google and other search engines.

There are a couple of great SEO roundups written by expert SEO’s.  A good source of daily SEO roundup information can be found on searchengineland.  Danny and his team do a good job of pulling lots of news stories and web tips together in a daily article that you can read online or receive using your RSS feed reader.

I have linked to a few good articles that I thought are useful in improving a website that you may be working on.

Analytics

Here is an informative article from Google on how to track Youtube video hits.

Youtube tracking

Links

An email template is a great asset when seeking links and makes sure that all the correct information is presented in the email, in the best possible way.

Requesting Links email

Search engines use links as their primary source of building up a picture of what a website is about. The way they do this has changed over the recent years.  Sitepoint have written a good explanation of what search engines look for when accessing a link.

Link reputation

Maps

I liked this story about Google Maps and the new street side view, which shows your neighbourhood as though you were actually walking down the street.  There seems to be mixed views ranging from outcry of privacy to delight.

Street view maps

Local search

Local search is a relatively new activity for a lot of website owners. It is however becoming more and more important. The reason for local search importance is that most of the time; customers are the locals and making a website rank highly when a local is searching for a service you offer makes lots of sense.

Targeting local search

Page optimization

What a sites URL is can influence the search engines when it comes to ranking a site. A good URL may mean the difference of being on the first page or not.

Best URL for a website

Many sites have been built in flash and it is a wonderful medium for allowing a website to be presented exactly the way it was designed. Unfortunately search engines were not able to read flash and anyone who wanted to rank well was advised not to use flash. Recently Google announced that they can read flash files. The following article says that flash is not yet a good choice for a website because there is still a lot that is hidden and only a small amount is being read by Google.

Flash usage on a website

In Rand’s first post of the series he talked about a fantastic way to ask for links. He noticed the following method being used after he bought something online from widgetco.com What widgetco.com did is capitalize on the connection and trust they had just established with a customer and then asked them for a link if they had a blog or a website.

Now not every customer has a blog or the ability to create a link, and only a small percentage of those that have the ability to do this will actually go to the trouble of posting a link to your site because you asked them to. What really counts at the end of the day is every link and if you don’t ask you won’t get.

What widgetco did was ask for a link back to their site by placing a small line asking for the link at the end of their email to the customer when confirming the order. This small line made the suggestion that if you have the ability and feel so inclined please link back to widgetco.com

In the comments section of the SEOmoz post someone else had seen another company take this initiate one step further and they said if a customer did link back to their site, the customer should let the company know and the company would credit the customers account with a certain portion of money.

This is absolutely brilliant as it encourages the new customer to link back by giving them a reward, allowing them to regain spent money. It then goes that step further where it has the money waiting for the customer to access but only by coming back and making a return purchase.

I think that this is a brilliant tactic and over time would definitely pay huge benefits.