In the first of a weekly series, creativesuit’s resident SEO Manager Matt Rycroft  (me) has decided to share the things he comes across on his travels on the internet. And as links make the Internet go round, i think its only fair that I send some link love to people who have written some cracking content.

There are a couple of tools I use to bookmark thing. I use delicious.com, I also Star things for reading later using Google Reader, both on my desktop and when on the move with my Iphone.

Frist up, this thing, that turns Jpegs into flash flip books, this is for a project we are currently developing where the client wants a book effect on the website.  The developers claim it is not as simple as the website makes out. But keep your eye on our portfolio and this will turn up on their sooner or later.

This thing from one of my peers, Aaron Wall. Who has written an excellent article on finishing up a web project

This list of 100 free mac tools, as we use macs in the office this has been invaluable

Still on the Apple mac subject, this little program makes your mac mail have 3 columns. And this thing called Mail Badger,  that makes you have multiple rosettes on your mail app, for different folders and mailboxes. Although I’ll admit it has crashed my mail a couple of times since I installed it.

The geniuses at Google have not only managed to get Video Conferencing through the web browser, but they have made it multi platform. It’s pretty impressive but we’ll stick with Ichat over here at our web designers in manchester.

Whilst on the subject of Google, they have also released a new version of their Iphone application, this one is supposed to recognise your voice when you search, and turn whatever you say into text. In practice it couldn’t really understand my manc/scouse/North Wales accent. You can read about it here

Here’s a nice article from Search Engine Journal regarding Sematic HTML Structure, it’s a bit heavy for the average internet reader. But it’s very relevant to my world.

And on a lighter note, I’m supposed to be sorting out my garage, and I came across this to help me.

The BBC website is one of the most trusted websites in the UK, if not the world. And getting yourself a link from the BBC, weather it was from a press release, a friend that works there, or somehow being very relevant to the article on a speciic page is the holy grail of link building. Google and the other search engines love the BBC. And you will get a massive rankings boost just by appearing on the links section to the right of the article.

At some point last week, I noticed that the BBC was not handling links in the way it used to. A couple of days later it was reported all over the internet. With blogstorm being first to report it in the blogosphere.  I was actually going to right a piece about it at the time, but unfortunatley we had a number of deadlines that day and that “exclusive” slipped through the net.

On the subject the BBC had to say:

Recently, in response to feedback, we have been putting more external links onto the BBC site and have also started using tracking for external links on the BBC News sites.

Essentially the reason for tracking links is to allow us to report to the BBC Trust how many click-throughs we are generating to external sites so that they can accurately monitor this.

We have had some feedback that the way we are doing this has an unintended side effect (”BBC pledges to link out - but holds back the Google juice”).

Strategically there is no intention to drink all the Google Juice. The reasons for this are less sinister and I thought it worth explaining.

The system the BBC uses for tracking external links has been around for years, but we only recently added this tracking to the external links on the Right Hand Side of the BBC News site. You will find the /go/ tracking system in use across the BBC website and the way it redirects links is nothing new. You can see the mechanism working if you use a /go/ URL off the BBC site (e.g. this). (Editor’s note 6.44 p.m.: To see the tracking mechanism in action, you need to be on a website that isn’t the BBC. We suggest you copy this entire link into a new browser window or tab: http://www.bbc.co.uk/go/bristol/content/features/2003/01/13/ sayingaboutus.shtml/ext/_auto/-/http://www.venue.co.uk/ )

On the BBC site you don’t get this delay, but you can see what it is doing - it is basically logging that you have clicked a link from he BBC to an external site by going to the intermediary page and then sends you on to this page. Many sites use similar mechanisms and have to deal with the side effects of this.

We are rolling out improvements to the way this works, as already used on some other parts of the website. Essentially we use JavaScript to retain SEO (”Search Engine Optimisation”) and Google juice for external sites, while we will still be able to track external links. Search Engines, casual observers and those without JavaScript will still see the original URL.

We will keep an eye on the situation, and continue to quest those lovely BBC links.

As you probably know, there are millions of little crappy directories all over the internet, the majority are ran by kids over at the digital point forums, obsessed with conning people out of a couple of quid, obsessed with Google page rank so they can charge more for a link. Its not something we do here at creativesuit, we are proud to say we have never ever paid for a link for anything, never have, never will. Our Search engine optimisation manchester department have other techniques they use to build incoming links.

Apparently Google has started kicking out these directories from their index. And now there is a lot of crying going on about it.

More info about it here

I read a cracking article from The Daily Moolah this morning about a really quick way to create backlinks, they actually reckoned that it would take you 15 minutes, they lied. It took me about an hour and a half. But thats only because I signed up to all the Online bookmarking sites that they are linked with.

Its a lot easier to do this if you actually sign up with the following Social bookmark sharing type sites first, and then sign up sign up with Onlywire

Now you have done the laborious task of signing up for all those social bookmarking sites (hopefully with the same username and password) you can go over to Onlywire and signb up with them and then they do all the donkeywork of posting your links to all these sites

Onlywire is an automated social bookmarking tool which has18 sites built in its content network. Setup is fairly easy and involves adding  a bookmarklet to your toolbar in Internet Explorer or Firefox. Click on the bookmarklet after visiting the site you wish to promote, and it will take you to Onlywire.

Onlywire takes the URL and the title information from the page. Feel free to modify the title, as that will be the anchor text linking to your site.  You then choose tags that describe the page you are bookmarking.  Onlywire has you separate tags by a space, so you need to cover all your bases when it comes to phrases.  I normally create one word with no spaces (affiliatemarketing) and separate with a hyphen (affiliate-marketing) to ensure proper coverage ( Each tag has its own page ). 

That page will contain a link back to your site!  I recommend using 10 – 20 tags per bookmark to optimize your backlinks.  You also need to include a description of the link in the comments box.  Your description should include any valid keywords relating to the site you are promoting, but don’t be a keyword stuffer. Click on the submit button and you just created over a free 100 backlinks!

Original article is here 

Some one on this American Real estate blog, did a test using wikipedia, and it makes for some interesting reading regarding google and how it boosts websites with good internal linking.

Wikipedia has a boring article called real estate with minimal external links pointing to it. By the way I refuse to give a link that does not have nofollow tags to wikipedia Either way, I spent a few boring nights of (ok call me a nurde) wikilinking (internal linking from other wikipedia pages) the word “real estate� (believe it or not without spamming wikipedia) from a few hundred other wiki articles to the real estate page. The results have come back and Wikipedia’s real estate article jumped from the #18 spot to #10 spot for “real estate� a VERY competitive keyword in Google in a few months of time.

Lessons to be learned???

This is a clear indication of what people can do with proper anchor text internal linking (either through their sidebar or through content linking). Anchor text still rules no matter where the link comes from. And, of course, Wikipedia will rule the SERPs for a long time to come as the nofollow tags seems to make Wikipedia nothing but a PR cookie monster.

The original article can be found here, on the real estate seo blog