I keep on getting asked by newbies so here goes

Search Engine Optimization is broken down into two segments. Aspects of onsite changes to make your site more spider friendly and Offsite keyword text backlinking.

From an on site SEO perspective, consistency and placement of your keywords are important. Spider read a page top to bottom left to right. Therefore your major keywords should be consistent from your Meta tags all the way down to your footer page. Consistency in Syntax as well a prominence. Interlinking your site with keyword text links not only helps navigation of your site but it improves your keyword density.

There is much discussion in regard to the keyword density as to what is considered a non spam factor. Each page should have about 350-500 words per page with a keyword density of no more than 7-10%. Keyword density is also considered in your graphic alt text as well as hyperlinks.

Generally speaking, if your keyword looks stuffed, it is.

Basic On site SEO Factors:

Title Tag ( with Keyword)
Meta Description ( Consistent with Title Tag)
Meta Keywords ( Consistent with Title tag and Description)
H1 Tags ( with Keyword)
Graphic Alt Text ( with Keyword)
Keyword Hyperlinks
Keyword Density in body text
Keyword in Menu Links
Footer Page with Keyword Text Links

Off site linking is generally though of as the most effective way to raise in the search engine rankings. However if your on site SEO is not complete you are battling an up hill battle.

When planning your off site linking strategy you need to keep in mind that reciprocal links are considered devalued through the latest round of algorithm updates. Textual Keyword Rich links from various C-block IP address are the best links possible.

There are many ways to receive quality links.

Some of the top linking strategies to receive quality links come from the following venues:

Article Submissions
SEO Friendly directories
Blogs
Press Releases

Growing your links in a consistent manor is also relevant. Creating 1000’s of links in a short period of time could set up red flags. You will receive many links via RSS Feeds from the sources described above and be successful in your linking campaign.

Getting Search Engine rankings can take time depending on your keywords, but consistency and effort both on site and off site will bring you the desired results.

Declaring that Internet search is currently broken, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales is trying to fix it. And he wants your help.

After several months of development and acquisitions to assemble the infrastructure needed to build a viable search engine, Wikia Search service goes live today. Wikia Search is a product of Wikia Inc., a for-profit company wholly separate from the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization that was founded in 2004 and oversees Wikipedia.

Following a brief period of private alpha testing, today’s unveiling is billed as a “public alpha release.” Wales has freely admitted that today’s launch is something of a test drive, and that the application will continue to see substantial modifications and updates.

With the community-driven, open-source search engine, Wales is hoping to transform Internet search, which he describes as currently dominated by a few large companies operating under a cloak of secrecy with virtually no accountability for how results are served up or pages are ranked.

“The philosophical background here is that I’m a very big advocate of openness and transparency,” Wales told InternetNews.com. The best parts of the Web are largely absent from the proprietary protocols of the major search engines, he said.

“My view here is that there’s an opportunity to change that.”

Starting from www.wikia.com, users can navigate to an unadorned search page that Wales compared to Google’s for its deceptive spareness — like Google, the Wikia Search launch page is just the tip of the iceberg.

Wales said that Wikia Search is both a social network and a search engine. On the site, users register, create profiles and are able to perform all the typical functions of a social networking site – messaging friends, uploading photos, etc.

The search engine serves up results as a series of links ranked in order of relevance, just as Google and Yahoo do (enter a query; receive a list of results), but the similarities end there.

Applying the collaborative editing approach that is the essence of a wiki, registered users can contribute to a mini-article that appears at the top of the results page, Wales said.

Users can click on the links and rank the relevance of the result to the search term on a scale of one to five; their evaluations are then fed back into the algorithm to improve the quality of information delivered.

Building a search engine from the ground up, with results delivered and refined the using the same approach that made Wikipedia the Web’s favorite general reference site, is not going to be an overnight process, Wales admitted. Just looking at the near future, “we’d be ecstatic if we grabbed 5 percent of the market,” Wales said.

The push toward community-driven search began in earnest in July, when Wikia announced the acquisition of Grub, the open source search project that harnesses the distributed processing power of individuals’ computers to crawl the Web.

The Grub Web crawler is just one of many technologies cobbled together to power Wikia Search, Wales said. On the back end, Apache efforts Lucene and Nutch shoulder the brunt of the search and indexing responsibilities. The front end, which handles the user interactions, such as the comments and rankings, is written in Java.

Wales said that Wikia Inc. is still exploring monetization methods for the search engine, but that, in a general sense, it would employ some form of an advertising model. No commercial partners have been announced.

Delivering search results through open source algorithms that evolve through community rankings begs the same question of user abuse that has dogged Wikipedia from time to time.

Search engine optimization is a microindustry in its own right these days. Asked about the concern that by turning the algorithms and rankings over to the community, Wikia Search could be a ripe target for gaming the search engine to artificially boost site rankings, Wales demurred.

“My view is that sunlight is the best disinfectant,” he said. “Talk with security experts and they will tell you that security through obscurity is a bad idea,” adding that the policing of Wikia Search will work in a very similar manner as it does on Wikipedia.

“We have a community that is in charge of the editorial content” that will be able to identify and block the bad apples who aren’t playing by the rules. Ultimately, SEO will be less of an issue for Wikia Search than it is currently with Google, Yahoo and the other major search engines, Wales said.

“I feel that this is going to be one of our strengths.”

Wales said he’s taking an organic approach to the development of the editorial community and that his own involvement will be extensive.

He wasn’t didn’t specifically answer whether there’ll be censorship or banning of rogue community members for trying to game the system?

“I have a general philosophy that’s served me very well: Avoid excessive a priori thinking – wait and see … we’ll see how it unfolds.”

The names of three banks and the word “stocks” beat “sex” to become four of the most Googled words in China last year, according to a Google China list seen on Thursday.

China Merchants Bank, Industrial and Commercial Bank of China and China Construction Bank ranked second, third and sixth, according to a list supplied by Google China on its website (www.google.cn).

“On the Chinese mainland, it was money and technology that took the honors last year,” the China Daily said, pointing out that “sex” was the most popular keyword for Google users in some other countries.

Fourth on the list was “stock,” not surprising with Shanghai shares having risen 97 percent last year. At number 1 was “QQ,” a Chinese instant message service and a brand of car.

China’s Central Bank, the Ministry of Finance and Banking Regulatory Commission ranked first, third and fifth in the “Most Popular Departments” list, the Web site said.

In another list named “qiu zhi,” or “seeking knowledge,” “what is a blue chip” and “how to invest in the stock market” were the most searched questions on Google in China, while “what is love” and “how to kiss” ranked top of the global list.

China keeps a tight rein on Internet content and has launched several campaigns to root out online pornography, perhaps one reason why “sex” did not score so well.

US Search engine giant Google is to launch its own version of online encyclopaedia Wikipedia in a bid to increase its stranglehold over online advertising revenue

Google is building its own version of communally-constructed online encyclopaedia Wikipedia, which consistently ranks among the most visited websites in the world.

The internet search powerhouse is inviting chosen people to test a free service dubbed “knol” to indicate a unit of knowledge, vice president of engineering Udi Manber said yesterday in a posting at Google’s website.

“Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it,” Mr Manber wrote. “There are millions of people who possess useful knowledge that they would love to share, and there are billions of people who can benefit from it.”

While Wikipedia lets visitors make changes to its online pages, trusting that people with accurate information will correct errors and misleading entries, Google is inviting folks to author their own articles.

Technology queries dominated the list of fastest rising overall search terms of 2007.
Unsurprisingly, Facebook topped the list in a year when the social-networking site gained critical mass and snowballing membership. It was followed by video-sharing site YouTube, and competing social networks Bebo and MySpace. Interestingly, a number of child-orientated websites also ranked high on the search list: Club Penguin, in which youngsters adopt a penguin cartoon character and interact with other members through the snowy virtual world, was number five on the list; and StarDoll, a website that allows you dress cleverly sketched pictures of celebrities in the latest fashions, made an appearance at number seven.

Wikipedia, Gumtree and eBay made up the remainder of this category, and arguably demonstrate that people perhaps do not know how to use search engines properly – most of these websites simply need a “.com” added to the end of their name in a web browser to take you straight through to the site, and yet people persist in circuitously accessing these pages via Google rather than by going straight there.

Gadgets, celebrities and strange diets top Google’s list,for the first time, the internet search giant has produced a city-by-city list of the most Googled words across the UK.

Google by area: Farnborough inhabitants are looking for love while London seeks shopping info

People in Gateshead searched most often for “Gordon Brown”, while those in Oxford Googled “David Cameron”. The inhabitants of Swindon are either suffering from a crimewave or are closet Sting fans – the most searched-for term there was “Police”. Bristolians searched for “takeaway” most often, while it was “love” in Farnborough, “shopping” in London, “holidays” in Bletchley, and “weather” in St Albans. “Beer” dominated online search habits in Cambridge, while in Sheffield it was “baby”.

Fun-loving residents in Nottingham searched for “party” most often in 2007, while the ever-optimistic folk of Leeds searched for “sport”. In Edinburgh, “Xmas” was the most searched-for term of 2007, rather suggesting that no-one used the internet in that city before November.

Recently, a conference was held in Las Vegas, the Publishers Conference (pubcon.com). Lots of discussion around search marketing and opportunities to generate traffic and business online: Link building, universal search, local search, social search, personalized search, web 2.0, social media optimization, content strategies and much, much more.

One of the top videos that came out of the conference that’s available now is the Matt Cutts interview for top SEO advice. You will also find more tips on WordPress and its recent release.

Lastly, some tips on YouTube and Google Video optimization, which is important for possible massive exposure.

Watch the video here

As anyone who has a product they can sell through a website will know, Marketing plays a vital part in reaching out to an audience. It’s all very well having the best product in the world, but if no-one knows about it, it’s not going to sell. Marketing, including Internet Marketing, is the best way to address this problem.

Marketers need to identify the needs and desires of consumers, and then to raise awareness of a product that will be useful or desirable for them. Essentially, marketing is a means of recruiting new customers and retaining existing ones – and in today’s fast-changing retail world, it is quite simply critical.

Internet marketing

The internet provides a ready-made audience of millions, but marketers need to take the correct steps in order to put their product before them. Website owners have an advantage in that online audiences are growing, while newspapers, radio and (to a lesser degree) TV are in decline.

This is illustrated by the fact that Google recently overtook ITV1 in terms of advertising revenues. Figures from the search engine showed that it made £327 million in advertising for the July to September period, as opposed to the £317 million made by the TV channel.

Another key benefit is that smaller businesses can effectively compete with larger companies using internet marketing, because they don’t need a huge budget for an expensive print media or billboard campaign.

But how do small businesses and other webmasters take advantage?

Search engine marketing

One tried-and-tested method is search engine marketing. This can include search engine optimization (SEO), whereby websites are boosted in Google, Yahoo, etc by containing more relevant keywords and fresh, ever-changing content, as well as through Link Building.

As the BBC notes, “one of the most important factors in deciding how relevant particular sites are is to count how many other sites link to it”, and responsible link building increases a site’s credibility.

Paid search is also popular, with companies bidding on certain keywords and having their ads displayed at the side or the top of the main results pages of the search engines.

Viral marketing

Finally, a fast-evolving method is viral marketing,
whereby social networks are used to spread awareness of a brand or product, in a self-replicating way similar to the spread of a virus.
The internet is particularly well-suited to this process because of the popularity of social networking sites such as Facebook, and because of the emerging trend for other collaborative projects and spaces.

A recent example was the Guinness viral campaign that trailed the launch of its latest television ad.

Mayhem breaks out as Google updates its PageRank, Yes a few sites have lost a few digits off the little bar, but some have gained.

Yes it seems to be aimed at websites Google thinks sells links and passes juice, what is the big deal?

Remember once upon a time I was the Googleman, only my signature, a promise, high court injunction and a few $$$ to keep my mouth shut for a few years kept me quite on revealing the SECRETS.

Whatever, PageRank is nice to have, BUT is it the be all and end all, NO.

I have had sites listing #1 for years with a PR2 and only got that through DMOZ, SERPS is what counts, no secrets, good content that is relevant, good internal linking and a few good inbound links should see you list.

Anyway back to the latest update, SERPS have been affected this time, especially if you have links from sites google has penalized, I am sure these will surface over the next week or so, I am seeing these now on a few websites already, no doubt we will have blogs and stories and screams about this next week.

Get it straight, Its not against the rules to buy links, if you buy for the right reason, traffic and not trying to shaft Google for PR or better SERPS, if you do then expect to suffer the rath of the BigG.

Google AdWords has received an upgrade to give its users a more “detailed breakdown” of how their keywords are performing.

Internet marketers using the ad-serving platform can now look deeper into the quality score figure for each keyword to find out if it can be improved, according to the official Inside AdWords blog.

“Specifically, you’ll learn how keyword quality and landing page quality are performing and receive recommendations for improvement,” said Inside AdWords ‘crew’ member Trevor on the blog.

The service upgrade also includes a prediction of how changes to settings or keywords can affect the visibility of ads.

According to the Google blog, advertisers will receive an alert if any of their keywords are under-performing and be offered advice on how to change this, as well as being able to view information such as their minimum bid for the keyword and an overall quality score rating.

Google AdWords deals with pay-per-click (PPC) adverts which are distributed to websites across the internet depending on the keywords selected by the internet marketer.

These advertising services are one method of link building, which can improve the performance of a website by attracting more users