In light of Barack Obama being announced as the 44th US President I thought I would take a look at Google’s top 10 Search result listings for his name. So overall it looks like we have some good quality relevant results with no spammy sites jumping on the band wagon.

After some News posts we have the number one result, the official Campaign Page for Barack. Next up we have the wikipedia page for Barack where you can learn everything (well almost) you wanted to know about America’s next president. For the hipper voters, in the top 10 we have Obama’s Facebook, MySpace and Twitter feeds. It seems that Obama or his team are certainly up with current web trends and I truly believe that the Internet has played a substantial role in his Presidential win. These web 2.0 results are followed up by some good old fashioned News Outlets to keep you up to date with the role.

Im sure the McCain party tried to use the Internet to their advantage, but it just seemed during the presidential run that the Internet generally speaking had Obama’s back.

Paul Teitelman has come up with his top 25 paid directories which you can check out here on his website Search Engine People. We have shown the top 10 from his list, but please visit the site to read the rest. Paid directories are much debated issue at the moment. So think carefully about where to spend you money.

1.) Family Friendly Sites
2.) Incrawler
3.) Kahuki
4.) Greenstalk
5.) Rakcha
6.) Joeant
7.) Splash Directory
8.) Goguides
9.) Enquira
10.) ALS Links

I expect a fair few of you already use Twitter, but I have only just decided to try it out. Feel free to follow me here. It’s quite lonely so far as no one is following me, but im sure that will all change and I will become the Paris Hilton of Social Media (wait is that a good thing?)

See below for updates

We are performing a little experiment to see if we can get this page ranking for Tom’s Fruity Mug and how quickly it takes. Keep an eye out on the results through this link .

Update:

So it’s a few hours later and the blog’s home page is appearing in the Google serps for Tom’s fruity mug

Update 2:

So we were fairly happy as we reached number 7 for all the web and number 1 for the Uk listings in Google. We could finally quit our job’s and start up our dream business around they keyword “Tom’s Fruity Mug” but alas Google has removed us from the top 100 for the term. Does this mean Google places temporary listings boosts for blog posts but then removes them after a certain period? It’s not like anyone is truely competing for that exact phrase, so why are we not the most relevant listing. Good job this was just a test and we didn’t want to start a mug business (looks around nervously)

Over at Matt Cutt’s blog there is a new handy tip about getting some free links. Well these aren’t technically new links but sorting out dead links. You maybe asking how you find these broken links? Well through webmaster central, that’s how. Matt goes into more detail, but the gist of it is, that you use the diagnosis section of webmaster tools to find out who is linking to dead pages or pages that never existed. Then you can e-mail these websites and ask them to change the link to an active page. What a simple yet great link building idea.

Matt Cutts

This may seem an obvious technique, but while searching for a client in the google serps I had a brain wave. A Lot of the results below the clients website will be sites talking about them and linking to their site. There’s a good chance that if they have not been gained by the SEO team, that they will be using wasteful anchor text like “click here” and the company’s name. So why not contact these websites and ask them to modify the anchor text to include your targeted keywords. One of the links I found in 3rd position after two listings from my client was a monster.co.uk profile page that  was PR3 and linked to our site with the dreaded “click here”. So we will now look into getting this changed. Hopefully this technique will help you convert some existing links into SEO friendly links.

Team member Sam found this cool video with Maile Ohye from the Google team talking about some SEO things, it’s a long one so I will report back with important points later.

Well there seems to have been a Google PR Update, and the South West SEO blog is now PR 3!!! : ) Most people will already know what page rank is but for the people out there who are maybe new to the game, here is a great site explaining the theory behind page rank.