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

We often hear about social bookmarking and its future importance to SEO but what exactly is it? There are many different sites who allow their users to save/organize and manage the bookmarks to their favourite sites. These are then made available publicly so that other users can check out peoples favourite or most popular bookmarks.

These bookmarks are generally saved as tags which can then be found when someone searches for that particular sector. I.E. Someone searching for “online seo blog” will come across other users favourite bookmarks to do with online seo blogs. Most social bookmarking sites also provide a feed that will show a user when a friend of theirs has added a new bookmark so that they can then check it out. Traffic wise for a site you can obviously see the benefits of new people being given access to your site every day but is there really much benefit SEO wise?

There is now, thanks to Mister Wong. Already known as an authority site in the social bookmarking world, Mister Wong has approximately 4 million visitors every month looking to use their excellent bookmarking service. As well as being able to access your bookmarks wherever you are in the world there are benefits to help you sites rankings. Mister Wong is a PR 8 site and offers do follow links this will obviously be beneficial when it comes to link building. But beware, use sparingly otherwise you might get banned!

For more info on Social Bookmarking check out this video.

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.

The expectation from clients of seeing top ten results in Google and Yahoo within a short space of time can be demoralizing for most SEO executives. I mean you’ve only got to make vast onsite changes as well as start link building and viral marketing campaigns…

The problem is how do you explain to a client that SEO rarely works quickly? Results aren’t visible within hours and recent links may take a while to activate. Everyone of us working in SEO understand that clients want to see positive changes as soon as possible but next time you are getting it in the neck for not “producing the expected results” remember and pass on these details to keep their business.

Search engines take time to re-crawl sites – Authority sites that are used by millions daily won’t be troubled as much but can still take days or weeks to be crawled. Sites that are slightly lower in Google’s “have to crawl” list can take up to 4 months before all of the sites pages have been fully indexed.

Linked sites need to be crawled too! – Sites that you are linking with will need to be crawled by Google too. Unless you are linking with authority sites (in which well done!) you will have to be patient to experience the fruits of you labour.

Search engines reward patience – Google and Yahoo quickly learnt that black hat link building is often made for the short term whilst good, quality links last. This will see a links power/worth increase over time thus making your site a trustworthy one. New sites and domains suffer with trust issues especially with Google but over time you will see your links having a positive effect on your rankings.

Patience is one of the most important qualities when it comes to SEO, particularly whilst we are going through tough economic times. It is advised that you give a good 3-4 months work on a client’s site before expecting the positive results to roll in.

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.

One of the biggest parts of SEO is content creation, whether it is for your website, blog or articles. Google loves good fresh relevant content, but as we all are aware we can’t be experts on every subject. So a bit of Internet research will be required to come up with this great content. You may have heard of “duplicate content” which is the big supposed no no that will get you in trouble and / or the content ignored.  So how can we be sure the content we are posting is unique? One website we have found allows you to copy and past your article/content and it will scour the net to find if it is found somewhere else. After scanning it gives you an Plagiarism score, hopefully being low so that you know your content is unique. If you are interested in creating good unique content i suggest you check out the Plagiarism Detection System website out.

Not really SEO related, but Google have put up a site to celebrate their 10th Birthday, there is an interesting interactive timeline thats shows you the history of Google.