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?)

Just a little experiment here at South West SEO it see if two of our social bookmarking profiles will get indexed by Google and be of any use to us at all!

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.

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.

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.

We are members of the awesome SEOmoz and regularly read the blog posts they put up. One of the newer ones is about how high street retailers don’t bother with SEO and prefer ppc over organic results. Read the article here. Can you think of any major retailers that do badly in the organic results or ones who do outstanding?

A nice example is Currys vs Comet and their “Washing Machine” Pages

In the Red Corner is Currys with their URL:http://www.currys.co.uk/martprd/store/cur_page.jsp?BV_SessionID=@@@@0738042494.1222078553@@@@&BV_EngineID=ccekadefejmhgddcflgceggdhhmdgmi.0&page=ProductList&category_oid=-30549&fm=4&sm=0&tm=0&show_all=true
and in the blue corner is Comet and their URL:
http://www.comet.co.uk/shopcomet/category/49/Washing-Machines

Who will win the battle and appear in the top 10 of google for “washing machine”? Place your bets and click here to find out