If so, chances are that those old pages are still indexed by the search engines (at least for a while) and so still hold value in terms of user experience and link equity.

So, rather than have a 404 error (link not found) page sitting there, add a 301 (permanent) redirect from these old pages to your new pages of similar content and the visitirs and page link values will be passed to the new page (and site).

This can easily be done through most hosting control panel’s (e.g cPanel) without the need for technical expertise.

So, us Webtistic types have made absolutely sure that we satisfy all of these factors with the launch of our new ‘SEO Client Reporting Suite‘.

All of our clients now have real-time access to a wealth of live project features including time-logs, milestones, strategy calendars, file uploads, results, progress reports, and private discussion facilities.

Clients can be involved as much, or as little as they like.

Here are a few screenies from a demo project:

Client Home Page:

Project Time-Logs:

Milestones/Tasks/Strategy Calendar:

Want to hear more about our super-dooper SEO services? Contact us.

• The meta keywords tag is not considered by Google at all
• The meta keywords tag is not considered by Bing at all
• The meta keywords tag is barely considered by Yahoo, and for categorisation purposes only
• Yahoo will be using the Bing search technology later this year so even the very marginal benefit offered by Yahoo is soon to be removed

So, best practice says add upto 10 comma-separated keyphrases in the meta keywords tag, but if you don’t it will make very little difference to your rankings.

There does, however, still seem to be some confusion about where to install a blog in relation to an existing main site.

Our advice is to add your blog as a subdirectory, e.g:

yoursite.com/blog

The reason for this is that the value of all links coming into your blog posts will benefit your main site without losing link value.

The alternative is adding your blog as a subdirectory, e.g:

blog.yoursite.com

This used to provide full link value to you main site as it was effectively classed as a separate domain, but in 2008, Google changed the way it handled subdomains which resulted in many links from subdomains not passing on full link value.

I hope this helps!

If so, read this very carefully:

Google places almost complete value on the first link from a single domain to your web page, but every consequent link from that domain to your web page is devauled massivley (if not completely).

So, remember to diversify your link sources accordingly rather than placing all of your links ‘in one basket’.

It really is one of the few things that can make or break your rankings overnight, so getting the most out of your title tag is essential.

Here are a few pointers:

• Make sure your keywords are in your title tag
• Make sure each page has a unique title tag
• Add your most important keywords as early as possible in the tag
• Cut the bloat! Remove ’stop’ words like and, for, is, are, etc. These dilute the power of your keywords.
• Use the pipe symbol (|) to separate title content

So, here is an example of a poor tag (assuming the targeted keyphrase is ‘monkey food’):

"Visit MonkeysRUs today and buy our extremely pleasant monkey food"

And here’s how it should look:

"Monkey Food | MonkeysRUs"

*Note, it is optional to use your brand name in the title (this will diliute the keyword power slightly), and this decision should be based on your own current ranking situtation.

So, without further ado, here is the first clump of immense usefulness:

Super SEO Tip #1 – Image Linking

Google uses the first link on your website if there is more than one link to any other page.

So, when you have an image link with a text link below (both linking to the same page), add a no-follow tag (rel="nofollow") to the image tag to tell Google to ignore the image link and instead use the text link to make use of its juicy anchor text.

An alternative way to achieve this is to use CSS to make sure the text link code appears before the image link code so the preferred link is used.

We run the Profitistic affiliate network, and come into contact with many merchants/advertisers who are looking to start an affiliate marketing campaign, or who are looking to expand an existing one.

They want to further their marketing reach, generate additional sales/leads, and make their brand as popular as possible, so one of the first questions we are often asked as a network is ‘how many affiliates will be promoting our website’? The answer of course, is that it very much depends on the merchant and the details of the campaign.

So, we decided to have a little office chinwag and discuss the Top 15 factors that we think dissuade affiliatese from running any particular merchants affiliate campaign.

Here are the 15 Reasons Why Your Affiliate Campaign Isn’t Attracting Affiliates:

1. Low Commission: An obvious one this, and fundamentaly the most important. If you offer a lower level of commission than that of your competitors, who do you think the affiliates are more likely to promote?

2. Poor Or Lack Of Creative Material: Affiliates are fully aware of the power of good creative. Poor creative generates low click through rates, and wastes potential earning opportunities. Also, a full suite of creative should be made available, including html (email creative) a wide range of banner sizes, text links, and any other supporting material.

3. Restrictive Terms: Affiliates use a wide range of traffic sources to drive sales/leads to merchants campaigns. Restricting promotional choice (e.g, no pay per click affiliates, no email affiliates) can severely reduce the amount of traffic being sent to a merchants website

4. Leakage: Prominent telephone numbers with strong call to actions (e.g call us now!) will serve to divert a proportion of affiliate referrals towards calling the merchant in question, rather than completing the online checkout process. This will result in lost commissions for affiliates. Experienced affiliates know this and will avoid such merchants.

5. Merchants Website Design/Usability: With affiliate marketing, conversion of traffic referrals is everything. The merchant’s website should be professional looking, and usable to maximise conversions. Poorly designed websites will see high bounce rates, and affiliate traffic will be wasted.

6. High Merchant  Pricing (sales campaigns): This ties in with conversion rates. If a merchants pricing is higher than its competitors pricing, conversion rates will be low. Experienced affiliates know to compare prices and promote the merchant with the lowest pricing.

7. Low Stock Availibility: Similar to above. Conversion rates will be low if stock levels prevent referred traffic from converting into sales.

8. Brand Reputation: Affiliates know that well known brands are often trusted by potential customers compared to lesser well known brands and so, all other things being equal, convert better. Lesser known brands have to offer ‘more’ in order to attract affiliates to them.

9. Poor Localisation: Campaigns should be localised to the target market. For example, a UK landing page should show currencies in GBP, and address details should ask for Postal Codes (not ZIP codes). Don’t mention CNN or ABC News to UK visitors because they will see that it isn’t UK-specific which can drain trust.

10. Payment History: Some merchants are more reliable on the payments front than others. Savvy affiliates will know who pays (and who doesn’t) and prioritise merchants accordingly.

11.Payment Terms: Affiliates want to be paid as quickly as possible, using the most convenient, and lowest cost payment methods. If you are offering net-90 terms, and insisting on paying using Postal Orders, it willl effect affiliate take-up.

12. Trust Of Longevity: Does your campaign have monthly sales/lead caps? Have you suspended the campaign and restared it umpteen times? If so, you may have lost the trust of potential affiliates who require campaign consistency and longevity.

13. Pre-Approval Requirements: Many merchants (especially on the larger networks) pre-approve affiliates. The problem is that some merchants take weeks (or even months) to approve affiliates and so affiliates prefer to promote instant-approval merchants who enable immediate promotion. Merchants need to ’strike while the iron is hot’.

14. Poor Campaign Descriptions: When describing their affiliate campaign, merchants should go into details about why affiliates should be running their campaign. Campaign descriptions should include all of the merchants unique selling points, and anything else that sets them aside from the competition.

15. Lack Of Niche Marketing Materials: Many affiliates require specific marketing resources to enable promotion. These may include data feeds, voucher codes, content units, and anything else a merchant can think of to increase accessibility.

We think this is a decent list of the main factors, but please feel free to add anything we have missed!

Anyway, every Thurday, they would meet up for a chilled glass of Veuve Clicquot and discuss how well their websites were ranking on the search engines. It seemed that both were struggling to make progress but they had heard that swapping links to each others website would place both websites in better standing with ‘The Big G’ (no, not that one!) and the websites would both enjoy higher rankings.

Indeed, after a few weeks, both websites were performing much better, and so they also swapped links with their buddies, and soon enough, Adam, Eve, David, Abraham, Moses, Samson, Delilah and Tom Jones were all happily swapping links and dominating the search engines.

The problem though, was  that ‘The Big G’ was looking down on them and realised that the websites with unique, fresh, and valuable content were suffering in the rankings due to not being a part of a link exchange scheme. You could have the most valuable website on the internet, but these ‘lower-value’, websites would conquer all.

Something had to be done, and it was. All ’straight’ link exchanges were devalued massively and a positive emphasis placed on ‘natural’ reciprocal (two-way) linking. So, in other words, Adam and Eve’s links to each others websites became worth very much less in the eyes of ‘The Big G’, and these links only passed ANY value if they were a very small percentage of a much larger link profile.

However, ‘The Big G’ also recognised that links between 2 websites that linked to each other over time as a result of qualifying their content were seen to be natural and non-engineered and were subsequently not considered to be a delberate attempt to manipulate search engine rankings. These links were considered to be ‘valid’ and would pass on ‘trust’ and ‘authority’.

So, to summarise… if you are a plumber in Birmingham, and you deliberately swap links with a plumber in Newcastle, then you can guarantee that those links are of minute value (at best), especially if all you have coming into your website are reciprocal links.

But if you are a plumber in Birmingham writing a blog post about the new plumbing technique devised by this new upstart Newcastle plumber, and, 5 weeks later, the Newcastle plumber, as a means of qualifying his content, recommends a blog post written by the Birmingham plumber, then that would probably be seen to be ‘natural’ and link value would be passed.

As usual, the boundaries aren’t defined, so the way to look at it is this… if Mr Google Quality Engineer visits both sites and manually checks the links, would they appear natural? If so, you have nothing to worry about.

I have a couple of good friends over at Latitude including one who has ‘forced’ me to consume too much alcohol on more than one occasion and so I just hope that their jobs are safe. It seems that Vitruvian, its private equity owner have already negotiated a pre-packaged buy-back of the positive assets, so I doubt little will change in real terms, but I thought it very interesting nevertheless.

I would imagine that the new sleeker (and less debt-burden) Latitude will continue to be a force, but it goes to show that being a small company (4 people and 2 dachshunds), as we are, is not always a bad thing.

Moving on, I thought I would see, in this world of brand protection, how Google’s new turbo-charged news feeds would see it, and only one word can describe it….OUCH!

As you can see, when you enter the brand term ‘Latitude’ the first position on the Google SERPS is broadcasting to the world (courtesy of the Telegraph) how they have gone bust! For a massive SEO company, there is an irony there, and not a particularly pleasant one.

Couple that with the fantastic news (via the Adwords ad) that Latitude have recenty announced funding to ‘accelerate growth’ and you can see what a calamity looks like!

Anyway, enough on this. I hope the guys over there sort this out, and that as many jobs as possible can be saved.