It is time to get rid of all those heavy graphics, flash, and unnecessary videos. It’s not like the advice about speed hasn’t been given before but previously the main reason was for better user experience (Who likes waiting for a page to load anyway?). This time though (for those who didn’t listen before…) there is another reason why you should make sure that your web pages load really fast – it is one of the factors Google looks at when ranking pages.

Google has confirmed that they use speed in web search ranking, however, they also emphasize that it is NOT one of the major factors in SEO. According to Matt Cutts it is the good old SEO factors like “relevance, topicality, reputation, [and] value-add” that carries the most weight. In fact, Google claims that right now less than 1% of queries are affected by site speed. Despite this fact it is still a good idea to of course optimize your site’s speed, after all with SEO we all know that every bit counts. In the end, it definitely won’t hurt because it’ll do your SEO good and will surely make your visitors happier with the experience.

As for those that have fast-loading sites already then the bright side is that you have one less thing do, which means you can focus on your reputation and link building and of course come up with even better content.

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Phil Muncaster reported recently in V3.co.uk that hackers will be using Harry Potter to distribute malware. Harry Potter himself won’t be waving his magic wand anytime soon to harm anyone’s PC (He’s the good guy! Come on!) but what the hackers will be doing is simply distribute malware by attaching them to bogus sites advertised as pages where one can download the upcoming movie “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” even before it is released. Black hat SEO will be playing an important part in their scheme because they will be optimizing these sites in order to rank well so as to get the fans that just can’t wait for the movie to come out.

Right now though with the would be victims on the path to unauthorized sneek peaks I can’t imagine the Harry Potter guys trying to do anything about the it. After all word of the malware distribution might even help quell illegal early distribution of the movie.

Aside from the Harry Potter movie, Rik Ferguson, senior security adviser at security vendor Trend Micro, is reported to have said that he also expects black hat SEOs to use the Michael Jackson tragedy to do harm and profit.

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If you’ll be somewhere in the Washington area on August 24 and 25 make sure you sign up for SEOmoz’s PRO Training Series 2009 immediately. SEOmoz’s training seminars get sold out really quick so you’d better decide quickly. This is one of the seminars that will actually help you learn something useful about SEO providing value other than networking. Seminar’s limited to 220 participants only.
The good thing though is if you’re too far away or found out too late you can still get the knowledge they’ll be sharing on the seminar via the SEOmoz PRO Training Seminar 2009: Tips, Tricks & Tactics DVD, which is already available for pre-order.

Stuff you’ll learn in the seminar include:

* Content Creation
* Site Architecture
* Linkbuilding
* Keyword Research
* Social Media Marketing
* Conversion Rate Optimization
* Competitive Intelligence
* Vertical Search
* Search Engine Penalties & Guidelines

There will also be elective courses.

Those in Europe will have to wait till October for SEOmoz to go to London to hold another seminar there. Speakers will differ for the two seminars but Rand Fishkin will be present in both seminars.

Price will be $899 per person. SEOmoz PRO members of course can get in at a discounted rate of $599. The seminar DVD can be bought for $249.

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I have not used Internet Explorer for quite a while now. Ever since I tried Mozilla Firefox, I was hooked. I did try out Safari and Google Chrome – and still use them sometimes – but never IE. I can’t overlook the fact that there are still countless people out there who use IE, though, and when working on web sites or blogs, those users cannot be discounted.

There is some news with regard to SEO and the new version of the Internet Explorer, IE8. Andrew Girdwood has this to say about the matter:

Popular search engine optimisation and internet marketing blogs look set to prove that they practise what they preach by boasting designs that hold up well in the forthcoming Internet Explorer 8.

It is the new ‘Suggested Sites’ feature that is most likely to upset these stalwart bloggers as Microsoft’s technology offers to take readers straight to competing blogs or, in some cases, unfamiliar download sites.

In his article, he highlights some of the most prolific blogs on SEO and search and points out things about their design that may be affected by IE8. You might want to take a closer look at those points in his article, especially if you have picked up a design idea or two from any of those blogs he talks about.

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Search engine optimization has reached new heights in the past year. Suddenly, everybody and their mom are interested in engaging in SEO in order to make their web sites more visible. Not everyone knows even the basic SEO practices and not everyone wants to spend some time on them. That is why there are many SEO companies making a killing in this niche. However, you should know that not everyone who claims to be an SEO expert is for real. In fact, I just read the results of a research conducted by an SEO firm, Increase Visibility, which shed light on some of the common SEO scams being run today.

I am hoping that you have not been victimized by any of these but to be on the safe side, here are some of the major warning signs that they have pinpointed:

• Emails guaranteeing number #1 Google rankings.
• Offering guaranteed rankings for a very small fee.
• Achieving a #1 ranking for a unique, very long search term. The very long search term has no search volume. This practice is a scam.
• Guaranteeing a #1 search engine ranking by purchasing it with Google Adwords or pay per click advertising. The Adwords might show up on the top of the search page or in the sponsored link section in the right column. However, the majority of searchers use the organic search results located in the left column.
• Offering to submit a website to a vast number of search engines for a small payment (this strategy simply fails).
• Not having a legitimate website or they own an amateurish site.
• Offering to submit a website to over a thousand important directories, however there are only a small number of directories that bring traffic to websites.

My suggestion is for you to start learning about the basics of SEO yourself. You can build on this in the future and actually be your own SEO person OR you can use your basic knowledge to hire legitimate and knowledgeable SEO professionals.

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During hard economic times – like the one we are in right now – many things are cut off from people’s budgets. Personal expenses are drastically cut down. Business expenses are not exempt as well. Somehow, people find ways and means by which to lessen spending in order to weather the financial storm. Peripheral spending and nonessential expenses are usually the first to go.

If you are thinking of cutting off your SEO expenses because of the credit crunch, you might want to think again. Ephipany Solutions explains the situation:

Firms should not cut back on search engine optimisation (SEO) spending because of the credit crunch, it has been argued.

Daniel Robinson of Vizcom Design Limited suggested that SEO strategies can play an important part in the success of a business and claimed that such marketing strategies can help firms to stand out in the marketplace.

Indeed, this is particularly imperative during times of economic difficulty, he remarked.

The spokesman said: “Marketing and SEO can be key to helping some businesses to differentiate themselves from their competitors during a recession and win vital work to keep them going or even grow.”

I see the sense in what he is saying. There are peripherals that may not help you keep afloat but SEO just might do the trick in these hard times.

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This post is for bloggers out there who are using Wordpress. You would all know that there is a proliferation of plugins available for this blogging platform. Some of them are quite useful and fun while others may not be necessary. Here is one plugin that you would surely be interested in – the new Disqus comments feature.

What is it all about and what does it have to offer Wordpress users? The Download Squad has a pretty good write up:

Disqus offers web publishers the ability to spruce up their comments sections with advanced features including threaded comments, avatars, and ratings. Perhaps the most significant advantage Disqus offers over the default Blogger, Wordpress, TypePad or Moveable Type comments features is the fact that users can sign up for one Disqus account and leave comments on thousands of blogs and web sites.

There’s just one problem (for web publishers): Up until now, user comments were stored on Disqus servers, not on your web page. That means search engines didn’t notice any information left in comments on your site, which could hurt your page rank. Today, Disqus took the first step to address this shortcoming with a new Wordpress plugin.

The second paragraph is the key to it all – what the plugin does is allow the comments to be seen by Google and all the other search engines out there. This is all good news for bloggers who pay close attention to SEO. The original plugin also works for Blogger but I don’t know if the updated one does. Anyone know?

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Calm down – I know your heart is probably pounding like crazy right now, especially if you are working on your own blog which focuses on SEO. I felt the same way when I started reading Lee Odden’s post about Wordpress labeling SEO blogs as “banned .” Reading on, however, it was made clear that Wordpress is pertaining to blogs which are search engine optimized in a “bad” way and not blogs which talk about SEO – much like this blog.

These are the blogs which Wordpress specifically bans:

• Scraper blogs: Blogs that take content from other blogs and re-publish it without permission (this is sometimes called scraping). If a blog contains all or mostly stolen and unoriginal content, it’s gone!
• SEO blogs: Blogs that are written for search engines instead of humans. These blogs are dedicated to trying to fool Google and other search engines into ranking them highly. WordPress.com is not meant for this type of activity.
• Affiliate marketing blogs: Blogs with the primary purpose of driving traffic to affiliate programs and get-rich-quick schemes (”Make six figures from home!!”, “20 easy steps to top profits!!”, etc). To be clear, examples like people writing original book or movie reviews and linking them to Amazon, or people linking to their own products on Etsy do NOT fall into this category.
• Warez blogs: Blogs that promote pirated copies of ebooks, software packages, music, movies, games, etc.

I suppose that Wordpress could word the classification tags in a more specific way so as to avoid confusion and reactions like I felt when I first read the post. Still, we should not overreact as we know very well that blogs such as this one do not fall under any of these categories.

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For many people, it used to be that Flickr was perfect for SEO purposes. However, when Flickr suddenly made use of nofollow tags to comments and picture captions, it seemed that the bomb dropped on these people. Naturally, negative reactions erupted all over the web because of this action – which took place around last week, by the way. If you have not heard of this, don’t get immediately swayed by the prevailing opinion – that Flickr is now useless for SEO. I ran across a post on this issue, which provided me with a better perspective of the whole she-bang. Will Paoletto at BigOak Blog shares:

1.) Flickr has not added nofollow to discussion boards. For those of you who liked to scout out high PageRank pages and just drop your link as a comment to the photo, which could be accomplished easily if you owned a link-laundering website, you can still do this in the Flickr group discussion boards. Flickr has not yet added nofollow tags to those, and given the preponderance of discussions that revolve around people sharing photos, you can just as easily drop relevant external links in the discussion and reap link juice benefits.

2.) Flickr has not added nofollow to personal profile pages. If you have a personal profile page, you can place targeted anchor text on it, point links at it, and receive full SEO benefit as it gains PageRank.

3.) Flickr has not added nofollow to group pages. If you own a Flickr group, you can still put as many links as you wish on the main group page without fear of them being turned into nofollow.

So there you go – you still have three areas wherein you can work your SEO magic. What do you think?

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And I thought that many SEO experts were leaning towards keeping silent about their expertise! (Remember my post on silence being the key?) Well, if I were to judge by the actions of Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, I would say that there are SEO experts out there who would like nothing more than to help people out in their quest to learn more about SEO techniques.

He came up with a plug-in for Wordpress that would display SEO tips. The whole idea stemmed from the default plug-in “Hello Dolly.” I am sure Wordpress users know about this – every time you log in to your Wordpress account, you will see random phrases from the lyrics of the song “Hello Dolly.” Van Zanten decided to play around with it and have it display SEO tips instead – much more useful, I should say.

So how did he come up with the SEO tips? He sent out an appeal to everyone to send in their SEO tips and, according to him, within 30 minutes, he was able to receive hundreds of SEO tips from other SEO experts! Talk about selfless sharing here, huh? These contributors even went as far as to help Van Zanten collect and fine tune the submitted tips. Now, with the plug-in anyone can view the tips anytime they want on their very own blog.

The best thing is that the plug-in is for free! You only have to download the plug-in from Van Zanten’s blog and you are good to go.

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