With all this talk of the American economy dwindling in the balance, I couldn’t help but ask this question. The wheels look well and truly set to come off of the American bandwagon, with elections looming and a result either way evident to create some degree of separation adn division in American society, it worries me how this will effect the seo industry.

Okay, this is something that I have just seen again, and its the final straw with me, I have to write a post on it! I really can not understand why Google (or other search engines) continued to rank website which have domains such as:

please-rank-my-site.com
online-poker-cheats-and-codes.mv
gambling-tips-and-tricks-blue-square-bonuses.uk.org
search-engine-optimization-spain-coumbia-canada-washington-afganistan.org.uk

I read on the CNET News blog this morning that Google.org are now investing in Twitter and Facebook in an effort to aid the Innovative Support to Emergencies, Diseases and Disaster (InSTEDD) organisation.

In a previous post (see Twitter, a fantastic waste of time) I suggested that Osama and pals might use the technology to aid their differences against our American bretheren, or perhaps 'Twittter consoles' might be used for tactical precision strikes on the caves in the Tora Bora mountains, so it's nice that someone has thought of a much more pleasant and socially positive use for the technology!

I had to laugh... my business partner Allan sent me a link to a search forum he was busily posting away on the other day. On the forum there was a guy (who shall remain nameless because I don't want to give him any credit at all for anything) who was insisting that we knew nothing about search engine optimisation because Allan was asking questions on the forum about on-page optimisation! The guy went on to talk a total load of crap!

I got a call this morning from a nice chap who informed me that he was building a shiny new site for a customer that had cost £XXX thousands, and he has now been commissioned to find someone to do the search engine optimisation...

I had a look at this shiny new site to give him an estimate on how much it would be to pick his work apart and do it properly for the search engines only to find out that it was all controlled by a custom content management system and would therefore be a total nightmare to alter to make it search engine spider (and for that matter 'all browser' ) friendly, as the site was built to use all manner of Internerd Exploder addons (insert version number here) which don't work in Firefox or any other browser.

How annoying is it when you spend a good two hours writing a new post about something which you think is brilliant and then the evil scrapper robots out there scrape your site straight away and have your content ranking higher on their site than on yours!

In order to optimise a small site the diligent seo must pay attention to many issues both on and off page. Whilst this is a reasonably specialised skill its not rocket science. seo is not a black box of tricks and spells, its really quite simple stuff, and most people who read a lot will easily pick up the basics. So why is it some of us are more highly regarded, dare I say it more highly paid? Personally I think one area that takes a lot of experience is the ability to optimize and get high rankings in Dynamic sites.

Now this has always, since day 1, been a really good directory to get your site up the rankings. Recently of course the guys over at Best Of The Web have done a great job of improving the look, feel and usability of their site which has helped to gained them a very high PR7 ranked website. In addition to this they have also launched their blog directory which is both a good place to list your blog and a fantastic resource. Link below: