Included at the bottom of this post is a special discount offer code. More information…

I am asked all the time questions like ;

"How can we get more visitors from search engines like Google™?"

To which I normally exhale and say my normal response of;

"Well, it depends on why you want more visitors! I guess you're really asking for more buyers from Google™ aren't you?"

Most of the time, the person asking the question looks at me kind of funny and says, "I thought you are an Internet Marketing guy, not a shrink!" I guess I have to expect such reactions when answering a question with a question!

Anyhow, there isn't a single, simple answer to the question, because it is about the purpose and function of the online material. Ok, hold the phone, what the hell is Online Material? Well, this can be a commercial website, blog, Facebook page/group, Twitter page, Linked-In profile, YouTube video etc, etc. So for the purposes of this post, let's just call it a website or blog.

So now we want to look at the words "more visitors" a little closer. If you sell Fridge Freezers and other kitchen white goods, I'm guessing having 100% more visitors from the student demographic is not really what you're looking for! What you want are more relevant visitors. So you really want people who are in your marketplace and interested in what you have to sell or discuss.

Funnily enough, this is exactly what search engines like Google™ want to do also! So your both singing from the same hymn sheet, your ships are sailing in the same direction, you're both speaking the same language! Google™ wants to send relevant visitors to you, and you want more relevant visitors. A match made in heaven!

However, communication with Google™ is a little different to explaining something to a customer in person or online. After all, Google™ is software at the end of the day, very smart software, but its computer code and doesn't interpret nuances or inflection in speech or the written word. It certainly doesn't understand images or cool looking animations and definitely doesn't get catchy or friendly titles.

If you are looking for a quick win, e.g. sales straight away, you should be looking in the arena of Pay-Per-Click or affiliate marketing. Having said this, promoting your website and/or blog through the natural organic listings in search engines (the free ones), is and should be the ultimate goal of any and every website owner.

In order to improve your position in the natural listings you need to play the game with Google™ and communicate effectively with it. At the same time, you mustn't forget your real target audience is still human, they want and need to be able to find the information quickly, they also don't want to crawl through pages and pages of text, just to get to the point. Hmmm, maybe I should shorten this post!

So, a few points to consider are below, but if you want more in-depth knowledge and understanding why not take advantage of our 10% discount promotional code available on our Understanding Search Engines DVD. The discount code makes it a steal at just over £35.00 including worldwide shipping. Users of the DVD have found that they received 30% more visitors from Google™ after using the training DVD! More information…

Things to look at and think about on your website;

• Webpage copy includes the keywords people are using in search engines regularly. (Finding the best keywords to use is discussed & demonstrated on the DVD)
• Each webpage has unique meta page titles and descriptions, uses well structured images, links & headings (The DVD explains this fully)
• Each webpage has a unique and specific purpose. If this is not possible each separate section of the webpage is clearly broken up with headings indicating the purpose and information found underneath. (Examples of this are provided for on the DVD)
• You publish your website or blog to search engines regularly through Xml Sitemaps and other publication methods such as directories & postings. (Examples of search engine publishing is both discussed and demonstrated on the DVD)
• You seek out related and relevant websites and blogs to create link partnerships with, in order to make your webpages popular in search engines eyes. (The DVD demonstrates the process of finding possible link partners and also discusses contact and communication strategies)

The list goes on! So if you are looking to improve your position and visibility in the natural listings of search engines, start by using the Understanding Search Engines DVD as a kick start.

Have you ever added a comment on somebody's blog, just to find it removed or never pass the authors screening?

Most bloggers want to see comments on their posts, but they want to see related ones. We spend a while each day clearing the deluge of bogus and automated comments in a hope, an almost desperate hope, that one may be serious.

The fact is many Internet Marketers see blogs as being a quick and easy way of growing links to there own blogs and websites. However, most blogs instruct search engines not to follow comment links (see our post on no-follow mechanics). So they are, to a certain extent, wasting their time.

Having said this, adding related and relevant comments helps you build rapport with the author and over time you may be able to leverage the relationship to your advantage. Perhaps the blogger may post some information about you or your company, they may consider you when carrying out other day-to-day business activity. You can look at the comments section of a blog as an opportunity to network.   

So here are some guidelines;

1. Always read the article first!
2. Always read the article first! (No, this is not a mistake, we want to be sure you get what we're saying here.)
3. OK, now that you have read the article, think about what interested you about it and make some notes. Did you agree or disagree with the post? Do you have any thoughts that may extend or improve the information within the post?
4. Now write a sentence or short paragraph about your thoughts. Don't just compliment the author on how great she is, that's just annoying!
5. Use your name in your comment, not your company name or the keywords you want to be known for. This is a sure fore way of getting your comments deleted really quickly.
6. Always use your real email address. Most blogs don’t publish your email address, and using free Gmail and Hotmail email addresses is sure to make the author think very carefully about keeping your post active or not.

Learning computer skills is a gradual process. It can often take an individual a few repeated attempts to make tasks second nature.

Traditionally businesses would send their staff on day courses to learn the skills they need, however, most of the time the people being taught only need to learn the things they either struggle with or need to know for the job. It's therefore, often, a waste of time and money as the learner has to sit through a significant portion of training material they are already aware of or have no need to know.

It would be better if training could be done in a similar way to a doctor diagnosing and treating a patient. Targeting the gaps in people’s knowledge and filling them, is proving the most efficient way to keep your workforce up to speed and productive at the lowest cost possible.

Shelley Fishel, managing director, of The Training Surgery has developed just the medication businesses of all sizes require. Typical sessions are one-to-one or in pairs and rather than having a rigid format, the trainer concentrates on the areas the learner(s) needs help with. The outcome is less time training, therefore reducing cost but with massive increases in productivity.

Training can be done on all Microsoft Office products, on PC's or MAC's. Of course all the training can be delivered as a standard full or half day course too.

Organisations that have worked with The Training Surgery find their staff productivity increases by an average of 2.5 hours per person per week, a significant saving of time that can be better spent on brining in more clients or generating more sales.

Social media is everywhere you look. Not just online but in the papers, yes even the broadsheets, television, radio and mobile phones, it's just everywhere!

The question is how are large national and international businesses engaging in this arena and how are they managing the communication?

Well, there are a few methods, dispersed services and applications available such as KickApps, Sparta, Small World Labs, but move over KickApps, Comment Technologies truly Kicks Ass!

So Comment Technologies is the new kid on the block, but rather than just being a platform, it's a social marketing one stop service.

All of the other platforms are just that, platforms! They are something you need to learn, adapt and manage. This means slow lead times to launch, increased workforce and a very steep executive management learning curve.

Comment removes all of these adoption issues by providing a full end to end service of implementation, data migration and management. Meaning that any company can have there social media solution in place extremely quickly without resource constraints. Furthermore, while executive management and marketing departments are getting up to speed community engagement, growth and moderation can all be managed by the full range of Comment Technologies services.

However, it doesn't stop there! Where other platforms either focus on just building communities and/or selling advertising space, Comment provides a cutting edge back end reporting and analysis service comparable to best of breed Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems.

So you want to target a new product launch in the central states of North America, focusing on married women aged 20 to 35, no problem. The information is available at a touch of a button.

Along with such powerful reporting and export features comes enterprise quality slice and dice import facilities. Got your customers in SAP or JDE? Hey no problem, import and synchronisation are a breeze.       

We feel the real value of Comment is not just its top grade, financial services quality, infrastructure but the services that can be bolted on to enable the business to adopt quickly and integrate into its day to day activity gradually.

If you are looking at social media as a marketing strategy and would like to know more, feel free to fire us over an email or connect with us on Linked-In, Twitter or Facebook.

So you have created your marketing video and now want to promote it, well, everywhere!

YouTube is an obvious start, perhaps Bebo and the countless other video hosting websites and networks around. Eventually you’ll also add your video to Facebook, but in our view, Facebook should be the first place you go.

Facebook has a powerful tagging feature which allows you to associate your video post with your friends names. When you do this, your video will become visible to those peoples friends also. This means more exposure to people you don’t even know!

However, you can only tag friends of yours, in other words people whom have agreed to share their information with you.

So if video marketing is something your thinking about, try to do the following first;

1. Look for friends that are in a similar profession to you and mix in the circles of your target audience
2. Check out how many friends they have, you’re looking for people whom are active on Facebook and have upwards of 500 friends. 500 friends equates to approximate exposure of around 1,500 other people. This is calculated assuming a minimum of 3 unique friends per connection. (Drop me a comment if you want me to expand on this.)
3. Request to become friends with them, if you don’t know them, you may want to find out something about them first which you can use as an introduction. For example, see if they are on Twitter, mention them in a tweet, follow them there and then send a Facebook friendship request saying that you liked their Twitter page. Compliments get you everywhere!

Now in the production of your video, try to find a way of incorporating these people into the video in some way. If you find it tough, don’t stress, that’s what the credits at the end of the movie are for, simply add a list titled “Thanks to;” to the end of the video.

Don’t abuse it! If someone feels like you are piggybacking too much they may well kick up a stick with Facebook and you could get yourself cut off. Think carefully and strategically, and this system will work well for you.

Last week we launched our new Internet Marketing Affiliate scheme. The program provides Internet & Marketing professional a way of increasing revenue without additional cost or risks. It also provides business people with connections to these groups of companies and professionals with a way of earning revenue through a multi-tiered payments. We have created a short video which describes the scheme and an example of the payment tiers.

With so many different ways to market our companies, services and products online nowadays it's often difficult to know which we should spend the most time on.

It would be nice if we had a framework, a guiding tool, to help us decide which way is best.

A very easy way to start to define your online marketing strategy is to follow our framework guidelines. We call this the Internet Marketing Landscape and at this stage it covers content only. i.e it does not cover advertising such as pay-per-click, banners or search marketing such as SEO etc.

The landscape starts with 4 main dimensions;

1. Conversations
2. Profiles
3. Sales
4. Support

You can think of these dimensions as quadrants of the bigger picture. Our aim is to slot our online marketing activities into 1 or more of these, the more dimensions they hit, the more valuable they are.

Let's take a commercial website as an example. This is certainly part of the sales dimension but it's only a one way communication channel so it doesn't sit in support or conversions, just sales and profile. How about our linked-in account? Well this sits in profile and possibly, a little bit, in conversations but not support or sales.

Our blog crosses all dimensions, it has the ability to sell, support, encourage conversations through comments and also provide profile information. In actual fact blogs, if used well, are one of the strongest components of the landscape. What about Twitter? Well again it's a great conversation platform, it can also be used for support but we aren't using it for this.

Most businesses will use many different online strategies and systems, some may use Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn and others won't use any of these. The ways in which these systems are used are also quite different so it's important that you map your own businesses onto the landscape.

Once you're done, you should look for the items which cross the most dimensions. In our example above, our blog is the strongest. So we should look to publish content to it as frequently as possible, next is our website, so again we should look at updating the content on our website on a regular basis.

However, this is not to say that you should neglect things like eBay or Amazon, which produce sales. The landscape is more about allocation of resource for updates, so that you can divide your online marketing time and budget accordingly.

It seams like everywhere you look online nowadays, all you find are widgets!

So you may well ask "What the hell's a widget?"

Above is dictionary.com interpretation of the word, but in the realm of social media its idea is, well, anything really! Sites like Facebook, Twitter, Linked-in and Google all provide widgets of one sort or another.

Most of the time a widget is a small component of a web page. It's a piece of code developed by one company/website which is then run on many other websites in a hope to allow visitors to connect easier. For example, on our blog you’ll find 2 widgets we are using, one of them is a Twitter re-tweet button and the other is a Facebook share button.

These work in much the same way as most social media widgets work, they are small HTML & Javascript snippets of code your web designer can simply drop onto your pages and off you go. You're using a widget!

However, the plethora of widgets available just seams to be a little overwhelming and in many cases completely useless and unnecessary. I can imagine in many companies trying to tap into the social media market, the directors sit around a table together with the designers and developers and they say "We have to make it different and stand out in the crowd, any ideas?" to which some bright spark says, "I know, lets create a widget!"

I may sound a little negative here, but I’m trying not to be, honest. Just create widgets with purpose! So I have listed a few of our favourites below, please feel free to comment and let us know yours also.

Re-Tweet Button: http://tweetmeme.com
Facebook Share: http://facebook.com & http://www.fbshare.me
Social Networking Components by Google Friends Connect http://www.google.com/friendconnect
RSS & ATOM Feeds: http://feedburner.google.com
Gravatars (Used in blog comments etc.) http://en.gravatar.com 

Earn passive income by promoting and referring new business to us.

This is a free to join affiliate program, promoting our Internet Marketing Training, Tools and Services.

How much can you earn?

This is really down to you, the commission structure is simple. It runs between 15% and 40% for sales directly made which originate from you and, if you would rather a quite life, 5% from sales produced by other partners you introduce to us.

For business generated by you in any given month we will pay the following commission rates;

If you have introduced a partner to us also, they will be paid the commissions above and you will receive 5%. It’s that simple!

It’s not difficult, it won’t take up your time and you can earn from it!

It isn’t difficult nor will it consume your time or detract your attention from your day-to-day activity. Implementing our affiliate scheme can be as simple as adding a link to your website or blog. Or, you can choose to spend a little more time and send out an email to your contacts or even discuss our products and services through your favourite networking sites such as Linked-In, Twitter, Facebook or perhaps you can write a review on your blog or newsletter. It’s entirely up to you!

Our system has a video tutorial, some online “Getting Started” guides and we are always at the end of the phone or email if you want some ideas or guidance.

I’m a people person, how can I get involved?

I guess by this you mean that you generally meet with people all day long and your referrals are normally done in an exchange of telephone numbers. No problem, you can email links to your contacts instead of just reading out our telephone number. Our system will provide you with your unique affiliate link and that’s what you use in your email.

What if my referred visitor doesn’t buy straight away?

You still get paid, this is covered in our frequently asked questions, so I won’t elaborate here. It’s suffice to say that we use a number of techniques to track visitors and once a visitor is recorded as coming from you, you own them and will be paid if and when they should buy anything from us.

So what do I do now?

The first thing you need to do is enrol, but don’t delay, we are offering to credit your account with a welcome £10.00 for a limited time only, so don’t loose out, signup now.

Please remember, don’t delay and make sure you benefit from the £10.00 credit today and also feel free to call or email me if you have any questions.

We are looking forward to paying you oodles!

Signup Link: http://affiliate.beginning-internet-marketing.com/affiliates/signup.php
FAQ Link: http://affiliate.beginning-internet-marketing.com/affiliates/faq.php

Like me, I’m sure you’re tired of seeing the same old junk SPAM online about some get rich quick schemes. This SPAM seams to be everywhere, Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, email, just everywhere. You click a link and up come some guys sitting on a beach and they tell you that they earn $100,000 per month and all they do is sit on their rear ends all day. If only life were that simple?

We all know these are scams, they are just an Internet spin on an old, and in many countries illegal, practise called Pyramid Selling. It’s a real shame that this is happening as the actual channel of affiliate marketing is fast becoming one of the main driving forces behind online commerce.

In fact in 2007 sales generated by affiliates grew by an estimated 45% on the previous year which attributed £3 billion^* to the affiliate marketing channel. The amount of growth slowed in 2008, which we feel is down to the financial situation we have all experienced, but revenue remained the same.

So, if you are thinking of jumping in to a reputable affiliate program, think in terms of an online business which requires work to get yourself on that beach, but there is a pie, currently larger than £3 billion which you can take a slice from!

Today we have launched our own free to join affiliate program, which begins by selling Internet Marketing training material but will extend to Internet marketing tools and services in the very near future. Plus, for a limited time only, we are paying new sign-ups of our affiliate program £10.00 for just signing up.

You can read more about our free affiliate marketing program on our affiliate partner site.

* The eConsultancy Affiliate Marketing Merchants Report 2007

You've probably seen it on the end or beginning of a Twitter tweet, it normally looks something like "#FF @BeginInterMktg", but what does it mean?

Well, #FF stands for Follow Friday and the hashtag (#) is a Twitter search feature which allows users to group information into a category of some kind. Try a search for #FF here. OK, I know that hasn't really answered the question, so what does Follow Friday mean?

People, especially marketers, want to grow their followers. #FF is a way to recommend others to follow them. In doing this, you can also grow your followers because of a kind of mutual gratitude.

Here's how it works:

You identify people you follow and decide to recommend them. You obviously can decide who to recommend yourself, that part's up to you. You may like someone's tweets and find them useful, so you want to share them, they may have previously re-tweeted one of your tweets, or they may have already recommended you, the choice is yours.

Next, pull up Twitter and start an update as follows:

#FF @UserName1 @UserName2

Where you replace @UserName1 and 2 with the users you want to recommend, but don't forget the @ sign in front of their user names.

Hit the 'Update' button and your done. Now make a note of your current follower numbers, you should see it increase over the next few hours.

The reason your followers are likely to increase is because anyone watching the #FF stream may well follow the people your recommending but are also highly likely to follow the people doing the recommending.

It's that simple, so don't delay, get Following on Fridays, and then have a great weekend.

The Google Wave is gathering momentum and the beta testers are having quite a ride. The question is what and how can the Wave be leveraged by business users? Firstly take a look at this superb video which contains strong language but does demonstrate the Waves amazing functionality of the search mega giants embrace of social media.

Wow, the system is a fully integrated media extravaganza, with the ability to pull in images, movies, sound clips, background tracks and multiple format text. The user can start multiple waves (conversations) and select participants by their wave avatar (image or photo) and then start collaborating.

The end result is a single platform which looks like it can be used by business, not only for marketing, but customer support, project management, quick internal and external conversations, the list just goes on.

Many dispersed workforces have been using chat-room technology to connect quickly for quite sometime, but the interactivity is normally limited to some text and a smiley :o). Recently with Facebook and Twitter, some have started to use these slightly richer platforms to perform the same tasks. However, the very real and rich components of The Wave may well be so compelling that business once again migrates to the better platform.

From a marketing perspective, the Wave will need to encourage the same mass buy-in as Facebook and Twitter. Googles Friend Connect hasn't yet hit the big time but we are sure The Wave is going to hit much harder.

On the 16th to 17th October 2009 the Internet saw a new trending topic. Promoted by Social Media Marketing of Atlanta GA. People were told far and wide to post to Twitter, Facebook and on their own blogs the hashtag #beatcancer.

Superb sentiment and with 209,771 recorded posts, a superb result, which is now being proclaimed a world record. Twitters' search of the hashtag reported that eBay/Paypal and MillerCoors would be donating 1 US cent for every recorded hit. Well as far as we can tell, all three companies could afford to bump that up to a nice square dollar, but hey, I'm not one for spending other people's money!

So what now? Although the intention in this case was obviously sincere, what's going to happen next? There's enough SPAM on Twitter as it is, all we need now is a bunch of copycat marketers "Trying to beat the world record". Suddenly you're being asked to tweet #abcelectrics because they want to hit the 300,000 recorded mentions.

I know it's grumpy and perhaps a bit sceptical, but I just hope we don't see an overuse of this strategy, at least, save them for the really important things.

Having said that we got involved with our partner iPhone App iCamWait which donates 10% of pre-tax profits to a number of charities one of which is the World Cancer Research Fund. So at least we can say we did our bit, however #abcelectrics? Well Goodluck if you do try I guess!

On the 15th October we wrote about corporate management of social media. The article was titled "Manage the conversation with Comment" which introduces a new platform for larger organisations to engage their audience through social media.

The article also demonstrates the key issues which face corporate business where social media is concerned. We feel that these issues are extremely compelling and certainly pose a very real challenge.

The key concepts which we are sure are keeping many marketers up at night are the ways social media can be used to promote products/services and brand along with crisis and negative feedback management.

It's the crisis and negative feedback management which poses the real threat. Flare-ups of negative attitude and posts occur within the Twitter time-line stream, as an example, on a daily basis. Just a few weeks ago, a major mobile telephone network had significant outages and their brand name made it to the top of the Trending Topics (TT). That may seam like good news for some in the marketing department, until they actually looked at the posts from disgruntled, upset and downright annoyed customers. So how can such organisations manage such criticism?

Social Media is real-time, business doesn't have a 24 or 48 hour window of opportunity to devise a response and react to negative reports in newspapers, television and radio reports. If it's happening now on social networks, it needs to be addressed now!

The key to tackling this very real and growing problem is to take more control.

Companies can attempt to engage their customers and prospective customers on their own turf and setup networks of their own. In order to do this they need to build solutions which they can integrate into there own Internet Marketing Landscape. This is where we feel Comment Technologies can help greatly. Its platform is sophisticated and feature rich and provides the tools required to setup such an environment. 

However, the corporate companies also require the tools to allow them to keep track of mentions on networks like Twitter, Facebook, Linked-In, Google Wave etc. This is one of the most important parts of the puzzle. So we have started our search for what looks to be the holy grail of social media reporting. We'll keep you updated on what we find. Please feel free to add a comment if you know of any such solution.

Here are a few links you may find of interest;
Hootsuite (http://hootsuite.com) is a Twitter client which allows organisations to manage their Twitter accounts as well as reporting on Brand and statistics.

Comment Technology (http://www.commenttechnologies.com) is a Social Media technology company which provides a feature rich platform for companies' to produce and manage their own networks.

Over the years you may well move office or change contact details on a number of occasions. However, if your clients don't know you have moved or can't get in contact with you, you could be loosing them, or at least, upsetting them.

You're probably answering this with a comment something like, "We'll send them an email or a letter!". Of course you will, but how many of your recipients will actually take the time to update their contact system such as Outlook as an example?

The truth is, very little, but when they do need you it becomes a mad panic and in the worse case scenario, it means a lost opportunity for you.

Wouldn't it be nice if you could just automatically update your contact details in your clients CRM systems or Outlook contacts lists?

Unfortunately, I don't know of a way to do this yet, but here are a few suggested remedies for the problem.

1. Update your Linked-In profile with your correct contact details.
2. Ensure your website and email signatures are updated and ALWAYS, include your signature on ALL of your emails. Yes, even replies and forwards.
3. When informing your clients of your move send them a vCard contact file.

You can create a vCard easily in Outlook, I'm sure the process is similar in other systems also, but I'll demonstrate it here.

Firstly, create a new Contact in Outlook and fill it in with all of the information you wish to share with your contacts. You have space to add your home contact details and date of birth etc. However, just because you can, doesn't mean you have too!

Your screen will look something like this;

Next, pull down the File menu and click Save As.

Now find a location on your computer to save the vCard to. Don't forget to change the "Save As Type" to vCard or vcf file.

Click Save, and there you go. You now have your contact details nicely packaged in a vCard which you can email to your contacts and they can quickly and painlessly import into their contact system.

By the way, they can import it as easily as double clicking the vCard and their contact system, like Outlook, will guide them the rest of the way.

We hope this helps and happy moving!

The age of social networking is well and truly here!

Facebook™, Twitter™, Linked-In™ and Flickr™ are just a few of the household names we stumbleupon™ on a daily basis. We may not use them all or even know how they all really work, but you just can't help switching on the TV, radio or even browsing your favourite website and not see or hear about one of these services.

The question is not are you doing it yet? It's have you dugg it with digg™ yet?

Companies large and small are trying to leverage this new form of word-of-mouth marketing to spread their message in a passive, but effective manner. However, there in lies a problem. This problem is especially true for larger organisations where the control of information is paramount. Maybe the word control is a little too strong here, perhaps we should say "Analysis & Response".

What I mean by this is, the larger the company, the more they are in the spotlight and bad news can hit like a tidal wave. Companies need a quick way of responding to trending discussions on such news and leveraging social media is fast becoming the new, and lower cost, way of doing this.

Ok, that is the bleaker side of the commercial use of social media, simply transmitting flight information as Lufthansa's has started with its http://myskystatus.com/ service is a cool use of the medium along with the growing trend to promote movie releases and new products and services are all there too, but it all does come back to control, management and marketing finesse.

There are a few services around that offer social networking solutions for companies, KickApps.com has been on the playing field for quite sometime, but released just recently, at the end of last year, Comment Technologies launched with a new angle on corporate buy-in to social networking.

Their philosophy is to "bring the conversation back home" and the platform appears to do just that. With common tools and services like RSS boxes and content panels (Facebook wall etc.), Member profiles, Member pages, Blogs, Polls, Opinions, Surveys, Forums, Photo Albums, Messaging & Groups to name just a few. They promise the epitome of a dream social networking solution for any wide-eyed and bushy tailed corporate marketer.

The Chococo Community is a featured implementation of the platform and you can take a look through it here http://community.chococo.co.uk/.

As for Comment Technologies? We think this is going to be a very interesting few years for them and I look forward to reporting back to you on their progress.

Today our friends at Google(tm) released Fetch as Googlebot. This is a new tool available in your webmaster control panel (http://www.google.co.uk/webmasters/) under the Labs link in the Dashboard links.

It's purpose is to display what Google sees when it visits your web pages. The reason this tool is going to be useful to webmasters is that it will enable them to ensure that what Google received is what you intend them to see. This is not a tool to allow you to change the content you send to Google, that would be a real no, no and is a sure fire way to get your website blacklisted. However, it is intended to allow you to check all of the;

• HTTP headers
• Cookies
• Content types
• And overall web page content

At the moment the results are very raw and displays a basic dump of your web pages headers and HTML markup. We feel there is more to come though, we are going to add some comments to Google Labs feedback to include;

• Highlight ignored page elements
• Highlight issue elements found on page. e.g.
  • Poor markup
  • invalid doctype
  • invalid links
  • not followed links
  • un-indexed page areas
• Page Improvement recommendations
• Heat map of indexable content so that a webmaster can see areas of the content which are going to have higher index priority than others.

Why not let us know your thoughts and together we can make the Fetch as Googlebot a tool for everyone to benefit from.

Using the same password everywhere is a big mistake. Everyone knows it, but equally, most people do it.

The problem is that your online security is a bit like an egg, Hmmm, funny analogy isn't it? OK, stay with me and I'll explain. An egg is a very robust and durable thing, it's hard and most eggs, if held in the palm of your hand, are really quite hard to break by just squeezing them. However, once you Peirce an egg, all of its strength is lost.

This is the key to my previous statement. If you use your password in the wrong place and someone gets hold of it, they can start to create real trouble for you. Think about all of the places you have used that password and you can start to see why it could be an issue.

So this undesirable person has grabbed your password from www.wearenotsafe.com what do they do now? Well they probably got your email address also, so they may start trying to log in to your;

• PayPal account
• Amazon account
• Google profile
• etc. etc. etc.

So, apart from writing down your passwords, what's the next best solution?

Well, our friends at DailyBlogTips.com just posted a great article on keeping your password safe by creating a formula so that you can have a different password for every website, but never forget them. Wow, fantastic job guys! View it here.

They demonstrate the steps to take but make sure you apply your own letter & number elements otherwise we'll all end up with the same damn password and that wouldn't be great!

PageRank™ is passed from web-page to web-page. It does this through links, everytime you link to a page on your own website or to pages on a partner or an information website you pass across PageRank™. You vote for that page!

So this is a good thing for who you're linking to and can be a good thing for you also, it demonstrates a sense of sharing and helps Google™ and other search engines crawl the web, you have now become a source of links. However you are not yet trusted!

To be trusted you too have to grow your own PageRank and have others vote for you, but that's another post and tutorial all together. If, however, your interested in this check out the Understanding Search Engines DVD.

OK, so on with the topic in hand. What can you do when you wish to link, but not vote? In real world terms it's like telling someone you know a plumber but can't vouch for them as you haven't used them before. In this case you can direct Google™ not to follow a link. There are 3 ways to accomplish this;

1. Meta tag directive 
2. Anchor (link) tag directive 
3. Robots.txt files

Meta tag directive

The meta tag directive is a small piece of code you add to your HTML head tag. It has a number of different settings, but in terms of PageRank voting, you need to use the 'nofollow' attribute setting as follows.

<html>
 <head>
  <!-- Other tags such as Title, meta description etc. --> 
  <meta name="ROBOTS" content="NOFOLLOW">
 </head>
</html>

This instructs the search engine not to follow any links found on that web page. You can also instruct the search engine not to index the page by using the following snippet;

<meta name="ROBOTS" content="NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW">
 

Anchor (link) tag directive

Similarly to the meta tag directive, you are also able to add no follow instructions at the lower level of just a single link. You may have a number of links on a page and only a handful are not to be followed, in this instance using the Meta tag or robots.txt file is not suitable. You use this tag as follows;

<a href="http://www.targetsite.com/subpage.html" title="something interesting" rel="nofollow">Stuff I may not trust in the future</a>

The rel="nofollow" directs Google™ not follow this link.

Robots.txt Files

A robots.txt file sits in the route folder of your website and provides search engines with hints of what it can and cannot crawl. Therefore the robots.txt file is more of a NOINDEX directive than a NOFOLLOW one. A basic file may look like this;

User-agent: *
Disallow: /links/

However, you can add specific instructions to certain crawlers by adding the crawler name to the User-agent like this;

User-Agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /links/

This would have the effect of stopping Google™ from crawling the links folder but allowing other search engines to crawl it.

We hope this helps, please comment if you have any questions.

Would you walk into a crowded room, filled with people you didn't know and shout out "Hey, anyone want to tell me their life story?" I guess the answer would be no.

However, online the request for comment is significant and also expected to a certain extent. It's difficult to know why people don't see a difference, but this is our take on the subject. Obviously, feel free to share your comments (ha ha he he)!

Firstly, most regular online activity is more conversational, long gone are the days of simple static pages. We are in the age of social networking and this is all about expression and collective discussion. Therefore you have to have an outlet for these dialogues and the perfect way to do this is through comments, feedback, RSS feeds etc.

The next part is about developing a community, this takes time as people, lets face it, don't necessarily trust everyone else just because they say they are trustworthy. So encouraging readership is done through promoting discussion. Hence the request for comment.

Above we added a very soft request for comment, did you spot it? However, you don't have to be so reserved, you can just write an entire post dedicated to requesting comments. See todays post at Daily Blog Tips and see how they have proactively focused an entire blog post on getting readers to comment. It worked too, at the time of writing this, they were up to 32 comments. I think these include some replies from the author but still, a great response in less than a day.

Give it a try, ask for comments in your posts or write a post dedicated to getting comments! If you do, let us know and we'll sure get the ball rolling for you. All you have to do, you guessed it, is post a comment here and ask!

Happy days everyone!