Practical SEO Workshop

We will be presenting an interactive SEO workshop on how to design and update the websites for search engine visibility. During the practical search engine optimisation session we identify opportunities for immediate improvement based on the websites submitted by workshop participants. The date for Sydney workshop is scheduled for December 11. Starting from evaluation of actual websites we will analyse the search term selection, meta tags strategies and linking options. With plenty of personal attention from our SEO tutor you will learn how to increase your branding and competitive advantage on the search engines. At the conclusion the clear SEO strategy will be presented on case by case basis.

Government Web Usability

In a recent October issue of Government News magazine I have found an article about usability issues with respect to government organizations websites in Australia. Document dumping seems to be quite a common way of adding and building web pages. The end result is that things are hard to find and there is a lack of website functionally. On a bright side more government departments are conducting usability studies and improving their websites. One of the good examples is Australia.gov.au website. However in my opinion they should capitalize the link to business.gov.au on the left side. It is not a capital letter at the moment, possibly they refer to small business? Also search for Australian government on Google shows as a second result: " Not Found - australia.gov.au Australian Government Australian Government ... We're sorry, but there is no australia.gov.au web page that matches your request." That gives very unprofessional look. Also the third website on the list www.gov.au shows very poor title tag: Home - www.gov.au. There is still a big area for improvement here.

SEO Bootcamp Sydney

This year Search Engine Boot camp organized in Sydney on 30 November will be dedicated to SEO and SEM topics. The agenda will cover subjects from intelligent keywords research, SEO site structure, local search and PPC management tools. The afternoon sessions will focus on advanced SEO about optimising for flash and database driven websites. The case study or rather live interactive SEO clinic will have a website analysed for search engine friendliness. For more information visit:
www.searchenginebootcamp.com.au/wordpress

Search Engine Strategies

Last month San Jose was a place to be for all search engine marketing professionals. And they came in thousands to find out about the latest trends in SEO market, Internet advertising, search optimization issues and all related areas. Search Engine Strategies conference was as usual very loud with bright lights and all the companies trying to outdo each other on the exhibition floor. The big fun moments came as we were invited to Mountain View Googleplex for the Fifth annual Google Dance where we had the opportunity to meet with Google engineers and visit Google Labs technology playground area. For more visit the official SES Strategies website.

World Wide Web Origins

The history of the World Wide Web started just 15 years ago on August 6, 1991 by Sir Tim Berners-Lee. On that date the first web site was built http://info.cern.ch and put online. Later on that day Tim Berners-Lee wrote a post on the alt.hypertext newsgroup introducing his world wide web project to the world. In the original post he said: "The WorldWideWeb (WWW) project aims to allow links to be made to any information anywhere. The address format includes an access method (=namespace), and for most name spaces a hostname and some sort of path. The WWW project was started to allow high energy physicists to share data, news, and documentation. We are very interested in spreading the web to other areas, and having gateway servers for other data. Collaborators welcome!"
The greatest thing is that his idea is available freely, with no patent and no royalties due, so it keeps spreading like a wild fire.

Myths about SEO

In the recent interview Laura Lippay, SEO Program Manager for Yahoo has been expressing concern about lack of education in the area of search engine optimization techniques. Quite often SEO propaganda headlines does not match with good skills and improved search engine results. Those are her words: "There always seems to be a lot of stuff going around that just does not have real proof to back it up. I do not really believe any of it until I can test it for myself. A lot of site owners, seem to think that all they need to do for SEO is slap a couple of keywords in a browser title and an H1 tag on their page and they will see results. The lack of education of SEOs and non - SEOs alike is disheartening sometimes. We still have a lot of work to do on the education front."

World Cup Live Search

During the World Cup 2006 Google offers live scores and live tracking of matches. To see the results simply type in the names of the countries which play the game. For the latest game being played type in world cup results. In addition by following the top link www.google.com/ig/worldcup Google will show information about the live scores, when it starts, the teams, who scored and videos for each goal duiring the match.

SEO Contest for Charity

The SEO contest has been announced by the webmaster community forum Webmaster-talk.com. The keyword phrase for the contest is: "retsambew dash klat for Charity" which means "webmaster dash talk" spelled backwords. The end date is Friday 01 September 2006. To win the website will need to rank the highest for a brand new domain and a keyword phrase "retsambew dash klat for Charity" in Google. The total cash value of the prizes is $5,810.30. The contest conditions stipulate that one must use a brand new domain name and the winning page must link to a charity of your choice from Give.org.

Search Party News Article

Advanet has been mentioned in the Fairfax Business Network article which deals with SEO business in Australia. Three leading search engine marketing companies have been selected by a journalist from the Sydney Morning Herald to provide the advice and opinions about the current state of the Internet marketing game.
The extensive news article covers advice on search friendly aspects of the web design and how to achieve higher placements on search engines. To add some spice to rather technical SEO subject, speed dating company has been chosen as a case study. And for those who want to stay incognito, there are also hints about how to disappear from the search engine results. I guess most of us will want to do just the opposite, so I encourage you to read Coming to the aid of the search party.

SEO and Journalism

How to give your post or an article search engine friendly title? That is the question which some journalists and bloggers are considering. The New York Times in the recent article This Boring Headline Is Written for Google is elaborating on how to attract search engine spiders and do not bore readers at the same time. It will be a difficult act to balance.
"The news media are gingerly stepping into the field of SEO. It is a booming business, estimated at $1.25 billion in revenue worldwide last year, and projected to more than double this year. SEO seems to be an endless chess game. The optimizer wizards devise some technical trick to outwit the search-engine algorithms that rank the results of a search. The search engines periodically change their algorithms to thwart such self-interested manipulation, and the game starts again."

BMW and Fast SEO

Out of control speeding BMW on one of the English motorway was not the only difficulty facing the German automaker. Google has removed the German BMW website from its index and they have learned the hard way that fast SEO strategy does not work very well. The delisting lasted for only three days, and SEO community had a chance to see that no matter how big is the company they need to follow the Google guidelines in order to achieve good search engine positions.
BMW web designers had repeated the words "gebrauchtwagen" and "neuwagen" which means "used car" and "new car" many tens of times on the home page. They used two techniques: invisible text and keyword stuffing to boost the search engine rankings. Those are some of the black hat SEO methods which sooner or later lead to demise of the website.

Online Advertising

Are you tired of online advertising? Most people would agree that everywhere we look we find so called - efficient targeted online ads, and there are just too many of them. So why if everybody is very tired of all the ads, the website which is full of them and having no other content at all, receives 25,000 unique visitors every single hour? I am referring here to Million Dollar Homepage designed by Alex Tew, a 21-year-old business student from England. If you are not quite tired of online ads you can find his website easily.