Date: 26th March 2008

A free half day workshop hosted by the CTE at Edwinstowe House, Nottinghamshire:

• Legal issues to consider when creating your website
• Email and your business
• How to sell safely online
• Copyright, patents and trademarks
• Understanding the data protection act and disability discrimination act
• An overview of other legal requirements

Book your place here:  book early, places are limited

Just a quick reminder that I am teaching two courses that might be of interest:

Search Engine Optimisation: 31 March 2008
Learn how to improve your rankings in the search engines, and get more visitors to your website.

Pay Per Click Training for Small Businesses: 4 April 2008
Learn how to spend less money on Google AdWords advertising, and get better results.

Your web page rankings in the search engines is a function of the quality, quantity, and relevancy of other websites that link to you.

One common strategy to boost your number of links is to build reciprocal links; that is to say, a swapping arrangement where I will link to you, if you give me a link back.

There is much debate as to whether Google approves of reciprocal links or not. The answer to whether reciprocal links are good or bad is it depends.

Good reciprocal links are those links where we should link to each other naturally. If your business is about Renewable Energy then you are very likely to be linking to other green energy sites, solar power websites and the like. And it is only natural and logical that these sites are going to link back you.

High ranking renewable energy sites are very likely indeed to have a high proportion of reciprocal links with other energy sites. They all like to link to each other, and they provide the links in the authentic spirit of signposting other useful resources to their visitors.

Bad reciprocal links are links coming from irrelevant sites that have nothing to do with your business. Particularly worthless links are coming from spammy sites that will give absolutely anybody a link in return for a link back.

Some characteristics of good reciprocal links are:

• the site will be in the same topical area of my website
• the site will be indexed by Google, especially the specific page containing the link to my site
• the site will have a good Google Page Rank
• the site will not have hundreds of links on its linking page
• the site will have an element of moderation, meaning it is not a”free for all” links page

When seeking reciprocal links with suitable partners, keep in mind:

• that you might want to ask your linking partner to link to a specific internal page on your website, for instance you might ask the solar specialist website to link directly to your solar energy page
• that you will want to ask the linking partner to include keyword rich anchor text in the link to your site
• that your link is embedded in some text that is relevant to your business area

Want to know more? You might also like to take a look at these articles:

Getting Perfect Inbound Links

Commercial Link Building Services

Backlink Checking Tools

Google Sitelinks are those extra navigational choices that appear under the first website in the search engine results page.

Have you looked to see if your website brings up Google sitelinks in the search results?

You’ll recognise these from the John Lewis website (also note that Google now offers the ability to search within the John Lewis site as well)

Sitelinks aren’t just restricted to the biggest companies. Google offers sitelinks for any site that it feels is relevant to the search, provided the site has a good site structure. Here’s what mine look like:
Google’s aim is to analyse the link structure of your site to find shortcuts that will save users time and allow them to quickly find the information they’re looking for.

The sitelinks are generated automatically, and will be updated by Google from time to time.

I’m not terribly happy about the sitelinks Google has selected. At this stage I cannot make recommendations to Google for what I feel are useful sitelinks, but I can ask Google to block those that are not appropriate.

You can provide feedback to Google in your Webmaster Central control panel. You might want to block a sitelink because:

• you don’t want to emphasise that particular page
• the sitelink title of the page is inaccurate
• the link to that page is broken

I do not want my Accessibility page in sitelinks, and have reported it to Google like this:

These links will remain blocked for 90 days.

And I am hoping that Google will choose another more relevant page, say Internet Marketing Services or Testimonials for inclusion in my sitelinks instead.

For further reading see:

How does Google compile sitelinks?

How to provide feedback on sitelinks?

Hallam Communications has been shortlisted alongside Dell and Aircom in the Blackberry Women in Technology Awards for the category “Best Female Mentor.”

The Awards look to honour the individual (or company) that has achieved success and competitive advantage through innovation, management and return on investment via technology.

I have been specifically nominated for Best Female Mentor award, recognising
leadership and inspiration to others in the field or use of technology.

The winners will be announced in 6 May; keep you fingers crossed for me!

See the full press release here.

How can you remove old web pages from the Google index?

I have a client who was advised by some cowboy search engine optimisation company to create lots of web pages stuffed full of spammy repetitive keywords.

He now knows this is a bad thing, and has deleted the pages from his site.

But the old pages still appear in the Google index. He’s been told there is nothing he can do about it.

Google will automatically remove dead pages from the search results as part of the indexing process. Pages with 404 messages (not found) or 410 (gone) will eventually be disappear from the index and the search engine results.

But this can take time.

The quick solution is to use Google’s Webmaster’s Remove URL’s tool. It can be used to remove any content that you don’t want appearing in the search results. Google says the removal request typically takes 3-5 business days to process.

The Google Webmaster toolkit is full of useful utilities for optimising your site, and learning about your site performance in Google.

Keep in mind that it might be best to simply update the offending page and let the spider re-index the new content.

You might also want to keep the content on your site, and just block Google from indexing it using appropriate meta tags and the robots.txt file.

The URL removal tool does just that: it removes the page entirely.

And remember that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Humans don’t like spam, and neither does Google.