I know my lack of blogging is starting to really show, but January has kicked off majorly and work just doesn’t seem to stop.

The next few months won’t be boring that’s for sure. And hence I need more staff for the Edinburgh office. So if you know anyone looking for a junior SEO job or Link Marketer role, please pass them my way.

For more info on current openings, please check out our SEO jobs section.

Just a couple of weeks ago, I read Sugarrae’s interview: 11 Experts on Link Development speak out. It’s a really interesting read and covers the insights on link building resources and tips of the following whizz kids in the SEO world.

1. Jim Boykin of We Build Pages and Internet Marketing Ninjas
2. Rand Fishkin from SEOMoz
3. Justilien Gaspard, Link Columnist for Search Engine Watch
4. Michael Gray of the Graywolf’s SEO Blog
5. Rae Hoffman, CEO of Sugarrae & MFE Interactive
6. Andy Hagan who is living the dream at the Tropical SEO Blog
7. Todd Malicoat from Stuntdubl
8. Debra Mastaler of Alliance Link and the The Link Spiel
9. Roger Montti, founder and owner of Martinibuster.com
10. Aaron Wall of SEO Book and Clientside SEM
11. Eric Ward from URLwire

I like Rae’s idea to get each person to chip in a link building question, which is then in turn is answered by everyone. Nice idea!

As I am planning on having a series of interviews coming up, I may “borrow” this format!

Having carried out a number of web copywriting courses over the years and also adviced and written content for clients, I thought I had a pretty good understanding of what is important when compiling web content. Surprisingly the book still had a few insights, which I think would be valuable for anyone working in the internet industry or who is responsible for website content.

Redish, who is also an usability expert, explains all stages of preparing, writing and structuring content in detail, referring to many useful resources and websites to find out more about certain topics, such as accessibilty and usability issues.  The book is divided into 13 chapters, each focusing on topics such as how to understand your web audience, getting to grips with your home and pathway pages, what to consider when designing a page, how to best write the content and integrate lists, tables, headings and how to write meaningful link text and compile a style guide.

Every chapter has “before” and “after” examples, outlining problems of certain pages and what was changed to get their purpose across, whilst being reminded of usability and accessibility factors.

In overall a great book whether you are a seasoned web professional or just starting out on a smaller scale in-House project. I recommend this book highly and will certainly keep it handy as a  reference at work.

Now Mairead doesn’t have her own e-commerce site and sells her bags on Etsy, a website, which allows anyone to create their own shop within the site and sell their handmade goods, like handbags, jewlery etc. It pretty much works like Ebay, where it’s possible to create a shop and Etsy will take a cut of any sold item, with two significant differences:

1) Etsy takes a smaller percentage of the sold goods

2) There is no auction-style selling.

My friend has not the option of having her own website at the moment, now, how could she still utilise the web to promote her Etsy shop with other means?

The site offers the option to sign up for an RSS feed, so it’s possible to keep up to date with any new products a certain seller puts up, but Mairead at this point wants to spread the word.

Mairead shared the link to her Etsy shop on Facebook. Another option to show this link at all times is to add it to the information, which appears on the right-hand side on below the profile picture.

These are all valid ways of reaching a very small group, only direct friends. If looking at the Facebook Advertiser tool, the following statistics are pretty interesting. In the UK alone, there are 6,860 females interested in handbags, in the US 5,720 and these are just two examples, as Etsy is used world-wide.

Further options are:

• Creating a shop page on Facebook, this can reach more people who are interested in handbags
• Stumble the Etsy shop page (which I have already done)
• Create a Twitter account and keep it public, updating people on new products posted. I’ve undertaken a handbag search and already quite a few other people utilise Twitter for this purpose
• Become a member of various handbag fan pages and leave comments, directing people to your shop

During my brief research for this, I’ve also seen that there are many shop and fan pages on Facebook for people who are interested in handbags. Mairead could also be cheeky and invite these people with her Facebook shop page, however, this could be seen as “unethical”, as it could be perceived as spam or unwanted contact by Facebook users. I’d be intersted to hear your comments on this.

Anyhow, I hope that Mairead’s business succeeds and as I can see she’s already been making a few sales, which is great! Good luck, Mairead!

There is now a second part to this “How to promote an Etsy shop online” series called How to promote an Etsy shop online – Part 2.

Bizarrely enough, sometimes new Google Analytics features may have been live for a while in the US or in the UK but not here in Spain or vice versa. Therefore I had already read and heard about these features but my account hadn’t been updated with them until today.

So what are these new features, still residing in Beta?

1) Custom reporting

2) Advanced segments

The custom report can be set up using a combination of metrics and dimensions. It is vital to verify first which combination of metrics and dimensions can be used together and should be checkedin the chart here.

Metrics can be any of the following:

• Site usage
• Content
• Goals
• E-commerce
• Advertising

Dimensions are divided as follows:

• Visitors
• Traffic sources
• Content
• E-commerce
• Systems

Creating the reports is very easy. There are already colour-coded fields for “metrics” (blue) and “dimensions” (green) and once you click on the respective fields, a variety of buttons unfold themselves, which can easily dragged and dropped onto the predefined fields. Once you’ve chosen all the metrics and dimension combinations you would like to appear in one report, you can preview it and if you are happy with it click on “create report”.

I’m very excited about these custom reports, as it enables to get more specific information without having to create filters in a variety of profiles.

Have fun with these new Google Analytics reports!

For a limited time only I offer a free technical and SEO website audit for anyone who is interested in the search engine friendliness of their website.

This offer is only valid until the 15th November 2008, so don’t think about it and contact me today with your website’s URL and the keywords you would like to be found on. I will get back to you within 2 working days with a comprehensive report on your website’s search engine readiness.

Read more on the full list of online marketing services I offer now or contact me directly with your requirements and to obtain a quote.

My latest project is a multi-lingual SEO project for the German based personnel development and management consultancy Actus Purus. I’m working in collaboration with Ruaridh Currie CSS webdesigner in Barcelona.

I’ve started off with the German site, as this is where the client’s main target market comes from. We are at the end state of building the site, the main content is being finalised and imagery is to be added.

I’m currently establishing a SEO strategy, which I will also apply to the English site.

There will be a more extensive case study and I’ll keep this blog updated to let you know how the site is doing.

I’m also setting up Google Analytics for the site, so I’ll be using this site as my example for the step-by-step user guide.

At the moment I’m planning a big re-vamp of the site, adding SEO and Google Analytics case studies, a Google Analytics user guide, and a general resource for SEO, PPC and Google Analyics related topics.

Bye for now

It is also a fact that there are really no two links that are indeed the same. Therefore Wiep Knol decided to ask about 17 well known and respected SEOs to gives us their input on link value factors. This article is really interesting and outlines about 40 link factors and their importance.

The importance of each link has been rated as follows:

1. Not of any influence on the value
2. Fractional effect on link value
3. Moterate influence on the link value
4. Strong influence on the link
5. Very strong influencing factor

There is also a section on so called “dampening effects” of links that perhaps lower the strength of a link.

These factors were also rated as follows:

1. No negative effects at all
2. Slight negative effect on the value
3. Somewhat negative effects
4. Big negative effect on the link value
5. Maximum negative effect

It’s about time we had a full “bible” on link value factors.
Read it! It’s an eye opener!!

Well, breaking news… Google has tightened the way it looks at robots.txt files, if not validated, a lot of site owners could face getting their websites banished from the Google index.

You can easily validate your robots.txt file with robots.txt validator offered in Google’s webmaster console

I found this really interesting thread on these latest robots.txt developments, called “validate your robots.txt, Google might deindex your site” by Sebastian’s Pamphlets.

Anyway, I better double-check my clients robots.txt files now.