Many companies are jumping on the social networking bandwagon for numerous reasons, some with the intention to build a bigger network of prospects others to increase their brand awareness. Whatever the reason might be, social networking sites are becoming so popular that companies who do not take advantage from it are missing out big time.

Small companies with a well-planned online marketing campaign are increasing their revenue year by year and are gaining advantage over big organisations that failed or were too slow to predict the potential of social networking.

Take the bakery trade for instance. More and more bakeries around the country are investing part of their marketing budget on social networking sites like Bebo and Facebook, and they are receiving great feedback from it.

In one of these bakeries based in London, clients can order the products online and have it delivered to any address in Greater London. Besides the website, the company has a Facebook Page, a blog and accounts in other social networking sites like YouTube and Flickr.

What is so great about social media marketing is that there is no need to spend rivers of money or many hours of work to achieve good results.

So, what are you waiting for? Jump on the Social Networking Bandwagon!

Wikipedia defines anchor text as:

“…the visible, clickable text in a hyperlink. The words contained in the Anchor text can determine the ranking that the page will receive by search engines.”

I have a simpler explanation to it, a hypertext link is any text placed between the <a> and </a> tag also known as anchor tags, therefore the term “anchor text”, here is how  a hypertext link looks like in a HTML document:

<a href=”/search-engine-marketing.php”>SEO Bedford</a>

Where <a is the beginning of the anchor tag, href is an attribute of <a> and refers to a specific location of the web or within a website and “SEO Bedford” is the anchor text.

Making use of the right anchor text puts you one step ahead of your competitors, my advice here is to use your most competitive keywords in the anchor texts of your inbound links, sometimes you don’t have control over those links due to the fact that they are in sites others control.

My suggestion here is to constantly monitor who is linking to your site and contact the site owners or webmasters and ask them if it is possible to modify the link to add the correct anchor text.

All this process is not as easy as it seems, nowadays getting an anchor text link from another website, specially an authority site, is worth much more than gold due to its value from a ranking standpoint.

My last piece of advice is, ensure you do your keyword research to optimise the anchor text to its full potential and try various link building tactics, then stick to them and create unique and link worthy on page content.

The politician is also planning to use social networking sites to try to get people involved in a global deal on climate change.

In his new role, Prescott is responsible for finding out the opinion of the public and reporting back to the Council before the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December.

The Copenhagen meeting will bring together more than 90 countries to find a way to keep global warming below two degrees C by 2050.

Mr Prescott is also launching a new website, New Earth Deal, designed to promote the idea of a fairer settlement on climate change by requiring bigger cuts in emissions by rich countries and financial help for developing countries.

Online Marketing is fast becoming the most effective way of promoting any kind of business or event and with the help of blogs and social media yours can now be found easier.

For more information on all of our online marketing services including blogging, website development and search engine optimisation please visit the THUK website.

Since the 1st of July Bing has been showing real time date from a few iconic Twitters based on their followers count and volume of Tweets as well as their influence in certain fields. The SEO field is represented by Danny Sullivan do a search for [Danny Sullivan Twitter] or [Danny Sullivan Tweets] or even [@dannysullivan] and you will get as the first result Danny’s latest tweets as well as link to see more tweets from him which will send you to his Twitter profile.

It is worth noting that Bing has no special relation or any kind of deal with Twitter and all data is coming from the Twitter API.

This new feature is not at its full potential yet, but we can expect innovations to roll out anytime soon as I’m certain Bing is not the only Search Engine looking into ways to integrate real time data to its SERPs.

All this makes me wonder, how long will it take to Google to respond to it? What are the search giant plans to deliver real time data in its SERPs? Will real time search results have any impact in search engine optimisation?

We want to hear from you now, what you have to say about this real time search trend? share you thoughts in our comments section.

“Your site’s reputation can be affected by who you link to”

If you are an SEO you know exactly where the above quote comes from, for those of you not familiar with it, that is a quote from Google Webmasters Guidelines, basically is saying that if link to bad neighbourhood sites, you could be penalised.

But apparently that doesn’t seem to apply to Google itself, a few months ago search experts noticed that Google was displaying fake ads for US Government Grants; it took a while but they removed it from their sponsored links section.

Now another type of fraudulent advertisement is polluting the SERPs, the “Get Paid by Google” ads from sites like Kevinlifeblog.com, Scottsmoneyblog.com, Maryslifeblog.com and Googlemoneytree.com are being visited by millions of people each day, all offering a guide of how to make thousands with Google in the comfort of your own home.

Anyone with basic education could see that as a scam, but in times like this where unemployment is sky high and collapsing industries many people are falling for those kind of ads, but the million dollar questions is: Why don’t Google Ban those Site or even allow them to create an account with Adwords?

The answer is very simple, because Google makes lots of money with those sites, first they have to pay Google for the advertisement via their Adwords accounts and second these fraudulent ads increase the bid price of certain keywords making legitimate marketers pay more for their keywords.

What is more revolting is that for us SEOs and legitimate marketers, Google is always trying to make things harder, at least that is how I see things as an SEO, why don’t Google and its spam fighting team focus more on those “Scammers” and let us legitimate professionals carry on with our work.

Let’s face it, we are doing a service for our clients and the search engine as we make it quite clear what a site has to offer to the humans and the search engines, so they can accurately index each page accordingly.

What do you have to say about all this? Could scam ads lead web users to lose faith in online marketing and advertising? Share your thoughts in our comments section below.

What is PageRank Sculpting?

First of all, the only way to pass PageRank is via links on a given page. Now imagine a page with £10 of PageRank to spend, this page has 10 outbound links, these links could be to other pages inside the same site or to other sites, that doesn’t matter, the point is each link will receive £1.

Let’s say we used the nofollow tag on 5 of those links, till now it was believed that the other 5 links would get £2  instead of £1 each which would help those five pages rank a bit better. So let’s say there is a login page within your or less important pages that you don’t want to rank well, before you could nofollow the links to those pages and direct PageRank to more important pages, that is how PageRank Sculpting worked.

The Death of PageRank Sculpting

“What happens when you have a page with ‘ten PageRank points’ and ten outgoing links, and five of those links are no followed? Let’s leave aside the decay factor to focus on the core part of the question. Originally, the five links without nofollow would have flowed two points of PageRank each (in essence, the nofollowed links didn’t count toward the denominator when dividing PageRank by the outdegree of the page). More than a year ago, Google changed how the PageRank flows so that the five links without nofollow would flow one point of PageRank each.”

The above is quote from Matt Cutts’ announcing the death of PageRank sculpting; well at least with the use of the nofollow tag. Basically what Matt is saying that, links with a nofollow tag still get no “PageRank money” at all and regular links continue to get £1 each.

What makes me laugh is the SEOs who have been quoting the benefits of their “PageRank Sculpting” over the past year, when Google changed the way PageRank flows over a year ago.

Conclusion

To sum things up on how Google assigns PageRank here is a quote from Danny Sullivan that explains the matter in a simple and easy to understand way:

“Google itself solely decides how much PageRank will flow to each and every link on a particular page. In general, the more links on a page, the less PageRank each link gets. Google might decide some links don’t deserve credit and give them no PageRank. The use of nofollow doesn’t ‘conserve’ PageRank for other links; it simply prevents those links from getting any PageRank that Google otherwise might have given them.”

First thing you need to know about a keyword is its search volume, the higher the better, Google Keywords Tool is showing local search volume now which is very useful for geo-targeted sites. Once you have the search volume you need to compare against the competition on that given keyword, here is a simple rule of thumb, higher search volume against low competition.

Ok, now you have the search volume and the competition of your keywords, but what if you wanted to know more about it, like how many sites are using your keywords on their title tags? For that you will need a special command when you perform a search just type intitle:keywordname to refine it use intitle:”keywordname” that will give an exact match.

What about how many sites have my keywords in their URLS? To find that out use inurl:keywordname again to refine it inurl:”keywordname”.

Want to know how many sites have your keywords in the anchor text of links point back to them? Use inanchor:keywordname and to find out how many sites use your keywords in their description tags use intext:keywordname

Always remember to refine results to an exact match just quote the term, this also works for a normal search query.

All these commands are very useful to tell how much competition a certain keyword has and to determine how hard it will be to rank for them.

You would think that if you were the owner of a company that has over 60% of market share that wouldn’t be enough to raise any eye brows, well that is not how Google’s co-founder Sergey Brin thinks.

According the NY Post, sources inside the search juggernaut said Sergey Brin assembled a team of his best search engineers to study Bing’s algorithm and determine how it differs from the one he created with his classmate Lary Page back in 1998, as well as work on urgent upgrades to his own.

Sergey’s move generated chaos in the search world as it is not common these days for Google founders to get their hands dirty in operations at the company anymore.

Speaking to the NY Post a Google insider said:

“New search engines have come and gone in the past 10 years, but Bing seems to be of particular interest to Sergey,”

To deny such a move from the search behemoth a spokesman for Google stated:

“We always have a team working on improving search. We dedicate more time and energy to search than anything else in our company. Our algorithm is constantly evolving.”

If it is true or not that Google is studying Bing’s algorithm we will never know for sure, but one thing is certain you better treating a cancer while it’s on its early stages.

So, what say you? Is Bing really a threat to Google? Will this “urgent upgrade” ordered by Sergey Brin have any affect in search engine optimisation?

Leave your thought and opinions in our comments section below.

Google Wave is a real time communication platform that combines aspects of email, wikis, web chat, social networking, project management and file sharing all in one powerful in-browser communication client.

Since Google announced this super communication platform, the buzz around it has been so huge that it outshone Microsoft’s Bing, coincidence or not Google announced Google Wave on the same day Microsoft confirmed Bing would be the name of its new search engine.

Unfortunately, our SEO team here at THUK haven’t had the pleasure to test Google’s new toy yet, Google Wave is only available for a few lucky developers as an alpha version so we have to rely on reviews we found over the internet to talk about it.

Ben Parr from Mashable is one of the lucky users who had the chance to test it and posted a guide to Google Wave, even though the product is not even out yet.

Danny Sullivan from SEL was at the official announcement at Google I/O and live blogged about it.

When it is ready, Google Wave will be a live flexible stream of conversation to best suit users needs, a full integration with Google Docs is already confirmed plus the ability to handle any kind of data inside a wave.

To finish things of here is a video of Google Wave official announcement at this years Google I/O.

First it was the launch of Wolfram Alpha a fact search engine which in reality represents no serious threat to Google, then Twitter announced TwitterSearch will start crawling links within Twitter and indexing pages in real time, with a yet to be developed algorithm, and finally came Bing, Microsoft’s new search engine with the promises of better search refinements and a strong marketing campaign.

Despite all those attacks Google is looking strong as ever and announced the launch of two new products, Google Squared and Google Wave, the first is already available in Google Labs and the second we will have to wait a few more months before is available.

Google Squared

Google Squared is an experimental search tool that collects facts from the web and presents them in an organized collection, similar to a spreadsheet. If you search for [roller coasters], Google Squared builds a square with rows for each of several specific roller coasters and columns for corresponding facts, such as image, height and maximum speed.

This technology is by no means perfect. That’s why we designed Google Squared to be conversational, enabling you to respond to the initial result and get a better answer. If there’s another row or column you’d like to see, you can add it and Google Squared will automatically attempt to fetch and fill in the relevant facts for you.

Visit us tomorrow; we will be uploading information on Googles biggest product launch in years – Google Wave