So what are the options?

Google Chrome

Google Chrome was released by Google in September, 2008. Chrome was built from the ground-up making it one of the fastest and most reliable web browsers out there. Recently Google added extensions which makes Google Chrome a viable alternative to Firefox.
Download Google Chrome

Mozilla Firefox

Firefox was released by the Mozilla Foundation in November, 2004. Firefox has evolved tremendously since its launch in 2004 and has by far the largest number of extensions of any modern web browser.
Download Mozilla Firefox

How to find an SEO company

• Search for “SEO + Your Town/City” (for example “SEO Manchester“) and look at the highest ranking SEO companies. Ignore the paid advertising along the top and right-hand side of the page and also ignore any Google Local Listing/Google News items that appear.
• Get a recommendation from other business owners. If you know someone who has worked with a search marketing company ask them about their experience using that particular agency.

Questions to ask a potential SEO company

• “Can I be number one on the Google for some competitive term? By some unrealistic period of time” – if the answer is yes steer clear of them. Many cowboy agencies claim they can get you to number one for X terms but they will actually mean through pay-per-click advertising.
• “How much will you charge?” – if the answer is less than a few hundred pounds per month avoid them.
• “How do you go about building links to my website?” – if the answer mentions any of the following avoid them; buying links, link farms, content networks, bulk directory submissions, link exchanges.

Choosing an SEO company is hard and you may not get it right the first time so make sure you ask the above questions, keep asking what you’re getting for your money each month and monitor the results closely.

Objective: Force users to define specific custom fields on pages using custom templates and display them as separate required fields in the page editor.

How it would work: As the developer you simply put add the required variables to the custom template file when you declare the template’s name. Something like:-

<?php
/*
Template Name: Snarfer
Requires: page-subheading | Page Subheading
Requires: some-image-for-popup | Popup Image
*/
?>

These fields would then be displayed in the page editor and the user would be unable to publish the page unless the custom field has been entered.

Anyone know if this has already been done? If not, what do you think?

However now they include the users real name as well as their username.

This is another opportunity great for both brands and people to own more of the SERPs for their names.

• Events
• Housing
• Jobs
• News
• Products
• Services
• Travel Packages
• Vehicles

Google then pumps this information into a variety of services including Google Product Search, Google Base Search and most importantly Universal Search (this is the name for when Google search includes news, images, products and other items in the results page).

Here is an example of a Universal Search result for the query garden shed:

As you can see from the example above the Google Product Search results have been inserted into the SERP (search engine results page) above all organic listings and directly below any PPC adverts- this is valuable space. It is also worth noting that Shedstore appears twice in the Google Product Search listings and is ranked #3 in the organic listings and that Screwfix.com appears in the Google Product Search listings but does not appear in the top 100 search results.

This example illustrates the value of adding items to Google Base. Over the next few weeks I am planning to post about each of the different Google Base formats and how to optimise Google Base.

• iFooty – great app that helps you stay up-to-date with the latest football news and pulls in live match text from the BBC. Saves me loads of time checking the scores for the best team in the world!
• Remote – allows you to control your iTunes from your iPhone.
• Twitterific – Lets you post tweets/replies to Twitter and view your Twitter feed.
• Facebook for iPhone – allows you to use Facebook functionality on your iPhone. My favourite (and probably most over-used) feature is the photo uploader, which lets you take a photo and upload it “live” to Facebook.
• Wordpress for iPhone – allows you to post to your Wordpress blog using your iPhone.

iPhone Review

Over the past six months the iPhone has both delighted and frustrated me. The iPhone is not a great phone. It does not let you send MMS (although some say that being able to send an email is just as good), you cannot forward text messages or contact information, the camera quality isn’t great and it does not do video recording. However the ability to install great apps which increase your productivity and keep you ahead of the game make it a great accessory to have.

Think I’ve been fair? What are your favourite apps? Let me know in the comments!

The questions in the exam are pretty straight forward as long as you read through all of the learning material beforehand. As Mark mentioned in his blog post the other week some of the questions in the exam need correcting. All of the questions are multiple choice and they use a radio box where there is one only answer and checkboxes for selecting multiple answers however for several questions I was presented with checkboxes and not told how many to select!

Also, as many of you may have noticed I have updated the entire website so that the theme remains the same throughout the website – if you have any feedback/suggestions please do leave a comment or contact me

• Contact related websites and see if they will link to your/your clients site. For example if you sell model aeroplanes, try to contact fan forums for links.
• Submit to directories, there are several quality directories you should try and list your site on the most important directory (in my opinion) is Dmoz, however you should also look for industry directories. You can search for industry directories using a Google search for “industry directory”.
• Check the backlinks of your competitors, ensure that if they have a link on a quality site you have tried to get one on too.
• Create link bait, these are pages on your site that will attract linkage. To create link bait your site should be humorous, informative, controversial, useful or provide something no one else does.
• Use dofollow blog search engines, these are search engines for blogs which have nofollow disabled meaning when you comment on the blog it will pass link juice back to your site. There are many dofollow blog search engines to choose from but you should make sure you leave good quality comments otherwise they will probably be removed during moderation.

There are of course many other ways of link building, however these are the main ones we deploy when working on a clients site. If you think I’ve missed a technique or you have another suggestion please leave a comment!

What is a robots.txt file?

A robots.txt file is usually located in the root of a website for example http://www.rutley.co.uk/robots.txt. A robots.txt file tells search engines what parts of the site they should visit, and which ones they should not include in their index.

What does a robots.txt file look like?

A robots.txt file must be laid out in a specific format. It should first say how much access each of the search engines have.

As there are many search engines you can specify a general policy for all search engines, and also set policies for individual search engines.

To set a general policy:

User-agent: *
Disallow:


The * means the rule applies to all search engines and the Disallow: means that no directories/files are disallowed.

To disallow the entire domain from all search engines you can use:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /


To disallow all the search engines from a specific directory you can use:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /admin/


To specify a rule for a specific search engine you can add:

User-agent: googlebot
Disallow: /articles/

This will stop googlebot indexing the articles folder.

You can also specify the location of your sites XML sitemap. To do this you simply add:

Sitemap: http://www.rutley.co.uk/sitemap.xml

This is great for SEO, as it tells the search engines where your sitemap is located, which in turn lets the search engine know what pages are available for it to index.

Summary

Robots.txt files are useful for several reasons. They allow you to stop directories and files from being indexed and can help more of your pages to be indexed.