You can get an invite directly from Google (https://services.google.com/fb/forms/wavesignup/) or you can be invited by an existing member, which is why there are so many people simply asking and begging existing members for a spare invitation. Twitter is riddled with people blatantly asking for invitations, and I have heard of people actually selling them to others! If you want to see the chatter, follow the hashtag #googlewaveinvite on twitter.

I am lucky enough to still have some invites available, and have allocated 15 out of my stash to give away to desperate people in need on an invite.

I will be randomly choosing 15 names from the people who tweet or comment on this post, and inviting them to Google Wave. I will choose 5 random names from people who tweet, 5 from people who comment using a disqus profile, and 5 from people who comment using a non-disqus profile.

If for some reason very few people comment or tweet this post, then everyone will get an invite.

Having your anchor text in the backlink set as your target key phrase, should make your site rank better for that key phrase, basically increasing its relevancy for that phrase. There is a theory that even a blank page can rank high on search engines if there is enough backlinks with the same anchor text linking to it.

An extreme version of this technique has been called a ‘Google Bomb’, ‘Link Bomb’, or ‘Google Washing’, which is basically when thousands of websites all link to one site, all using the same anchor text, so as to manipulate the search engine results. These days Google has changed a few things so that extreme versions are not as easy to create as they were back in the day. Google needs to deliver Relevant results to its customers, and if the results are incorrect, due to a Google bomb, it would have unhappy users, hence the change. For some information on famous Google Bombs, visit Wikipedia

Another important part of your link building efforts is getting websites with a high Google Pagerank to link to your website. Many of the link exchange pages on websites specify that they only exchange links with websites that have a high PR, or a Pagerank of at least 3 or 4, with the purpose of getting good quality inbound links to the website.

At the end of the day, if you are trying to get good rankings for your website, you will be wanting to get loads of backlinks, especially those with a high pagerank.

Now for the cool stuff!

When you are trying to get your website ranked above your competitors in the search engine results, its a great idea to see where their backlinks are coming from, what anchor text was used, and the pagerank of the site the backink is on.

I like to use a tool called Link Diagnosis, which allows you to put in a url, and get a list of all the backlinks pointing to that domain.

Creating a report showing the links to a website shows the Pagerank of the inbound links, the anchor text used, if each link is No-follow, how many outbound links are on that page, and the strength of that link! Awesome!

With this information you will be able to visit all the same high PR and quality sites linking to a competitor website, and see if its possible to add your own link there too, or even better, if you can get your link listed instead of the competitor website.

Using this method is a really easy way to find a great list of websites that you could possibly exchange links with, or event better, to build a one-way link to your site with.

I suggest you start with the websites that have a PR over 2 for best results. What I like about Link Diagnosis, is that you can arrange all the links displayed in order of Pagerank and link strength, as well as the fact that you can register as a member, and save your reports online, not to mention export them to a spreadsheet.

Another great website that I like to use is called Check Backlink (http://www.check-backlink.com), which offers a similar service. I like both these websites and use them both quite often. I find that although Check Backlink is not as comprehensive as Link Diagnosis, it is a fast way to do a quick check when doing research, while Link Diagnosis is a tad slow sometimes.

Need to build quality one-way backlinks FAST?

If you are looking to build quality backlinks fast, I can suggest http://www.textlinks.com, if you sign up for free, you can place 25 permanent links. Obviously it would be better to pay the $99 a month and be able to place 100 links per month, but I like the fact that you can sign up and test the system before buying. Even if you don’t purchase, your 25 links are permanent and will remain.

You only get to choose your username once, and it cant be changed or transferred, so you MUST choose wisely.

On the Facebook blog:

Username selection is now live at http://www.facebook.com/username/. Remember, choosing a username is optional and will give you a distinct Web address for your profile. It will not change the name that appears on your profile, in search or elsewhere on the site.

Facebook go on to say:

Your new Facebook URL is like your personal destination, or home, on the Web. People can enter a Facebook username as a search term on Facebook or a popular search engine like Google

This is pretty interesting, as FB is a really powerful domain name, it could be great to have a keyword or phrase as your username for one of your Facebook pages, or even your own username. Surely it will display a URL from Facebook in the search results for that term somewhere, and any little bit helps right. Even if the username pages are not any help for google searches, time will tell if it will help with internal searches on Facebook, and hey, if you give out your profile to clients, wouldnt it be cool if they could see your product/services etc in the name, more professional I think.

Usernames allow public entities to easily promote your presence on Facebook with a short URL (http://www.facebook.com/companyname). This username can be used in your marketing communications, company website and business cards.

I was able to get: facebook.com/searchengine.optimization.expert for myself, so I can now give that out for my personal profile. I also have loads of Facebook pages, and tried securing names for them, but was not able to for all. At the moment, FB knows there are going to be loads of people trying to secure names for their pages, so they have set limits.

The limits are temporary, and are to allow pages with more than 1000 fans, that were created before 31 May 2009, to get first dibs.

Check out the rules here: http://www.facebook.com/help.php?page=900

If you are new to Facebook, you will only be able to choose a username for yourself on or after June the 9th, 2009.

So….get cracking! Go out and secure your names, using the keywords that you want to be found with….let me know what you choose.

We began by cleaning up the coding on the website. A couple of years of subtle changes, tweaks, script changes etc had taken its toll, and due to laziness or bad workmanship, the code was splattered with snippets of left over code.

We cleaned up the code, removed all unnecessary coding, made sure the site validated as valid xhtml and css on W3C and streamlined the site. We wanted to also reduce the number of http requests to the server, so we combined images and used hotspots on the images to link to pages. The load time difference after changing the images was not noticable, and the file sizes were similar, but the http requests was cut in half.

We created a favicon image for the site, our reasoning was that we didnt want any errors when loading the site, and Google has the option of showing search results witht the icons of the sites displayed.

We combined all the javascripts in the site into one external javascript file, and moved the script to the base of the html.

We optimized all the remaining images on the website, making them faster to load, and streamlined the text, optimizing it for the target key phrase.

The good news is that in a two week period, the site jumped from page 3 position 6 on Google, to Page 1 position 10. Obviously the ranking is changing all the time, as Google re-crawls each page in the top pages and re-shuffles the sites, but hopefully the site will carry on up the charts.

The main changes to the site allowed it to load in half the original time, with fewer requests, and more valid and streamlined code. Score!

Google describes PageRank as:

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important”.

For more information on PageRank, check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank

Apparently the actual update was on the 30th of December, so many people will start to see changes on the search engines over the new year and the beginning of 2009. If anyone is interested, SEO Company has a page showing updates, I dont know how accurate it is, or how up to date, but it has some interesting info anyway.

Sadly, not everyone is going to benefit from the changes, there are many sites that will drop in PageRank, but I suppose not everyone can be a winner, there has to be a loser too

The sites I noticed the biggest change on, were the ones that I have been working hard on with on-page SEO, as well as making them faster loading, valid xhtml and css, cross browser compliant.

Lets hope that 2009 is a good year for all our websites, good luck to all!

I have been trying to make a bit of money online for a while now, and am thrilled with this new website that allows you to instantly install a blog, ready for monetization, and has over 1000 templates to choose from!

This is a dream come true for people who dont have much experience with earning money online.

I thought I would share the info, obviously if you are a Pro, then you may prefer to do things the way you know how, but for newbies, this makes it so unbelievably easy to setup a website and start earning immediately, dont forget its free too!

The website is being run by the creators of the Thirty Day Challenge, a website that teaches you the basics of how to make money online for FREE! Their website is http://www.thirtydaychallenge.com. If you are new to internet marketing and making money online GO TO THIS SITE NOW, they will teach you all the basics 100% FREE of charge.

They have setup this awesome site called WordPress Direct, which has free and paid areas. (http://www.worpressdirect.com)

Simply put, Wordpress Direct will allow you to create SEO-Optimized, Content-Stuffed Websites Instantly!

No More Wasting Your Precious Time with Setup, Search Engine Optimization, or Maintaining Your Site . . . WordPressDirect has been designed to handle all the setup, SEO and maintenance functions for you.

The free area allows you to setup 3 fully functional sites, while the other pay areas let you do more.

Trust me, once you have tried this you will NEVER worry about finding wordpress hosting, templates etc ever again! Best of all is FREE for the basic version, awesome hey!

Do yourself a favour, go check it out, and start earning money asap.

When I say the ‘fittest’ sites appear at the top of the search engine rankings, I mean the ones that are normally working the hardest at it. How do you excercise your website you might ask, well, here are some things you could do to increase its fitness:

• Edit / add content on your website regularly – search engines as well as real people will visit more regularly if the content is fresh.
• Refine your coding, make it clean, fast loading, and web standards compliant – nobody likes a slow clunky website
• Keep your site design and coding up-to-date with the website trends and ideas – again, keep it fresh
• Target specific key words and phrases with each new page, and tweak it on pages that are not ranking too well
• Run a newsletter that can be sent out to a subscriber base, publish it on your website as a new page too, combine it with an RSS feed if you can.
• Market the website on social networks, forums, blogs, newsgroups etc – flat out tell people about the site
• Run competitions, polls etc on your site, get the visitors involved and interacting with the site
• Build the brand, associate your website with speed, service, prices, value, whatever you can, so visitors return to your site and tell their friends about it.

It is way easier to get and keep an ‘active’ website in a good ranking position on search engines because like people, fitter is better. Just as in the human body, if you neglect your website, it will suffer, slow down, and generally fade into a sad soggy, floppy mess that nobody finds attractive! The top sites normally have been designed in a way that is appealing to the visitor as well as search engines. These days your design needs to be done twice, once on the visual side of the site, the part that the visitor sees, and again in the coding of the site. Both of these need to be maintained, toned, and updated, so that they dont become boring, obsolete, and uninteresting.

Just like there are those horrible people who never have to excercise, and still look great, there are horrible websites that seem to do well on search engines even though they just dont deserve to be there. It all comes down to conversion of visitor to customer, sometimes a site may rank well, but not convert anywhere near as many visitors to customers as a competitor website that ranks further down on search engine results. This is why your site must focus on the visitor and their experience on your website, just as much as the search engines, and their perception of your website.

The bottom line is that you will find it much easier to rank high in search engines if your site is well toned and excersised regularly. Like with most excercise, quick fixes are short lived and not worth it in the long run. Often you will end up in a worse position than when you started, and in the case of your website, may have to outlay large amounts to get your website and its reputation ‘fixed’.

It makes far more sense to set a goal and steadily work toward it, continuously making improvements with the end result in mind. In the long run, your site will rank better, and you will find it easier and easier to outrank competitor websites.

Those of you who suddenly feel the urge to tone your bodies and get fitter, visit hot body training for some tips

Most of our clients are SMME, we deal directly with the owners of the company, and get to know them on a personal level. Unfortunately, every time I talk to clients about website maketing, they all ask about getting listed on so called ‘thousands’ of search engines. It seems that almost all of them have at some point in time received some spam email promising their site on thousands of search engines within 24 hours or a similar type offer. Worse still are the ones who have been ‘educated’ by friends and / or family, who think they know what they are talking about. Most of these guys have all been brainwashed by people and companies wanting to make a quick buck.

The reality is that people do use search engines to find things on the web, that much is true. What they DON’T do, is use all these thousands of search engines as much as people would have you believe. The fact is that almost all good search engine traffic woldwide comes from Google, Yahoo, and MSN, the most popular search engines on the web. These engines being the most popular engines, leads you to believe that the others are NOT all that popular, and therefore dont get as much traffic, let alone traffic that uses their services. Of the web traffic these engines do get, you have to ask yourself, what is the percentage of their visitors that will be trying to find YOUR website or services / products? Why would a visitor to these other engines websites use them to search and NOT use Google, Yahoo, or MSN?

Dont get me wrong, there are some other engines that do have satisfied and loyal customers, and most of the time they keep their place in the market by being language, region, theme or subject specific, in order to hold onto their loyal users, but not many.

Some of these engines supliment some or all of their search results, by re-branding the results from the big 3 under their own name. Many times you will find that you can get identical results when searching for something in Google, and other search engine X. One such website that gets results from multiple locations, and has a great following of loyal users, is the site www.Dogpile.com, which lists the top results of each of the engines in its results.

So definately the big 3, Google, Yahoo and MSN are the most important engines to be listed. The next place your website MUST be listed in, is the DMOZ directory. Thousands of other websites get directory results from DMOZ, the most important web directory on the web. Get your website listed in those four locations, and the chances are that your site will be ‘findable’ in most of these thousands of other search engines already anyway.

If you get listed in all these thousands of small independant engines, your link is not listed for any given length of time on a specific page, and is only able to be found via a search. So the only traffic you will receive from that engine, is as with any engine, from visitors using the search facililty. So you once again need to ask yourself, what sort of visitor traffic is the engine getting? Of that traffic, how many people will be looking for my site/products/services? I am not saying it wont hurt to submit your site there, but would you get a good return on investment (ROI) from paying some company to list your site in all of these ‘thousands of engines’, when the big 3 are clearly dominating in traffic and searches? Correct me if I am wrong, but as far as I am concerned, the short answer, is a huge NO!

So what happens if you dont care, and are willing to spend the money with one of these companies to get listed on ‘thousands of engines’?

Are you sitting pretty, making so much money through your website that you dont know what to do with all of it? Well, not necissarily! You might have just paid to be listed on tons of these ‘engines’, but that doesnt mean you are going to get any more traffic than you are already getting. Just because your site is indexed, does NOT mean you will be listed on the first page of results on that engine. There are NO guarantees to where your site will be placed in the regular search results on any given search engine, by any web marketing company on the web.

The fact is that your website still needs to be optimized for search phrases that you would like to be ranked high for, before you see the results of being indexed in any search engine, and that goes for the big 3 too. With each real search engine having its own unique formula that it uses to judge where your site should be listed in search results for a key word or phrase, its going to be hard to optimize a website to be number one for all of the big 3 engines at the same time.

So you have ask yourself again, why pay to have your site submitted to thousands of search engines, with no guarantee of placement, and no guarantee of traffic? I don’t get it, maybe I am missing something?

till next time – F

As far as I am aware, these are all ‘dofollow’ websites. (I have made some updates to the list 08/03/2008). If any of you have suggestions to add to, or remove from this list, please post them in the comments area below. I will update as I find more.

1. http://www.Furl.net
2. http://Ma.gnolia.com
3. http://www.mister-wong.com/
4. http://www.Blogmarks.net
5. http://www.BibSonomy.org
6. http://www.Connotea.org
7. http://www.RawSugar.com
8. http://www.ClipClip.org
9. http://www.Connectedy.com
10. http://www.MyLinkVault.com
11. http://www.Backflip.com
12. http://www.LinkaGoGo.com
13. http://www.Spurl.net
14. http://www.BuddyMarks.com
15. http://www.Jumptags.com
16. http://MyJeeves.Ask.com
17. http://my.Xilnus.com
18. http://www.A1-Webmarks.com
19. http://www.Diigo.com
20. http://www.OYAX.com
21. http://www.MyVmarks.com
22. http://www.TeDigo.net
23. http://ez4u.net
24. http://www.Yattle.com
25. http://www.Digg.com
26. http://www.mixx.com
27. http://www.bumpzee.com
28. http://www.searchles.com
29. http://www.tagza.com
30. http://www.corank.com
31. http://www.squidoo.com
32. http://www.syncone.net
33. http://www.zlitt.com
34. http://www.dotnetkicks.com
35. http://www.memestreams.net
36. http://www.grupl.com
37. http://www.socialogs.com
38. http://www.linkinn.com
39. http://multiply.com
40. http://www.memfrag.com
41. http://www.newsweight.com
42. http://spotback.com
43. http://www.listible.com
44. http://reddit.com
45. http://www.Folkd.com
46. http://www.Wirefan.com
47. http://slashdot.org
48. http://www.mypip.com
49. http://netrocket.com
50. http://www.propeller.com

Here are a couple of other ones that are great, but are nofollow, still good for getting human traffic though. If you want I can make an ultimate no-follow bookmarking website list, but I don’t really see the point.

• http://www.Faves.com (formerly known as BlueDot.us)
• http://Del.icio.us
• http://www.Netvouz.com
• http://www.Stumbleupon.com
• http://www.Blinklist.com (this was do-follow, but seems to have moved over to no-follow)

This is a first draft of the list, as taken from the Social Ninja secret Facebook group. I will edit it as time goes on.

You might want to try using http://www.socialmarker.com, http://www.onlywire.com and also http://www.socialposter.com to make posting to some of these a much quicker process. I have recently discovered http://www.posttoaster.com which is a new ‘bulk’ social posting website, I really like this one, maybe you guys should give it a whirl.

If you like this list post your comments, I have enabled do-follow links on this blog, so any approved comments will count as a link back to your site. This blog is still new, so there are not many comments, which means you could quite easily get listed on the right as a top commenter, which will link back to your site too. Just a suggestion!

There is no magic way to instantly get to number 1 on Google’s regular results overnight, using a highly competitive or popular key phrase for any length of time. Let me explain why I think this, I may be wrong, but this is how I understand it, and I am open to correction.

Google, Yahoo, MSN and other good Search Engines all have a top secret formula that they use to calculate the results for search topics. That formula is constantly being improved upon, changing results from time to time, and differs from engine to engine, as they all try to be better than the other. All these big search engines have one thing in common, they want to deliver RELEVANT RESULTS to your search term. The all compete against each other to deliver the most relevant results, so sometimes you get similar results across all the big search engines, but similarly you can and do very often get completely different ones.

All these search engines pay your site a visit every so often, to check for changes. If you have a high page rank, they like to come back more often than if you dont, but generally they visit around once a month or so. Every time a spider comes to ‘check’ your site, it is re-evaluated against the current formula the search engine is using. This is when your site will either move up or down in the search results against your competition websites. The interesting thing to note, is that while this is happening to your site, its also happening to your competition’s websites, but not necessarily at the same time. Each search engine doesnt visit everyones sites at exactly the same time, or at the same frequency, so while your site may move down two places today for a specific search term, your main opposition site might move down five places for the same term tomorrow. If you can imagine a magician shuffling a deck of cards, and each card representing the top sites in the results of a search engine, you will realize that your site and your competition’s websites all move up and down on a constant basis.

Search engines are clever! Remember that! Their mission is to deliver the most relevant results at that specific time. These results are influenced by the formula the engine uses, and some, like Google, are a bit too clever, the formula is dynamic, and changes from person to person. If I search for a specific term on google.com, I will get relevant results according to what google thinks I want to find. These results could be completely different from the results for exactly the same search term on google.com, but from a user sitting in Germany, the UK, or the USA. With this in mind, you have to then conclude, that all your checking and optimizing etc is more than likely for your own local search results. If your website is targeting the search results of web surfers in a foreign country, you have to rank high on their results, and not necissarily on the same results locally. So not only do you have to ask yourself “who is your target audience”, but “where is your target audience” too. Now you can understand why many websites offer their visitors a choice of language to view the site in. This is one way of targeting the same audience, possibly in a different county, or using a different language, effectively increasing the web footprint of the website. You can understand then that its quite possible that the german version of a website, will more than likely rank better in google.de, than the english version of the same site. Now think about where your site lists in google.com as opposed to yahoo.com, or msn.co.uk!

So if the formula for search results is extremely complex, and delivers ever changing results for the same search terms, influenced by many elements such as ip address and location, links, domain age, and search trends, to name a few, you will understand why it is not easy to get to position 1 all that easily, UNLESS, your site is the most relevant for that search term.

This brings you right back to the basics of website building, information. What information is on your website? Is your website an authority on its content? Old school marketing always asked “who is your target audience”, many people have forgotten this when building their websites, but this, combined with relevant information is key to having a website, and having a website that WORKS. If your site offers original, relevant information specific to your target market’s search phrases, then you are half way there. Just don’t forget about your competition’s website, if you think they are not all sitting around trying to figure out how to beat your site in search engine rankings, you are sorely mistaken!

I think if you want to get ranked well, you need to really deliver when it comes to your content, target market and your target key phrases you want to be found for. If your site can pass all the ‘checks’ needed, to be ranked at the top of search results, then you have done well. One thing almost every site that ranks high on google has is GREAT CONTENT, have that on your site, and you WILL do well. Dont forget to put yourself into the shoes of your web visitor, be objective and take a hard look at your site, ask yourself a few questions like:

• would you as a customer be satisfied with the information on your site?
• Would you come back to the site for more?
• Is it good enough that you want to refer it to a friend?
• Is it that informative that you would want to bookmark it?

Once your site has killer content, and you can begin to market your site online, to boost your google rankings.