Of course all good SEOs knew that about two weeks was the real best guess on a site with some authority but when you got things moving four weeks earlier than promised, it certainly did no harm to the reputation.

And when a site was firmly establised — after about six weeks — as long as you published often enough, you knew you’d get the robots back within a few hours of any change to the site.

But it’s all different now. Thanks to microblogging and the rise of social media like Twitter, instant search — with results sometimes as recent as 30 seconds — is a fact of life.

Just today, as part of an experiment, I posted some stuff and nonsense on my personal blog — Let’s Talk About Me — and set up a Google search for the headline to refresh once a minute.

Just 14 refreshes later, “All the good addresses have already gone” was there at position 1. Even “All the good addresses” was at p4.

This is not to show how great a copywriter I am, or even how eagerly awaited my post was. The point is that even a rarely-updated blog like mine can appear in the SERPs less than a quarter of an hour after publication. Google’s army of spiders is very busy indeed.

This has implications for backlinking campaigns which are largely based on a steady stream of blog posts, zine articles and the like. The complaint from clients is that these posts are worthless because they don’t have any Page Rank. Butif a new blog post can top the SERPs 14 minutes after publication, by implication it already has some value.

I find it hard to conceal my true feelings about PR: even Google wish they’d never nurtured this troubled child.

PR — or at least what everyone calls PR — is meaningless. It’s as if you read the football scores from six Mondays ago and are now convinced that that team rankings must still be the same today.

“Published” PR, which the vast majority of people fixate on, is “published” every three months or so as a snapshot of how much “authority” a page has. In past years, the interval was often much, much longer. Today, with Google’s public pronouncements of the “death” of PR — they don’t even show it in their toolbar any more — who knows how often it will be updated from here on in?

PR was always a shorthand measure of a page’s worth, but if it was ever the true yardstick, how come searches regulalrly show pages with lower or even no PR higher in the SERPs than big-PR sites? These days it’s a little more complicated, and people wanting to know the true  value of a page must dig a little deeper.

Simply put, pages with more authority fare better in the SERPs than those with less. Authority comes from a number of factors, including trustworthiness. That means pages from trustworthy sites are worth more (at birth) than pages from sites with “issues”.

Therefore a new page on bbc.co.uk is worth more than a two-month old post on an obscure blog. This simple truth still seems to confuse the ill-informed majority — often residing at decision-making level — who still fret and worry that because a page has no PR it has no value.

I’m currently investigating ways of actually demonstrating value in a page long before its PR is “published”. I’ll keep you posted.

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WordPress is now in version 2.8 and going strong. It’s trusted by many big names including the BBC, Ford Motors, TIME magazine and even LastMinute.com, the online travel site which will forever be linked with the dot.com boom of the late 90s.

We’re also moving the Association of American Correspondents in London‘s theAACL.co.uk web site to WordPress, giving them a flexible platform to promote a more interactive community. The AACL’s current President, Karla Adam, a London bureau chief with The Washington Post emailed us to say: “Looks good! Much fresher, cleaner. Looking forward to going live soon.”

While WordPress is not the answer to everything, it is possible to get it up and running quickly and cheaply using one of the many blogging packages offered by reputable hosting companies such as the UK-based 34sp.com, which offers a built-in installer to minimize the effort required to get started in the first place.

There’s plenty more about WordPress at the WordPress site, and links to lots of free plug-ins, themes and ideas for blogging success.

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But we can take this a stage further; making the site even more accessible AND giving the Search Engines more content to index.

In fact, the use of CSS-styling to add extra content to the page which does not show unless the stylesheet is removed can drastically improve the amount of spiderable text on a web page whilst remaining within Search Engine rules about “hidden” content.

Current W3C standards include the display attribute, which includes the value none. If this style is correctly applied to an element it will not show up in a browser which uses CSS.

For example, we can define a style called .accessible thus …

.accessible { display: none; }

This can be applied using SPAN tags thus …

Now you see me <span class="accessible">, now you don't!</span>

In a CSS-compliant browser such as Internet Explorer or Firefox what is seen is

Now you see me

But remove the style sheets for the page and you see

Now you see me, now you don’t!

This means that text can now be embedded in a web page which only shows up in “accessibility” mode (i.e. when the style sheets are not used).

An example of this might be the addition of explanatory text to a web page link …

<a href="/eng/support/" rel="Get help with your BlackBerry device, software or billing, and read about BlackBerry training and how to get technical support"><span class="accessible">Get help with your BlackBerry device, software or billing, and read about BlackBerry training and how to get Technical </span>Support</a>

In the browser, with a style sheet applied, this shows as …

Support

Without a style sheet applied, this shows as …

Get help with your BlackBerry device, software or billing, and read about BlackBerry training and how to get Technical Support

This not only makes more sense to a screen reader, it also provides more spiderable text for search engines to index.

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A common myth about Accessibility is that it caters to an insignificant minority. According to the RNIB, Tesco.com gained £13 MILLION a year in new business by making its site accessible site.

While it may be great to get more business like Tesco.com, the real truth about accessibility is much more subtle — and valuable.

Right now there is one class of “blind” web users who have TRILLIONS of dollars at their disposal and can influence entire societies. They will never “see” the elegant roll-over navigations and have no interest in colour combinations. And they’re not in the slightest bit worried about flashy animations or clever scripting.

They are the Search Engines — Google, Yahoo, Windows Live! and Ask, to name just four.

The unspoken truth about Accessibility is that it is perfect for SEO. All the “best practice” techniques aimed at making the Internet experience good for people who cannot see hold doubly true for the Search Engine Spiders.

An example of this is related by spoonfed.co.uk, a London listings website which discovered that content it syndicated to other websites appeared in Google HOURS before the same stories featured on their own pages. Quite simply, the syndicated sites were using more Accessible designs.

How you can use CSS to improve Accessibility AND Content is the subject of my next post.

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But what EXACTLY makes a quality backlink in the eyes of Google is hard to determine. If you use Google’s own Webmaster Tools you’ll find a list of backlinks AND a list of sites linking to yours (Pages with External Links) , and while the latter may be full of URLs, it almost certainly won’t match the former.

So why the difference? That’s the $64,000 question. Only Google knows for sure. Which is a pity because backlinks do seem to be the really big factor in getting to the top.

It used to be thought that published PR of the referrer — commonly known as PR — was a key factor (it had to be PR4 or greater); however, this no longer seems to be the case and sites with PR of 3 and below frequently show up.

We’ve worked on many sites where there is a big gap between “backlinks” and “sites linking”, and one connection seems to be forming — pages counted as “backlinks” get more than 100 visitors a day.

It would be stonishing if this was the only reason for the difference, but it must be at least one factor.

So, in five easy steps, here’s how to recognise a quality back link.

• It’s relevant to your page theme
  if you run a pet store web site, a link from a local koi carp society would be relevant, a link from the local exhaust fitters would be less so.
• It’s voluntary
  In 2007, Google started filtering out “paid-for” links schemes (although most paid directories seem to have escaped, especially where the payment is seen as a “research fee”)
• It’s one of less than 10 links from that page
  This is why having your site on a links page is bad news for any backlink; it dilutes the power
• It’s not reciprocal
  I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine (at least in backlink terms) seems to cancel out the strength of any link. The favored method today is three-way linking, but be prepared for that to fail anytime soon.

AND

• The linking page is popular That is why a link to your IT start-up from time .com or the BBC talking about your great new thingummajig is better than a link from  your personal blog (unless you’re Stephen Fry or Barack Obama).

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TweetDeck

Based on on Adobe’s Air platform, TweetDeck splits up your Tweets into handy customisable columns: All Updates, Replies and Direct Messages. But it goes further by providing filtering to separate the wheat from the goats. There are many other goodies, but they don’t get in the way. The in-built Tweet “growth predictor” is something to keep an eye on.

Best Feature: fine-toothed filtering

Download From: www.tweetdeck.com/beta/

TwitterFox

This is an Add-On for Firefox which you soon won’t want to be without. It sits quietly in the status bar and checks every few minutes for updates. These can be set to pop up as they arrive, meaning that you never need to explore further, but if you’re away from your keyboard and the Tweets mount up, you can click on the icon and see all the latest entries.

Best Feature: Multiple Twitter accounts accessed in the wink of an eye.

Download From: TwitterFox@Firefox Add-ons

TwitterBerry

The essential Tweet tool for the Blackberry, allows you to keep in touch with those you follow without using the browser. And the cool text entry means you can Tweet anywhere you have network access.

Best Feature: Access your friends’ Tweets in two clicks on the 9.32 from Lewisham

Download From: orangatame.com

Digsby Tweet Icon

One of the best features of multiple IM client Digsby, is the ability to connect to social networks such as Facebook, Google Talk and Twitter — which puts it streets ahead of its rivals.

Best Feature: Like TwitterFox, it also allows you to run multiple Twitter accounts.

Download From: digsby.com

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Still. it is said that every cloud has a silver lining it seems and for SEO it may be that people are seeing Organic Search  in a new light. Compared to other forms of online marketing, SEO is seen as a cheap, effective way of getting the message across. According to recruiters we’ve spoken to recently (and others with less of an axe to grind) demand for good SEO professionals is on the increase. Hooray for our side!

But the loser in this may well be Pay Per Click advertising (not that we expect Google to throw in the towel any time soon). As cheap as a well-run PPC campaign may be, some website managers look at the number of clicks which DON’T end in a sale and think of it as wasted money.

What is only partly appreciated is the link between effective SEO and PPC. In essence, web users are more likely to click on a PPC link — or indeed any brand-related link — if they associate it with good organic search results.

This is because SEO is as much about “Reputation Management” as it is about anything else. That includes quality backlinks — everyone wants to link to the “world’s favourite website”.

In other words, sites that give good attention to organic search can expect other benefits too.

It’s right that SEO is getting more attention, it simply makes sense. But treat it as a FOUNDATION of your whole SEM effort, not all of it.

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Around three-quarters of the world’s search traffic comes through Google and many people have it as their home page. Getting your site high on Google’s index is important, and every SEO professional claims they are best at improving your Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) score.

But there is an alternative “search engine” with just as much clout as Google and which is probably more widely seen.

Google News is a regularly updated index of top stories from news sites across the Internet. Google News is still Google, but getting your site indexed by it is a much trickier prospect than ordinary search. Nevertheless, if you’re producing “news”-type items on a regular basis, it’s worth a try.

Succeed and you’ll find yourself listed on XML feeds used by some of the planet’s most-visited websites via plugins for popular CMS platforms such as Google News for WordPress, or Google’s own targeted feed APIs.

So how do you get in? Google’s official rules for inclusion are …

• Sites that have news content that is original to the site
• Sites which do not solely promote their own activities
• Sites which are written and maintained by a clear organization, one that has multiple writers and editors

Most candidates fail on that last requirement since many news blogs are one-man (or woman) bands. But if you can turn your blog into a “community of newshounds” there is hope.

Having said all this, a quick trawl through Google News throws up all sorts of sites which seemingly flout these rules.

Once again, the mystery of Google is preserved.

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The major reason for this is that the old Scene wasn’t really updated very much: we said what we needed to say and got on with making great web sites. As a result, the search engines had no need  to check us over all that often because they believed that we obviously had nothing new to say.

These days, Scene is much more a platform for information, discussion and community (and the odd pitch to build you a website at a jolly nice price). That means we have included more ways to update the site, including blogging and microblogging.

We’ve been shown the way by the masterminds behind CasinoUpdate.co.uk, a site we developed for an independent casino news organisation. The good people of CUUK set out to make their web site interesting and regular, so from the very beginning they posted news items at least TWICE a day.

After just three months, CUUK found their pages were being indexed every 20 minutes or so, with stories appearing at similar intervals. That has contributed to CUUK becoming a trusted news source with a regular following inside and outside of the gambling industry, not to mention good search engine rankings, impressive PR and a popularity among advertisers.

To be honest, I’m not sure we partners at Sceneonthe.net have the time — or the imagination — to post something original and interesting every WEEK, let alone twice a day. We’ll see.

But we do hope that we can be interesting some times. We’ll try, as often as we can.

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JWC was set up in mid 2007 as a blatant exercise in self publicity and good SEO, but after other work took priority in early 2008 it fell dormant with few updates.

But JWC was more than just a blog: there were tools including keyword density counters, character converters and readability engines, the latter appearing in Google’s top five for the keywords “readability analyser” right up to its sudden disappearance and a few weeks beyond.

The intention is to ressurect JWC as part of the Scene on the Net blog, including the popular tools.

Watch this space

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