MatBennett.com

There’s a fine line between optimism and lunacy, and I’m rarely accused of the former.  So why is it that I have just taken on a small contract to try to get a new client ranked on Google in under 2 weeks?  Well.. I like a challenge.

Gorgeous & Co. have a great boutique store specialising in all things for the romantic bedroom.  It’s a nice looking site with a great range of products, but the one thing that they don’t have is search engine position.  Due to some imminent press coverage, that what we are now going to try to get them and in less than two weeks (13 days to be precise… and we don’t yet have FTP access).

As one well known UK SEO put it well need to “be lucky as a leprechaun with a 4 leaf clover on St Patricks day standing at the end of a rainbow”.  Fingers crossed eh?

(Of course if any kind blogger stumbles across this and is feeling helpful, do feel free to link to gorgeousandco.com and help out!

With over 70 million registered accounts at the time of writing, myspace is an internet phenomenon that is hard to ignore for those involved in online marketing.

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Just been looking at optimising some Froogle feeds and wondered which site were used to produce the Froogle merchant ratings. Oddly I can’t find much written about this on the web at the moment, so thought that I would pop a quick list of the ones that I have unearthed so far:

• www.resellerratings.com
• www.DealTime.co.uk
• www.Shopzilla.co.uk
• www.Ciao.co.uk
• www.PriceGrabber.com

Sure that there are others as well, but they seem to be the most common for UK stores at least

Interesting article listing 93 factors that may (or may not!) have an effect on SERPs. Must have a good read of this at some point.

http://www.seomoz.org/articles/search-ranking-factors.php

OK, I know that this is old hat, but the entry about the Matt Cutts Blog made me think of it again, and I thought it worth noting here.

Google-guy Says is simply a site that notes when a particular user posts on the Webmaster World and Search Engine Watch forums. Not all that interesting unless you bare in mind that Google-guy, as the name suggests works at Google.

I’m not a huge fan of either forum as the signal to noise ratio is generally way off, but there is good information on both if you care to dig. Some of the best of it comes from Google-guy, which obviously makes Google-guy says a useful tool.

There now appears to be at least 2 sites running under the same name, both of which appear useful. I’ve therefore linked to both below:

http://www.markcarey.com/googleguy-says/
http://googleguy.zorgloob.com/

I’ve recently noticed a growing number of “mainstream” sites utilising trackbacks on their pages. Even CNN’s all powerful news.com now has a slightly messy trackback / pingback system in place.

Not sure of the history of trackback and pingback, but both systems are heavily utilised by bloggers as a way of providing related links to a topic. The basic principal of both systems is that that one information site links to another through an article and let’s the target site know that the link is in place. The target site’s automated system then recognises this link and provides a link back.

Considering how difficult it now is to get a good relevant link, utilising trackback / pingback methods could well now be the easiest way to get links in to an information based site. I’m not talking about spamming every trackback page you can find (although I am sure that a lot of people are doing this), but instead deliberately searching for relevant articles to provide as further information sources.

I’ve only really used either method as part of out of the box news/blogging systems, but can’t imagine it would be too difficult to put a standalone module together - which is exactly what I intend to do. I’ll probably experiment with it here on this site at some point then roll it out on to relevant work projects.

I’m not a huge fan of blogging, as the vast majority seem to have little new to say. Good ones though can be great.

I haven’t yet read enough of Matt Cutts’ blog to decide whether it will be one of the rare good ones or not yet, but at first glance it could be interesting. What immediately made Matt’s blog stand out for the crowd is the fact that he works for Google.

I’d love to know what his employers think of the blog and how much of it he has pass committee before it hit the pages. Certainly what I have read so far is not ground breaking, but does put an interesting human face on the inhabitants of the (in)famous Googleplex. I’m sure that SEO engineers around the world are adding it to their RSS readers at a huge pace, something that Matt himself must be very aware of as he decides what to include.

Anyway, it’s here to remind me to take an occassional look. http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/