Well we are almost at that time now and my family holiday is almost upon us, each year I look for a holiday that has to cater for all of us, no mean feat when you consider that there are lots of us all wanting something slightly different. Usually I search Google for luxury villas and select a location that I know I will like such as Moraira in Spain, the location is as important as the Villa itself.

I look for a swimming pool, this must be heated – yes I know its a luxury but remember that jumping into a nice warm pool is great and relaxing whilst jumping into a cold pool (villas in Spain will have swimming pools outdoors which will be cold) will make you tense and there is the chance that you spend less time in the pool.

I have often selected country cottages in the UK for breaks and again use the same criteria as if I were hiring a villa but of course in this country you cannot be sure of the weather and so most pools are heated and housed indoors, that is why I love heated pools. Many luxury holidays taken with heated pools means I know just how much more fun it is to just slip into the water at any point and indeed spend hours at times without getting out.

Even in the heat of Spain pools can be very cold and no fun for kids who want to spend hours playing in the pool so criteria one is a luxury villa heated pool, next I need space as there are lots of us. I have no problem with people sharing bedrooms so twin beds are no problem, I always want a good master bedroom though for myself since there will be quality time spent there

A bit of garden is important, I like to play with the kids so a football or swingball or basketball is always a likely activity and you need a little space, my younger children love looking for Lizards and Bugs so a garden helps with that too.

So all in all they are the main requirements for my luxury villa and therefore ingredients for a good holiday!!

Copywriting for SEO purposes is a vital process that sometimes is an outsourced and sometimes is delivered inhouse.

I have spent many hours training London agencies to fully understand how to fulfill the exact requirements needed for a successful deployment of content both for website content and also for press releases. Its amazing how poorly many  of them create and publish their information and in todays buzz world of SEO their services are sold as copywriting for SEO or the completely new title of SEO Copywriters.

Clearly when created and implemented correctly copy or content is king and providing the integrity is protected then search engines will lap it up. But to truly align copy to a website it needs to fulfill a number of other requirements for maximum SEO benefit, furthermore a good copywriting service will align any credible work with comprehensive keyword research.

Even then its not enough, other page elements must be married to the copy to support the page message, once this is in place then content will have maximum impact, one last ingredient is linking, either internal contextual linking or external inbound linking that again supports the theme.

The whole set of elements will be needed before a successful copywriting service can also claim to be SEO led and almost every copywriting service that I have been called in to train did not understand what a true service for SEO is.

Yet another top SEO expert is looking to help smaller businesses in the recession, a new website has been launched through a simple wordpress format aimed at assisting small businesses get affordable SEO solutions that deliver results with a minimum of outlay.

In the current recession small businesses cannot afford to compete for high quality SEO services and have ended up at the mercy of unscrupulous SEO agencies who are not competent but happy to take the money.

Affordable SEO solutions are available now from experts who are recognising the struggle that smaller businesses are enduring, their marketing buck is a very precious commodity but all too regularly it is given up for no return. This leaves much bitterness about the industy but really hurts the small businesses who are the victimes.

I applaud the current trend and happy to publicise the trend for established and successful SEO experts to offer an affordable solution to business owners who traditionally are unable to pay the high fees for this expertise. The new initiative is being led by small scale blogs, very simple affairs without branding or lavish success statements.

If low profile assistance is offered in this way it must be a good thing, it is perfectly acceptable for these SEO experts to do this on a low key basis which ensure there is no conflict of interests with their larger SEO clients.

So if you see affordable solutions being offered check out the people behind them, do no be put off by the low key web offering and just ask to see their real credentials, you may just be suprised at what you are getting.

Affordable SEO has never been so good.

It has been announced by the government and as far as I am concerned its about time!!
Garden grabbing though has been the only outlet for the smaller builder and developer and so hand in hand with this is the release of greenbelt land to enable this hugely valuable industry to continue, thus providing the homes and the work needed.

I welcome the change with the garden grabbing law, for too long the corrupt councils have allowed internal development to go on based on who has influence and how that influence is applied, our villages are destroyed and towns made into bricks and mortar jungles as each bit of green is built upon.

For years I have taken off from airports and looked down at the villages and towns, almost all of Britain is countryside and its a myth that development is swallowing it all up, the current trend has been to squeeze good quality and valuable English village space and town space and fill it with houses because we are led to believe its the only area left to build on. That is rubbish, most of britain is owned by the few, most of Britain is out of bounds to the general population, the countryside is vast, just take a look when you leave an airport, look down, masses of countryside with little rat runs where we have to live and drive.

Bring Back Gardens

Stop infilling the only areas that we have to live in on a daily basis and start pushing back village and town boundaries for spacious development with green areas that are covenented so they cannot ever be developed.

Britain has enough land to do this and it would benefit everyone, just because we are crammed into narrow corridors of britain doesn’t mean there is no room, its a fallacy. There are millions and millions of acres available by just pushing town boundaries back a little, not towards each other but into the contryside, but cut the density and allow homes to be built with proper gardens.

garden grabbing

In Ireland you cannot build outside a town boundary unless the house is accompanied with half an acre of land, they still allow development but it is strictly controlled in towns and the new plots look great with lots of trees and bushes, hedges and of course wildlife.

Britain must get out of the concept that development is the end for wildlife, bees, insects birds they need habitat and in the past the traditional English, Welsh, Scottish garden was full of flowers and of course in some cases weeds but it was vital to wildlife, don’t you think that squeezing all this has contributed to the downside in their numbers, for Sparrows and Blue Tits and Bees there is more food in a traditional garden that in a field that has a crop on it for just 2 months of flower and is completely barren during Winter.

Bring back development in a sensible way, and watch how mother nature populates it again.

As we know in the world of SEO there is a need to keep content fresh and updated on any website, this has given rise to the use of Wordpress and other like minded software.

Whilst Google loves the way that this software can work there are still pitfalls when people are trying to use it for an actual website rather than just a blog, the first problem is obvious, most company websites will have a mission statement on their homepage. This is quite difficult when you use a Wordpress platform as by nature the blog software will continually replace the mission statement each time you write a post and then knock it down the page. This creates difficulty for serving that crucial engaging statement and after a few posts it will not be visible.

The option is easy. you make sure the first post, the one with your mission statement is ’sticky’, this keeps it at the front of the list and each new post will then drop down underneath. Problem solved right, nice and quick? Actually no, if you are not careful you will offer Google a major duplicate content issue which then defeats the object of using the wordpress blog software that Google loves.

So what is the issue? – The problem is that once you reach the pescribed post density on your homepage your software then starts page 2 and as new posts tumble in older posts are pushed off the bottom of page one and then onto page 2, ordinarily this is not really too much of a problem but with a sticky post it means you will automatically add a second sticky post to the top of page two, and then when the time comes page 3 and so on. Each one will be a replica of your sticky post on page 1 and so you then have a perpetual duplication issue.

The bigger your sticky post the greater the problem of duplication will be!

I know of one blog that has dropped three pages now withing 2 weeks of this issue presenting itslef purely because the blog is tripping Googles duplication filter.

So the answer is not easy, clever people will get into the code and force a change, others will deny spiders to the homepage archive (not maybe the best way anyhow) others will continually rewrite the sticky post before it leaves page 1 but remember this may immediately duplicate it to other pages.

Whatever solution you try remember that leaving duplication will harn your search positions!

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I have a number of Squidoo lenses including one for my French Watermill

Squidoo has been used frequently to aid the passing of trust in link campaigns, in fact it is often possible to get a Squidoo page well ranked in its own right and then pass the benefit of this strength to a secondary website, this can of course be done legitimately as I have a Squidoo lens for my French Watermill renovation and because of the way it is set up I can actually earn a little advertising revenue from the Squidoo page but also get people into my watermill blog.

The problem with Squidoo is that Google gives it a lot of trust but also is very capable of understanding how people can abuse this when creating their online marketing strategy. Squidoo themselves are reasonably good at policing some aspects of course but benefits hugely from being Google friendly.

To see the effects of creating a Squidoo lens for marketing purposes and then overdoing the SEO work we set up three individual lenses and then populated them with content. The lenses linked to corporate websites so they looked really genuine and viable for a test.

Once they had been around for a few weeks with some initial linking we tracked their progress in search using niche search terms that the pages were targeted towards.

Once that was done we then went to town and deployed a reasonable spike in the link campaign, with one Squidoo lens we hit it with 400 independent links in 2 days another with 800 and the third squidoo lens with 1200, now bearing in mind we had a few inbound links to start with and that in some respects these were reasonably low numbers for link spam the results were startling.

The lens with 400 links moved up over 3 weeks, the other two didn’t move at all and then after week 4 they were dropped from Googles index one at a time, there was nothing linking the squidoo lenses together and no common denominators.

The question is whether Squidoo worked with Google or did Google just spot the link spike and knew not to trust those lenses, at the time of writing none of the lenses have returned to Googles database.

What was the point of this test.. well using Squidoo as part of a naturally balanced SEO strategy is a good idea but remember just because Google trusts Squidoo it doesn’t mean you can get away with link spamming as a method of safeguarding a clients URL, clearly if you link spam the Squidoo lens it will get burnt in serps and render it useless in your campaign.

Be patient and work the lens with good content and use the social media options that are offered, get the lens successful in its own right.

No Corporates were hurt during this testing.

Things seem to have changed and it looks as though over optimisation is showing a different hand.
So convinced am I that this is becoming a serious issue that I am writing a new paper on the subject and will post it soon based on actual observation for corporate websites.

I have seen 3 corporates drop over the last few weeks after a period of instability, these sites all have the same techniques and the same deployment of content style. The websites would normally look as though they were bang on the money for high quality SEO practice with everything looking squeeky clean.

Now these sites are page 4 and eve a backlink check with proper tools does not show any convincing link spike or abuse, they are perhaps…. too optimised?

This is a question I have posed to Google just to see if I get a response that is helpful, I will publish my article anyways but over optimisation maybe just got a different threshold over the last few weeks and months. I know there is an algo change afoot that affects longtail but this is mainstream generic search terms in big websites that should already be enjoying brand push from Google.

Something is amiss and I am looking out for a bit more…

Delving deeper it is confusing as the sites affected have lost a large amount of profile in both generic and longtail search results in some categories but also retaining generic and longtail results in others. By that I mean that the sites have lost search positions on some keywords but not others.

This is pretty strange as usually when a website gets hit it will be either generic or longtail or both, never did I experience a mixture of retaining some generic whilst losing some generic, thats what I call an enigma.

What is also strange is that at least one corporate site has been affected like this and there are no common denominators between the sites affected. For example site A is affected and that uses absolute positioning whilst site B is affected and doesn’t. Site A has had a sensible level of linkbuilding and site B has been a little too aggressive for my liking so everything points to site B being a potential candidate but its site A that has the problem.

I have to say there is nothing like earning your corn in this industry, I go away on holiday and always seem to come back to a drama, I recon that Matt must monitor my passport.