The Google Webmaster Central blog yesterday posted about it's new PDF SEO Starter Guide , available for free download . This is excellent news for webmasters, especially during a recession, as many small businesses will be looking to push their search rankings/traffic forward but without the budget for SEO consulting. "Welcome to Google's Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide. This document first began as an effort to help teams within Google,

I've been blogging for the last three years now and one of the most important things I've learnt is readers don't have the time )or attention span( to read through long detailed posts. Concise, attractive looking posts grab the attention of readers and perform far more effectively almost every time. I figured this out the hard way, spending hours writing up long posts which I considered to be quality content but unfortunately no-one else agreed!

Google have obviously been clamping down on paid links during the last year, but it now looks like they may also be taking a stance against blog reviews made in exchange for free gifts! Just in case you haven't heard of this; a recent popular strategy has been for website's to offer a free gift in exchange for bloggers reviewing and linking to a product.

Having been involved in a wide range of travel SEO projects during the last 12 months, I thought it would be a good time to write about the buying cycle of searches when purchasing a holiday online.

I've noticed this on Google a few times recently, but when forum listings appear in search results they have a post count, number of authors and last post date stamp alongside them: I'm already finding this very useful to filter out the one post results and find posts containing more substantial information, without the need for clicking each listing. Copyright SEOptimise.

I'm not saying this is a bad thing, infact it's probably quite useful as Wikipedia will provide a different type of search result, but the number of locational searches where Wikipedia rank in Google's top 10 is quite incredible! Here's some I found by performing a range of queries for countries, cities, counties,

Over the last couple of weeks I've been moving into a new apartment and I had a problem getting the oven to work )not too good at these sort of things(. Anyway, I didn't have a manual so I headed over to the manufacturers website, Creda, for help. Searching for Creda in Google I found www.creda.co.uk at #1, but was surprised to see the following result snippet displayed: Bit strange,

Earlier today I wrote a blog post over on e-consultancy which looks at how UK supermarkets are ignoring SEO for major keywords . In my opinion this is a massive oversight and it appears that the leading supermarket retailers such as Asda, Sainsburys and to a certain extent Tesco are trying to overprotect their brand rather than optimise their website's for very important keywords. I'm not suggesting that they keyword stuff their h1 and title tags etc,

Following XL Airways going into administration last week and yesterday's annoucement that Lehman Brothers are filing for bankruptcy , many competitors have quickly setup PPC ads targeting brand queries to take advantage of this. Below are the ads appearing on Google for XL and ads have quickly started appearing for Lehman Brothers too: This obviously wouldn't have been possible before Google opened up brand bidding , but is this a good thing?

There's a heated discussion on Twitter today following the move to take away link juice from bio links on profiles. This follows Dave Naylor's backlink tip which caused Matt Cutts to notify Twitter founder Evan Williams , appearing to request/recommend that hyperlinks are removed from profile bio. The heated discussion occurred because many active users feel that the time and effort they have spent in building up their Twitter profiles should be rewarded with a backlink.

I expect by now most people have heard about Google's launch of its new web browser Google Chrome yesterday. Rather than talk about Google Chrome itself )as it has been very well covered already(, I've taken a look at how Google are promoting this to encourage users to download and try out the new browser. Google.com & Google.co.uk Both Google.co.uk and Google.com have download messages on their homepages.

A common question we're asked by clients is how can they improve their rankings for Google Maps local searches? Having analysed many listings, in my opinion the main factors to Google Maps listings in the UK are as follows: 1( Distance to location - the closer your registered business address is to the centre of a town or city, the more relevant Google will find your listing to a locational search.

As spotted by Ciaran Norris , British tennis player Andy Murray is now using Twitter to provide regular updates to his fans and followers. Described by many, including the normally very polite Tim Henman, as a " miserable git " this could be a very clever idea to help win over some new fans by helping to portray himself a more cheerful image of what happens behind the scenes, rather than the serious/grumpy Andy Murray we see on-court and in post-match interviews!

Yesterday the very popular social media bookmarking website Del.icio.us relaunched and moved to use delicious.com . This was well covered across the blogosphere, with reviews looking at its improved design and enhanced speed , but in addition to this the move is also likely to boost the website's search rankings. Here are some of the SEO factors from the Delicious.com move which will help to strengthen the website: del.icio.

In Dragons Den last night Clive Billing turned around what looked like a pretty average pitch into a £255,000 offer for 40% of his business, online diamond website diamondgeezer.com. How did he do this? By announcing that he ranked in Google at #12 for diamond and #9 for diamond engagement rings . He might not have got much further had the dragons actually searched for this to realise that the site had dramatically dropped to outside the top 100.

We are currently looking for search engine marketing professionals to work from our office at the Magdalen Centre in Oxford. The job roles available are for an SEO Executive and Pay Per Click Manager , this is a great opportunity for anyone keen to learn and looking to improve their experience in the search industry. If you know of anyone who may be interested it would be great if you could point them in our direction' Copyright SEOptimise.

Earlier today the new search engine Cuil was officially launched. While it's obviously got a very long way to get anywhere near competing with Google what I find interesting is that it's been developed by former Google engineers and that it "ranks pages by content, rather than popularity". This means that rather than ranking a page based upon the quality of it's backlinks,

While searching Google earlier today I was very surprised to notice that one of the listings returned in the top 10 was an FTP site! Digging a little deeper and I found that there are actually millions of ftp://ftp.domain.com addresses indexed in Google , all of which appear to have read access permissions granted to the folder structure. I admit that I know very little about hacking but surely having this information available is a potential security risk to webmasters?

You may have noticed that we have moved the SEOptimise blog away from the subdomain blog.seoptimise.com and redirected this to www.seoptimise.com/blog. The reason for this change is because inbound links to subdomains are treated differently to links which point to the main subdomain. Google generally has less trust in subdomains because it's very easy for people to setup websites such as mysubdomain.blogspot.com.

Over the last couple of weeks many people have noticed several ranking changes in Google.co.uk. Reports so far suggest that the Google algorithm is currently favouring .co.uk domains over .com and other top-level domains. Is this a positive change? Recently Google have appeared to be moving away from heavily relying on TLD information and trusting a wider range of factors in order to assess a website's geographical location, so the algorthim update seems quite surprising.