Relevant, useful and appealing content is a vital part of any search engine optimisation )SEO( campaign but it is not as straight forward as writing a business letter or a proposal. There are different ways of writing for the web which may not be immediately obvious to the average business director who has agreed to keep a blog or write an authoritative guide to help their business gain momentum. Here are a few tips for creating good, readable web copy. 1( Keep it simple,

Most website owners rely on quick website tweaks and the right tools for measurable website success . That's not wrong but that's also not enough. Being serious about business, a webmaster must get links to get additional exposure via search engines, of course predominantly Google. Google still judges a website mostly based on the number and quality of links pointing to it )backlinks(. So even today you got to get links , be it via outstanding content,

It is hard to underestimate the importance of fresh, keyword-rich content for search engine optimisation )SEO(. The internet is a tool for delivering information, and consumers seek relevant and interesting writing. All search engines want to do is keep their users happy by supplying them with such content. Portals such as Google and Yahoo! constantly develop their algorithms to make sure they only offer useful content.

How to measure website success when rankings, Google PageRank and sheer traffic have gone the way of "hits": All these older metrics become more and more meaningless in the current web environment. Why measure ranking when they differ from location to location and from computer to computer due to localization and personalization efforts by Google and other search engines?

Britons have upped the amount they spend online, according to a new report compiled by the Interactive Media in Retail Group )IMRG( and Capgemini . Again. Every time they publish this report , the news is the same, online spending rises every month as Britons gradually shift their shopping onto the web. I should just publish the same story and update the numbers each time! The IMRG/Capgemini e-Retail Sales Index August 2008 revealed spending rose to £4.

Paid-for search advertising "dominates" online marketing, according to the Ofcom. Its report Communication Nation: UK consumers paying less but getting more found the amount spent on promoting goods and services via the internet grew to £2.8 billion last year. The watchdog reveals the amount spent on advertising through the web was greater than the total amount spent on marketing through C4, ITV1, S4C and five. I find this a bit frustrating.

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.

New web tools appear daily. Often I don't even manage to bookmark them all, let alone try them. Nonetheless I try as many Internet tools as I can, I'm just a serial early adopter. I can't stop it. These mostly free 30+ tools which are either web tools or tools for the web I discovered just recently in 2008. I tested most of these tools and I use some of them regularly as a web professional. Most of these social media, web design & development, search, SEO and analytics,

The Guardian may be wincing this week as it emerges it purchased sponsored Google results for the keywords Madeleine McCann. According to the CounterValue blog , written by Justin Williams, assistant-editor of the Telegraph Media Group, the Guardian showed poor taste at best. "There is no phrase too sensitive, no taste that is too poor ' apparently," he sneered. Ouch. Even more painfully, Williams published a further post ,

High street retailers are gaining more visitors to their websites than their online-only competitors, a new study shows. The research and analysis gurus at Hitwise compared the 100 largest online high street stores, like Argos and M&S, with the 100 biggest web-only retailers, which include Play.com and the mighty Amazon. According to the study, these high street retailers received a fifth more UK visitors last month than those companies operating only online.

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!

Yahoo! has urged marketers to choose appropriate keywords for their paid search campaigns. A post in the engine's search marketing blog reiterates the message we tell clients day after day â€" choose business specific keywords. It suggests firms bid on both generic and specific phrases, warning generic selections can quickly eat up budgets and are less likely to result in sales than more targeted choices.

Business people often ignore many simple fixes for websites. Their sites don't get found or scare away visitors who do land there. Web developers often underestimate the plethora of ways to tweak a website for more visitors and higher sales. SEO has been around for 10 years but still many sites fail to take advantage of most little fixes Google needs to assess a site and visitors need to get what they want. This list of 30 really "quick and clean",

Google's latest move could give everyday users more of an understanding of how it works and modifies their results. It already offers results based on information such as location, previous searches and web history, and now it is to inform users when their results have been modified in this way. In the next few days, users will start to see notifications popping up to notify them their results have been customised. The engine will use IP addresses to customise results,

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.

Here at SEOptimise, we know it can be hard to persuade some bosses you need online marketing. Sometimes they do not use the internet, or simply do not want to allocate the cash â€" perhaps because they do not believe in the returns which are possible with a decent search engine optimisation campaign. To save you time, we have prepared the below letter. Simply edit and print! Dear [insert boss's name here] , I hope you are well.

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,

Google is now the most popular website for Brits browsing the web with their mobile phones, a new report reveals. Research conducted by Opera shows Google has finally overtaken Yahoo! in terms of unique visitors. Another search website, MSN.com, makes the top ten most visited sites list for mobile users. This shows it does not matter whether the consumer is using their mobile or their PC, the preferred starting point for online experiences continues to be a search engine.