We want to highlight the most important things we have, our customers, and thus begins an interview series dedicated to just these. First up is Robin Larsson, CEO of gambling company NoiQ.com , which we are helping with organic search engine optimization and online marketing.

Name: Robin Larsson
Lives: Madliena, Malta
Born: Town, Sweden

What is NoiQ and what are your duties?
We provide games on the internet within Poker, casino and sportsbetting. My job consists mainly of keeping the movement together, and will review all options for expansion of the company.

What is a typical day at NoiQ?
An ordinary day at NoiQ is that we work largely with two different parts. One part is to maintain our current players with the support and VIP services, while the second part is working more with the recruitment of new players.

You recently launched your new website, what are your expectations for this?
With our new website we wanted to simplify navigation between our various products significantly. We expect to have a larger spread between the products, and increase the turnover of the casino and sports betting.

How do you think it has been so far to work  with Crystone, which is your SEO provider?
It has worked very well and has been very easy to work with Crystone, which is our SEO provider!

Have we so far lived up to your expectations?
Crystone has certainly lived up to our expectations and we look forward to a long partnership.

We previously wrote on our blog about the domain auction for Haiti that was held by MissDomain after the initiative of Internet Sweden a domain auction. Sales were passed on in full to help the victims of the earthquake disaster in Haiti.

The auction generated around 10 012 EUR (approx .$ 13,600 USD), a total of 217 domains were donated to the auction and 73 were sold. The most expensive domain was IJ.se that went for 2350 EUR (approx $3,200 USD).

Crystone's own donation, webhotell.com, was the domain that generated the largest number of unique bids and the final price ended up at an impressive 900 EUR (about $1,230 USD), which resulted in a bronze place among the domains that were sold.

Here we have listed the 10 most expensive domains:

1 IJ.se 2350 EUR
2 forsakringar.nu 1100 EUR
3 webhotell.com 900 EUR
4 prylar.nu 850 EUR
5 uthyres.nu 850 EUR
6 skidor.nu 800 EUR
7 festlokaler.nu EUR 325
8 bytjobb.nu 225 EUR
9 idol.nu 190 EUR
10 tippa.nu 176 EUR

When looking for an SEO company to help give your business a boost, you really have to be careful. There are a lot of SEO scams out there that take your money and give 0 results. That’s why Pay for Performance SEO is such a good idea.

This service allows businesses to really get results from their SEO. In fact, you only pay if it works! When your company begins to get ranked in top search engines, such as Google,Yahoo!, and Bing then you’ll pay a monthly fee based on how many rankings you get. If the SEO company doesn’t manage to get you onto that first page, then you don’t have to pay.

No one can guarantee you a specific result, but if you don’t have to pay unless you are actually seeing results, then you aren’t wasting money. Since there are a number of companies that promise the number one place in Google, yet fail to deliver once you’ve paid or get your site ranked for a non-existent phrase, it really pays to look for the  Pay for Performance SEO option.

You are in business to make money, so why throw it away on organic search engine optimization that doesn’t work? Stick to tried and true methods and reliable companies that offer pay for performance as an option and you will end up with far better results.

Most business owners these days know a good deal about organic search engine optimization, but what they might not realize is how useful it can be to go local. Local SEO terms are often what people look for when they are ready to buy from local companies. 

There are three main stages of buying online. First, people start looking for a solution to their problem. Once they discover what that is, they move on to researching the actual solution. This is where they begin to look up specific brands or companies to find out more about their products and services. You really do want to get in on this level, but even better is when someone is looking for very specific keywords, right down to the location. This is almost always a sign that they are ready to buy.

When your website shows up in relevant local search results, you will see a far higher conversion rate. This means you will be earning quite a bit more than if you are targeting general keywords. Local search engine optimization really does work, yet most companies aren’t yet using this technique.

It’s beneficial for most companies to outsource their SEO if they truely want it done quickly and professionally without having to learn all the ins and outs. After all shouldn't they focus on what they do best, which is focus on their products or services. When looking for a company to handle your search engine optimization, check into their experience with local SEO and find out if it would be right for your company. It could make all the difference in how many sales you make.

These days, any business website that doesn’t use organic search engine optimization methods has very little hope of making it into the search results. You need strategically placed keywords throughout the site, of course, but that is often not enough. Real SEO involves far more than merely content, though that is a large part of it.

Unfortunately, it can take a very long time to learn how to optimize your site correctly. During this process, you’ll find that you can make quite a few mistakes, or you could even end up using techniques that aren’t exactly by the guidelines, thereby causing problems later on and possibly destroying your rankings. That’s why many people choose to outsource SEO to a reputable SEO company.

By hiring experts to do your search engine optimization for you, your business site will get better rankings faster than if you try to learn to do everything yourself. An SEO firm will already have the experience and knowledge necessary to work more effectively on your projects. This is a huge benefit and well worth paying for. It also frees you up to attend to more important matters in your company. Every business owner has other areas that they need to deal with, so turn the SEO over to the experts and focus on the areas of your business that only you can do.

Take your time and find a company that has the necessary experience in SEO, since many people start up businesses without having much practical experience. A company that offers search engine optimization and has the experience to back it up can be gold. Particularly if they offer affordable prices or even Pay for Performance SEO pricing.

Many businesses start off by designing their own websites and then try to do their own search engine optimization, as well. This rarely works as planned. It can take years to learn what you need in order to successfully integrate Organic Search Engine Optimization into your site. In other words, you can waste a lot of time learning and working on your site and never get the results you want.

An SEO company, if they’re good, will be able to set you up quickly and easily. They will look at what your site already has, then let you know just what can be done to improve  your search engine rankings. After all this is what they focus on, so hand the reins over to the SEO company and they can take over, changing your site as necessary and providing other SEO services, such as article marketing, blog writing, and link building. There are many methods of boosting your ranking on the search engines and chances are the professionals know more about the various methods than you do.

Letting someone else take over this aspect of your business means you are free to focus on other areas that only you can do. SEO experts will be able to work far faster and more effectively than you can on your own, which means you will see results much faster. If you’re serious about running a successful business, you need to look at outsourcing the parts of your business that others can do faster and better and SEO is one of these tasks.

With Pay for Performance SEO, businesses only pay for results. However, it’s vital that you know how the SEO firm you hire is getting those results. In search engine marketing, there are two main types of techniques used, white hat and black hat.

White hat methods are those that essentially provide the visitor and search engines with legitimate information for organic search engine optimization. These include article marketing, blogging, etc. Essentially, your keywords are used naturally in content that is spread across the internet, with relevant links back to your website or blog. This is acceptable by all search engines and isn’t cheating, it also helps establish your company as a useful source of information and draws clients in.

Black hat marketing, on the other hand, is cheating the system and using methods that trick the search engines into thinking that your site is valuable enough to be ranked in the top 10 results. These include invisible text and keyword stuffing, or other techniques that are not permitted and can get you in trouble. While these techniques usually do see short term results, they rarely last long, since the search engines are constantly changing their algorithms to avoid spammers and cheaters. Some Pay for Performance companies use these low techniques to get you results so you will pay them and then they leave you to take the fall.

For long term, stable results, look for companies that offers white hat SEO techniques. They should be able to tell you how they are going to get search engine results for you and these should be acceptable tactics, such as article marketing and  on-page optimization. Pay for Performance is a great way to go if you are on a tight budget and can’t afford to throw away your advertising dollars, but you should also have a good idea of just how those results are being achieved.

Finding a search engine optimization service that is reputable and does a great job can be a challenge these days. There are a number of companies that are not run by experts at all, but merely people who have a basic ability in SEO. When it comes to your business, you want only the best, so take the time to find a company that is going to do a good job of your SEO. Not sure what to look for? Here are three traits that a great SEO firm will have.

1. Rapid response time. While they may be booked for a while, a team that responds to your questions in a timely manner is likely going to do a good job for you. Keep in mind that they will have work hours, but if they respond to you within two work days, you can rest assured that their customer service is good and you will be treated well.

2. Multiple services. Good search engine optimization companies offer not only a site makeover, but other methods of improving your search engine ranking. Look for a firm that will help you with blog writing, linkbuilding and article writing. This means you get everything in one place and don’t need to worry about hiring your own writers and submitting articles to directories, etc. It will all be taken care of for you.

3. Experience. You definitely want a company with experience under their belt. Does that mean you should look for an SEO firm that has been around for 5 years? Not necessarily. It does mean, however, that you need to make sure that the people who run it have been in the business for a while and understand just what is needed. They should have a finger on the pulse of the search engines, knowing what the best methods of optimizing your site are and be able to implement those rapidly.

There are a number of SEO firms out there, but if you want a very good one that will give you the best value for your money. Organic search engine optimization  is something that is usually best done by someone who knows what they are doing and can rapidly get you the results you need.

We have at the year end of 2009 completed the sale of our Norwegian operation to FS data. The reason for selling is that we want to invest and grow in our other markets, primarily Sweden, USA and Turkey, and we are through this sale gain both capital and other resources to do so in an even greater extent than we do today. 

For Crystone AB, Crystone LLC and Hostley customers this means, of course, no change at all. And to our Norwegian customers, there will be no change in existing systems and server structure in the near future, it will be business as usual. 

The Domain Auction Site, MissDomain.com, announced a few days ago that they would be holding a domain auction. This is following the initiative and idea from InternetSweden.se, a domain auction where the sales go to help the victims of the earthquake disaster in Haiti. A prerequisite for this success is obvious and that there are buyers who are interested in the domains in the auction, but also to donate some domains that can be auctioned.

Crystone has therefore chosen to donate nine domains to the auction. Among these are names that domanparkering.se, windowstekniker.se and but.se but the domain that stands out most, and probably has the highest potential value is probably webhotell.com.

Over half of all business websites were designed to attract and sell to the customer, with little or no thought to organic search engine optimization. That means that the majority of business websites are not drawing the traffic they should be from search engines. While word of mouth is great, as is having traffic from other sites recommending you, there’s still no real substitute for being found in the top rankings on Google or one of the other popular search engines.

Often there are just a few simple changes that can be made in order to turn your existing website into one that will attract the search engine spiders while still bringing in people. In fact, when done correctly, your site will draw very targeted traffic, people who are looking to buy what you’re selling. It will also sell them on your product. Essentially, your site needs to be in two different languages, that of the search engines, and that of people who visit it. Just one or the other will result in low conversion rates and sales.

To ensure the best of both worlds, it’s a good idea to look for a professional SEO team that will be able to take your existing website and improve it, making it work for both search engines and people.

Make sure to use organic search engine optimization methods if you want your website to rise in the rankings and stay there. The methods that promise fast traffic are almost always a bad idea, since they could get your site removed from the rankings completely. Stick to clean SEO and natural appearing linkbuilding and you can’t go wrong.

If you spend any time researching SEO, you’ll quickly find that organic search engine optimization is the best way to go. There are dozens of other methods that can be used to boost your traffic quickly and while some are legit, such as Pay Per Click management, nothing beats real SEO, with strategically placed keywords and links for boosting your website. But why is that?

The entire purpose of search engines is to provide useful information to the searcher. Since search engines aren’t human, there are algorithms that determine what is useful or not. The best sites get moved to the top of the stack. This isn’t always true, of course, since people figure out how to trick the search engines. Google, Yahoo! and Bing are all on the lookout for this, however, and are constantly changing things up to ensure that only the best and most useful websites rise to the top.

While no one can ever know for sure just how the search engines work, we do know that getting backlinks is very valuable because it helps to determine if a site is worthy of attention or not. Organic search engine techniques like article writing can be quite useful for getting those backlinks build up.

If you are going to outsource, make sure you look for a company that will use "white hat" organic search engine optimization, as opposed to less acceptable methods. They should work on your website to get it into the search engine results. It’s an ongoing process and can take time. Rarely do these things happen overnight, but with careful planning and execution, your business site can be the first thing people see when they search for your keywords.

Pay for Performance SEO means you only pay the SEO company that you hire if they get you the results that are agreed on beforehand. There aren’t many companies that will do this, since it means they lose out if you don’t see results. And you can bet that the ones which do offer this option are going to be very, very good at what they do, or they would lose money.

Just what should you look for in a pay for performance company? The first thing is to find out just what they are offering. What are the results that you should expect? Will you pay a one time fee or a monthly fee? In many cases, it’s in your benefit to go with a monthly payment, since that means the company will continue working to keep you in those top results.

Make sure you find out just what you will be paying, as well. You should be able to get a proposal from the company that will outline everything. Read it over carefully, because if they get the best results, you’ll need to pay.

Find out what the company does to get these results. You should look for organic SEO, white hat techniques only. These include things such as article marketing and blog posts which will boost rankings naturally, as opposed to using unacceptable methods that may work for a short time, but eventually be banned from the search engines.

You want a quality company, so one that not only offers pay for performance SEO as an option, but one that offers white hat SEO techniques. You should also look for a company that can help you improve search engine optimization on your website, as well as provide offsite optimization.

There are many number of SEO techniques available, but many of them will only end up causing problems or getting your site penalized. Unlike these “black hat” techniques, organic search engine optimization allows you to build up a steady flow of traffic through natural means. These aren’t paid ads, so you won’t be wasting any money.

Organic search engine optimization involves tweaking a website to make it more search engine friendly, as well as other methods of building up natural links through videos, articles and other methods. These techniques help build your reputation with the search engines, since they prefer natural linkage. Rather than paid links or large numbers of identical links that point to the same page all in a short time period, this technique relies on slowly building up links to move your site up through the rankings for your top keywords. It’s not a process that happens overnight, but it is very effective in bringing in highly targeted traffic in the long run.

Most businesses find that rather than try to maintain a long term, regular campaign, they are better off outsourcing. An established SEO firm that uses organic search engine optimization will be able to take over this rather tedious part of SEO for you. Experts will be able to get things done faster and more efficiently, as well. It’s a good way to go if you want natural links that the search engines like and to build your online reputation slowly but surely.

The Pay for Performance SEO option is a great opportunity to only pay for actual results. Most SEO companies wouldn’t dream of offering this kind of a deal, but there are some very good reasons to seek out the ones that do.

1. Don’t waste money. It’s easy to spend a lot without ever seeing results when it comes to search engine optimization, but you can avoid that problem with this payment option. Wait until you can actually see your business site ranked on that first page of Google, Yahoo! and Bing, then pay.

2. Avoid scams. Unfortunately, many so called organic search engine optimization companies aren’t legit at all. They will take your money, but give very little in return. They will point out the obvious . . . no one can guarantee first page ranking, as a way to excuse their lack of proper work. However, if you select a company that only charges you according to what they accomplish, you won’t be scammed.

3. Test the company. Most SEO companies offer a range of services, so if you find a good one, you’ll be able to use them for a range of tasks. Apart from the obvious search engine optimization, you can hire them to run your blog, do monthly article marketing, etc. The best way to decide if you want to use a company is to first test them out and doing that without having to pay until you know that they do a good job.

There are many reasons to use a Pay for Performance SEO company. Finding out just how they work and whether or not the company is honest is a very big reason, but you will also appreciate being able to see the results before paying. Since not many companies offer this option, make sure you look for one that does.

There are entire books written on SEO, including organic search engine optimization. Unfortunately, the majority of business websites have yet to implement the techniques, despite the fact that they are very effective. The search engines love good, clean SEO, but still, many people either avoid it completely, or they opt for black hat techniques that cause problems down the road.

It's a good idea to look at organic search engine optimization if you want long lasting results and to stay on the good side of the search engines. Here are three excellent methods of doing just that.

1. Article marketing is one of the most overlooked methods of building links. It's quite simple, you take articles written with your keywords and a link back to your site and submit them to a number of article directories. Not only do the directories themselves offer a link back to the site this way, but other site owners and bloggers can then use the article, with the link intact, on their own sites, increasing the number of links you have pointing at your website.

2. Videos are very popular these days and can also be used to create natural links back to your website, using your keywords as anchor text. A well done video that is designed to reach a very specific market can go viral and be spread across the internet in no time. When optimizing your videos and submitting them to websites like YouTube.com, utlizing text links in the video description is a good way to boost your SEO.

3. On site optimization is also quite important. While having plenty of great backlinks is good, the website itself also needs to contain your keywords, as well as have great content to keep visitors interested.

With organic search engine optimization, you can expect to see better search engine rankings that are easier to maintain than those obtained with black hat methods. It's well worth the extra effort.

New search ad formats for Google AdWords were recently introduced to provide a more informative and richer search result to Google AdWords researchers. New search result formats will include maps, images,  videos and more.

Some of the new ad formats include visual elements. For example search results for movie releases may display an ad with a screen capture of the movie trailer.

The AdWords team has been developing these new ad formats and testing them to provide a better ad search experience to online shoppers.

Have you ever uploaded a video to YouTube with hopes of your video attracting lots of attention and garnering enough organic search engine optimization traffic to help you earn a nice chunk of cash, but after several weeks your video doesn't seem to be attracting much attention at all?

Well Google has a solution for that now. About a year ago Google announced launched a program within AdWords called Promoted Videos as a search advertising program on YouTube. This allowed anyone who creates and uploads video content to drive viewership of their videos by targeting hundreds of millions of searches that happen on YouTube every day.

Google has been working diligently on broadening the reach of Promoted Videos by making those videos appear on Google's search results, the YouTube home page and recently across the AdSense network too.

As a result the Promoted Videos program is now driving millions of video views per week.

Google wants to make it easier for advertisers to use the medium of video to reach out to their target audience. Starting today you can buy Promoted Videos directly from within your AdWords account.

According to Google "any AdWords advertiser with video content — from a small business looking to promote a product, to a movie studio premiering a new trailer — can use Promoted Videos to make sure their videos find a larger audience."

Promoted Videos are currently available in Canada, the U.K., France, Italy, Germany, Spain and the Netherlands.

Google Wave, an online, real time collaboration and communication application, is going live to approximately 100,000 beta testers today. If you have requested a beta invitation then don't expect to receive your invitation until late today according to Stephanie Hannon, co-founder of Google Wave. Stephanie tweeted at about 10:30 AM Eastern this morning that invitations would be delayed because the support staff for Google Wave is located in Sydney, Australia and they want to be awake when all of those beta testers start using Google Wave.

According to Google, a wave is equal parts conversation and document. What that means is that folks can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, videos, photos, maps and lots more.

Furthermore, a wave is shared. Any person participating can reply anywhere within the message. They can also edit the content and add participants at any point in the process too. If you as a participant come late to the party you can use a playback feature that lets you rewind the wave to see who said what and when.

Google also says that a wave is live. This means that data that you are contributing is being transmitted as you type it. People participating on the wave can have faster conversations, interact with extensions and see edits in real-time.

The application possibilities for marketing your products and services through Google Wave are not yet clear but we can reasonably assume that if Wave is a success, which is likely, then there may be some new opportunities open up for extending your reach to more prospective customers across the web with organic search engine optimization.

Google has a beta version of a new keyword tool available in the AdWords console. To get to it( if you are currently using Adwords), login to adwords.google.com, go to a campaign, click on opportunities (if you have that tab), then on the left bar, click on keyword tool. A “beta” link should be available for you to click on in the top paragraph.

The keyword tool integrates some of the other tools that Google has been releasing. It links to the Google Insights for Search tool and it brings in data from industry segments. It also gives more advanced break down of filter options,  showing country specific data, mobile data, setting your own CPC prices, allows you to add keyword filters, you can even filter by industry category, break out by word and filter by match type. This tool seems quite interesting but only time will tell if this updated version will be as useful to Pay Per Click Management companies, organic search engine optimization firms and individual users.

Video search engine optimization and marketing is a powerful medium of distributing content. Google and many other search engines are now showing video listings in their search results. Now more than ever before it's vital that you learn how to optimize your videos to rank high.

To generate traffic from your videos you need to focus on creating high quality "how-to" videos which create the need for the visitor to visit your site to get the complete solution which they are looking for. Take the time to produce good quality videos. When we talk about video quality we are referring of course to the resolution of your videos, but were also referring to the actual content of your videos. The content of your video needs to be extremely valuable and must provide a fantastic benefit to the viewer.

Analyze other videos in your market. Find what others are doing with success and emulate them without ripping them off.

YouTube.com is the dominant video engine and has the largest user base, so it's a great idea to upload your videos to YouTube.com.

To properly optimize your videos for high rankings you need to use your primary keyword or phrase in the video title. Your video title also needs to be benefit driven. You want to pique peoples interest when they read your video title, as the title will be displayed where ever your video ranks in Google or YouTube's search results. Write your main keyword phrase into the video description and ensure that your description is written with proper grammar so that it makes sense. Do not stuff your video description with keywords. Use 5 to 6 keyword phrases relevant to your video within the tags section when uploading your video to YouTube.com. If you are submitting your video to multiple video engines or video hosting websites do not use the same video title. Write completely unique titles for each place on the web that you upload your video.

Ensure that you have a clear call to action at the end of your video and incentivize people to visit your website after watching your video. Embed your domain name or website address right into the video just like you would watermark a photo.

Benefit from the YouTube.com community features, reach out to your audience through your opt-in email subscribers if you have any and ask for community support, vote it up, add a comment, Digg it, make it a favourite etc.

Link to your videos to improve their rankings, vary the anchor text using your targeted keyword phrases within the anchor text. Consider linking to your videos from articles that you've distributed across the web.

More and more site owners that are savvy about organic search engine optimization are concerned that they might get penalized accidentally because of duplicate content on their websites. If you run mirror sites, will search engines ban you? If you have listings that are similar in nature, is that an issue? What happens if you syndicate content through RSS and feeds? Will other sites be considered the "real" site and rob you of a rightful place in the search results?

Google is very concerned about content duplication. On August 12th, 2009 Greg Grothaus, a member of Google's Search Quality Team, gave a talk at Search Engine Strategies (SES) San Jose about duplicate content and hosting duplicate content on multiple domains.

Google has published a video about the talk on the Google Webmaster Central YouTube Channel. We have embedded the video below for you.

Don't start out your link building campaign by acquiring incoming links too fast. That will certainly lead to Google taking notice and devaluing those links you've worked so hard to acquire.

Start by submitting to trusted web directories such as the Yahoo! Directory and to Business.com. Follow up with submissions to some of the smaller but still valued directories.

Links pointing to your website are always more important when they are within content, a part of a paragraph of text, as opposed to being placed in the footer of a page or within a lengthy bulleted list.

The anchor text of your incoming links should include a broad combination of keyword phrases and not just the keyword phrases that you are targeting to achieve rankings for. In fact, no more than 10% of the links you have incoming should be using your targeted keyword phrase as anchor text.

It's very important that incoming links to your website com from not only relevant themes and relevant web pages but that the words which surround your link also be relevant too.

And last but not least, do not just focus on building incoming links pointing to your home page, also build incoming links that point to relevant sub pages on your website too.

Search Engine Rankings have always been a valued success measurement in SEO. After all, it's easy to monitor and it appears to be the bee all end all for some people. However, if you really want to measure the effectiveness of your SEO campaign, stop obsessing about rankings and start looking at the conversions and search volumes for those keywords.

Companies must now look at changing the focus of their expectations from rankings on a single keyword, which they feel is the most relevant, to looking outside the box and understanding the value of search volume and conversions for keywords they may have never considered. For example if your have a keyword such as “dazzling website design” which has a competition of around 209,000 and a search volume of 0, then obviously if you are ranked in the number 1 spot on Google it will make no difference since no one searches for that keyword.

Your keyword choices for SEO need to be considered very carefully. If you truly have a good search engine optimization company then they will have shown you search volume, competition, and your ranking probability. If they haven’t and claim they can get you the number one spot for a particularly cheap price then ask yourself “How is this particular keyword going to help my business”. If there is on one searching for that keyword then the answer will be “not at all”.

Everyone by now is probably aware of the deal between Microsoft and Yahoo that has littered the headlines this summer.  Well in case you aren’t then let me elaborate. Bing is to take over Yahoo search, in terms of algorithmic ranking. Basically Bing will be handling the back-end, while Yahoo will be handling the front-end design of the new Yahoo Search. All this should be happening next year sometime. So the next question is, “How will this affect my SEO?”

With Bing taking over Yahoo Search, SEO’s and webmasters alike are going to need to evaluate their sites in regards to optimizing for Bing. Optimizing for Bing should be a standard for search engine optimization companies, seeing that they are still one of the “big 3”, those who see a good deal of traffic from Yahoo Search, are going to want to give pay close attention to this.

The word on the web is that it doesn't matter if you rank well in Yahoo now (at least it won't matter when the change comes), if you don't rank well in Bing you may see a decrease in rankings. If you're ranked in position 1 for your keywords in Yahoo, but you're on the 8th page in Bing then you've got some work to do.

There are some differences between Google and Bing, but Microsoft's stance on SEO isn't all that different than Google's. There are different algorithms, but both like quality, relevant links and good content. In fact, if you've optimized for MSN in the past, you will be glad to know that Bing is not that different.

According to Microsoft’s Bing white paper for webmasters "There have been no major changes to the MSNBot crawler during the upgrade to Bing," "However, the Bing team is continuously refining and improving our crawling and indexing abilities. Note that the bot name hasn't changed. It will still show up in the web server access logs as MSNBot."

Do yourself a favor and read that white paper and you would also do well to make sure your sites are listed with Bing Webmaster Tools. You may even want to increase your paid budget, just to circumvent any lost organic traffic in the transition period.

If you are blogging for the purpose of achieving high search engine rankings but your efforts have so far been in vain then maybe it's time you thought about why you are blogging in the first place and what needs to change about the blog writng style in which you write your blog posts?

If you are rambling on within your blog posts using scattered thoughts and not putting across clear concepts then you're likely confusing your visitors and you're not doing yourself any favours with the search engines either and perhaps you need to change blog writing styles.

Relevancy is the Key to Higher Rankings

The search engines almost always give preferential rankings to website's that present their content in a manner which is relevant to the topic or general theme of the overall website itself. If you have a blog that is primarily related to auto transport services and one afternoon you decide to upload a post about growing tomato's in your garden, then you can't very well expect your post about tomato's to be ranked very highly for keywords related to tomato's unless you are using very obscure long tail keywords in your post.

Ask yourself the following:

·         What do I love?

·         What am I really good at doing?

·         What do I have to say?

Now think about the keywords that users will type, then include them naturally in your posts:

·         Automobile Shipping

·         Motorcycle Shipping

·         Vehicle Transporting

·         Yacht/Boat Transportation

Those are all relevant to the field of automotive transport. Now you're developing a theme for your blog!

Don't forget to use ALT attributes within your images (3-4 relevant words) if you choose to use images within your blog posts. Remember that you can further maximize your search engine optimization with image and video search too by embedding both of those media formats into your blog posts.

Around every two years, SEOmoz puts out a report of Search Engine Ranking Factors based on survey findings from 100 of the industry's top SEO minds. This year around 72 of them participated in the data gathering process and answering of survey questions. Here's a summary of the results.

According to the SEOs surveyed by SEOmoz, the following are the most important ranking factors; I have only included the ones that are rated from very high importance to moderate importance and very high value to moderate value.

On-Page, Keyword-Specific

1. Keyword(s) in the title tag.
2. Keyword(s) used as the first word(s) in the title tag.
3. Keyword(s) in the root domain.
4. Keyword(s) used in the H1 headline tag.
5. Keyword(s) used in Internal Link Anchor Text on the Page
6. Keyword(s) used in External Link Anchor Text on the Page
7. Keyword(s) used as the First Word(s) in the H1 Tag
8. Keyword(s) used in the First 50-100 Words in HTML on the Page

On-Page, Non-Keyword

1. Unique, relevant content.
2. "Freshness" of the page (eg. how recently it was published).

Effectiveness of Link Building Tactics for SEO

1. Linkbait + Viral Content Creation
2. Blogging and Engagement with the Blogosphere
3. Classic “Create Valuable Content” Strategies w/o Promotional Marketing
4. Public Relations (beyond just press release publication) 

Like most things, obtaining great SERPs is not a cookie cutter formula; if it was, anybody could be successful at it. There are many factors to consider, all depending on the vertical you're in, the keywords you're targeting and the amount of competition you face. There are many different SEO factors that may play more or less of a role in your websites’ specific optimization needs.

The search engines can change their algorithms at any time so even if you're doing everything right today, you can’t be assured that tomorrow hold the same. The best thing to do is to have a search engine optimization firm at your disposal that will monitor your search results and that strives to keep you on top the search engines.

Google recently unveiled a new Image Search results page for Android, iPhone, and iPod Touch in the US, the UK, and Japan. This new and improved layout features up to 20 images on a single results page, this now allows users to quickly get the details for the images that are of interest to them. Among the things you can do are: see a larger thumbnail, visit the web page containing the image, or view the image by itself in full size. In addition, the new results page also supports the so called “search-by-style” filters, which allows users to restrict search results to people’s faces, clipart, line drawings, or photo content.

Earlier this year, Google unveiled a new Image Search results page for Android, iPhone, and iPod Touch in the US, the UK, and Japan. This new and improved layout featured up to 20 images on a single results page, this now allows users to quickly get the details for the images that are of interest to them. Some of the new features are: see a larger thumbnail, visit the web page containing the image, view the image by itself in full size, and navigate the search results using "next" and "previous" links. In addition, the new results page also supports the “search-by-style” filters, which allows users to restrict search results to people’s faces, clipart, line drawings, or photo content.

Since then, they have unveiled a new format to iPhone and Android in 28 countries. Now, the new Image Search results pages are also available for most other phones and is available in 38 languages.

We all know that local search engine optimization has been an industry-accepted practice for quite some time now, and that local business owners want a way to benefit from it. But are SEO companies actively practicing this?  

First let’s define what local search engine optimization is. For those in the search engine optimization field, this means optimizing sites to be ranked high for localized search queries. For those who aren’t it means getting your website to come up in the search engines when people use GEO targeted keywords to find local businesses. For example if you have a local pet sitting business in Fort Lauderdale then most of your customers will be people living in the Fort Lauderdale area that are in need of pet sitting services. With regular search engine optimization you probably would optimize your site for keywords such as "pet sitters". But with local search engine optimization you would go after keywords such as "pet sitters Fort Lauderdale". This keyword phrase is far more specific to your business and will generate more targeted customers in your area.

So how does local SEO work? It is just like standard SEO, where relevant and compelling content is crucial. You must make sure that the content for your users is well-written and not just stuffed full of keywords. The next thing that is very important is making sure that proper local keyword research is done. Not all keywords have the search volume necessary for optimization, meaning if no one searches for that word do you really care if you come up in the number 1 spot?

Below are the benefits to local search engine optimization:

Higher search-engine rankings: Competition will be less for the local keyword phrases which means you will see your ranking move up faster
Higher conversion rates: Using the local keyword phrase your visitors are looking for, the website traffic you get is much more targeted
Make more money: Your earnings potential is higher when you use local search engine traffic because people who come to you are more serious about your product, service or information.

Small local businesses generally have smaller marketing budgets. If they're going to sacrifice a penny of that budget for optimization of their site, they want to know they're getting their money's worth and local search engine optimization is the way to get it for them.

Last week we wrote a post introducing you to Google Caffeine. Now we have some more information to share with you as well. Google Caffeine is a "secret project" considered to be next-generation architecture for Google Web search. The word on the web is that it will be shaking up the results a bit, but it may also open up a new avenue toward real-time search results.  Early reviews indicate that there will be noticeable differences in the results pages for many terms and brands, so those with SEO campaigns are advised to watch this update closely. 

Google's Matt Cutts compares Caffeine to the company's 2006 Big Daddy upgrade in his interview with WebProNews.

"It's essentially rearchitecting, or rewriting, a large chunk of how we index Web pages," Cutts said. "We've engineered it so regular users shouldn't notice much of a difference. Power users might notice a difference, and that's why we opened up a power-user preview."

Cutts also says Caffeine is not a reaction to Microsoft Bing, but instead says that summer is a great time to test. He also hits on the topic of real-time search question; Cutts says it will help index documents faster but stops short of saying "Caffeine will enable Google to index Twitter tweets."

So for those who are already taking the  best-practices approach with their organic search engine optimization campaigns, sit back and watch the change and be ready to study the impact. This could mean a little, a lot, or nothing at all to your websites’ rankings.

The search engines need to crawl websites regularly to index new content and check for changes to existing content and also to make themselves aware of content that has been removed from the web. Sometimes the amount or frequency of time which the search engine robots spend on a particular website can cause that website server to experience load problems. For that reason most of the major search engines allow webmasters the ability to slow down the crawl rate to help web servers to keep up with the load.

When performing search engine optimization on your website, using this feature is not usually needed and isn't generally recommended either, but it is available should the need arise to use it. Smaller websites which do not update their content regularly will likely never need to slow down the crawl rate. They probably won't receive any benefit from using a crawl delay, because search engine robots will adjust their crawl rate to an appropriate frequency based on the content that it finds on a website each time that it visits that same website.

For large websites that have lots of web pages that are updated more frequently, they may need to be crawled more often and deeper too so that all of their content can be indexed by the search engines.

If you feel that your site needs to set a crawl delay you can do so by setting the crawl delay inside of your robots.txt file. In the robots.txt file within the generic user agent section you can add this directive as shown:

User-agent: *
Crawl-delay: 1

You can only use positive, whole numbers as values. The higher the value, the less frequent your crawl rate will be. Most webmasters will want to use the lowest value possible, which is a value of 1. Never use a value of more than 10 because that will severely impair a search engine robot from effectively crawling the content of your website.

This is how crawl delay settings effect your crawl rate:

No crawl delay specified - Normal

1 - Slow

5 - Very Slow

10 - Extremely Slow

Google has a team of engineers that have been secretly working on a complete over haul to their search index. Google calls this over haul their Caffeine update. If you'd like to try out the new version of Google's index you can get a preview of the results by searching at http://www2.sandbox.google.com and see how the search results will change over the next few weeks and months.

Users won't notice much of a difference to the way that the results page looks as this update is more about rewriting the infrastructure and core indexing code beneath Google's hood, so there are not so many changes for things like ranking. Some of the search results do change though so you should try out the preview to see where your website and your competitor website's stand in the results.

Do you host a blog on your domain? If so, do you think that you are utilizing your blog in a manner that gains the maximum benefit for the most important web pages on your web site?

Think about that from a search engine optimization perspective.

When we instruct our clients to blog more efficiently there are ten actions that we want our clients to perform when they write a new blog post.

1.       Decide which web page(s) on your domain that a blog post should be supporting.

2.       Come up with an idea for an informative post that provides useful information.

3.       Write a keyword rich headline for the blog post.

4.       Write 2-3 occurrences of each keyword into the body of the post.

5.       Hyperlink one occurrence of each keyword to a web page on the web site which has been optimized for that keyword.

6.       Ensure that your post has some length to it, i.e. at least 100 words.

7.       This applies to all posts that are written for the blog - be sure to vary the length of each post so that they are not all close to the same word count as each other.

8.       If it is appropriate to do so within the blog post include a clear call to action, specifying what you want the visitor to do after reading the post.

9.       Encourage your visitors to socially bookmark your blog post. You can make this easy for them to do so by placing links on your blog post to some of the more well known social bookmarking web sites such as twitter.com, digg.com etc. If using WordPress as the blog platform there are many social bookmarking plugin's available that make this easy to implement automatically into each blog post.

10.   Be sure to tag and categorize each post appropriately with keywords relevant to the post.

There seems to be much speculation as to what is actually going on today, so seeing that I can't tweet this then blogging is the next best thing.

This is what the latest word is on what is happening today from Twitter's status blog.

The company says that it is defending against a denial of service attack (DOS), which basically means millions of users are just clicking their refresh pages way to fast.

There are natural DOS attacks and then you also have malicious ones. As it stand right now it is unclear which one this is.

This blog lets users know about planned outages and other issues on Twitter, however this outage was not planned.

It's not clear when the outage began or even when it will end.

Facebook, the social networking site, is also was experiencing slowdowns and lots of error messages.

I guess social media is taking a vacation today!

The Google Webmaster Tools team have released an update. Some of the improvements include:

• Ability to block non-homepage sitelinks.
• View URL removal requests submitted by other users for sites that you own and revoke them if necessary.
• The site selector now lists all verified sites that you own and allows you to search as you type.
• More user-friendly navigation on the Google Webmaster Tools homepage. There is a much clearer differentiation between verified and unverified sites now.

Login to Google Webmaster Tools and check out these new features today!

There are two types of sitemaps, one is an HTML sitemap that lists the pages of your site and is meant to help users find the information they need. The other is an XML Sitemaps and is a way for you to give the search engines information about your site.

An XML Sitemap is a list of the pages on your website. Creating and submitting a XML Sitemap helps make sure that the search engines know about all the pages on your site, including URLs that may not be have been discovered during the normal crawling process.

XML Sitemaps are very helpful if your site has dynamic content, it has pages that aren’t easily discovered during the crawling process, your site is new and has little to no links to it, or your site has a large archive of content pages that are not well linked to each other.

An XML Sitemap also provides additional information about your pages, including: how often your pages on the site change, the date each was modified, and the relative importance of the pages on your site.

So to answer the question “Do you really need sitemaps?” Yes XML Sitemaps play a very important role in the organic search engine optimization process and HTML sitemaps assist the user in navigating your site.

By now most people have heard the phrase “white hat” and “black hat” SEO thrown around when talking to an SEO company. Both of these techniques will get you better rankings; however there is only one that will get your website banned. That would be black hat SEO.

White hat SEO means that means that the webmaster or SEO tech is not trying to trick the search engines. It means playing by the rules. When your site is optimized using white hat SEO methods then it is more beneficial to web surfers, search engines and webmasters.

Now on the other hand black hat SEO improves rankings in ways that are disapproved of by the search engines and can involve deception. Some of these methods include cloaking, doorway pages, hidden text, link farms, and keyword stuffing. The search engines have made it clear that they will penalize your site if they detect any black hat SEO techniques being used.

With all the info out there why would any knowledgeable person want to do black hat SEO? We all know you can get results faster, however they are fleeting. You may be on the top one day and gone the next.

So word to the wise keep all SEO white hat and make sure your SEO company puts that in writing.

It seems lately that people have lost their way when it comes to making their banner advertising campaign the best that it can be. So I thought I would give a few tips on how to get the users to click on your ads and how to keep them on the site once they do.

Keep it simple The first rule of creating effective banner ads is to keep your message short and simple. You need to catch the user’s attention right away and if it is too much to read or look at then you most likely loose them.

Carefully select your images Don’t go overboard with graphics but don’t go underboard either. You need to make it appealing without cluttering it up and make sure you have good quality in the images that you use. This will be the gateway to your site and if it is not interesting then no one will enter

Use large text If the user can’t read it they won’t click on it. Make sure it stands out so it will attract attention and get the users to your site

Control the file size How many times have you gone to a site and it took soooo long to load? This is due to the fact that the banner ad that is running on it has too large of a file size. Keeping your file sizes smaller will help avoid this annoyance for the user

Make sure there is a call to action in your banner Having the “click here” option is a great way to engage the user, this tells them exactly what you want them to do and there will be no confusion

Make sure your call to action on the site is clear The worst thing that could happen to your banner ad campaign is that you get a great click through rate, but your website is failing get the conversion. Banner ads are only effective if they are supported by a landing page that reinforces the original message and the call to action is not a lengthy process  

We all know that in the SEO world content rules, but not everyone knows how to write good SEO content for their website. So for all those out there that need a little help here are a few tips on writing effective SEO content.

 1. Make sure that the reader comes first and then the search engines. The content must make sense for reader so don’t overstuff it with keyword

2. Avoid using graphic files, the search engines cannot read the text in flash files so all your efforts will be wasted

3. Use search phrases rather than single words, it will be harder to get good relevant content using only one word

4. Use variations of your keyword phrases: plural, tenses, ings and multiple spellings words as well (website, web site)

5. If possible GEO target your key phrases, these will likely be easier to rank

6. Be as descriptive as possible when describing your products, you not only want to rank with your SEO content but you want to sell your product too