Any one who runs a website knows this email, you receive it or a variation of it 10 times a day and it goes something like this.

I have visited your site and it is a great fit with our and we would like to exchange links with you.

If you add our link to your site we will add your link to our site at oursite.com/links

As you might all ready know links from websites are a great way of getting better rankings in the search engines and you will get more visitors.

Signed the link building manager.

Is it worth your time linking to this site in return for a link back?

In most cases no.

Here is why

• The alarm bells ring for me immediately, they have not bothered to visit your site, you can tell because they do not say the name of the site, they also tell you nothing about your site, so this seems to me to be nothing more than an automated spam email. 

• The place they are offering to add your link to will just be a page of links 50 – 100 links on the same page, all unrelated to each other with short spammy descriptions, being amongst this list will do you next to no good at all, no person is ever lightly to see this list and read it and no search engine is likely to take note of it as useful. 

• Swapping links with other sites was a way of getting promoted in the search engines years ago but not now, he search engines have learned that these trading of links are designed to beat the system and so they down grade the value of them, proper link building from relevant related sites that are well maintained are always going to be better than this spam. 

• Finally if this was coming from a person who was running a proper link building campaign then they would have a name they used to sign the email and contact details.

Companies who use these link building techniques are often doing themselves more harm than good as the search engines will discount the links they have invested in building in this manor.

Next time you get this sort of email think about the above points, if you genuinely like the site link to it, but remember you will get very little Search Engine Optimisation credit back in return from the search engines.

Many businesses can get stuck in old habits and methods and many are almost afraid of trying new advertising and marketing media.  Many small to medium sized businesses are happy to spend vast amounts of their marketing budget on direct mail, television and magazine and newspaper advertisements with often no idea of how effective they are.  The truth about these sort of advertisements are that yes they can work but there are a number of limiting factors.  

You can spend vast amounts on a TV or magazine advert and find that it has a negative impact on your business because the audience didn’t react in a positive way towards your message.   The other thing is how can you measure the effectiveness of the advertising.  A magazine can say they have 500,000 readers a week but there is no guarantee that those readers are going to see your quarter page advert.  A direct mail campaign may deliver your flyer to around 80,000 homes but how many of those flyers will make it any further than the bin?  There is no real way to measure the effectiveness of your advert.

With search engine optimisation and PPC you are bringing your product to the customer rather than trying to bring the customers to you.  What I mean by that is there is already a demand for the product or service you’re offering and you are simply bringing your product to the customers attention by putting it in front of them.  In theory it should be easy to sell your product or service.

The other advantage of SEO and pay per click is that you can see exactly how many people have come through your online advertising, if it converted to a sale and at what point they left your site.  You can even see which key phrases your website was found for and whether the PPC or organic SERPs brought in the customer.  All of these things can not only show how effective your SEO and PPC have been they also allow you to improve your advertising.

You may have found that you are getting a lot of people clicking on your sponsored links but it is not resulting in sales.  This could be for a number of reasons either your advert isn’t descriptive enough or your prices are higher than the potential customers expectations.  This means you can perform split testing and try different adverts perhaps one with a price in would detract those customers before they click on your link saving your advertising budget.

The truth of the matter is that the best way is to combine a number of marketing techniques together as this will help build brand awareness.  That said any business that is looking to trade online would be foolish to not use SEO and PPC to promote their website online. 

So people are finally starting to accept that we are in a recession and as a result this has had an interesting effect on the Internet marketing community.  Many businesses look to cut their outgoings when times are tough but it would seem that this trend is changing as Google has announced a huge gain.  This means that many online retailers have been increasing their spending on Pay Per Click advertising as well as their search engine optimisation.  

This to me makes perfect sense, if the number of people looking to buy your product decreases then you should look to capture the majority of those people.  This can be easily done combining SEO with PPC.  The reason this works is because some search engine users like the sponsored PPC advertising while others prefer the organic listings.  Therefore if you are at the top of the organic SERPs and have a good PPC position then you are more likely to capture the people looking for the product and now you just have to convince them to buy.

The other side of the coin are the businesses that look to either decrease their PPC and SEO marketing budgets or to cut the work out completely.  This makes no sense to me as good SEO work will deliver potential customers straight to your door and if you can’t sell your product or service once they arrive at your site then the problem must lie elsewhere.  It could be that your site is suffering from a lack of usability, it could be the website design that is putting people off or your product, service or sales staff are not up to standard.

Either way some businesses may be able to ride out the storm by simply tightening the purse strings and making cuts but many will meet a sad and untimely end.  It is always the pro active businesses that make increases rather than making cuts that survive to become bigger and better companies while their competition get left behind.        

The Internet has meant that academics can now have their work published quickly and easily either on article websites or on blogs.  Which is a good thing right?  Well apparently not.  An article featured in The Guardian has reported that search engine optimisation is killing the creativity of these articles because of the need to be found in search engines like Google. 

When writing articles it makes sense to include keywords and phrases in the title and the text to help it be found by the search engines but this doesn’t mean you have to repeat the same things over and over again.  Yes, you will need keywords in there but as long as everything you write is related to the topic then you don’t need to have a boring, wordy title.  The article uses the following quote to show this point.

“SEO can, however, make articles tedious to read. A headline that once read “Of mice and men” for a study that discussed the suitability of mice when testing drugs for humans might now say “Suitability of mice for in vivo drug testing” or something even more jargon-laden.”

Well I have already come up with a title that is creative and suitable for the SEO.  Man or Mouse? Are Mice Really Suitable For In Vivo Testing?  The other complaint mentioned in the article is that social bookmarking is being used as a method for the articles to gain popularity and this has turned it into more of a popularity contest, where as it used to be about the best report.  This is just a sign of the times and I know people fear change but yes, you are going to have to market your academic reports online if you want to be found in the search engines.  This may take add a bit of time to your report and may require some prior planning but as long as you use the SEO work sensibly then it shouldn’t effect your creativity or originality.

It has been reported in the last couple of days that there has been an increase of teenagers trying to hack into websites and to collect credit card details.  It has been said that the teenagers have been exchanging ready made hacking and phishing kits in online forums as well as credit card numbers and have been using basic search engine optimisation skills to.

Most of the malware that these teenagers have been producing is used to try and gather data from social bookmarking and networking websites like Myspace, Facebook and StumbleUpon.  The teenagers then tend to move into making phishing software in order to try and create their own scams to make money.  The only problem the teenagers have been facing is that most of their programming skills are really bad, making it easy to find out where the virus have come from and to put a stop to them.   It is a shame that these teenagers are using SEO to try and make money by breaking the law when they would probably stand a better chance using their SEO skills to make money from online advertising and affiliate deals. 

Mobile phones, love them or hate them they have become a permanent fixture in our everyday lives.  The technology has evolved so much now that rather than being just a phone your mobile is your camera, diary and more.   Using your mobile to browse the Internet started with WAP and then advance to 2.5G and then 3G.  While using the Internet on your mobile isn’t perfect it is a growing market with a lot of potential.  Surely this is the next market that is going to be a battle ground for Google and the other search engines as well as search engine optimisation gurus and Internet marketing experts.

The .mobi market is already growing with domain names like flowers.mobi, sportsbook.mobi and fun.mobi being sold for between $100,000 and $200,000.  This is proof that businesses are looking at this next part of the web expansion, especially as there are 1 billion Internet users and 2 billion mobile phone users.  This is a market that will need to be jumped on by web design companies dealing with search engine optimisation as their clients will soon want part of this growing market.      

We all know that to make the most of your search engine optimisation you need to combine it with other forms of marketing both online and offline.  Proof of this can be seen simply by visiting Google.  You will often find that some companies appear in both the organic listings and the sponsored links and there is a very good reason for this.  People react differently to things online, where some people may not trust the sponsored links and only use the organic listings some people may just use the sponsored links.

Royal Mail recently conducted a survey among consumers to find out how they react to direct mail.  Their findings suggested that direct mail can boost marketing campaigns when they are combined with SEO.  The reason for this is because the more a consumer sees a product or brand in different areas of their life the more they begin to trust it.  This is vital for major brands with huge marketing budgets which is why they are everywhere but this might not be the case for small to medium sized businesses that have to be more strategic with their marketing budget.  The best solution is to ensure you have a good search engine optimisation and PPC campaign, as people tend to search online to find out about companies and products and then to fit in offline marketing where possible.   

Using Pay Per click (PPC) can be a great way to see what keywords are attracting people to your site, you can set up a campaign, an this does not need to cost a lot, that is triggered by a number of keyword, using the stats that are shown in your Google PPC account you can tell

• How many times th Keyword was searched for.
• How many times your ad was clicked on.
• How many of those clicks resulted in a sale or enquiery.

Now that you have this information you can see what keywords are bringing in the best returns on your investment.

Instead of continuing with the pay per click you could concentrate instead on the organic listings for these keywords.

If you have a company or represent a company that is involved in the gaming or gambling business in the UK Google will now allow you to use their Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising system.

The company must be registered with the gaming commission and be able to provide a valid operating license number

To apply to advertise online gambling with Google AdWords, you will need to:

Google has sent the following guidelines

• Create a new Google AdWords account solely for your gambling campaigns (this applies to both new and existing advertisers).
• Fill in the application form and legal declaration. Please be sure to submit your new AdWords Customer ID, located at the top of any of your account pages.

To ensure the quick progress of your application, fill in all of the requested information. We will review your request as quickly as possible and let you know whether we were able to approve your application or not.

This is following a review of the legal and cultural attitudes to gambling in the UK say Google, we wait to see what effect it will have on the PPC industry as a whole.

When you decide to carry out a web redesign you must consider a number of things to ensure the smooth transition and the Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) ramifications of the web design.

Web design Salisbury are experts in this sort of work and some of their recommendations include

• Keep the same page names
• Ensure the title tags for the pages are relevant
• Use the keywords appropriately
• Design with the user in mind
• Ensure the content is accurate  

Look at your logs and see what the most popular parts of your excisting site was and then ensure these are easy to find from your home page of your new site.

Web design Salisbury have been creating websites for over 15 years and involved in promoting them for almost as long, with specialists in web design and SEO they have been seen as the go to guys in Wiltshire for over a decade.