OK, so I haven’t posted anything since the end of last year. After getting de-listed from the TopRank Big List for not posting enough and getting taunted by esrun (who now has more visitors to his blog than me), I’ve decided to try and make more of an effort.

I do have an excuse for not blogging recently though… almost everything SEO related boils down to either client work or affiliate projects for me – neither of which I can really talk about.

So, I’m going to put an offer out on the table – if you have an Internet Marketing question or problem and don’t mind it being discussed publicly, send me an email and I’ll try to help you out by posting up a solution on this blog. I can’t guarantee that I’ll answer everyone (and don’t expect me to do a full site audit for you), although I’ll try to get through as many interesting topics as possible. If you’re after the darker stuff, I can withold your domains if requested.

If you need a guaranteed answer to a question, I can highly recommend the SEOmoz Pro Membership.

My New Years resolution for 2007 was to become a published author, with the thought of writing an SEO book which tackles search from the corporate and in-house point of view. This idea fell by the wayside when several friends in the industry also announced similar intentions (although with different angles and subjects).

The book which I was planning would not just cover the basic Best Practice areas, but also tackle issues such as Black Hat SEO and dealing with agency bullshit. I’ve worked with some of the biggest brands on the web, and really think that there’s still a lot to be learnt when dealing with corporate websites.

Would you read such a book, and should I follow my ambitions?

I picked the worst possible time to go on holiday, although my mate Dug and I have been planning a roadtrip around Ireland for a long time now and we’ve already put the date back twice. So we packed our bags and headed to Heathrow for a quick flight over to Dublin and an 11 day adventure. Oh, and to add to things, I resigned from PartyGaming on the day that my vacation began (to move into full-time SEO Consulting)! With the plan being to stick to the rural roads and try to stay away from popular tourist traps, getting internet access was not as easy as first imagined (there weren’t even any WiFi points to leach off!). I therefore had little time to keep up with industry news, which was actually quite daunting for a person such as myself. It seems that Jane is in the same situation as I was – don’t do it Jane!

The holiday was superb though; meeting the Kerry clan…

Re-creating the cover of one of my favourite books… can you guess what it is yet?

And drinking the black stuff of course!

While I was away, ThreadWatch closed its doors, which was not good at all. Although Aaron announced his intentions before my holiday, I was sure that a) It wasn’t just a link bait idea and b) someone would buy the rights and keep things flowing. So when I got home and discovered a page of stale news, I was mortified. If you’re wondering, I heard that Dave Pasternack and Jason Calcanis were to blame for the site closing – threatening to use clickbots on Aaron’s PPC campaigns and write a negative bio about him on Maholo .

I thought that JasonD planned to create a Threadwatch2 at w3wisdom.com, although the site seems to have disappeared.

The big chief also started a Threadwatch/Digg style extravaganza called Sphinn which I hadn’t spotted before. It allows you to submit new search industry stories like on Threadwatch and vote for other people’s stories like on Digg. I like how extensive the profile pages are, with lots of room to pimp out your blogs and contact details. I’m actually very keen on the site so far, which is very unusual for the grumpy old bastard that I am. Well done big chief, and I look forward to spamming (sorry, SMO’ing) it soon If you haven’t check it out yet, get in their fast before I hold all your usernames to ransom!

The SEO Chicks also raced ahead of us Blokes with a plethora of almost respectable articles, gaining some cred from Stuntdubl among others. I accept some of the responsibility for SEO-Blokes.com not keeping up with our female fatales, so I’ll try to start blogging again soon.

I don’t think that anything else major happened, not that I can mention here anyway. Maybe I’ve missed something over the last 2 weeks?

It will be hard for me to go without internet access for that long again, hopefully I’ll get a Blackberry soon for my email and RSS fix.

… you launch a new blog with a post like this: Time For A Valid Opinion

Oh well, I’ll just sit back and watch the flaming begin

PS. Stick the RSS Feed in your aggregator, or I’ll <edit>someone scary</edit> will come and beat you up

Most site owners are constantly on the look out for ways to increase their online exposure. Increasing web traffic not only allows for higher brand recognition but also higher revenues. One of the most overlooked methods to achieve this, is to get content syndicated from your website and onto smaller sites or 3rd party aggregators. This provides targeted inbound traffic from the people who have read your content and click through to read more.

One of the largest aggregators of content is Google, and Google News is a great place to get your content displayed – as long as you have relevant newsworthy content that is. Obviously Google doesn’t want just any old content within its news product, so first of all you have to get accepted onto their news crawl.

The first step with getting accepted into Google News should be an internal conversation – “is my content really up to standard?”. If you are running a small blog, then the odds are that you are going to be too small for Google News, so go no further.

Google currently states that it crawls over 4,500 sources of news, with their news algorithm choosing the most relevant and up-to-date items from the most trusted news sources which appear at the top of any news search. The actual number of news sources must now be a lot higher than this now; I alone have 4 web sites feeding news – all be it within niche topic areas.

Suggesting a potential Google News source
If you have a website with a good news section (and by good – I mean updated at least daily), then you can probably get in on the action.

When you suggest your source of news, you are asked to specify the location and the title of the news source. What you enter here will appear with your news items in Google News. It may sound obvious, but News is separated by language, so if you have English news, do not except people in France to see it.

All news article URLs need to be unique, and specifically Google requires a unique four digit (or more) number at the end of the URL of each article. This most probably helps them prevent duplicate news content or the indexing of old news.
There is usually a day or so wait for Google to respond to the source suggestion, after which you should receive an acceptance (as long as the quality of your content is good); otherwise the kind guys over at Google will send an email guidance as to why they have not accepted your site. This could be a technical problem with crawling your content or a rejection on the basis of quality, but if you are able make the changes – simply wait for them to re-crawl your site and you should be auto-accepted. There is no need to re-submit, as the news crawl will see the changes and you will become a Google News source.

Once you start to see your content on Google News, don’t be surprised if the odd news item does not appear in their news index; Google’s algorithm is picky and will choose which items of news make the cut.

The Traffic Generation
With good content, should come a steady increase in traffic – although don’t expect a huge spike overnight. Unless you are a breaking news publisher, Google News is never going to deliver huge volumes, but you will find that it does bring in new unique visitors who stumble across your content.

To increase your chances of high Google News rankings, you could carefully craft the inclusion of current affairs key phrases within your content and article titles. But unless you do this in a very subtle way, you risk harming the relationship with existing site visitors who already enjoy reading your news content.

Subscribe To SearchWeekly for Part 2 of this Google News special – published next week.

Initiated by Jeff Pulver, Blog Tagging has been going around the search blogosphere like wildfire. It’s a way of putting a human face to bloggers; breaking down the divide by offering 5 unknown facts about themselves. When you are tagged (a link to your blog) by another player, you must post 5 new facts about yourself and then tag 5 new bloggers.

Unfortunately, I’ve been a homeless blogger (accept for Search Engine Roundtable) until today – so sorry to Ben Pfeiffer, Lisa Ditlefsen and David Wallace who tagged me without a response.

So here it goes, my 5 noble nibbles of knowledge about Rob Kerry:

1. Business was in my blood. As a boy scout, I (along with a friend) was tasked with creating a newsletter for the scout group. With the assistance of my father, we decided to cover the cost of printing through sponsorship and proceeded to acquire advertising deals with local businesses. As one of the advertisers (an Estate Agent) had a heavy-duty photocopier, we negotiated a front page ad deal in exchange for free printing of the newsletter. We were able to give back almost all of the advertising revenue to the scout group, donating more then we could have made from shaking collection tins outside of Tesco. The newsletter itself was pretty good even by today’s standards; with scouting news, a list of peoples awards and achievements, jokes and cartoons.
2. At the age of 14 I started reselling domain names, gaining customers through natural search referrals alone. I must have been the youngest person in the world to have a merchant account for processing credit card transactions – I’m still not sure how I managed to get it.
3. I wasn’t a great student at school. The all-boys high school I attended was state run (despite being run like a strict private school) in the leafy sub-urban Home Counties. My parents couldn’t have been happier with my GCSE (exams taken at 16) grades, although it went a little downhill from there. I think it started when we were allowed out of the school grounds at lunchtime. It was compulsory to wear a suit (including tie) at all times, which just made us look like all the other businessmen walking around the town in their lunch breaks. What do 16 and 17 year old boys, dressed like adults, do with an hour of time to kill? Go to the pub of course! Needless to say, this somewhat restricted our study time and didn’t bode well for our after-lunch lessons.
4. My mother still doesn’t know what I actually do for a job. I’ve tried to explain it many times, although I think it usually ends up in her head that I work for Google. I was also shocked to discover that she didn’t know the name of the last company I worked for – even though I was living at my parents house for a few months whilst working for that company. Whether this is a sign that the average internet user’s idea of the web is as far from our own as ever (when did your Dad last Digg?), or that I don’t talk to my parents as much as I should – I don’t know.
5. I may be copying Li’s 5 facts here, although I’m surely the geekiest person at a Search Engine Strategies conference?! My favourite TV shows include Stargate SG1, Stargate Atlantis, Buffy, Angel, Star Trek (not the first series – that would make me a nerd), Family Guy, The Simpsons, Spooks and X Files. I even have the movie Serenity in PlayStation Portable UMD format so that I can watch it on trains, planes and automobiles. 90% of my books are published by O’Reilly, featuring every operating system, programming language and server software you can think of. My movie collection is a little more respectable – merging the boundaries between geek and, well… whatever the opposite is. Favourite movies include The Godfather, True Romance, Pulp Fiction, Carlitos Way, True Lies, Austin Powers and Shooting Fish. My music collection is a weird mish-mash including Oasis, Queen, Pink Floyd, REM, U2, and the list goes on. I know absolutely nothing about music, I just like listening to it. When at home, I usually stream BBC Radio 3 over the interweb – a collection of classical and jazz music which is perfect for when you’re coding, blogging or trying to think.

Phew, that’s me done then. Not exactly the most compelling of facts, although at least it should give you some insight into my weird twisted brain. As the whole Blog Tag phenomenon seems to have come and gone, there’s very few bloggers to tag – apart from the rest of you.