Placing keywords in your site’s title and meta tags is an SEO no brainer but its not sufficient to have search engine users click on them.

In order to entice search users to click on your listing you need to follow the following basic SEO best practices steps: 

1. Your title tag should not exceed 60 charachters (including spaces)

2. Your description meta tag should not exceed 160 characters (including spaces)

3. Include one instance of your target keyowrd at the beggining of your title

4. Include your target keyword twice (not consecutively) in your description meta tag

5. Include a call to action (buy now, try today, etc..) in your title and description tags

6. Ensure that the title and description tags read well to users

By following the above six steps, you’ll be well on your way to optimising your title and meta tags for ranking and conversion.

Enjoy the traffic!

What is strategic Link Building?  I define it as the art of acquiring links that will get you ranked above your competitors (all other things being equal).

Lets say you own a widgets site called Widgets4U.com and your competitor owns a competing site called MoreWidgets.com, how can you go about discovering which links your competitor has acquired?

Very simple.  Yahoo has created a webmaster resource called Yahoo Site Explorer which lets you discover many things about a site including information about all the backlinks pointing towards it.

So to get started, visit site explorer and type in your competitor’s domain name in the search box, then  and click on the “Explore URL” button. 

By default this will give you all of the pages indexed by Yahoo for your competitor.  If you click on the “inlinks” link at the top of the results, this will show you all the links pointing to your competitor’s site.

The list of links you get however will include all your competitor’s links including the internal links pointing only to the home page.   

So to get a more targeted list, choose from the drop down menus “Except from this domain” and to “Entire Site”.  This will give you a list of all your competitors outbound links pointing to anywhere on their site.

Once you have this strategic list of competitor links, you can go about contacting the site owners to acquire the same or equivalent links to boost your link popularity score with Google, Yahoo, MSN and all the other search engines. 

And this, in a nutshell, is what strategic link building is all about.  

Social networking site Digg has dropped Google Ads on its site for rival Microsoft AdCenter.  The details of the deal were not disclosed as both companies declined to comment.

Digg is MS AdCenter’s second high profile social networking client, the first was Facebook which was signed up a year ago.

 This is what Steve Berkowitz, a senior VP of Microsoft’s online services group said of the deal:

“We actually now are in the forefront of what we believe is going to be the next generation of advertising,”

Microsoft AdCenter needed this kind of high profile advertiser to kick off its Advertising programme.  

I’m not too sure this was such a good move on Digg’s part as most Digg users are anti Microsoft because of its monopolistic history with software applications.

Lets see how things pan out….

Mark Zuckerberg is facing a lawsuit for allegedly stealing the idea and source code behind the internet phenomena that is Facebook.

The lawsuit was brought about 3 years ago by 3 of Mark’s Harvard fellow student who claim they hired Zuckerberg to help them build the site that was to be named ConnectU. 

The 3 claimants, Cameron Winklevoss, his twin brother Tyler Winklevoss and Divya Narendra are claiming for copyright infringement, stealing trade secrets, fraud and breach of contract.

Mark Zuckerberg was rumored -a few weeks back- to have refused a $2 billion offer from Yahoo.  If this lawsuit hangs over the head of Facebook, it will be very difficult to sell the company to perspective buyers, well at least not for the price it would normally fetch.

Facebook is growing at an astronomical rate of 150,000 new members per day and boasts high profile celebrities such as Orlando Bloom,  Foreign Secretary David Miliband, and TV presenter Jonathan Dimbleby.

Internal linking, links within a website, if done properly can greatly contribute to the success of your website in the search results.

There are to areas to consider when thinking about your internal linking strategy; navigational links and in content links.

Navigational Links

The most important thing to remember when thinking about your navigational links is to ensure that they are readable to the search engines, the best way to do that is to ensure that internal links are always html links and not javascript, flash buttons or images. 

Another thing to think about is the logical structure of your link and the keywords used in them.  Always ensure that your strategic keywords are always included in your navigational links.

In-content Links

In content links are also very crucial to search engine rankings and contribute very positively towards your overall internal linking strategy, if implemented properly that is.

The think to remember when thinking in-content links is Wikipedia.  The reason Wikipedia is so successful (besides the thousands of unique content pages) is the way it links these pages together, using text links pointing back to the dedicated page of the word being mentioned.

And thats about it really, be smart about how you link your pages, not only for the search engines but also for your users.