This is post looks at UK specific citation places, but many will have sections for other countries.  For pure US citation sources try here.Local SEO is a hot topic this year, as marketers are realising the traffic potential of a good local ranking in certain industries.  One industry where Local SEO plays a big role in search marketing is Hotels.   A search for ‘London Hotels’ will bring up this 7 pack of local listings, which are now getting more clicks than the organic listings below them:

Google’s Local SEO algorithm has been greatly improved over that last year and listings are becoming harder to hijack and spam, though they still have work to do in pulling data for the reviews and citations:

What are the main factors of Local SEO?

• Reviews
• Star ratings
• Business address citations
• Total quantity of reviews and citations
• Trust/authority of the review & citation sources

(See David Mihm’s Local SEO ranking factors for more information on this area)

The citations are a key ranking factor and are seen as the new links:

In the Local algorithm, links can still bring direct traffic from the people who click on them. But the difference is that these “links” aren’t always links; sometimes they’re just an address and phone number associated with a particular business! In the Local algorithm, these references aren’t necessarily a “vote” for a particular business, but they serve to validate that business exists at a particular location, and in that sense, they make a business more relevant for a particular search.

Source: David Mihm

This list I provide is for general niches.  For specific niches you need to search competitor’s citations and find the best citation sources. e.g. for London Resturants:

-Search for ‘london restaurants’

-Click on ‘reviews’ or ‘more’ on the top local listing

-Go to the ‘more about this places’ section at the bottom.  These are the citations:

These citation places were discovered by devling into hundreds of local search listings across different niches and looking at the most referenced ‘places’ then looking at the site’s authority. Local SEO can be difficult, it’s not just about citations – but these will help you on your way to local domination.

Top 17 places for UK citations:

• Hotfrog

• Qype

• Local Data Search

• Thomson Local

• Yelp

• UpMyStreet

• Trusted Places

• Bview

• Tipped

• We Love Local

• Brown Book

• Infoserve

• Yell.com

• TouchLocal

• Scoot

• Ufindus

• SmileLocal

You will find that Google will also pull in reviews from these sites and mix them up with direct reviews from Google Places users.

Along with these top places to get listings you can also get address citations from many other authority sites, you just need to be a bit crafty sometimes .  Some other places where I have seen address citations being picked up by Google Places are uk.answersyahoo.com, ehow articles, meetup.com and uk.loadedweb.com.

If you are not sure whether you have listings in the top local directories, try David Mihm’s new UK local SEO tool which will search for your listings.

Related External Posts

Local Search Ranking Factors

SEOBook’s Local SEO Case Study

Distilled’s Local SEO Research Data

Related Videos

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday – SEO for Local Search from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

If you think I have missed any good places for authority citations (or easy and quick citation sources), drop them in the comments below. If you are looking for a local seo service, please contact me.

Being a freelance seo, I was unable to attend SMX London – £1295 for 2 days could not be justified…besides I have Twitter!!  Here is a round up of the top SMX tips and news which came live from Twitter using the #smx tag. Thanks to all the live bloggers for sharing.  Also included are some slides shared by the presenters.

PPC

“Exact match is like a rifle, phrase like a shotgun, broad like a bomb and automatic like a black hole” (via @joristoonders)

“With broad match Google is in control of your money” (via@marteenloeff)

“Master google products for universal search – very few remember to search G product search directly” (via @kevgibbo)

“Make sure low quality score keywords are performing if you keep them – because they hurt whole account “(via @kevgibbo)

Misc

“Push your content to social websites and let Google do the hard work” (Via @searchcowboys)

“some ppl trying HTML links in twitter streams – sites that have twitter streams then conver these into links! Awesome” (via @jaamit)

Digital Assets

“A page with video is 50x more likely to rank than a static page?” (Via @shodowdaddy)

“Thumbnail in Universal search news result is important, to get a thumbnailin the SERP keep it in 300×250 or 180×50″ (via @triballm)

“Recommended Google news WordPress URL format: /post-name/001-postID/ “(via @kevgibbo)

“use multiple authors (or create them ). 1 news item per day for 7 days include this data in news sitemap (xml)” (via @martijnbeijk)

“says microformats help smaller sites gain advantage, coz few people are using that” (via @jammit)

“Video SEO: Use the authority of an existing page to boost a new video in the SERP” (via @tribalim)

Conversion

“Testing is the difference between a low or medium conversion rate and a high or extremely good conversion rate!” (via @klaasknook)

Link Building

“Link building philosophy: A good ranking often comes down to a handfull of links” (via @kverleg)

“MAJESTICSEO: Google hasn’t fully addressed the issue of quality links vs quantity” (via @blueclaw)

“Visualizing Anchor Texts: throw the list of anchor texts in Tagcrowd.com and get a nice view of your anchors” (via @searchcowboys)

“Reach out to bloggers… not all bloggers work from home in their pyjamas” (via @joristoonders)

“Link building tip: Give the university some good press coverage, they might reproduce it on their blog” (via @tribalim)

“another one in line of current presentation. have a look at European Union Sponsored Project Pages. These are often valuable links” (via @martijnbeijk)

“Link building tip: Bad publicity isn’t always bad for SEO because it can generate a lot of links” (via @tribalim)

“#3 If you want a link on government websites: look for business directories on .gov sites, they exist!” (via @searchcowboys)

“Don’t use pagerank as a signal to gather possible linkpartners, but use relevance and freshness” (via @searchcowboys)

“build relationships (for linking) that competition can’t COPY!” (via @merrymorud)

Keywords

“Google Suggest dataset is updated frequently to offer fresh & rising search queries. Great tool for Keyword Research” (via @iviney)

Tools

Influence Finder – you can find out more about this launch from Nichola Stott’s Post.

The tool is also reviewed by Wiep

Other tools that were greatly discussed were Radian6 for social monitoring and web data extraction tool Mozenda.

Day 2 SMX London

Social media

“64% of companies say they cant measure social media ROI as much as they’d like” (via @jaamit)

“Think ‘social media MARKETING’ – be disciplined (dont just fanny about) and get other depts to think about it” (@jaamit}

“A couple of people recommend Scout Labs as a good entry level social media monitoring tool” (via @digitalalex)

“Twitter like a book is *not* a sales tool, it s a communication tool”  ( Lyndoman -via @maxormark)

“Negative sentiment against Dell dropped 30% after they engaged with the blogosphere”

“65% of UK facebook members (out of 26M) visit every day and spend 30 min. WOW “(via @clickequations)

“My avatar is bright red because most Social Media sites use muted colors. Red stands out, provokes reaction” (Lyndoman via @maxormark )

Conversion

In Social Media Bootcamp! Those who engaged in a community had twice the standard conversion rate (via @blueclaw)

Misc

“Your experiments need to be continual otherwise your competitors will gain ground on you” (via @louisventer)

“Video is 50 times more likely to appear in search results” (via @searchcowboys)

“Martijn says the 1st thing to make sure of is that ur being found. He claims that 25% of searches lead to a purchase. Really? christ!” (via @Jaamit)

“Contact pages shouldn’t just be a contact form. Add address info, phone info, add Google maps and driving direction”s (via @searchcowboys)

Analytics

“data mine live chat transcripts to spot sales obstacles – and text fixes with AB/MV testing. “(via @duncanparry)

Youtube

“Video is 50 times more likely to appear in search results” (via @searchcowboys)

“youtube search volume tool https://ads.youtube.com/keyword_tool “  (via @oscacarreras)

@ciaranj great casestudy on viral by Ray Ban (obviously faked) guy tattoos glasses on face

“Avi Wilensky: viral video = killer linkbait (via @blueclaw)

Facebook

“If you can´t advertise on a group page, pay for the privilege” (via @joristooners_

“Facebook ads have a short shelf life, keep ‘em FRESH & crispy (via ‘merrymorud)

“facebook advertising: add extra copy to the pictures as FB cannot detect it, you can get away with it” (via @davidcarraon)

“Facebook has 100 million mobile users” (via @sweena)

“Facebooks offers a strong user engagement like fan pages, facebook ads, engagement ads, social ads, applications and social plugins”

“5,000,000 gays on Facebook. They’re marketing gold as they have tons of money to spend” (via @sweena)

Great Quotes

.@demib “there’s a saying: ‘Never fuck with an SEO’” (re reputation management)

“First click attribution is like giving your first girlfriend the credits for you current marriage”

Live streamed

Still available to view by @conversion_guru >>  SMX LIVE STREAM

Detailed SMX Blogposts

See Jaamit’s new site, he has been live blogging today – you’ll find more detailed explanations on the above tweets here, here and here.

Facebook UK Demographics from @aimclear

Shared SMX London Presentation Slides

SEO Ranking Factors 2010 SMX London

SMX Presentation

Critchlow Will, Top 10 Analytics Reports

After researching Linkbait, I wanted to share some of my findings.  I wanted to discover which posts/articles on some of my favourite blogs attracted the most raw links.  Some blog posts look like great linkbait pieces, but have failed to attract good link quantities.  Pure linkbait has to attract links or it has failed it’s SEO objective.

It’s the creation of compelling and seductive content that persuades you perform an action such as linking to it

Lyndon Antcliffe, Cornwall SEO

For anyone interested in link building,  blogging or general content creation, you should find this post interesting.  I first researched the link data a couple of months ago and the data was accurate at the time of writing.  These linkbait examples will be continually attracting links, along with retweet counts and comments.  This article assumes that the total amount of  external links are ‘naturally’ acquired.

Terms and Tools for the research:

• ULD: Unique Linking Domains according to Linkscape Metrics.
• YSE Inlinks: Total number of links to the page excluding  internal links as given by Yahoo! Site Explorer at the time of writing.
• Page Authority: Calculated by OpenSite Explorer metrics.
• RTs: Retweets if applicable.
• Comments: Taken from the post comment count.

100 Excellent Free WordPress Themes

• Author: Vitaly Friedman
• Date: 08/01/08
• UDL: 1021
• YSE Inlinks: 12,530
• RTs: N/A
• Comments: 374
• Page Authority: 79/100

————————————————-

Google Wave Guide

• Author: Ben Parr
• Date: 29/01/10
  • UDL:  565
  • YSE Inlinks: 3,111
  • RTs: 6053
  • Comments: 208
  • Page Authority:  79/100

————————————————-

How to Get Traffic

• Author: Seth Godin
• Date: 03/06/06
• ULD:  389
• YSE Inlinks: 3228
• RTs: 147
• Comments: N/A
• Page Authority: 70/100

—————————————————

How  to report Paid Links

• Author: Matt Cutts
• Date: 14/04/07
• Uld:  738
• YSE Inlinks: 3,419
• RTs:  N/A
• Comments: 836
• Page Authority: 84/100

————————————————-

20+ Mind-Blowing Social Media Statistics

• Author: Jill Hird
• Date: 29/01/10
• ULD:  117
• YSE:  986
• RTs: N/A
• Comments: 16
• Page Authority: 47/100

————————————————-

Magnetic Headlines

• Author: Brian Clarke
• Date: 10/07/06
• ULD: 349
• YSE: 2,007
• RTs: N/A
• Comments: N/A
• Page Authority: 73/100

————————————————-

Top 5 Group Writing Projects

• Author: Darren Rowse
• Date:  07/05/07
• ULD:  407
• YSE  Inlinks: 1,517
• RTs: NA
• Comments: 530
• Page Authority: 75/100

————————————————-

Picture of his large adsense cheque

• Author: Jeremy Shoemaker
• Date:  ?
• ULD:  222
• YSE  Inlinks: 973
• RTs: NA
• Comments: N/A
• Page Authority: 73/100

————————————————-

Google in late stage talks with Twitter

• Author: Michael Arrington
  
• Date:  02/04/09
• ULD:  690
• YSE  Inlinks: 5254
• RTs: 4884
• Comments: 997
• Page Authority: 77/100

————————————————-

Guide to WordPress SEO

• Author: Joost De Valk
• Date:  10/06/08
• ULD:  464
• YSE  Inlinks: 5,582
• RTs: NA
• Comments: N/A
• Page Authority: 76/100

————————————————-

101 Ways to build Link Authority

• Author: Aaron Wall
• Date:  16/08/06
• ULD:  705
• YSE  Inlinks: 5,432
• RTs: NA
• Comments: 181
• Page Authority: 80/100

————————————————-

Search Engine Ranking Factors

• Author: SEOMOz Team
• Date:
• ULD: 2,170
• YSE Inlinks – 15,607
• RTs: N/A
• Comments: N/A
• Page Authority: 84/100

————————————————-

Google Adds Filtered Pages

• Author: Danny Sullivan
• Date: 01/10/09
• ULD: 368
• YSE Inlinks: 183 links
• RTs: 86
• Comments: N/A
• Page Authority: 75/100

————————————————-

Reputation Management Guide

• Author: Andy Beal
• Date: 07/03/06
• ULD: 269
• YSE Inlinks: 1,333
• RTs: 15
• Comments: 301
• Page Authority: 74/100

————————————————-

Paid Links pagerank Update

• Author: Loren Baker
• Date: 10/29/07
• ULD: 175
• YSE Inlinks:  658
• RTs: N/A
• Comments: 132
• Page Authority: 74/100

————————————————-

The SEOmoz Ranking Factors post has attracted the most links, but they have used a clever tactic.  Each time the ranking report is updated it stays on the same url and the old report is shipped off to another url.  This tactic can also be used on standard webpages that have old content but good links, move the old content and add fresh content to the old link-rich url.

Smashing Magazine has highlighted that the ’100 best’ posts work really well, especially if you have taken the time to research the article and really provide the reader with a quality resource.  The post is 2 years old and is still being retweeted and gaining links.

I think the data also highlights Rand Fishkin’s view of Twitter cannibalizing the webs link graph.  Mashable’s top linked to post had an awesome 6,053 retweets, but attracted fewer links than expected.  People were tweeting the post rather than linking to it in a blog post.  Though the retweets get the traffic, I’m sure Mashable would prefer more links.

The data also shows good linkbait articles stand the test of time.  Aaron walls 101 ways to build link authority was posted in 2006, I’m pretty sure bloggers will still link to this article in the coming years.

I have really enjoyed writing and researching this post and would love to look at articles across different industries,  it’s just seriously time consuming…

Linkbait Tools

See how well your linkbait blogposts do with my tool ViralSPY. The tool monitors the social reactions to a post along with the total links acquired.

ViralSPY

Linkbaiting Resources

SEOsmarty’s guide to finding linkbait inspiration

Smashing Magazines Golden rules of linkbaiting

Lyndon’s 10 link bait tips

Link Baiting by Wiep

SEOMoz Viral Marketing

SEJ linkbuilding using linkbait

Linkbait by Jim Westergren

Matt Cutts on Linkbait

Basics of Linkbait from the Freshegg Blog

Stuntdubl’s Linkbaiting Playbook

]]> http://www.seo-doctor.co.uk/linkbait-most-linked-to-articles.html/feed 14 http://www.seo-doctor.co.uk/seo-doctor-firefox-extension.html http://www.seo-doctor.co.uk/seo-doctor-firefox-extension.html#comments Sat, 27 Mar 2010 08:07:14 +0000 Gareth http://www.seo-doctor.co.uk/?p=532

This week the SEO Doctor Firefox Extension was released.  The tool gives you a mini SEO audit looking at H1 tags through to Robots.txt info.  The tool sits in your status bar below and gives you an SEO Score – this site scored 100% which was nice

The tools best feature (IMHO) is to examine a pages outgoing links. The tool shows this as a metric % , and helps you find the balance between outgoing links and good Pagerank flow.

Page rank flow is a number expressed in percentage of the links on the page going out of your domain, versus the total number of links. A page where all links are internal (going to the same domain) will have Page rank flow of 100% while the page where all links go to external sites will have page rank flow of 0%. In a nutshell this number represents how much of the incoming Page rank is kept on your site.

The tool also gives you a quick overview of some other data:

I  like the ‘nofollow’ highlighter, being nice and bright.  I’m colour-blind and the Quake highlighter is not very clear for me sometimes.  I also like the CSV export functionality, which is very useful.

The tool, developed by Vladimir Prelovac comes out at very poor timing, the same week as SEOmoz undated their killer tool bar.   SEO Doctor 1.0 is also competing in an already overcrowded market place.  The tool uses the name ‘SEO Doctor’, when there is already other SEO Tools on the market place with the same name.  Prelovac could have been a little more creative with his branding, but the tool is still good work.   Go and have a play and download the extension at Firefox Addons.

Related External Posts

http://www.garethjames.net/seo-chrome-extension/

Related Posts

http://www.seo-doctor.co.uk/best-firefox-social-media-extensions.html

SEO Doctor Tools

SEO Doctor Chrome Extension

(Guest Post from Ben Rozema at Bestrank.com)

Video SEO

To tap into your maximum search ranking potential it is important to not only focus on optimizing your textual content, but to also optimize other forms of media such as any images, podcasts, or videos. By not optimizing such media, you are losing out on the opportunity to connect with your target audience and gain potential visitors.  With that said, here are some tips to bear in mind as you optimize images, podcasts, video, and other media.

Optimizing Images

Image searching is one of the fastest growing searching practices today with some of the larger search engines, such as Google and Yahoo, even adding image search results within text search result rankings.  When optimizing your images, consider the following:

• Use relevant and image specific keywords within your image file name.  For instance, BlackDog.jpg is better than 234.jpg.
• Use very descriptive and relevant words for your captions.  For example, “Black Labrador Retriever playing in the grass.”
• Try uploading your image to refresh its ranking popularity.  Just as with text, you want to constantly add and update; therefore, by uploading your image again after a long period of time, search engine spiders will more likely reevaluate your ranking.
• Larger image sizes have better ranking priority than smaller image sizes.

Optimizing Podcasts

Now that iPods and other MP3 players are so popular and we have smart phones that can download MP3s, the podcast is one the best new ways to get your information out to the world.  And by optimizing your podcast, you improve your chances of actually getting a perspective viewer or listener to download.  Here are some things to consider for the best podcast optimization results:

• Use every field to add descriptive content such as description, comments, title, and details.
• Use content specific tags.
• Add a transcription or summary of the information you give in your podcast.  This will be helpful for both your viewer and for search engine spiders to page rank.
• Provide clearly visible information for your podcast’s subscription.

Optimizing Video

Let’s face it.  When we are looking for information on the internet, a lot of times we are looking for quick and easy which oftentimes means we would rather not read.  Also, we are turning to the internet for entertainment.  Video is able to give us all this at the click of a button.  However, in order to get those clicks, you will want to consider these easy video search optimization tips:

• Use specific keyword generated title names such as “demonstration-how-to-use-iPhone-maps.mov” instead of something generic like “345-lb.mov”
• Use relevant and optimized content on the video’s loading page.  A good way to do this is to either add a summary or transcription of the video content.
• Make sure you place your video in the proper category.
• Include RSS feeds.
• Create a video site map and submit it to Google.

Just as when you optimize content for your site, when you optimize your images, podcasts, videos, and other media, keep in mind that you are not only wanting to attract search engine spiders for a better ranking, but you are also wanting to attract your target audience.  With that said, just as you need to make sure you have high quality and relevant content, you also want to make sure you have high quality and relevant images, podcasts, and videos.

Other Posts by Ben Rozema:

Best Firefox Social Media Extensions

After playing with ehow for a couple of weeks, I have found there is ZERO quality control while Google just loves the content, it’s a complete joke.   As an SEO, we love to find strong trusted domains which we use to rank content and get links from, but there is a trade off. We don’t want the internet to become one large cesspool.

My ‘How to link build’ was written in under 10 minutes and is ranking on page 1 for the phrase, this kind of domain trust just encourages spammers (like me ) to produce crap.

Looking at Google’s predictive search results on ‘how to’ is entertaining in itself.  But I started looking for ehow pages and they do very well, usually on the first 3 pages.   They may not all be page one, but these results are here without any promotion, purely from ehow’s domain trust and authority.

So where are the ehow pages then?

#19 in Google.co.uk

#25 in Google.co.uk

To get these types of ehows on page 1 of the search engine results pages (SERPs), you just need some internal links, add a couple of cheap external links and you’re there.

Some more…

Though these ehows may be of reasonable quality, there are thousands of them that are complete shite.  But it’s a clever content farm strategy used my ehow to flood the SERPs and make money through ads…

The name “Content Farm” kind of describes it perfectly. What a strange concept, isn’t it? Or maybe not. Spammers and BlackHat SEOs have been auto generating low quality content for long tail search engine rankings for a while now. The content farm technique arguably takes this a few steps further by creating better quality (note – still questionable quality), user friendly content for the exact same reason                 Source: Rishil on Content Farms

But why does Google trust the ehow domain so much? Because they get their cut of the profits to the detriment of their own index?  Along with polluting Google’s index with nonsense, ehow is getting more criticism about their evil doings on how badly they treat their authors.   The only people really making money here are ehow and Google.

For the average internet user I believe ehow pollutes the index with crap, but it does highlight the SEO tactic of using strong domains to hijack SERP positions through ‘piggybacking’.

After just doing some SEO consulting and setting up analytics for site search on 2 websites, I thought I would do quick guide as Google’s own document is very unclear.

-From your anaytics websites profiles, click ‘edit’ on the website you want to add site search analytics.
-Then click ‘edit’ again in the top right hand side
-Select ‘do track’ radio button

To set the query parameters, do a quick search on your site search box and see what the query string urk is:

http://www.seo-doctor.co.uk/?s=seo

Here you can see the parameter is s, just add this into the box.

Do a test run and do some site searches, then wait 24hrs for the results to show.

Now what?

The data will give you information on what users are looking for in terms of content or products for ecommerce wesbites, this information is like gold dust.   It will also give you data on whether your users needs are being met by your website and allow you to discover new content ideas and long tail keyword phrases to target.  For ecommerce, you need to know what these top internal search terms are…these will be your biggest sellers.  Sites are also using Internal serach in some clever ways:

And some have gone beyond using SSA simply as a diagnostic tool. For example, the Financial Times monitors its site’s recent search activity for spikes in queries for personal and company names. They check to see if these suddenly popular queries correlate with their recent editorial coverage; if not, a spike might indicate a breaking story, and the paper’s editors are informed. So, in effect, the Financial Times is using SSA as a predictive tool

As people are using vertical search more, the imporatance of understang these analytics is vital.

To set up your interal search engine, see this Google video below:

Further Reading:

http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/2007/10/kick-butt-with-internal-site-search-analytics.html

http://econsultancy.com/blog/2805-q-a-lou-rosenfeld-on-site-search-analytics

http://yoast.com/wordpress-search/

This is a guest post from Ben Rozema of Best Rank, a San Diego SEO Company.  Go and check out their blog.

Any social media user, no matter what their level, can use add-ons and plug-ins to save time and create more opportunity. Some of the following listings work for specific sites, while others have more general and universal applications. Check them out. They just might be useful and increase your social media access.

StumbleUpon Add-ons

StumbleUpon is great for finding websites that match your interests, whether you seek dog-training advice or want to share interests with the Flat Earth society. You simply click the Stumble button to see the best websites for what you are already looking at. With over 500 topics to choose from, your recommendations get better and better the more you use it.

Digg Firefox Add-ons

This lets you see if what you are looking at has already been added to Digg. If it hasn’t, and you want to share it, no problem. Add it to Digg with one click. It’s that easy. Be the first to share a story on Digg.

Shareaholic for Firefox Extension

Enjoy sites like FaceBook, MySpace, Digg, Gmail and Twitter? Then you’ll love Shareaholic. The extension lets you quickly share, bookmark and email web pages through most social networking and bookmarking sites. It’s the ultimate add on for the link sharing junkie. If you like it, why keep it to yourself? Share it with the world and keep the fire going. The extension was good enough to win the Extend Firefox contest.

Social Media for Firefox Extension

The ultimate time saver for building powerful social media accounts, this site is the best kept secret of the world’s top Diggers, Stumblers, Navigators. The secret is to be the first to submit stories that are already popular on other sites. This lets you browse sites like Reddit to find good stories that have already been submitted, and then be the first to submit them to Digg. It’s a great tool for turning the truth into a virus.

Glue for Firefox Exention

Formerly Blueorganizer, Glue lets you connect with friends around things you visit, improving the social nature of the web. Browse popular sites on books, music, wine, restaurants and other popular features on the web and the Glue bar appears on the current page to show you friends who looked at the same site. Friends can share their thoughts, creating every website into gossip central.

Yahoo! Buzz buttons

Click on the stories that give you the most buzz, and the most popular may appear on Yahoo’s home page. You can impact what millions see around the world, just by sharing the buzz.

ul.timate.info Add-Ons

This Mozilla Firefox add on helps simplify how people interact with social media sites like Twitter, FriendFeed, MySpace and FaceBook. It makes sharing the world as easy as a click of the button.

There are plenty of others. Admittedly, this list only grazes the surface, simply because there are so many out there. The Internet gets more interconnected the more people use it and share what they’ve discovered. It can be a great launching mechanism for independent movies, books or even a presidential career. Thanks to social media links, the world will never be the same.

—————————————————————————————————————————–

Great plugins, thanks Ben. I’d like to add a few notables of my own.  If anyone else has some favs, please post in comments.

URL Shortner -  This lets you use over 100 different shorteners.

Echofan for Twitter – Loads of extra Twitter funcionality for Twitterholics

Linkedin toolbar- For the Linkedin crowed.

If you need even more, try Mashable’s monster list.

Related Posts

http://www.seo-doctor.co.uk/seo-doctor-firefox-extension.html

As an SEO Consultant, I always like to play with my titles and snippets displayed in Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs).  You can always have some fun..

But what can you do with your Linkin Profile? A standard profile listing will appear like this:

But you can change it.  In the editable field, your name is the meta title.  This can be changed to a maximum of 40 characters, they will also add ‘LinkedIn’ to the end on the title.  Now lets not forget that your meta title is an important place for keywords and that LinkedIn is on a well trusted domain.

Here’s how my profile was displayed in Google after some tweaking:

You can also see how Google pulls data from the ‘Professional Headline’ section which is editable, giving you extra control on what is displayed.  This extra line of data also helps rank for long tail phrases:

So if you want to make some changes, just dive into your profile and do some editing.

The only problem with going overboard, like above,  is that the whole title becomes your name and is continually displayed in your status updates, this could annoy a lot of your connections.  I am changing my profile now to make it look less spammy, but will still have ‘SEO Doctor’ in the title, as I am competing with some software on the name.

Linkedin have recently changed the url of profiles to start with UK (for uk profiles), so make sure you have updated all your profile links.  They have not 301′d the old urls which doesn’t do them any favours.

Other articles/blog posts on optimizing your Linkedin Profile:

Win Clients my optimizing your Linkedin Keywords

10 Linkedin Tips to Optimize your Profile

Why you should Optimize your Linkedin Profile

Today Google updated it’s toolbar Pagerank  – not to be confused with the real Pagerank that Google keeps private.

Looking at my sites and my client’s sites, the update appears totally random.  It’s very difficult to get any meaning from this data as there is a delay factor. This site went from PR3 to PR5 with no major links built since the last update a few weeks ago (October), but this change could be related to a totally different period.  It’s not worth spending any time deliberating.

People talked of penalties being issued mid-December and this appears to be a straight update.  It will take a couple of weeks for webmasters to discuss the updates fully.  Others believe that this update has seen more link filtering.  Google will always improve its ability to filter links each update, so I believe this to be true.

Whatever your Pagerank change, this will not affect your ranking positions.  I still believe that toolbar Pagerank will be stopped  in 2010, which is why as an SEO consultant I use other metrics to measure page strength – ones that are more accurate and make sense.

UPDATE: Another Pagerank Update 3rd April 2010

Another Pagerank update – and more meaningless data for webmasters to worry about.

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