Delicious, the social bookmarking site set up in 2003 by Joshua Schachter is being shut down, according to news leaked out last Thursday. Delicious is under performing, hence the closure. It is not alone, Yahoo Buzz, AltaVista and MyBlogLog will also be closed.

Delicious has released a statement on their blog apologising to people about the stories.

“While we can’t answer each of your questions individually, we wanted to address what we can at this stage and we promise to keep you posted as future plans get finalized.”

Delicious also tried to assure their customers by answering the most common questions people have raised.

“Is Delicious being shut down? And should I be worried about my data?

– No, we are not shutting down Delicious. While we have determined that there is not a strategic fit at Yahoo!, we believe there is a ideal home for Delicious outside of the company where it can be resourced to the level where it can be competitive.

What is Yahoo! going to do with Delicious?

– We’re actively thinking about the future of Delicious and we believe there is a home outside the company that would make more sense for the service and our users. We’re in the process of exploring a variety of options and talking to companies right now. And we’ll share our plans with you as soon as we can.

What if I want to get my bookmarks out of Delicious right away?

– As noted above, there’s no reason to panic. We are maintaining Delicious and encourage you to keep using it. That said, we have export options if you so choose. Additionally, many services provide the ability to import Delicious links and tags.

We can only imagine how upsetting the news coverage over the past 24 hours has been to many of you. Speaking for our team, we were very disappointed by the way that this appeared in the press. We’ll let you know more as things develop.”

I am sure what will happen, but one thing is for certain, the search and social landscape is a constantly changing field where we all have to make sure we keep on top of what is a happening in the market place.

Tweet

So the end of 2010 is just around the corner. What events are coming up next year?

Well there is still one more event to come in December. I am attending
1. London Blog Club on Tuesday December 14th.
Location: Theodore Bullfrog
26 John Adam Street London WC2N 6HL

Rajini Lolay of youngandpoor.co.uk will be talking about her webiste which she set up less than a year ago and already has 10,000 visits. Young And Poor is dedicated to cheap cool things happening in the city. Rajini will talk about how to grow your blog, including how to grow a social media presence, how to network, and how to make money.
What a great idea for a website. Most people talk about being young and rich, but more are young and poor as they are just starting on their career path.

2.London SEO SMO and PPC January 17th
I am the organizer of this meetup which is about the integration between natural search, paid and social media and how working together can provide the best digital solution for your own business or for your clients.

Richard Fitzgerald, blogger of 52burritodates.com will be giving a talk about his site and how he has used both social and seo to drive traffic and generate buzz. Richard won a year supply of burritos at a festival in 2010 and instead of consuming them all himself he thought he would share the burrito love with a new girl each week – hence the name of his blog.

Google will also be talking about what 2011 means for search. It is a great opportunity to get some insights from the monopoly search engine.

http://seojoblogs.com/2011/01/31/new-year-search-club/

3.Online Marketing Meetup – February 10th

This was the first event since Gus Ferguson took over the meetup which took place on a Thursday evening on the HMS President, if the weather had been better, it would be a great way to end the week – drinks on board the river Thames. Gus really outdid himself by organising 5 speakers to talk at the event, ranging from SEO, to social media and to PR. I will certainly be coming to the next one in May.

4.World Congress Barcelona February 14 – 17

The mobile conference is again in Barcelona this year and is one to attend if you are serious about mobile. Here is an overview of what is happening:

* A world-class thought leadership conference featuring visionary keynotes and action-provoking panel discussions
* An exhibition with more than 1,300 companies displaying the cutting-edge products and technology that will define the mobile future
* An even bigger App Planet the new Centre of the Apps Universe
* An awards programme that highlights the most innovative mobile solutions and initiatives from around the world
* And most importantly, the planet’s best venue for mobile industry networking, finding business opportunities, and making deals

5.SES London February 22 – 25

This has come around fast. I attended one day last year which was really interesting and I learnt so much. There were SEO and social media 101 sessions. I wrote about my experience earlier this year http://seojoblogs.com/2010/01/31/seo-events-calendar/. This year there are beginner sessions such covering the following:

* Introduction to Search Marketing
* Basic Analytics
* Introduction to SEO
* Introduction to Social Media

I hope to attend some of the advanced sessions:

* Twitter Nation & Automation
* Advanced Paid Search Tactics
* Duplicate Content Issues
* Killer Facebook Marketing Tactics

6.London Blog Club – February 22

London Blog Club – Richard Fitzgerald who spoke at my last event talked about his success with 52burritodates.com. He started blogging in 2007 and received minimal traffic to his site. It was only when he won the year supply of burritos at a festival last April, that he saw visits to his new blog explode. Moral of the story is that you may be trying to get lots of visits to your site, but if you have a niche then you may hit the jackpot and attract lots of visitors

7.SEO Chicks Boat Party – February 23
The SEO Chicks party was a nice way to round off midweek and talk to other fellow seo professionals. It was on the HMS President, the same location that the Online Marketing meetup took place a few weeks ago. There were well over 100 seo, online marketing, social and pr gurus.

8.London Blog Club – March 22
I went to London Blog Club – hosted by Marko Saric, Filip Matous and Tamara Walker. The event was held at the Blue Posts pub (one of the regular locations for the London Blog club), just off of Oxford Street, so quite central.

Sanjay Shelat from Edit Optimisation was the guest speaker. He has worked for companies like Gumtree & Ebay and was very enthusiastic about seo and gave a lot of tips on how to optimise your blog. I summarised the key points to take away in the post below:
http://seojoblogs.com/2011/03/26/london-blog-club-march-22-2011/

8.Spring Search London – March 28
This event was held in Theodore Bullfrog, 26 – 28 John Adam Street. I reserved the top floor for us and there was a small tab for some drinks.

At this Spring Meetup, Nichola Stott – Director & Founder theMedia Flow talked about her experience in social and seo and how working together has benefited her clients.

theMediaFlow is a UK SEO and social media agency and Nichola is also co-founder and director of SEO PR Training so she has plenty of experience to share with us. You may have read some of her work, she blogs for SearchEngineWatch, State of Search and SEO Chicks.

http://seojoblogs.com/2011/04/04/spring-search-london/

9.Search London – Boating on the Thames – April 18
I will be hosting an event on Monday April 18th. “Search London – Boating on the Thames” will take place on the HMS President, which is by Blackfriars station. At this event, we have Marko Saric, from howtomakemyblog.com. He will be telling us all about how he grew his blog from nothing to being voted one of the top 50 blogs.

So there are some of the events for early next year. I will add more as the event calendar fills up. Let me know if there is anything in particular you would like to see at SEO, SMO and PPC meetup.

Tweet

Clients have often asked if the number of twitter followers you have and facebook fans affects rankings and it does. As seo professionals, we always knew it was important but there was never any confirmation from the search engines till this week.

On December 1st, Danny Sullivan, from search engine land published an interview he took with Bing and Google which confirmed that links shared through Twitter and Facebook have a direct impact on rankings. You can find out more here:

http://searchengineland.com/what-social-signals-do-google-bing-really-count-55389

Below is the interview by Danny Sullivan

Danny Sullivan: If an article is retweeted or referenced much in Twitter, do you count that as a signal outside of finding any non-nofollowed links that may naturally result from it?

Bing:

We do look at the social authority of a user. We look at how many people you follow, how many follow you, and this can add a little weight to a listing in regular search results. It carries much more weight in Bing Social Search, where tweets from more authoritative people will flow to the top when best match relevancy is used.

Google:

Yes, we do use it as a signal. It is used as a signal in our organic and news rankings. We also use it to enhance our news universal by marking how many people shared an article [NOTE: see the end of this article for more about that].

Danny Sullivan: Do you try to calculate the authority of someone who tweets that might be assigned to their Twitter page. Do you try to “know,” if you will, who they are?

Bing:

Yes. We do calculate the authority of someone who tweets. For known public figures or publishers, we do associate them with who they are. (For example, query for Danny Sullivan)

Google:

Yes we do compute and use author quality. We don’t know who anyone is in real life 🙂

Danny Sullivan: Do you calculate whether a link should carry more weight depending on the person who tweets it?

Bing:

Yes.

Google:

Yes we do use this as a signal, especially in the “Top links” section [of Google Realtime Search]. Author authority is independent of PageRank, but it is currently only used in limited situations in ordinary web search.

Danny Sullivan: Do you track links shared within Facebook, either through personal walls or fan pages?

Bing:

Yes. We look at links shared that are marked as “Everyone,” and links shared from Facebook fan pages.

Google:

We treat links shared on Facebook fan pages the same as we treat tweeted links. We have no personal wall data from Facebook.

Danny Sullivan: Do you try to calculate the authority of someone on Facebook, either say via their personal wall or their fan page.

Bing:

We don’t do this on Facebook. On Facebook, we only get what’s public, only updates and things you’ve posted to everyone as viewable. We don’t get things only shared with friends, so we don’t know how authoritative you are on Facebook. There isn’t the whole convenient retweet mechanism we see on Twitter.

We do see valuable content shared by Facebook users, even though we only get what’s public. For example when Gary Coleman died we saw a video from Different Strokes, saying his favorite line “what ya talk’in ’bout Willis” gain popularity. It happened to be what a lot of people are sharing on the day he passed away.

Google:

Again, the treatment is the same as for Twitter. And we have no personal wall data from Facebook.

Danny Sullivan: Do you calculate whether a link should carry more weight depending on the person who shared it on Facebook?

Bing:

We can tell if something is of quality on Facebook by leveraging Twitter. If the same link is shared in both places, it’s more likely to be legitimate.

Google:

Same as question 5.

So what does this mean for seo? Well it confirms what we already knew and the same best practices of seo can be applied here.
Facebook and Twitter can be seen as an external link building channel. The more varied the links from the different Twitter and Facebook fans, the better. So you can’t go on retweeting a post x number of times from the same account, hoping to build more authoritative links, it just won’t work.

I am pleased Google and Bing confirmed the impact of social media on seo as it proves my point that integration is the key in this digital space.

I have just taken over as organizer for SEO, SMO and PPC meetup and will look to organise an event in the New Year.

It is important to integrate, seo, social media and paid search and therefore I was pleased when the organizer position became available to demonstrate how these three areas can be integrated. I think it is hard to think of each separately in this digital age. There is so much cross over between the three.

Blogger outreach – social media seem to have taken control of this. However, when bloggers are contacted and write content about a product/service, the seo team should become involved. They should work with the social media team to put together optimised content the bloggers can post on their blog. Optimised content, simply means links on keywords back to the site that is building up rank and traffic.

Keywords – paid search data showing the impressions and number of clicks can feed into seo work. When a new page is built, the seo team carries out keyword research to see which words have the highest search volume. Google keyword is sometimes used to view the search volume for the terms but it is often inaccurate. This is when the paid search data can be used to see the words that have the highest click throughs. If paid search are using certain terms that are performing well, then these terms can also be used on the landing page for that campaign. This also helps to improve the quality score of the paid search advert.

Buzz – the social media team monitor the amount of buzz generated for a certain client. However, it is the seo team that monitors the traffic and sales to the site that this buzz has generated. The seo team also record the rankings for its key terms and should see rankings improve. It is important to be able to assign a ROI to the buzz, otherwise it is very easy to keep spending money on social media with out seeing a return on the investment.

Integration is not just a new word, it is here and now and going to stay. The more people pay attention to it instead of treating PPC, SMO and SEO separately, then the more we will be able to reap the awards.

Sign up to SEO, SMO and PPC meetup on meetup.com to network and meet like minded digital people.

Once you have set up your wordpress blog, you need to be able to track visits to your site. It is important to see who is coming to your site, what pages they are looking at and where they are going after they leave your site. You can also see what keywords are driving traffic. This allows you to help optimise certain pages that are not performing well with the keywords visitors are using.

The most easiest web tracking software to use is Google analytics. It is also free, which is even better. I love using GA, it is so simple to set up and you can also integrate adwords with it. Here are the steps to setting up GA.

1) Get a gmail account. It is free and also simple to do. Just follow the instructions in the picture below.

2) Install GA in wordpress
Once you have a gmail account, go back to your wordpress admin section and under plugins, choose Google Analytics. Install GA, it should only take a couple of minutes.

3) Once GA has been installed, go back to your plugins and press activate. You will then GA in the settings section, in the bottom left, as the image below illustrates.

4) Account ID
You will need to enter the account ID in the top right hand corner. This will be located in the Google Analytics account you just set up.

And that’s it, now you are ready to start tracking visits to your site.

There may be areas of your site you do not want crawled by the search engine spiders, such as the admin area of the site or a test page. One way to tell search engines the files and folders to avoid is through the robots meta tag. However, not all search engines read metatags and therefore webmasters use the robots.txt file to tell search engines the areas of the site to avoid.

Link from:http://www.flickr.com/photos/microcosmos/1265783338/

What is a robots.txt file?
The robots.txt is a text file placed in the root folder of a website (for example: www.example.com/robots.txt).

Why is it used?

To give instructions about the websites to search engine spiders. The robots.txt contains information about the pages that should not be crawled. It also contains the location of the XML sitemap. A lot of people use the robots.txt file to stop the search engine from crawling a page or number of pages, for example if you are still building the site and do not want it to appear in search engines

What does it look like?

User-agent: *
Disallow: /admin
Disallow: /enquiry-form/
Disallow: /shoppingbasket/

The “*” means any robot. Each part of the site that you do not want the robot to crawl you have to put on a separate line.

Although you may have set up the robots.txt file, it does not mean that all robots will respect the file. Robots can ignore it. The file is publicly available, so anyone can see parts of your site you do not want the robots to use.

If you want to find out more information about robots file, here are some useful links:

The Web Robots Pages
Create a robots.txt file – Search Console Help

The nofollow attribute has brought a lot of confusion in the seo world. This post will clear this up.

What is nofollow?

According to Google the “Nofollow” provides a way for webmasters to tell search engines “Don’t follow links on this page” or “Don’t follow this specific link.”

A nofollow meta tag which goes on a link tells the search engine spider not to crawl that page. This means they do not crawl the linked page and index it, meaning it does not raise its position within the search engine result pages.

You can put a nofollow on individual links.

When do you use it?

1) when linking to an opponent or competitor’s web site, the tag stops the page rank flowing from your page to theirs.

2) A paid link – if someone is paying to have a link on your site they should not be getting pagerank from your site.

3) PageRank sculpting – when you want to control the pagerank flow within your page. For example, you may want to put a nofollow on links to pages that do not need to have as good search rankings, like the Privacy Policy, Terms of Service, and Contact Us pages.

What does it look like?

A normal link to the site
a href “http://www.examplesite.com>Example Site< /a>
Linking to the site with a nofollow tag
a href “http://www.examplesitecom” rel=”nofollow” >Example Site< /a>

I hope this has cleared up the nofollow link. Let me know if you have any further questions on this matter.

Sitelinks are generated by Google automatically and they appear in the natural search results listings as below:

Unfortunately, Google does not say exactly how they are generated. They say there are best practices webmasters can follow to improve the quality of their sitelinks. For example, for the site’s internal links, they recommend use anchor text and alt text that’s informative, compact, and avoids repetition.

Here are some of the ways sitelinks are generated:

– Site ranks first for the keyword(s) that generate the Sitelinks listing
– Easily spiderable, structured navigation
– High natural search traffic
– High click through rates from the search results page
– Useful outbound links
– Inbound links from high quality sites
– Age of site – the older sites may have more sitelinks than younger ones

So now we have covered that off, the next step is to help your site get sitelinks:

1. Useful to Google
According to Google, they only display sitelinks on sites they think are useful. In their words “We only show sitelinks for results when we think they’ll be useful to the user. If the structure of your site doesn’t allow our algorithms to find good sitelinks, or we don’t think that the sitelinks for your site are relevant for the user’s query, we won’t show them.”

Therefore you need to make sure your site has clear and easy user navigation. There will be text links to other parts of the site which the user can click on.

2. Page title and meta description
Make sure you adherer to seo best practice, meaning you optimise the page titles and meta descriptions, encouraging people to click through to your site.

3. Outbound links
With all websites, they should be easy to navigate, full of interesting content which includes providing useful outbound links through out the site. Do not worry, you are not encouraging your customers to leave the site, if they found your site interesting, they will come back.

4. Google Webmaster Tools
If you have not done so already, register your site with Google webmaster tools. Then you can monitor your sitelinks and even delete those that you do not want appearing in the SERPs.

You have all been there. You set up a website and then a couple of years later, you may have a bit more money and decide you want to revamp your site. You get the designers in, you change some of the content and you think by hosting it on the same URL that you won’t see a drop in rankings or traffic.

Wrong…..

Why will you see a drop in rankings and traffic? The reason is that you are potentially changing thousands of URLs and all the trust and authority that goes with it. It will take time for Google to come back and index your site.

Here are a few things you can do to help minimise the drop in organic rankings and loss in organic traffic

1. 301 redirects
Make sure you have all the 301 redirects in place, set up a database to show which old URL is directed to the new URL. This will mean all users who have bookmarked the old page will be taken to the new site.
It may take some time for Google to pick up all the 301 redirects. However, submitting a site map to Google webmaster tools would help speed this up.

2. Content
The site relaunch will be better than the original site, otherwise you wouldn’t be going through this process.
Make sure the layout, content and navigation uses the SEO best practices. So have key landing pages that you have optimised with content for your product, make sure there are breadcrumb trails – great for seo and user navigation
If there are pages on your site that already have rankings on targeted keyword phrases, you may want to keep these pages and integrate them into the new site.

3. Paid search
Increase you paid search budget when you relaunch to offset any losses from organic rankings and traffic.

4. Update all of your directory listings after the new site is re-launched, and try to update as many inbound links that point to your old pages as possible.

Don’t worry too much about the rankings and traffic drop if your new site is going to be better and more seo friendly than the previous. What is important is the planning, so you can see what changes you need to do and work through them at a steady pace making sure all tasks are covered. The new site will soon have as much traffic as the old, if not more if seo amendments have been made.

It is that time of year again, autumn has come, the shops are full of Halloween decorations and sweets and chocolates. England has seen a growth in the popularity of Halloween over the past decade, but it has been a well celebrated event in the United States from as early as the 1930s. It has a very long history and originates from the Celts. Halloween derives its name from All-Hallows Eve which was they day before All Saints Day (All-Hallows) a Christian festival.

Halloween comes from the pagan festival Samhain, which the Celts celebrated on what was their New Year Eve, October 31st. Samhain marked the end of summer and the beginning of winter which brought the evil spirits. The Celts believed that on this night, the barrier between our world and the spirit world was at its weakest and the spirits would return to the earth. They built bonfires and in England carved out faces in the turnips to warn off the evil spirits. The festival was celebrated by lighting bonfires and sacrificing crops and animals. The bonfire was also believed to protect them during the winter months.

Samhaim was officially recognised as All Hallows Eve by Pope John 14th in 1006. November 1st was known as All Saints Day or All-Hollows and the following day, November 2nd was celebrated as All Souls Day to honour the dead. The three festivals together were called Hallowmans.

The Celts believed the spirits of the dead would possess people’s bodies. They dressed up in scary costumes to ward off evil spirits from taking their body. When the Irish moved to America in the 1840s they brought this custom with them. And now children dress up in all sorts of costumes, from cute little fairies to blood thirsty vampires and knock on neighbours doors going “trick or treating”.

Now, the history of trick or treating, actually comes from a mixture of different origins. One was the Celts, who believed the devil would play tricks on the living so they gave them food when they visited their homes. The ninth-century Europeans had a custom called souling. On All Saints Day, Christians would walk from village to village begging for “soul cakes” – pieces of bread with currants. The more soul cakes a beggar received, the more prayers they promised to say on behalf of the dead relatives of the donors. People strongly believed at that time that the dead remained in limb and that prayers could send the soul’s passage to heaven. Lastly, the Irish peasant practice was to go door to door to get money, cheese, eggs, butter apples in preparation the festival St Columb Kill.

With commercialism, Halloween has thrived in the United States with thousands of children trick or treating, parading about in a variety of costumes. It is now the second most popular holiday after Christmas for decorating and sales of sweets.