Google says it has made significant changes to the way in which their algo works to favour fresh content, which they say will affect 35% of searches. The official Google announcement says: 

We completed our Caffeine web indexing system last year, which allows us to crawl and index the web for fresh content quickly on an enormous scale. Building upon the momentum from Caffeine, today we’re making a significant improvement to our ranking algorithm that impacts roughly 35 percent of searches and better determines when to give you more up-to-date relevant results for these varying degrees of freshness.

You can check out the entire article by clicking the link below and see how it’ll affect you.

Read “Giving you fresher, more recent search results” at Official Google Blog

Back in February 2010 I spent a weekend in Valencia to meet up with Graham Hunt and Dom Goucher, two fellow Brits living in Spain who I’d met at Ed Dale’s “Coming Come” conference in Manchester the previous November.

The weekend was partially social (Arctic Monkeys gave a free gig) but partially about brainstorming some new business ideas, especially since we were lucky enough to join Ed’s mentoring program for a year.

When brainstorming some ideas for a new business we struck upon the idea of promoting Market Samurai to Spanish internet marketers, and soon set up a website with information about find profitable niches – Market Samurai España.

While the version of Market Samurai you download is still in English, Graham put some videos together in Spanish to explain how to use it to Spanish speaking internet marketers.

The interesting thing about this process was finding out how to go about SEO in Spanish. If you’ve ever followed the 30 Day Challenge (or The Challenge, as it’s now branded) you’ll know about the “symphony of four parts” and while that is directly applicable to the Spanish speaking market we did find a particular problem with link building.

There are thousands of article directories, web 2.0 properties and blog networks to post content in English. However, the opportunities to do the same in Spanish are far smaller, the tools to enable easy backlinks just don’t exist.

The preferred keyword tool of many internet marketers is Market Samurai, which is only available in English, although it can target any linguistic/geographic market. There don’t seem to be any keyword tools (or herramientas de palabras clave in Spanish) actually in Spanish, which is where our website helps out, and it has been relatively successful in doing so.

By working on this website we aim to have the best information on finding profitable keywords – palabras claves – in Spanish despite none of us being a native Spanish speaker and from there see what other tools can be applied to the Spanish market place.

A recent experience has got me thinking about good web design and how poorly it is understood even by many professional web designers. The problem stems from thinking of web design as being an aesthetic issue, and although that may be true for some websites, it is certainly not the main one; stats show that for many markets the most effective web design is one that is quite basic and almost under-designed. Based on that I’ve created 7 DON’Ts of web design for small businesses – let me know what you think.

1. Don’t think that the main criterion by which a website design is judged is how it looks

Good website design is about creating an effective website, one that encourages targeted visitors to take a specific action, whether that is get in contact, join your mailing list, or – best of all – place an order online. In order to achieve that both the objective of each page needs to be decided and the preferred action made clear; make sure your website knows more than just design.

2. Don’t start anything until you’ve done the SEO research

Please, please, please – don’t start planning your website until you’ve done at least some research. Unless you know what people are searching for you won’t know how your site should really be structured at what keywords to be used. The best tool for this is Market Samurai without a doubt.

3. Don’t include something clever just because you can

Too many websites look cluttered. Part of the problem is trying to do too many things on one page, which means the visitor just ends up confused with the result they hit the back button. You’ve got to ask yourself, if someone visits that particular page, what are they most likely to be looking for. Once you know that it’s simple – provide that information and nothing else. Remember this mantra – one page, one job.

4. Don’t forget structure

A good design also also about how the site is structured.  First, you need to make sue visitors can find the information or products they are looking for quickly and easily. Second, search engines need to be able to find all the valuable content on your site so that it list your in the results. And good internal linking tells the search engines which pages you consider most important and give more traction in those in the listings.

5. Don’t forget to have a clear call to action

You may think it’s obvious what you want visitors to do, but do they? So many website lack a clear call to action, focusing the visitor’s eye on what you want them to do next. Don’t think that they will spend time looking if it isn’t clear – they won’t and if they can’t find it quickly they’ll leave your site and go elsewhere. So make it large, make it red, make it stand out; and test, test, test until you can’t do any better.

6. Don’t over-design

Get the template right, decide how the information will be presented throughout the site (photo or video goes here, text goes here) but don’t try and design it pixel by pixel. That may work on the printed page, but it isn’t how HTML works and you’ll get different results in different browsers anyway. Pick a template, modify it and use the same template throughout unless you really have to.

7. Don’t use Flash

Flash sites mostly look awful, don’t work on many devices (including iPads) and don’t rank in Google. So just don’t.

If you’re interested in how I can help you develop your website please get in touch. Going back to first principals I can help you design a good looking website that will rank well in Google AND convert more visitors to customers.

In my previous post on Link Wheels I gave an overview of how to set up a link wheel, but without providing a list of Web 2.0 properties you can use or how I go about it.

So here is a list of Web 2.0 properties to get you started, but you can also use anything else such as WordPress MU blogs.

Just a work of warning – some of your spokes will be deleted by the site administrators. When that happens simply use the content on a different Web 2.0 property and make sure the link wheel remains intact.

To start your first link wheel you first need to decide whether the link wheel will link directly to a page on your website, or to another Web 2.0 property which will act as a buffer – typically hosted on a Squidoo lens, Hubpages or Blogger.

Once you’ve made that decision you need to write some content related the page you want to promote and decide how many “spokes” your link wheel is going to consist of. You can simply add that content to each spoke in the link wheel, write slightly different content for each, or spin the article to create unique content.

Now you simply pick a Web 2.0 property at random, add the content and include a link to the page you are promoting, and use a social bookmarking tool such as Traffic Bug to make sure the search engine find your content – see the first article in the link wheel series for more details.

Next, pick another Web 2.0 property; add content; add one link to the page you are promoting; add a second link to your previous spoke; add to Traffic Bug.

Rinse and repeat so you have 4 to 7 spokes in your link wheel, then edit the first Web 2.0 property and add a link to the last so that the wheel is completed and Pagerank spread evenly though the wheel.

The process is relatively straightforward to outsource and can be done much cheaper than the link wheel services being currently advertised.

If you’d like a link wheel to be created for you check out my new link wheel creation service.

The results speak for themselves, but check out the organic traffic from Google on this site. I’m not going to tell you what it is, but it is a personal hobby niche and I’ve gone in pretty deep since April/May 2004. One of the keys to its success is the number of natural backlinks it has received.

If you ‘d like to me to help your website gain results like these then please get in contact – just leave a message below.