Google are very secret with the data they give out about websites. If Google give out even 1% of data on how there ranking algorithm works, it would make every other search engine better immensely in the world and Google cannot risk this because Search is where 9%% of Google’s profits comes from (Unlike Bing which is only one of many revenue sources Microsoft has).

What do you think, will Google give out their algorithm in the future? Or maybe, will Google be forced to give their algorithm in the future?

If so, then search will no longer be fun for many people!

Bing to launch new link reporting features in their webmaster center. This is some ace news and something to really look forward to. Bing will obviously have a far better database of links and information than any other organisation (excluding for Google and Yahoo of course).

The SEO world thinks Open Site Explorer is the best tool ever and nothing can beat it – This is only said because it’s the only tool that that offers rich data and no other tool offers the same.

If Bing play their cards right and offer more for free – Then they are going to have a killer product.

SEO is an investment, not a game. There are still so many people and businesses that consider investment in SEO to be futile and worthless and consider it merely to be a game and a waste of time and money.

What these people do not realise is the fact that even a  really small investment in SEO and a small jump in their search engine rankings will bring in potentially thousands and thousands pounds in increase of revenue.

So what is your opinion on this? Would you invest in SEO and if so, how much of the budget? Tell me!

Did you know that not only the people but Google themselve’s consider their biggest rival to be Bing! Not Twitter, not Facebook, heck not even Blekko. Google know that 99% of their income come’s from PPC and Bing is their only real competitor to this. Yes Facebook do ads but people ultimately go onto Facebook to chat and share – not to serch and click ads!

So what is your opinion on this? Do you think Google is right in considering Bing as their beiggest rival? I think they are.

Big is impressive and a great search engine.Try it. You’ll be surprised.

Did you know that there is a very big link between SEO and Newspapers (yes, the one’s in the real world offline, if you still know what that is..)

Lots of people think that now the internet is very popular, there is no need for newspapers and that newspapers have no say over anything – this is but a myth. If you look more carefully at the newspapers, you will realise that everything that is printed in the papers is actually also published online and available to millions out there.

So all the work journalists do is still notices by the online community (of course without the credit going to the journalists themselves – which makes it a time waster for them..).

SEO for Firefox: Provides some very useful information inline with with your search engine results. This plugin does tend to retrieve a lot of data from Google though, so be prepared to start being prompted to enter captchas whenever you search.

SEO Toolbar: Some excelent tools including the rather brilliant SEO Xray, that shows all the h tags on the page.

Server Spy: shows what type of server a website is running on. Useful to see if redirects are going to be possible using .htaccess..

User Agent Switcher: As its name suggests, this plugin basically allows you to change your user agent from the default, to whatever you want.. you can pretend to be a Google bot and check for cloaking and other blackhat nasties..

Every search engine optimizer has their own set of tools that tricks they like to use to keep sites ranking.

Most of my favorite come in the form of Firefox plug-ins:

Firebug: This is pretty much an essential tool for anyone in the web industry. It makes so many things so much easier.. from inline edits to style sheet changes. Firebug is the bees knees.

SearchStatus: A useful plug-in that has many useful tools, from keyword density to nofollow highlighting. It also provides a lot of shortcuts to various domain tools and back-links tools.

HTTPFox: Ar pretty simple plug-in that can highlight many problems with the HTTP header. it instantly shows up any redirects (and what type).

More tools to follow…

Rather than things being strictly black or white hat, gray hat is the thanks that are in the middle.. a gray area.. the SEO techniques that would be frowned upon by a Search Engine, but would not necessarily get you penalised of banned.

Its best to think of Gray hat techniques as bending the rules rather than breaking them..

As an example, Google says it is against link buying and, if discovered to be paying for links to increase search, Google has been known to penalize and even ban sites from the rankings. The white hat version would be to leave the link building completely up to outsiders.. relying completely on other people appreciating and linking to your site. The gray hat way would be to put links in forum post footers, directory submissions, that kind of things.. So you are not actually paying for links, but it’s certainly not a natural linking  technique.

Black hat SEO techniques are basically any method in SEO where you are intentionally deceiving the search engines, the actual methods range from simply hiding text and content from users or search engines to very sophisticated page rank sculpting, link farming and good old fashioned spamming.

White hat is the complete opposite. This is using standard, good practice, hard work and awesome content to get yourself a good ranking. Leaving the link building as an all natural process may leave you feeling great inside, but it’s going to take a while and a fair bit of great content to get you to the top.

There are those that argue that you should make your website for users and users alone. The search engines will find there way around it fine.

While I agree that in an ideal world, this is the case, The fact is that there are a lot of crap web designers out there still creating pages and sites that Google simply can’t and won’t crawl properly.

In these cases, you don’t want or need a designer, you already have a great looking website right?

You need someone that knows how the search engines work and how to squeeze as much juice as you can out of a site.