In all our SEO efforts, both here at Assertive-Media, and worldwide, we are all going for the same thing, and thats improved rankings. But what is the story on good backlinks, and why do they carry so much value. With all of the hype over the past few years surrounding links, it seems that without a good link profile, your website will sit in the deep dark depths of Google’s results for nearly all decent keywords. Ok, so you might catch a page 1 position for “Can I get a car with really bad car credit in London”, but honestly, how many people are likely to search that, and if they do, they are not likely to go past the first or second result for something so long tail.

Ok, so, onto the point, what is a Google friendly backlink? Well, theres no such thing, there are good links, and invaluable links, no bad links, just invaluable links. Good links are links that come from websites of a relevant or relative nature, so, something you would expect to see, instead of a link from an irrelevant website. Invaluable links are links that are unexpected, from resources that have absolutley nothing to do with the target links theme.

People still refer to “Bad Links” or other things with the same meaning, but do they really exist? The answer is no, simply because links are either built manually or naturally, allowing a judgemental view over bad links would mean competitors could poison one another by building poor / bad quality links in order to sabotage.

So, lets call the good links “Google Friendly Backlinks”, what we really mean is, Good quality links that are expected, and are not designed to mis-lead visitors.

Through the years, much speculation has surrounded all sorts of link types, from paid links to reciprocal links and so forth, the truth is, most speculate without evidence. What we had uncovered, like many other webmasters, was that good links paid their dues by helping the target website to rank better, we found poor quality links made no positive difference, thus, being invaluable.

We like to use the term Google friendly links, because this type of link is something Google would consider valuable, and, as such, would be rewarded by the odd position increase. But why would this type of link be of such benefit? Well, its simple, good quality links are best influenced naturally by having a good website, with good structure, and good content. This on its own, would drive natural link growth from other relevant sources, this combined with good on-site SEO would boost rankings significantly.

When people build links, they tend to look from the wrong perspective, simply because, the focus is around boosting rankings, which is fine. However, the long term picture should be, to generate Google friendly backlinks by giving people something good anyway. Writing a top cooking recipie, or giving good advice on a new car purchase, would be a great start, because the source offers valuable information that other webmasters are more likely to link to naturally.

This path is vital for a good SEO campaign, simply because Google can understand the relative connection of inbound links on a website, to its content base. A cookery website with hundreds of backlinks from Car websites, finance websites and other websites, doesn’t tell Google that the website is more relevant to cooking, so, as such, the generated links, along with the time and money spent are really not of any value.

But, on the other side, a cookery website with thousands of relative links from food websites, cooking equipment websites and so forth, gives Google the perception that the cookery website is actually something useful to visitors. Its this very simple, yet overlooked concept that webmasters and SEO agencies fail to recognise. After a big spend, and a long term investment in link development, you could find your budget wearing thin, with little to show for your money, other then a crowded index of invaluable links.

Why not push the boat out, dedicate some weekly time to blog, write valuable content rich and advice rich articles that make sense, and are of benefit to your target market.

You will find that the natural link growth takes a while to get kick started, but in the long run, it pays off. Stop wasting time with those hundreds of search directories, and irrelevant links, and focus your link building campaign on generating good “link bait” for those all important natural backlinks, or, Google friendly backlinks as we like to call them.

So why doesn’t Google show me all the backlinks that my website has?

Well, simply because it would create mass influence for webmasters to approach eachothers links, thus creating a larger possibility of poor search results. Google does everything in its power to reduce public release of information that could jeopardise the quality of its search results. Webmasters using webmaster tools however, can see further into a websites backlink profile.

Why does Google return poor quality links when I do a link command search?

This is a tricky one, but in the most simple explanation, Google does not release all link sources, instead, this process is made more difficult to encourage genuine webmasters to generate links using website media and content, rather then manual link development.

Why do my newly built links take so long to be recognised by Google?

Simply because of the volume of websites in Google’s index. Every few months, a large update rolls through the Google datacentres, repopulating link volumes and quality, this is commonly referred too as a PR Update.

Even after our initial download of the Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 ISO, we began to encounter problems, firstly with components in the installation failing, and problems with trying to install the components externally. We loved the fact that .NET 4 was included, but we didn’t like the fact that it left previous installations of .NET remaining, even with compatibility issues.

After a reboot, we selected the IDE from the programs menu, and selected our most frequent preference for GUI and development, only to meet a dead end with the dreaded “Application cannot start” error. Re tried another reboot, but to no avail as the application still refused to open.

After searching multiple forums, and resources, we come across a command, which is run from the RUN Dialog, namely devenv /resetsettings, which allowed us to go back to the GUI selection, however, upon selecting a different preference, we were greated by the same issue.

We tried re-installing, repairing the installation, we even uninstalled .net and re-installed it, yet the problem didn’t sub-side.

We tried again with the anti-virus disabled, firewall disabled, still no luck, and after another tedious search we found a page on the Microsoft website with a solution.

The solution recommended multiple options depending on the error, we tried them all, nothing worked, which left us quite frustrated that we could not get a preview of the new platform. We thought it was even more obsurd that the same problem occured on our laptops, that had clean installations.

It seems that other issues contribute to this problem such as the removal of font support for a number of true type fonts.

These issues one on top of another do not convey a positive start for VS2010, and, as a recommendation, we recommend that users stick with their current version of Visual Studio until these intial bugs have been ironed out from the RTM version of the product, which is due for release in April 2010.

We think that the main issues are compounded by the new components that run around the visual studio platform, at some point, we have all come across runtime issues with applications, especially those that run on the .NET framework, and we all know about compatibility problems between .NET installations along with their counterpart resources. One of the issues with the .NET platform remains with the MSXML library, which is a recommendation for repair from Microsoft.

We think that these components should check for incompatible installations and resources before the application is installed, much like Windows 7 & Vista do with incompatible programs, this may help to solve alot of the bugs that contribute to a bad name.

We liked the installations simplicity, and its speed, but again, the failiure of essential components should have rolled back the installation rather then letting the application remain on the test computer.

Once we manage to get a copy of VS 2010 up and running, we will provide solutions on how to fix these bugs.

Good luck!

But is that really enough to keep other phone operating systems at bay? We think not.

So the iPhone, well, its nothing short of popular, and is loaded with many things to do, from downloadable apps, to movies on the go. We can see Apple has done a good job ensuring that there are lots of apps ready to keep the public happy. But, what about device flexibility? Can the apple iPhone really offer so much that the public can’t put it down?.

Up until 2009, most companies just didn’t offer the wow factor with phones like Apple did, however, we find the iPhone a tad boring, with its built to boot OS, that once again offers little in the way for hackers, and modders alike. We were very pleased when Google’s HTC lineup was the first to boast the new Android operating system.

Finally, a contender who stepped into the ring ready to put up a fight against the iPhone.

Sadly, the android didn’t get the start it deserved, mainly because of its small entrance into the marketplace, with fewer then 8 phones offering android, most of which were not attractive to say the least, which we thought was a shame. But thanks to those crazy guys at HTC, we saw a new lineup of powerful smart phones that really did give Android a kick start.

In our tests, we made use of the sturdy and fairly well built HTC G1, which offered us the first line up in Android, version 1.1 of its operating system. We loved the apps, and we loved how quickly Android populated new apps thanks to its open source which allowed pretty much anyone to build their own applications.

Android vs the iPhone, round 1? Yes, well, Apple didn’t make application development a priority, nor did the market share a wealth of applications built for the public by the public. The android OS quickly took hold offering loads of Google based services from Gmail to Google Maps. Not long after Androids initial release, we saw new versions of the OS coming out, namely Android Cupcake, Doughnut and Cyanogen. Complete overhauls of the OS were on offer, and whats more, we didn’t need a new phone, it was a quick, and easy process to whack on a newer version of the OS, which offered new features, more fun, and an enourmous app store which grew by the day.

Android has set itself apart from the iPhone OS, Symbian Operating systems and other platforms, namely because it was made open source, and a developer SDK was on offer from Google. Hackers couldn’t wait to get stuck in, and yes, before long, eyes turned fully on Android, leaving the iPhone to sit on the shelf.

We hate the Apple lock in system, that forces an OS to remain consistent, made updates awkward and tried to prevent apps from the public from entering the market place. We love Androids open source, because we can see our phone frequently learn a new skill. Just the other week, we managed to turn our HTC G1 into a mobile wireless tether, which meants that computers in our office were soon surfing the net through a WIFI connection from the G1 tether, and we loved it.

iPhone on the other hand, prevents such tethering technology, which is highly enforced by the iPhones primary market, O2.

Before long, we come across hundreds of altered operating systems for Android, most with new tweaks, more powerful features, and lots more widgets. We think that this has given Android a leading edge over the iPhone, and we think its a matter of time before the android platform really does take mobile phone usage to the next level.

On android, we downloaded games, utilities, gadgets, tracking applications, tethering utilties and lots more. Although the iPhone market boasts a wide range of apps, we don’t think it cuts the mustard just yet.

Using embedded HTML, means you can now customise the property for the players start time, this means, that any video you include, can be started from mid way, the beginning, or even 10 seconds from the end.

So why is this useful?

If your trying to convey a point, open a discussion, or show people something useful, most of the time, you would include a video where the user has to wait to see whats been highlighted. Now, using the embedded Youtube video code, you can tell the player to start at 0:15 seconds in, 2:00 minutes in, or where ever you like, which is great if the videos you include are more then 10 seconds long.

Now, no fear if your no good with HTML, its not that difficult, below we will give you the code, and show you how to work the Youtube timestamp magic.

I find this very useful, when I discuss a topic, and I want to get straight to the point, making a user wait 7 minutes before they get to the point that I was covering, is almost like asking them to give up and move on. Youtube has offered many customisation features over the years, moreso after Google’s acquisition of Youtube.

So, how do we do it you may ask, easy!

When copying a video from Youtube, you will generally use tbe embedded URL option

Once you have copied your Embedded URL, you can add in the attribute for the timestamp.

Ok, so you have your HTML, open up the document where the code is to be inserted, and set the following parameters:

The start attribute allows you to customise the starting timestamp for the video. Remember, the time shown is in seconds, so to work out how far that is, you would do the sum of minutes x 60 seconds, I.e if you wanted a video to start 4 minutes in, you would do 4 x 60 = 240 for 240 seconds.

If you want to do it at a particular second, do the same as above, round the number, then add the uneven number, i.e.

For 4 minutes and 20 seconds you would do 4 x 60 = 240 + 20 = 260.

The variable should appear as:

&start=60    (Replacing 60 with the amount of seconds you wish to jump in the Video)

There you have it, a quick and simple way of really customising your youtube content.

There are loads of other cool video tricks from the embedded HTML, even colouring your youtube player is possible. Thanks to the guys at Google, you really can tailor your websites media, and get the best out of timestamp customisation for Youtube Videos.

Make sure your volume of seconds does not go over the video length, or it wont work.

Apple’s simplistic approach has become nothing short of boring, especially with the launch of the iPad, which sounds more like a brand of sanitry towel then that of the device it is.

The iPhone, given its plain look does boast some good features, but with its diabolical camera, TV remote looks and mediocre battery life we expected the iPad to be something new, refreshing and different.

Looking at it leaves to the imagination, that, it really does look like an iPhone, well, an iPhone that has been squashed and stretched, which really doesn’t spring anything fun to mind. We like the glossy look, but then again, we have seen it all before. On the Microsoft side, we see a great deal of companies constantly refining and improving looks, style and functionality, especially with Laptops that boast fingerprint logins, touch screens, 8 hour battery life and more.

Looking at the iPad, we see the same restricted Apple OS chucked onto a device that resembles a dinner tray. Its ergonomic properties are in deep question, we like the idea, but we hate the design. Ok, so there is no keyboard, allowing the device to be more portable, but really, is it that difficult to carry around an extra 2 pounds of weight?

Whats more, is the price, with introductory prices as high as £400, does it really offer value for money?

Why spend £400 for a device designed to read books, play on the net and perform simple office tasks when you can spent £250 on a slim, light and compact notebook or netbook such as the Samsung NC range, MSI’s core range or even the new ultra slim Sony Vaio’s?

What’s more, the iPad typically offers 64gb for mobile storage, whilst even the lowest level notebooks often boast hard drives from 120gb onwards?

Apple have chucked on its standard OS, which, fun for many, is the same thing. There has been no refinement, whilst Microsoft really did go to town creating Windows 7, making it perfect for mobile computing.

Its sad to see Apple’s wheel, has the same design, feel, touch and look, whilst Microsoft based innovation has allowed for hundreds of manufacturers to be very creative.

So I hear, “the iPad has a battery life of up to 10 hours”, Ok, thats impressive, but what happens when those batteries are tired from frequent charges, can you replace the battery? NO, it’s an Apple job to replace, and, with lower voltage CPU’s on the market, many Windows based laptops now boast up to and in excess of 8 hours battery life, hardly anything to sniff at when most commuters need no more then 3-4 hours at a time.

The iPad in short, is an iPhone, lacking 3g and voice support, which makes its price tag something to laugh about.

Thanks to Apple’s attempt, we see a far better idea from Lenovo who have created a Laptop Tablet which is a fully functional laptop that allows for the screen to be disconnected and used as a tablet itself, meaning that when needed, the base provides multiple USB and card reader connectivity, Wifi, Additional Battery Life, A Keyboard, DVDRW Drive and more.

We give the iPad a thumbs down on this, simply because the price vs. the spec and design, simply does not weigh up value.

We found the iPad awkward to use, difficult to maintain in a usable position, and to be honest, quite boring.

We say, stick to a good brand of netbook for mobile computing, splash out on some of the new netbooks boasting dual core low voltage Intel CPU’s, along with ultra bright AMOLED screens, Solid state drives and more!.

A notebook at the equivalent price to an iPad boasts 2x the processing power, 3x the storage capacity, 3x the level of Ram, and a battery life that is almost equivalent, we say, stick to a good quality netbook for mobile computing.

The website is beyond enourmous with over 142 billion pages online, over 6 billion terabytes of data, and 250 million servers, its no wonder our world is moving into the next age of technology.

But it must have all sprung from somewhere?

Well, the .COM boom really got going in the early 1990’s with companies jumping to get a domain around their company name, or extension. With the .COM came the introduction of worldwide domain extensions, the first group of domain extensions included .NET, .ORG, .WEB, .CO.UK which was handled by both Aren and Ripe. Following behind were worldwide domain extensions, which saw domains such as .FR, .DE, .IT, .ES introduced for the country assignment.

But, even before the .COM boom, what domains were to go first?

Believe it or not, the oldest domain is only 30 days away from its 25th Aniversary, making it the oldest registered domain on the internet at 25 years old (March 2010).

On the 15th March 1985 Symbolics.com was registered, making it the first website on the public net to be available. Websites were registered before this date, however, they were not on a public network.

So, lets look at the oldest domains on the internet, ranging from 1985 onwards, and yes, its funny to think you could have purchased these domains, only to have been offered hundreds of thousands of pounds for them at a later date.

Imagine having purchased download.com, adobe.com, fox.com, business.com and many others, to this date those domains could have netted you a hansom sum.

Anyway, enough with the ramblings, here are the oldest domains on the net:

With Google Wave you can share text, pictures, content, documents and more in realtime, anyone under your contacts can share information, post notes, chat in realtime and more.

The principle behind Wave is to help people communicate, whilst being able to share data, events, diaries and more. Wave is a combination of features like that of MSN Messenger, Facebook and various Online Chatrooms all under one roof. Since its all managed by Google, you can expect quick responses from internal functionality including quick upload speeds, almost instantaneous message updates and information at the touch of a button.

Here is the Google IO Wave Video:

Whats different about Google wave is that it is a platform that again allows developers to become a part of, under the umbrella of Google IO. Like the android platform, Wave is open to developers and testers who get to fully utilise yet another API.

With Wave, you can expect your e-mail, messaging, social networking and bookmarking along with lots of great tools. Again because this platform is open source, there will be a multitude of plugins available to enhance the Wave experience.

You can use Wave to further enhance your own website with realtime communication. Developers will be able to develop plugins that further enhance the features on the Wave API.

Google have been busy developing Wave for over 4 years down in Sydney Australia, the IO team have been building on a sandbox build of the Wave platform which is now open to a limited few to test.

The purpose of Wave is to not only enhance search and website functionality, but also to enhance peoples experience on the web. A big problem for millions of users always has included the ability to collaborate information, with Wave, collaboration has been taken to the next level.

Post waves, and get feedback and comments from your contacts, share data, maybe a picture of your boat trip, or a memo from your holiday experiences. Wave is build on the Java SDK toolkit, meaning it runs on all popular browsers including IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera etc.

It’s been a big misconception for a long period of time that keyword tags were still regarded as something of importance. We all know for good usability purposes that adding a keywords meta tag is still a good idea, but for what reasons?

Surely, the fact that Google does not class the keyword tag as important is still not a good enough reason to leave the tag out?

Well, we already know that Google will evaluate a websites relevancy based on its content, internal structure and its backlink profile. Why would keyword meta tags pose as any benefit when all they do is allow a webmaster to specify what the main keywords are for the page.

The problem with this is that it is a webmaster controlled element, which it can be used improperly, which has been a massive problem in the past. Search engines would get nowhere by using keywords in the meta tag, purely because of the fact that most tags are not given the correct data.

It is true, keyword meta tags are really depreciated, but may still be of use when submitting your website or pages from your website to directories or webmaster controlled resource websites. If however, your website is built on a dynamic platform, then its probably best not to worry since search engines will only extract visible content for relevancy checking.

So, yes it is true, Google no longer bothers with the keyword meta attribute. This was a very speculative area until Matt Cutts announced in one of his latest posts, we have added in his video so you can watch it.

It is most likely that the tags have been ignored for a long period of time, especially since Google’s algorithm has become incredibly advanced, and would place no emphasis on a tag that is nearly always used incorrectly.

Google’d queries will return results based on quality and not how many times a keyword has appeared in the document. Because of this critial factor keyword tags really are something that is overlooked.

But don’t drop all your meta eggs out of the meta basket. The description tag is still used, especially on websites that lack content, or do not provide enough descriptive data within the body content. Adding in a meta description is still evaluated because of its visibility within search results.

So next time you go to add that keywords tag, remember, its not Google’d and it won’t get you a number 1 ranking!.

Google themselves released a statement surrounding keyword tag usage. Because it was a HTML standard, nearly all created HTML documents carried it. During the late 1990’s webmasters began to abuse it by stuffing in as many keywords as possible, often exceeding 1000 characters (300 keywords) crammed into a tag that was meant to house 4-5 keywords relating to the page content.

Because this tag was abused so heavily, Google begun to disregard its important, although most of the public were oblivious to this, keyword tags continued to suffer spam, to the point where Google dis-regarded their value, instead, Google’s focus remained on content and the sites backlink profile. These factors, in today’s online search market, are still important.

Keywords would be enhanced in any HTML document, providing they appeared enough in the content and within the tag itself, but it was this rule that led to the huge overflow that was keyword spamming. Webmasters continued to abuse documents with excessive keyword integration, not just in the keyword meta tag, but in the content itself, often using doorway pages to capture as many people as possible.

Doorway pages were the most common places to find abused keyword meta attributes, sometimes, pages would take more then 10 seconds to render, simply because the code took so long to download.

SO, next time you create a HTML document, remember, the keyword tag won’t score you any brownie points with Google.

In a fierce market place, there should be one rule that is always followed, and thats, do what your competitors do, only better. When we say competitors, we don’t mean competitors that you know of directly, we mean competitors from the perspective of search. If a website outranks your website in Google then that is classed as a competitor because it is a benchmark to beat.

But what exactly do you need to do to beat your competitors SEO profile? Well establish who your competitors are across major search engines by searching for keywords relative to your website, making sure that they are the primary keywords. Once you have done this, you need to take a handful of the best performing websites, these will be your benchmarks for an SEO project.

Competitors are a good place to start, if they have held a consistent page 1 placement for your keyword selection, then it means that their websites are of some value. Break apart your competitors website to find out what really makes those gears work together.

An SEO effort is a single process used to enhance a websites value, so a combination of these efforts must be used to gain a good search engine placement, however competitor analysis is a good way to break these utilised factors apart to identify potential for improvement. If you find your competitor is missing out in certain areas, this gives you the opportunity to do what your competitor is doing, only better.

Remember, a competitor is someone who outranks your website for important keywords, we don’t mean long tail keywords that are 4, 5 or 6 keywords long, we mean important keywords that are between 1-3 words long.

Long tail keywords will generally have a far lower level of competiton because of the specific value of the search. Generalised searches, such as “Mortgages” for example is completely unspecific, because you are not specifying any variables, where as “Mortgages in London” or “Getting a Mortgage” is a specific search as you are highlighting a purpose for the search.

Using competitor analysis data, you can breakdown all the different factors that have come together to give the website its prominent position. So what kind of things can you identify from your competitor, well, there are lots of things, infact, there are hundreds of things that could be observed, such as

How old is your competitors website?
How many pages does your competitors website have?
Do they have keywords in the domain?
What technology is the website built on?
How much content does the competitors website have?
How well are the title tags written on the competitor website?
How do the pages interlink on the competitors website?

And many more…………

Using general SEO knowledge, you will be aware of the things you need to look for, for example, good websites will have a good internal linking structure, and will use good anchor text when linking between pages. A bad website will not use good anchor text, or will duplicate anchor text between different pages.

Here you need to be observing everything you can in order to build up a profile of what it is that your competitor does. Using these factors, you can make amendments to your website in order to enhance its profile to a better state then competitors, thus boosting potential for the website to achieve higher placements.

Remember though, not all websites that rank well are built well, or even SEO compliant, some websites are automatically trusted by Google because of it being a well known brand or because it has a very large link profile.

Backlinks are a cruical part of search engine optimisation, some websites rank purely on those merits, which is why its important to assess both on and off site SEO elements when looking at competitors. Doing this will allow you to see who links to the competitors website, and to even identify links that you could also achieve by approaching the webmaster.

So, when it comes to beating your competitor, remember to profile, identify and then resolve/implement. Doing this has brought substantial improvements to hundreds of thousands of websites worldwide.

So what has this deal shown now? Why would adobe want to acquire Omniture for 1.8$ billion dollars?

Omniture is a multi billion pound marketing and business giant in the business sector, both online and offline. Omniture are an optimisation model for businesses globally, and help to provide a more engaging experience for customers utilising businesses under the Omniture model.

Adobe has acquired a major part in Omniture to provide an enhanced service on the Saas Platform which will help businesses better utilisation management, company advertising, revenue and transaction processing and much more. We see this as a merge that will benefit both worlds, from those utilising Adobe’s already large content and application base to those utilising structures laid out by Omniture business modeling.

Is this a different direction for Adobe? We think so, already Adobe has expanded significantly with a net worth of over 5$ billion dollars, millions of customers worldwide and new platforms that now ship as standard in popular operating systems such as Windows 7 and Mac OSX 10.

The merge will provide both parties with better resource, hoping to expand in what currently seems a recessive market place.

Omniture has long provided a powerful web analytics service, along with business modeling and effective marketing tools, this merge with Adobe’s product line will allow a better and more powerful delivery of information and structure.

Currently under the Adobe branch, you can expect to find an array of powerful tools and applications that have been developed from scratch or acquired, other acquisitions include

Adobe acquires Shockwave Flash < Large scale transaction to purchase the original developers of the flash technology

Adobe acquires Macromedia  < Large scale transaction of the software giant Macromedia, who were responsible for the development and creation of Dreamweaver, Fireworks etc.

Adobe merged its existing Photoshop software suite with the Dreamweaver and Fireworks development tools to have a full suite of web development and publishing tools. The next acquisition of Omniture is in a different direction to software, however, this may work very well with Adobe’s Air platform which could be utilised as a way of delivering analytics produced by Omniture.

Over the coming months, we will see just how Adobe’s merge with Omniture plays out.