This one has us pretty amazed, when Google did the latest round of page rank adjustments, Google itself slipped to a PR of 9, while Google’s biggest competitor, Facebook went to 10.

Aside from demonstrating that Google is completely unbiased with the page ranking system, it is also the strongest indication yet of the importance of visitor time on the website being an important factor in calculating page rank.

Think about it, the more effective Google is as a search engine, the more quickly people will find what they are looking for and the less time they will spend on Google. Conversely, a social networking website like facebook should hold vsitors for a long time.

So what is the SEO Tip for the average website owner wanting to rank highly in Google? Keep tweaking your website to make it an engaging experience for visitors. Sure it’s important to have people linking to your site and to be indexed in directories and good PR across the web, but if your website is not holding the visitors when they get there, you will probably struggle more and more to maintain a good rank in search engine results. And anyway, the whole purpose of having a website is to attract visitors, engage in some way and get them to take some kind of action before they leave.

Back in 2009, Link Building was responsible for about 42% of a website's SEO rank

This is one thing the experts appear to agree on as Google becomes better and better at catching cheats. A comprehensive survey published on  SEOMoz, concludes that the perceived value of a website to others will be the most important factor in determining the search engine results.

This is good news for all those who maintain credible websites and have struggled to maintain high search engine ranks against the sheer mass  of  crappy Adsense  pollution that ruled that space for so long.  Slowly, one by one we have seen them get slapped into oblivion as Google becomes more and more sophisticated at defining crap and catching these morons.

But it does make you wonder – this patented system of ranking a website by the number of inbound links is what has kept Google the undisputed king of search engines for so long is now almost redundant. Doesn’t that mean Google will lose it’s advantage over the rest of the field?

It will be an interesting couple of years as the peer endorsement through website links all but fades away and is replaced more and more with the perceived value of a website to visitors. I expect to see software applications that mimic the patterns of visitors on a website, increasing the average time people spend on sites or perhaps that is what all the unemployed Indian link builders will be doing in the future.

But the one thing that will always be hard to cheat is good original content. I doubt there will ever be a substitute for it.

For those who love the science of SEO, the SEOmoz report is comprehensive and a good read, though very academic, as you would expect from such an organization.  Read it here: http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors

These ancient Chinese texts contain lessons for anybody wanting to create effective search engine optimization

Perhaps the most applicable passage I’ve read in the translations from Sun Tzu’s  texts on the ‘Art of War’ is the following:

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.  If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”

How does that apply to SEO Tips? Well, obviously your enemy is your competitors and you need to know something about their strategy and their capabilities to effectively compete with them and you need to know your own capabilities and weaknesses – hence you can bring in expertise to help you in areas you are weak in.

But in SEO, there is another party that you have to know, the judge and adjudicator, Google. Completely impartial until you make a move, Google can be your friend or your enemy and as an enemy, it can take you out of the battle completely. It always amazes me the number of SEO experts around who do not know the Google Webmaster’s Guidelines.

Do you know specifically what techniques are going to make Google your enemy and get your site penalized? Find out. Seek out an alliance with Google and you will prosper.  Sun Tzu says: “We cannot enter into alliances until we are acquainted with the designs of our neighbors.”

Make it your business to become acquainted with the designs of Google now.

When a client is not making money from their website, the first thing they do is run to you looking for SEO Tips. Quick solutions to drive more traffic to their website, but any astute advisor should always look a bit further than just how many visitors are landing on the page. The real number is what percentage of these visitors are turning into buyers. The conversion rate.

Here are some of the things you might assess:

1. Using Analytics (Presuming you have it installed), look at the average time visitors are spending on your website. I have seen websites that rank in the first five places in Google for highly searched keywords not return a single inquiry simply because the color of the website projected the wrong image. A simple color change increased conversion.
2. Does the website get the message to visitors quickly. Remember you have about 6 seconds to convince a new visitor that your website is worth their time. If it is a flash site, that 6 seconds may be just a load status bar.
3. Is it easy for people to contact you? Remember, there are many distractions online that can take away somebody who is ready to take action – someone may IM them, or an email they have been waiting for may arrive and they are distracted, then never come back to your website. I have seen a simple change on a website increase the conversion rate by 400%. That change was just putting a simple contact form on the top of the right hand column of every page.

Before you invest in a whole lot of SEO work for your site, ask  yourself if you are really making the most of the traffic you’re currently getting. It is much cheaper to convert existing traffic than it is to generate new leads and you’ll cut down on the senseless link and article pollution on the internet. Keep a small, tidy internet footprint and make the most of what you have.

I had an interesting discussion a couple of days ago with a gentleman by the name of Lawrence E. Hughes, an evangelist of IPv6 who runs one of the only IPv6 testing centres in the world, right here in Cebu, Philippines. It is Mr. Lawrence’s view that most of the world will switch to this new Internet protocol by the end of the year with or without the US, probably without.

It seems extraordinary that the country that drove the Internet could be dragging it’s heels on something so seemingly important, but there is a good reason for it. We have to switch, because we will probably run out of IPv4 IP addresses by the end of the year – that is except the US which has around 4 IP addresses for every citizen  (They allocated them), while the rest of the world has .2 of an IP for every citizen.

And the US has resisted change in the past to it’s detriment – remember Deming, the statistician who, shunned by Detroit, went on to influence Japanese industry to embark on a program which ultimately resulted in them dominating the motor car industry? And no prizes for guessing which country is at the forefront of IPv6 technology.

Anyway, according to Lawrence E. Hughes, there is a 35 year jump in technology from IPv4 to IPv6. So what does that mean to users, SEO specialists, webmasters? Your guess is as good as mine. One thing is certain – things will radically change and unless you embrace change in a big way, you are doomed to go the way of the Detroit industrialists.

IPv6 will provide secure point-to-point, direct connections between computers, without the many hops that IPv4 makes us take – so that certainly means faster connections with existing lines. It also means accessing people’s computers directly, so it probably means doing SEO on a portion of a hard drive instead of some files on an internet server.  It means masses more information becoming available and perhaps clouds being made up of individual’s computers. And it means to me, that social networking will truly become the dominant internet activity.

What about the portals? and Google? – Certainly there will still be a need for portals and Google is very much out of step with the rest of their complacent countrymen in that they are embracing IPv6.  But the big picture is that Asia is leading the way in this new chapter of internet history and they have certainly thought more about the consequences. The next Gorilla in the room may well  be Asian.

What you do off-site with SEO, such as Directory linking, link exchange or even web 2.0 linking will have absolutely no impact on your Search Engine ranking  if your website is not optimized for the keywords you are trying to rank in.

Sounds absurd, but this is a common scenario:  A great set of keywords is identified for a client to rank in. Of course it is a generic phrase that gets some searches, let’s say it is ‘mountain bike accessories’ and the client’s site is about one particular mountain bike accessory called the ‘Warburton testicle protector’ which stops you falling forward on to the frame when you hit a bump. Now the url is testicleprotector.com and the <h1> header is “Warburton Testicle Protector” and so is the page title.

So our SEO guns go out and do a truckload of linking etc. without effect. Because Google wants to rank pages about Mountain Bike Accessories under the keywords ‘mountain bike accessories’ and the Google bot has no idea that the Warburton Testicle Protector is a mountain bike accessory. You need to let it know.

Opinions will vary throughout the SEO community about what Google likes or doesn’t like with on-site SEO, but what I have personally seen work best is URL,  <h1> Title and document title in that order. I have seen a site disappear from Google results simply because a company artist decided graphical headings would look better than ugly HTML <h1> headings.

OK, so does Warburton go out and register mountainbikeaccessories.com? and change his whole website? That would be better, but as a second best option, he could make a page called mountain-bike-accessories.html and optimize that one. The rest is easier, <title> tag or document title should be ‘keywords – company’ or ‘keywords – product’ always keywords first, as should the <h1> header.

And it’s amazing the number of developers who don’t use the <h1> tags, given their importance in the process. They create their own css style called “heading” or “pagehead” – If they have done this to your website, point out to them politely that they could take that same styling and apply it to the <H1> tag, allowing you to do some on-site SEO.

So again, good SEO starts with

1. keyword research and if you are not sure how to go about this, find a good SEO company to help you.
2. Next test these keywords with a PPC campaign to see if they really produce inquiries. Here, I would really suggest you have an experienced Adwords management consultant involved to minimize your click costs.
3. On-site SEO. Tell Google (and the others) what your site is about – especially in terms of what people are searching for.
4. Tell the world about it – directories, link exchanges, web 2.0

If you’re ever in doubt about whether to do something or not, ask yourself  ”is this easy to cheat?” and  ”if Google is trying to find the most relevant sites, would this be important?” and be guided by the answer. Remember, Google’s survival depends on returning the most relevant results for searches and catching out the cheats.