In these cases, people often tell me that the greatest struggle is finding time and resources to do link building for their site. Rather than pitching your boss to hire a new team member to assist with SEO and link building, you may have more success (and get more value out of) asking for a little time with members of different teams from different disciplines…

There’s a tactic that I’ve recently seen used in a few very different industries; I wanted to share this with you, as it’s something definitely worth considering for your site and your business…

Let’s get sidetracked for a moment: I’ve lost track of the number of people at agencies who have been asked the question "If you’re so good at SEO, why don’t you rank for ‘SEO in London’?"

The answers vary, but one important thing is almost always the same: when you look at the off-line inquiries, people rarely phone up an SEO agency and say "Hello, I’d like you to perform some SEO for me, to cover a variety of tasks including keyphrase research, on site recommendations and link building" – the phone call is more likely to begin with "Hi there, er, I have a website where I sell my widgets, but I want to sell more, and I think I need to promote the site better online…

A critical distinction when looking at a graph like this is whether the site’s performance is increasingly worse than the competitors, or whether the whole industry is in decline. In this post I want to recommend some metrics that can be tracked to benchmark your site against competitors (independent of market behaviour) and to check the health of the industry…

This post covers competitions and giveaways; I’ll share techniques and tactics you can use, and will include links to some interesting competitions seen online recently, and some that we’ve run for clients.

Running giveaways online typically offers a few different opportunities; of most immediate use to SEOs is that competitions can attract links from authoritative sites and a variety of domains…

Here’s a couple of example links; the first is a link to the White House’s website, the other is to Distilled’s new US website…

But this list isn’t going to be blogs, post and online articles, oh no. These suggestions are entirely offline. We’re going into dead tree mode with eleven books and two magazines. Some of these suggestions you may want to flick through, some you may want to read cover to cover…

I’ve chosen some of the standard roles that you may find in a company or organisation with a web-presence and for each one have listed:

• Their role: a description of their position within the company and their responsibilities…

Obviously, this add-on is chock-full of features that are useful for web developers, but it really does make diagnosing various SEO issues much easier. This list gives the top seven tasks that I find easier when the toolbar is installed.

Click on any of the small images in this post to see them in full size…

We’ll often rattle off various metrics quite casually in conversation, but it’s easy to forget that others (such as your clients!) might not know whether these are big numbers or small ones. For example: “We’ve just published a guest post on a site with Domain mozTrust 5.67. Mr_Gadget mentioned it to his 64 thousand followers, and it managed to get over 1,000 Diggs.”

This post should be useful to anyone who needs to orientate themselves around such numbers…

Google Analytics can show you the total number of unique organic keyphrases at a glance, on the Traffic Sources ⇒ Keywords page. (Make sure you select ‘non-paid’ to exclude any CPC campaigns…

There are a variety of tools that you can use if your site does not already have a search functionality; I won’t second guess which search application will best suit your site.

There have already been posts on various blogs about best practices for implementing site search (such as: label the button ‘Search’ and not ‘Go’, search case-insensitively by default, always recommend refinements to searches which generate no results, etc…

OK, I can help you with that, by using one equation and five quick techniques to get you thinking. Here’s the equation:

Number of Posts Read = Number of Visits * Number of Posts Read on Each Visit

Rather than just trying to get more people to your site, we should spend some time talking about the final part of that equation – the number of posts read by each visitor…

In particular, there’s one piece of advice that I’ve given so much recently, that I thought it’s worth mentioning here. I hope that even experienced link builders will see value in considering this (and to be honest, they may get even more out of it…

These are targetted at small companies, probably with limited internal resource or a small SEO agency contract, and who don’t have a PR firm able to get them into newspapers or an advertising budget that will put them in magazines, on radio, etc…

Whether it’s in an editorial article, a guest post, etc, it’s great for sending some strength and trust to your site. However, the drawback of links from big sites, is that you might find it’s on a small page. The newly published page will take some time to get indexed, much of it’s strength (certainly initially) is likely to come from internal links, and it’s unlikely to have a great crawl rate…

For some people, this second part can seem the most daunting – whilst there is a person you can talk to if you want a link on every page of timesonline.co.uk, there’s nobody you can call or email to get a link from every small website or blog…

At the risk of getting a stern talking to, I’m going to have to ask: really? I’m confident that where you see a well-known brand’s site sat next to an anonymous brand, the recognised name will get a disproportionate number of clicks…

In the ‘current economic climate’ there is a chance that any company may have to ‘restructure’ or even cease trading altogether. These events are no fun for any employees involved, but I’d like to share some advice that will help you prepare for and cope with the worst situation if it arises.

Negotiating Your Redundancy
If you are being made redundant, do ask your employer if they would be interested in reducing your working hours instead…