RSS feeds are a great way of adding dynamic content to your site, but what if the content you are wanting to add does not offer an RSS feed.

The answer lies in free tools that create an RSS feed from any dynamic listing on any website. All you do is sign up for an account, and follow a couple of simple steps to create the feed.

Obviously google offer this service through their feedburner site feedburner.google.com. Alternatively, if you would prefer not to give Google even more information about your activities, there are other tools out there including www.ponyfish.com.

You can see the end result on www.net-recruit.co.uk who use a feed generator to deliver the “Latest Jobs” section of their homepage.

You can also use these sites to create RSS feeds for content on your site. A great way to encourage those all important backlinks!!

It now seems to be official that Google are considering adding website speed to their ranking algorithms. This means that they may now use the speed your pages load as one of the factors in determining your page ranking in their index.

You can hear it from the horse’s mouth in this interview with Matt Cutts of Google (The discussion on site speed is about 2:40m into the video).

Before we all start panicking and loosing sleep over this one, we need to consider a few things:

1. You should already be concerned about the speed of your site! – Speed is a significant factor in making your site appealing to visitors. If each page takes 30 seconds to load, visitors will not stay long, and you have a problem irrespective of whether Google list your site.

2. Given point 1 above, Google are not going to put a site with less relevant content that loads in 1 second ahead of a site with great content that loads in 3 seconds. Their mission is to deliver the content people are searching for, so the best way of ensuring a good ranking is still going to be having a site with great content that gives searchers what they are looking for.

3. Google have been using speed as a factor in their adwords quality score for a while now, and I have seen very people commenting that they are being penalised for the speed of their site in this area, so it would seem not to be a key factor. Google use over 200 ranking factors is indexing sites, each with different weightings. I do not believe that speed will be a heavily weighted factor.

Assuming that you do not see the speed of your site as an issue for a visitor experience point of view, I would suggest that you would be better spending resources on improving, enhancing your site content and ensuring it clearly communicates your message in an interesting & informative way, and on building good quality back links to your site. Once this job is done, then by all means spend time “minifying your javascript” to speed up your site.

In other words speed of your site should always be a consideration, but it should not become more important just because it has been added to Google’s agenda!!

For a while now, we have been saying that when measuring online success you should focus on metrics that offer real value like site visitors and conversions rates. Rather than the usual ones touted by SEO companies (Google page rank, number of page 1 listings etc). With this in mind, it is good to know that the mighty brains at Google agree! As illustrated by this recent post on Webmaster central:

“Don’t worry. In fact, don’t bother thinking about it. We only update the PageRank displayed in Google Toolbar a few times a year; this is our respectful hint for you to worry less about PageRank, which is just one of over 200 signals that can affect how your site is crawled, indexed and ranked. PageRank is an easy metric to focus on, but just because it’s easy doesn’t mean it’s useful for you as a site owner. If you’re looking for metrics, we’d encourage you to check out Analytics, think about conversion rates, ROI (return on investment), relevancy, or other metrics that actually correlate to meaningful gains for your website or business.” – Susan Moskwa (Google Employee)

FYI, here’s the post

If you want some help adding Google analytics to your site, we are happy to do it for free – Click here for details

Traditionally redirecting a standard HTML page on a Windows server has been tricky especially if you don’t have access to the server config.

This may now have changed. I was watching an interview with one of the Google “Geeks”, and he was explaining that Search engines have agreed a new standard for redirects. (In addition to 301 which is still perfectly legitimate):

Here is a link to the interview if you are interested

The method is simple & involves adding a tag to the top of the page

link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.example.com/example.php”

where href = points to the page you want the search engine to index.

(note: This needs to be put in the normal opening & closing tags <......./> in the header of the document)

I was recently made aware of this video on Youtube. Although I am not 100% convinced that this trick will work, I can see where he is coming from, and its very easy to implements so thought it worth passing on.

Please feel free to comment. I would be interested in the opinion of others on this one!

Thanks to Richard at Mortgage Savers for passing this to me

This is a question I have been asking for a while now, and finally, I have come to the conclusion that the answer is Yes.

Video is a great way of connecting with your marketplace,and communicating your message in a user friendly way. It is also a great way to enhance your image, and reinforce your experise in your field (both key marketing objectives).

In addition to this, because search engines now also include video results in their indexes, it is also very helpful an SEO perspective.

A great expample of the use of video in this way can be found on www.mettricksbutchers.com.

www.mettricksbutchers.co.uk/Videos/c10/pages.html

You will also find the videos on YouTube.

If you would like to explore how you could use video as part of your web marketing mix, get in touch.

If you are into SEO or Pay Per Click advertising, you will always be looking for new keyword tools. I have seen a couple launched this week. One of these is free & offered by Google.

www.google.com/sktool/

The tool links into an existing PPC account (if you have one) along with your website content & suggests keywords based on this. It looks like an interesting tool and is definitely worth checking out.

If you want more info on the tool & how it works, the help pages can be accessed on the
google help pages

Over ther years of our link building activities for ourselves and for clients, we have been building a list of Marketing Directories relevant to UK organisations, so I thought it would be good to share with you.There is a perminant link to the list on our Blogroll.

Recently at BSA we have been discussing how Search Engine Optimisation is developing, and how the focus seems to be changing from Search Engine Ranking to a broader view of Web Marketing.

Over the next month or so we will be publishing a free white paper on how we see the future of SEO & Web Marketing, but in the meantime, I think this interview with Matt Cutts from Google makes many of the points we have been considering. (Though it’s a pity that the representative of the worlds largest knowledge management company thinks that Thomas Cook is a bank!! – Watch the Video)

If you want to be sure of getting a copy of the paper when we publish it, then register on or website or blog, and we will be sure to let you know when its out.

Browsing the Forums, I found this post today, linking to a guide to SEO best practice published by Google, so it has to be worth reading.

Here is a link to it:

Google Best Practice Guide

Also here’s a link to the Original Form Thread