I found an IT Support company website where they had setup a blog, with an interesting twist.

Although their blog posts were about IT Support, Broadband Internet and IT Security, they somehow managed to ensure every single post, regardless of content, featured their primary keywords… and they linked those keywords back to relevant pages on their website.

Now personally, it looks like overkill. It doesn’t read too well and in all honesty, dilutes any link juice potential.

What they should rather do is focus on being very topical and ensuring that they use only relevant keywords when linking back to aspects of their website. I think this has better benefits, is less spam-like and will also read better as a whole.

Another tip regarding blog posts for your company website is not to go too crazy with keyword tagging! Keep it as relevant as possible – no more than 3-4 keywords, ideally. There’s no need to spam each post with keywords out of fear of missing out!

Bill Gates is now on Twitter, though he’s not here to flog Windows 7 or Bing (well not entirely anyway). A lot of his focus is about his philanthropic efforts through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (as can be seen by his first few tweets).

His arrival has been greeted with all kinds of emotions – in fact, many are now simply asking, where are the other hot shots of the world? specifically, Larry Page and Sergey Brin (of Google fame). Interestingly, not all famous people are on Twitter, even though some of them absolutely deserve to be!  I guess this begs the question, why aren’t they on Twitter? apart from the obvious reasons of being time poor.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to reading Bill’s tweets, through Firefox/Chrome

Bill Gates Twitter

It’s quite simple to get better rankings in Google and you don’t need to be a fancy pants marketing guru either….really!

1. Fix your page TITLES.
Keep them relevant, concise and catchy – no keyword stuffing! It’s a well known fact that optimising your page titles helps you improve your rankings sooner.

2. Name your pages properly
Be specific and relevant. If your page is about high pressure hoses, don’t name the file ‘hoses1.html’ – try ‘high-pressure-hoses.html’ instead.

3. Use H1, H2 and H3 tags properly and sparingly

Think of these as headlines in a newspaper going from biggest to smallest. Use them wisely (ie. short, sweet and spam-free). Combine these with your content in tags and you’re on your way to writing good clean code that plays ball with Google.

4. Include relevant keywords in your content
Sounds obvious but this is why you don’t rank. If you’re selling letterboxes and you don’t actually mention “letterboxes” in your content but instead choose to go on about fluff (you know, 5 star service, best quality products, quick email response, etc), then you’ll have a very hard time ranking for “letterboxes”.

5. Write sensibly (ie. for humans)
After reading point 4, people are gonna run off to add their keywords everywhere. DON’T do that. Instead, write content that will read well to a human being then slot your keywords in tastefully. Classic example: SEO companies. “At SEO 4 U, we love SEO. We live SEO all day every day. Our SEO is amazing and awesome. It’s easy to see how SEO 4 U can do SEO 4 your business and website SEO plans blah blah” – this is just spammy and turns people off.

So there you have a quick 5 step guide to fixing up your site so it gets a better chance of ranking better in Google.

Of course, every website needs links so on top of this, you need to have a structured link building plan in place – one that continues month by month and provides proper benefit to your website in terms of link juice. You’d rather get 2 top quality links per month than 20 weak links per month. I’ll post more about link building and ways you can score in that department.

Google are ever so creative!

As a tribute to Sir Isaac Newton, they’ve placed some apples on their logo and made one of them drop and bounce on the ‘floor’ as the page loads.

I can’t record it and show it to you but the screenshot below should give you some idea.

I’ve been using BasecampHQ, HighriseHQ and InvoiceMachine at work recently to keep track of projects, prospects and invoices. It’s been good so far, until I discovered ProjectBubble.com

It does everything the other 3 do, all in one and is so easy to use. It’s FREE and although I haven’t run it through its paces yet, I’m liking it a lot more than Basecamp, Highrise and InvoiceMachine. I do admit, InvoiceMachine is very pretty and functional and you can actually integrate all 3 systems.. I just prefer having everything in 1 place (esp. considering how much more user friendly ProjectBubble.com is).

So if you’re after a free online project management tool, check out ProjectBubble.com. It’s great, i’ts free and it’s BLUE!

Google have once again shown their fun side by giving us something to smile about for the New Year.

If you go to Google and press I’m feeling lucky (blank search form), you should get something like the image below.

Lots of ‘fireworks’ with Happy New Year greetings from Google.

Very cool. Thank you Google for your New Year’s Easter Egg. Wishing you the best for 2010 and beyond!