It looks like we are going through another PageRank update. I’ve seen some blogs and websites move up in PR just in the last couple of days. SEOJ is now a PageRank 5 - woo hoo!

Brick Marketing has gone up to a PR 4. But what does it all mean?

Well, just a little bit of info for you on PageRank, if you are not all that familiar. Having a PR4 really is not anything super duper to be proud of. If you do everything right in the SEO department, you can reach a PageRank of 4 within 1 year, no problems. You really don’t start getting the recognition you deserve until you hit PageRank 5 and beyond. But for every step in PR you take up the ladder, the more difficult it becomes to get to the next one. I think there are two reasons for that.

No. 1, it gets more competitive as you move higher up in PageRank. But, you also have to do more to convince the search engines that you are a trustworthy source. You don’t really have to work harder. What I mean is, once you’ve got thousands of inbound links from authority sources, getting more of them is a little more difficult to come by. You really have to be a trustworthy authority; you can’t fake it. Faking it in the lower ranks is easier, in other words.

But keep in mind that whatever your PageRank is today is not your real PageRank. Google updates its PR about three to four months behind when it actually goes up. So it isn’t real time. Since SEOJ went up to PR5 just in the last couple of days, that means we were at a PR5 three months ago. Assuming that we are still on the incline with our PageRank, I’m likely between a PageRank 5 and PageRank 6 - something like a PR 5.4.

Google PageRank is ever evolving. It goes up and down on a daily basis depending on what you are doing on your website. If you get plugged with negative algorithmic karma then your PR will go down. If you do the good stuff then it goes up, but you’ll never see it in real time.

Many SEOs don’t put a lot of stock in it any more. I still think there is some value in PageRank, but it isn’t what it used to be. It is a good measure to watch to determine if you are doing all the right things and making the search engines happy. If you see your PR go down, look back over the last three months to see what you might have done to influence that.

It seems there has been another PageRank update over the last 24 hours with the usual chorus of ooh’s, aaah’s and oh-no’s. In the meantime search engine optimization consultants are busy calming their clients.

Generally speaking, PageRank is not worth worrying about except perhaps when a new update is released. For many, it validates their search engine optimization strategies. There is nothing like getting a little numeric pat on the back every now and then.

Where PageRank updates do deliver a valid message is when your PageRank drops. Then you need to seriously reconsider your search engine optimization strategies along with any other activities that be considered a little gray, unethical or downright black hat.

If you have been in the search engine optimization business for any length of time then you will know that PageRank is fluid, it is constantly on the move and a toolbar update is only an indication of your placement recorded at some stage in the past. It is however a clear signal as to the direction of your strategies and the increase in the authority for your pages.

If your page rank as gone up - yipee, now get on with the real work of improving your pages rankings even further. If your page has stayed the same, tough luck, keep working at it, perhaps review any doubtful activities. If your rank has gone down, oh dear, you may have been naughty. Either that or others have worked harder on their search engine optimization strategies have simply out gunned you. Treat is as a report card that says - ‘could try harder‘.

PageRank, where is yours sitting? Are your search engine optimization strategies delivering the goods? Take the pat on the back if you get one, then get on with the real work of reaching number one in search engine results pages - after all, that is the real goal of search engine optimization.

Or do you even have any outbound links? Should you?

Whether or not you have any outbound links depends a great deal on your editorial philosophy. Some old-style SEOs say that you shouldn’t. Others say that you should. I think it really matters on your goals and your style.

If you do choose to include outbound links, you should start by choosing links that make you look good. Don’t use any other kind of links. That is, your link partners should be chosen not on whether or not they are linking to you but on whether or not they provide your visitors with any real value. If you create outbound links that give value to your visitors then you will be seen as an authority in your field and you are more likely to receive inbound links that benefit you and that are given by other authorities within your niche. That’s when you know that you’ve arrived.

Here’s another way of thinking about it. Many webmasters will not link to you if every link on your website is self-serving. And, trust me, they can tell. But if you have selfless links that point to the other sources online within your niche then it appears that you are not simply promoting yourself but promoting your niche, even if it leads your visitors to other places online. That’s how you become an authority, and authority sites are well liked by a lot of different people. They tend to linked to more often and the links are valuable links. Those links increase your PageRank and further serve to increase your authority within your niche. Look at it as a sort of Web karma. Build your own authority with outbound links.

Small businesses will generally have to work harder on their search engine optimization strategies than some of the larger corporations simply due to branding. Many of these organizations rely less on organic search results and more on direct referrals.

Take a brand like Coka Cola - most internet users will enter coke.com into their address bar. In fact coke, cokacola and coka- cola will all result in coke home pages. They rely more on their brand than any keywords or search engine optimization strategies.

Obviously, every business strives to build on their brand. If you can build your brand recognition to significant proportions then you can relax your search engine optimization focus and spend more time delivering the content. In the meantime, keywords, keyphrases and your brand need to be optimized to the fullest.

Brand recognition doesn’t happen overnight, in fact it can take many years. While many try to ride on the back of larger corporations and their brands, courts are now starting to recognize brand ownership over the internet and issue rulings preventing the use of these brands. Legal damages claims could run into millions. To be successful, your search engine optimization strategies should be designed to build on your own brand and your own set of keywords.

Find keywords that promote you and your business. Optimize your brand through social marketing and advertising campaigns whilst developing a search engine optimization program that at the very least places you on the front page of the search results. If you are number two behind a site like Coke, chances are you will get the click as Coke searches will generally go straight to the site.

Small businesses should build on their own strengths and where possible, use search engine optimization firms to further develop those strengths.

It seems that social media marketing may be passing SEO in terms of importance for internet marketing professionals. But it remains to be seen if social media marketing will maintain its momentum. Jon Rognerud gives a list of top social marketing websites for those interested. The list includes:

1. Twitter *See more below - specific for twitter
2. Facebook (download toolbar)
3. YouTube (toolbar exists, but have not tried)
4. Del.icio.us (download toolbar)
5. StumbleUpon (download toolbar)
6. LinkedIn (tip: use the Q/A section to gain readership and clients)
7. Flickr
8. Digg
9. Reddit
10. Technorati
11. Secondlife (3D)
12. Meneame (spanish, translate title and synopsis before posting)
13. Newsvine
14. Tip: Subscribe (RSS) to Techcrunch!

I’ll have to take issue with some of these on this list. For instance, if you don’t speak Spanish or cater to a Spanish audience then Mename may not be for you. I’ve also never used Secondlife and I’m not sure that Reddit or Newsvine is necessary for everyone. In a word, which social media sites you use depend a lot on the nature of your business.

I’ve also noticed that some social media sites give link juice while some do not. StumbleUpon doesn’t, but I’d still use it. Furl and Propeller do, but they may not be great places for networking for everyone. You have to do your homework when it comes to which social sites you want to take advantage of. Personally, I’d add Mixx to the list as well.

No matter which social media sites you use, however, you’ll still want to use SEO. It’s not a matter of either/or. It’s really a matter of how you employ the mix. You want your SEO to compliment your social media marketing and vice-versa. Otherwise, you could be just peeing in the wind.

There are distinct differences when it comes to web pages and blogs, not just in the look or navigation, but in the search engine optimization strategies as well. Sure, both need the usual villains of content, keywords and links. However SEO outcomes for each can be quite different.

Aside from the ease of creating multiple pages, each page of a blog will get indexed by they search engines. If there are ten pages to (or posts) on a blog, that is potentially ten pages indexed. A web page on the other hand gains only one indexing. Most web sites are made up of more than one page, however, extra one of those pages are far more difficult to create and require some knowledge of web page coding. Because each page can be designed from scratch, search engine optimization strategies can be fine tuned for each page.

Blogging requires little to no knowledge of programming codes, however your ability to fine tune your search engine optimization strategies is limited to the types of plugins available and how well you utilize them. It is much harder to customize each page on a blog.

Blogs and blogging can be great for delivering traffic. Web sites on the other hand are well suited to action such as buying, signing up to newsletters of or any other activity. Search engine optimization strategies for blogs require a focus not just on the search engines, but also with an eyes to the many social sites.

Search engine optimization on web pages can concentrate purely on gaining search engine result placement. Blogging and social sites fit like hand and glove as do web sites and search engines. Whilst more than half of many searches deliver blogs in the results pages, individuals who are looking to buy will almost always click through to a web page rather than a blog.

If you have a web site that is commercial in nature, you need to maximize your search engine optimization efforts to deliver targeted traffic. A blog in reality is a support service for your web page. Blogs need to not only target search engines, but also target the social community as well. Search engine optimization needs to take that social community into consideration as well.

A good example of this is in keyword selection. A web page can target keywords centering around the products being sold. A blog needs to expand on those keywords to include phrases that relate to solving problems, offering tips and providing information. The search engine optimization strategies for each can be totally different.

The best approach is to consider each as totally separate entities with totally different requirements. Your search engine optimization strategies should be separated and optimized for each entity to gain the maximum return for your efforts.

A reader asked what I thought about the practice of using the display: none attribute in CSS to hide text. Generally speaking, hiding text on a web page is a method of keyword stuffing that search engines frown upon. You might get away with it in the short term, but don’t expect to be able to get away with it forever. Some search engine optimization gurus are always looking for ways to outsmart the search engines and get their web pages ranked higher and faster. That’s like trying to find a better way to rob banks. You might succeed, but keep robbing banks long enough and you’ll eventually get caught.

Over at search engine land, Eric Enge wrote a fabulous article on the legitimate use of the display: none attribute. Then he encouraged his readers to use the tactic to hide text on their web pages. Here’s a snippet:

The legitimate use of this technique is so prevalent that I would rarely expect search engines to penalize a site for using the display: none attribute. It’s just very difficult to implement an algorithm that could truly ferret out whether the particular use of display: none is meant to deceive the search engines or not.

I’m no expert on creating algorithms, but my guess is what is difficult today may be quite common next year or next month. At one time, it was difficult to clone cells. But then came Dolly the sheep. It was once difficult to land on the moon, then came along John F. Kennedy and Neil Armstrong. It was once difficult to run a 4-minute mile, but then Roger Bannister gave health experts a heart attack and did the impossible. Now, his record has been broken and the 4-minute mile is common place. Even The Bandit did what they said couldn’t be done.

The point is, it may be difficult today to create an algorithm that will catch the illegitimate use of display: none to hide text on your web pages, but that doesn’t mean search engines will never do it. They caught link farms, didn’t they? They caught URL cloakers. And Google is constantly updating its algorithms to make link building more difficult for spammers. I’m guessing that they could eventually discover a way to ferret out legitimate and illegitimate uses of a particular tactic. Even if they don’t, by employing such techniques, you are leaving yourself open to further scrutiny should the search engines see other red flags. The more risk you take in your SEO tactics, the more likely you are to run afoul of the search engines. They don’t have to rank you at all.

In a previous post, Search Engine Optimization Tips - Don’t Hide Your Name, I mentioned using you web site name, or domain name, in the header region of your web page. Several comments have looked at ways to place your site name in the header using techniques that hide it. The post title was ‘Don’t Hide Your Name’ and for good reason.

Using techniques such reducing the font size to one pixel; or making the font color the same as the background; or having your site name print way of the screen are all considered ‘black hat’ search engine optimization techniques and you are more likely to get penalized than gain any benefit from the technique.

If your site name had been included in your keyword list then I must say I wonder why you would want to hide it. There are techniques using your style sheet that enable you to have your site name published as text and still blending in quite well with your overall header design whilst providing search engine optimization value.

Obviously, if you want to get into fancy text then a graphic may be your only option. The point of the previous article is that you may get more search engine optimization value using text rather than a graphic.

The whole process starts with your web page design. You can go for fancy graphics or you elect to use text. If you use the graphic option, then be sure to use good alt tags. If you use text then the value is in the text. Either way, when it comes to search engine optimization, hiding data may sound good, but in the long run it will cost you more than you could ever gain.

Do you know what version of WordPress or Joomla you are using? It doesn’t matter what CSM, blogging software, or other website software that you use, every now and then it will be updated and you’ll need to get the latest version. I highly recommend that you always use the latest version for one simple reason: Security.

Hackers and crackers are smart guys. They learn too. Every time a software is updated, the makers of that software package fix the security issues from the last version. But security only goes so far. The bad guys are out there learning the latest tricks too.

Especially if you are using open source software such as

• WordPress
• Joomla
• Drupal
• Pligg
• Or one of many other software packages available online

Because open source means that anyone can view the source code and modify it. That’s essentially an open door hackers and other bad guys to fiddle with the code to learn how it works. Then, when they figure it out, they create their own brands of software, robots, and malicious tools to break the code and hack into websites that use that software. That’s why you always see new software updates that say they’ve fixed security issues - because there are always security issues.

That doesn’t mean that your website is perpetually unsecure. It just means that you always have to stay one step ahead of the bad guys. And the surest way to do that is to update your software.

Search engine optimization can be a strange business. Often the harder you work at it the harder it becomes yet we have often been told to work smarter, not harder. There is certainly some truth in the latter part of that statement.

Getting started is always going to be the hard part, but then again, if you are starting a brand new bricks and mortar business from scratch, getting started is always difficult. In fact in the bricks and mortar world, anything up to 75% of new businesses fail within the first two years. Online businesses are no better. However, if you can get your search engine optimization strategies right and start to gain reasonable placement in the SERP’s, can SEO strategies become self fulfilling prophecies.

In simple terms, the higher your place in the SERP’s and the more often you appear, the more traffic you are likely to receive. Whilst most search engine optimization specialist pay little notice of factors like PR, thousands of web users (particularly bloggers) do.

You have a decent PR, you appear in the first four or five of the SERP’s and you are receiving good organic traffic. By their very nature, other users are going to want a piece of your action to help in their search engine optimization programs. They will do this by trying to attract your attention either through leaving comments on your site if enabled or by quoting and linking to you on their sites.

Self fulfilling prophecy? The more popular you are, the more people will link to you and the more people link to you, the more popular you become still. Perhaps not a self fulfilling prophecy, but could you call it a viral search engine optimization program? It works for me.

Yahoo! has rolled out a limited beta of its new developer app called SearchMonkey. I like the general idea.

The tool will allow webmasters and other developers the ability to add enhancements to their search engine results at Yahoo! These enhancements could lead to an increase in traffic and if you’re like most webmasters, you probably could use that boost from Yahoo! SERPs.

The biggest problem I see in SearchMonkey is that searchers must opt in before they can see the enhancements. That doesn’t really help webmasters any. How many users will actually go through the trouble to opt in? My hope is that Yahoo! will release that restriction at some point in the future and simply deliver the enhancements to users without requiring them to opt in. That would help searchers and webmasters alike. Meanwhile, I encourage you to sign up for an account at SearchMonkey and play around then report the results back here. Do you like it? Is it helpful? Do you expect great results?

There are a lot of keyword research tools available at present but sometimes nothing beats checking out social sites to see what is humming with their users. Use some of those keywords in your search engine optimization strategies and you may strike gold if or when those keywords spike in the search results.

In a strange twist, topics can become very popular on sites like YouTube days before those same terms become popular searches through traditional search engines. If you have targeted those keywords through your search engine optimization program then there is a good chance you will be on the front page for those results.

YouTube is not the only social site to consider. The Digg homepage can be useful along with StumbleUpon’z Buzz page and don’t forget sites such as FaceBook and Del.icio.us or any of the other sites that may favor your genre. The data you glean from these sites can then be used in any of they keyword research tools to fine tune your search engine optimization program.

There will be times when none of the information collected really matches your genre. However, by keeping a regular eye on these sites you can be in a position to capitalize on any buzz as it does start to build.

Keyword research and search engine optimization is often a matter of trying to second guess tomorrows trends, the more help you can get, the easier it can be.

If Google, who for all intents and purposes owns and defines search, does not want a single web property ranking for the same keyword phrase more than once in order to maintain a diversity of search results for searchers, what do we make of blogs on a particular topic that have the potential to rank several pages for the same key phrase? Should bloggers be concerned that they are being discriminated against?

Google implemented this policy in order to be of better service to searchers. The search giant didn’t want experts in SEO dominating the rankings for all the keywords that people will search for. It’s actually a good policy.

If Bob and Benny both own a widget store in Seattle, Washington and Bob hires me to do his SEO for him while Benny decides to do it himself then Bob can’t dominate the SERPs because he has more money to spend. His 10,000 budget has the potential to outstrip Benny who must spend no more than 1-2 hours per day on writing his blog and other marketing (because he has a business to run). Because Bob can spend all day running his business and pay me to write his blog, run his PPC campaign, do article marketing, etc., Bob’s marketing efforts stand a better chance of succeeding in the search engine wars. But not if the playing field is leveled.

It isn’t discrimination against Bob to say that Benny deserves one of those spots as much as Bob does. It would be discrimination against Benny to say that Bob deserves them all because he can afford to pay an SEO to ensure that it happens. That’s why Google’s responsibility to maintain a fair playing field in the search results is so important to protect and it’s also why webmasters must seek out creative ways to rank in the SERPs beyond the mere blog and static website race.

Search engine optimization is all about getting the best recognition possible from the search engines. To do this, you need to feed as much relevant information to each of the search engines.

One mistake that many web owners and web designers make is to hide their company name, their brand and some of their products inside banners. Graphics are very useful particularly when well optimized, likewise text. Banners by their nature are not search engine optimization friendly.

A banner is, essentially, a single image. If you use a banner in the header area of your screen, how has it been designed? Most web owners have a terrific banner and when it comes to marketing, it does a great job. When it comes to helping with your search engine optimization strategies, forget it.

Often, the same effect can be gained by layering the information which can then be used to compliment your search engine optimization strategies. With the use of style sheets, you can get the best of both worlds; having a banner image whilst having your company name, logo or any other data rendered as text, yet blending seamlessly with your images.

Having your company name in bold H1 text at the top of your page adds a lot of grunt to the importance of those words when it comes to search engine optimization strategies. You can have your banner and optimize it too - just separate and overlay the various components. Search engine optimization is all about what the search engines can read - not what you hide.