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I was reading Aaron's excellent post on the value of a #1 ranking in Google, and decided to do a quick check on one of my most important keywords in the Google traffic estimator, vs. Google Analytics, and I was once again astonished by how incredibly bad the estimator data is when noone is bidding on a keyword... Check this out:

So that's 1 or 2 clicks a day... Now check out the stats for css3.info on that term, which holds the #1 and #2 position, with sitelinks:

6,600 visitors where using the term css3 as or as a part of their search query, and clicked on the organic results for css3.info in the last month. That's 220 a day. So either the ratio of a #1 and #2 ranking with sitelinks vs. an AdWords ad is 110-220 to 1, or the data in the traffic estimator is crap...

Most Search Engines do not consider extremely common words in order to save disk space or to speed up search results. These filtered words are known as 'Stop Words'.

Below are a Couple of methods to implement URL Redirection.

The robot exclusion standard, also known as the Robots Exclusion Protocol or robots.txt protocol, is a convention to prevent cooperating web spiders and other web robots from accessing all or part of a website which is otherwise publicly viewable. Robots are often used by search engines to categorize and archive web sites, or by webmasters to proofread source code. The standard complements Sitemaps, a robot inclusion standard for websites.

A robots.txt file on a website will function as a request that specified robots ignore specified files or directories in their search. This might be, for example, out of a preference for privacy from search engine results, or the belief that the content of the selected directories might be misleading or irrelevant to the categorization of the site as a whole, or out of a desire that an application only operate on certain data.

For websites with multiple sub-domains, each sub-domain must have its own robots.txt file. If example.com had a robots.txt file but a.example.com did not, the rules that would apply for example.com will not apply to a.example.com.

The protocol, however, is purely advisory. It relies on the cooperation of the web robot, so that marking an area of a site out of bounds with robots.txt does not guarantee privacy. Some web site administrators have tried to use the robots file to make private parts of a website invisible to the rest of the world, but the file is necessarily publicly available and its content is easily checked by anyone with a web browser.

There is no official standards body or RFC for the robots.txt protocol. It was created by consensus in June 1994 by members of the robots mailing list ( This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it ). The information specifying the parts that should not be accessed is specified in a file called robots.txt in the top-level directory of the website. The robots.txt patterns are matched by simple substring comparisons, so care should be taken to make sure that patterns matching directories have the final '/' character appended, otherwise all files with names starting with that substring will match, rather than just those in the directory intended.

With ACAP 1.0 (Automated Content Access Protocol) a possible add-on for the Robots Exclusion Standard was released on November 30, 2007.

Of recent interest is the percentage of website pages that have robots.txt files and which specific robots are given privileges to crawl specific website files. To help understand these issues, a publicly available robots.txt search engine, BotSeer, has been developed to search and index robots.txt files.

Building quality backlinks is an important step in the development of your blog, or any type of website for that matter.

It can be a boring and time consuming process but the success or failure of a site can depend on it.

What is a backlink?
A backlink is a link from another website to yours.

Why do I need backlinks?
Backlinks are important for a number of reasons:

• They can increase traffic to your website.
• They are an important factor when Google assigns PageRank.
• They help to improve your ranking on search engine results pages.

What follows is six of the most effective methods you can use to build backlinks.

1. Directory Submission

Submitting your blog to directories should be one of the first things you do to kickstart your link building efforts.

It is unlikely you’ll ever see any significant traffic from directories, but that’s okay. The purpose here is to gain backlinks to help increase your PageRank.

There are both general directories and blog specific directories. Seeing as this process can be quite monotonous I’d suggest starting with the blog specific directories and if you don’t run out of steam move on to the general directories afterwards.

Note: Make sure you only submit to directories with high PageRank.

Alot of directories require a reciprocal link, meaning they will only list you in their directory if you link back to them from your blog. It is generally better to stay away from these sorts of directories.

Here are a few directory lists to get you started:

• Blog Directories
• General Directories
• Free SEO Friendly Directories
• High PageRank/Non-Reciprocal Directories

For those of you who would rather not plug away at their computers all day you can find plenty of people on the Digital Point forums who offer directory submission services. It comes at a price of course, but most of them are pretty reasonable.

1. Targetting the wrong keywords 

2. ignoring the title tag

3A. Flash website without a html alternative

Flash might be attractive but not to search engines and users. If you really insist that your site is Flash-based and you want search engines to love it, provide an html version. Here are some more tips for optimizing Flash sites. Search engines don't like Flash sites for a reason – a spider can't read Flash content and therefore can't index it.