The issue is deserving of an entire post, and indeed there is a comprehensive one over at SEO-Chicks by Julie Joyce which sparked me into writing this very article.

The issue here is, should you report a competitor for buying links?

For me the answer is generally a yes. As someone who doesn’t buy links, it’s incredibly frustrating to be told by Google not to buy links, and then see no action taken on those blatantly breaking the guidelines. I hate to do this as I feel like a ‘tell tale’, but the fact is that it can otherwise be impossible to outrank a competitor who is buying links, without paying for links yourself.

So these are your options:

1) Buy links yourself to outrank them – risky but in some industries it’s accepted as essential.

2) Report them and cross your fingers Google takes the appropriate action. Which, may I add, for me should mean devaluing the paid links rather than handing out massive site wide penalties.

When is the answer No?

If you buy links yourself and then report a paid link that’s pretty unethical in my book. You must be clean cut and not breaking Google’s guidelines, otherwise you’re setting yourself up for someone to do the same to you.

So what do you think? Would you report a site for buying links, or do see outing a site as below the belt?

Everyone is, or should be aware of sights like Mashable, Blogstorm and eConsultancy. If you’re not, then they are three blogs to check out on a daily or even hourly basis.

But what about the 100o’s of other online marketing and social media blogs out there? Here is my list of top blogs for you to check out that you might not have come across before:

1) seo-chicks.com ; Great blog contributed too by some of the leading women in the industry such as @nicholastott, @lisadmyers & @yoshimi_s

2) laurenceborel.com ; Social Media blog from Laurence Borel. Great site for picking up what’s hot in Social Media. Follow ‘Lolly’ on Twitter @Blogtillyoudrop

3) ciarannorris.co.uk ; If you go to search conferences then you will probably say this shouldn’t be in a list of lesser know blogs, as Ciaran is pretty high profile in the digital world. Check out his blog for Ciaran’s thoughts on SEO, Social Media and “music, stuff & nonsense” to quote him. If you’re going to a search conference where he is speaking I recommend going to one of his sessions. Along with the always colourful Dave Naylor Ciaran is one of the most entertaining speakers in the digital world. Follow him @Ciaranj

4) janecopland.co.uk ; Search consultant at Ayima with a previous post at SEOmoz Jane is well respected in the digital field. A great blog for SEO news and goings on as well as her personal take on all things digital.

5) chrisg.com ; OK, so this is another blog that is actually pretty huge within the industry, but i’ve got a feeling it will still be new to a lot of people out there. Chris Garrett is an expert in blogging and social media, and it’s well worth not only reading his blog, but subscribing to his mailing list and definitely someone to follow on Twitter if you’re not already @ChrisGarrett

6) thehodge.co.uk ; Dominic ‘The Hodge’ Hodgson is a lively SEO and Social Media marketer. Great blog for a look at digital developments written with an entertaining slant. Heard him speak about Twitter at A4u London and will make sure I catch him again if I see him on the agenda elsewhere. Another great guy to follow on twitter @thehodge

7) chewie.co.uk ; Great posts on everything SEO, SEM & Social Media, only problem is not the most frequently updated. When it is though it’s always a good read.

8 ) seogadget.co.uk ; SEO blog mostly by Richard Baxter. A highly recommended read. Follow on Twitter @seogadget

9) vervesearch.com ; A useful SEO blog from Lisa Myers, a regular SEO conference speaker. Again not updated as often as i’d like but great content when it is.

10) seoptimise.com ; A great blog from SEOptimise with regular updates and news on SEO, SEM & Social Media

11) marketingdonut.co.uk ; General marketing advice on all aspect of marketing but with a frequent focus on digital marketing.

12) michaeljcooper.co.uk ; Blog from Michael Cooper looking at marketing, social media & the future of digital. Follow him @michaeljcooper

13) ukcopywriting.com ; Blog with a focus on copywriting for the online world. Follow him @martinjwilliams

14) prgeek ; More of a PR blog really but has a strong focus on the online industry. Also some more lighthearted posts and fun stuff

15) searchenginechocolate.com ; Blog from Joanna Butler, another online expert with some great insights on digital developments. Another blog that i’d love to see updated more regularly though!

16) unmemorabletitle.co.uk ; SEO and copywriting blog from Andrew Nattan

17) seosmarty.com ; Fairly well known within the industry, the seosmarty blog is focussed on SEO & Social Media

18) katylindemann.com ; Useful for PR, Social Media & Branding

19) ppcblog.co.uk ; A PPC specific blog thrown in as it’s an area not as well covered as SEO & Social Media on the top blogs. Not updated since October though…. anybody there?

20) webtoastie.co.uk ; A useful SEO & Social Media blog from Kieron Hughes. Also a good guy to follow on Twitter @kieronhughes

I’m always on the look out for new digital blogs so please tell me about yours either by commenting or tweeting me @simonjturner

A couple of weeks ago I noticed twitter lists making it onto page one of the SERPs. Fair enough not for competitive terms (yet), but to say twitter lists have only been around a month or so it’s quite a development – Check out these examples:

SEO Heavyweights

tech or digital blogger

UK PR and Social Media

In time I can see more and more twitter lists making their way to the top of Google; for more and more competitive keywords.

I’d like to see what would happen if a few big bloggers, with some real link juice behind them, threw some anchor text rich links at a couple of twitter lists for competitive keyterms. If lists can rank quickly for powerful terms this could be a big development in shaping the SERPs.

Has anybody seen a Twitter list already ranking for a competitive term?

Google have today announced they are testing out realtime search

This has long been a question over Google’s future market dominance, and today goes a long way to answering how they are dealing with it. Check it out for yourself here

It’s a pretty nifty feature which gives a listing for ‘Latest Results’ in a similar way to how news or shopping results are displayed. They’ve created a pretty awesome scrolling feature which auto updates:

You can then click on this ‘latest results’ section to see the entire real time results taken from twitter, the blogesphere, news sites etc.

Google trends has also been updated to show up to the minute trends of what the world is talking about.

What do you think? Has Google just blown the other engines out of the water once again or are you unconvinced by this innovation?

So what is SEO?

Search Engine Optimisation is the art/science of making a website rank well in the search engines to increase visitors to that website. It’s also the single most important online marketing practice to be aware of (queue comments disagreeing with that one!)

If you’re just setting off in the world of online marketing you need to get to grips with SEO, and I strongly recommend you become as knowledgeable as possible about it. Luckily the basics are pretty straight forward, and if your website isn’t in a competitive industry you can get some big wins by getting the basics right.

So firstly a simple summary of how Google works:

Google crawls a website and adds it to it’s index. When it crawls a site it ‘reads’ all the content, and even the images to understand what the site is all about. Then when somebody performs a search Google decides what the most relevant websites are for that search. The content and structure of your site are know as ‘on site’ ranking factors.

Google doesn’t only base it’s rankings on what it find on your site though. It looks at how many other websites link to yours, and the quality of the websites that link to you. These external links are known as ‘off site’ ranking factors. Links are widely considered the most important of google’s ranking factors, particularly when targeting competitive keywords.

How to get started with SEO:

1) Keyword research:

Before you start optimising you site you need to know what keywords you are aiming to rank for. The factors you want to consider are:

a) The search frequency of a keyword. There’s no point ranking for a term that nobody searches for.

b) The competitiveness of the keyword. Look who ranks for a keyword, check out their link profile and consider if you are going to be able to compete. For example there’s probably very little point in a new website targeting a terms like ‘Bingo’, ‘Poker’ or ‘cheap flights’ unless you have massive time and financial resources.

c) The relevance of the keyword to your website. You want to rank for terms which are going to achieve your aims. So identify what you want a visitor to do on your site and what terms are likely to drive relevant visitors.

There are some good free tools for keyword research including Google’s Keyword tool and Google Insights for search.

2) Page title’s:

Arguably the most important onsite ranking factor. Make sure you include your top keyword targets in your page titles. Make every page title on your site different, and as relevant to the page as possible. Remember as well that the page title becomes the main description of your site in the SERPs, so try to word it well to aid a good click through, possibly even including a call to action.

You also need to be aware of meta descriptions and meta keywords, but these are not widely believed to be important ranking factors anymore, at least for Google, so i’m not going to cover them here.

3) Internal linking

You need to tell Google what every page is about, and the best way to do this is with internal links. When you link to a page use descriptive anchor text, ideally your target term for that page. Never link with terms such as ‘Click Here’ as you’ve just missed a great chance to tell Google what that page should rank for.

4) Header tags:

Within your content use header tags. Use one h1Tag per page to tell Google what the main subject of that page is. Use h2, h3 etc for subheadings.

5) Links

You need to build links to your website. This will tell Google your site is well respected and every link works as a ‘vote’ for your site. The better quality the links the better your site appears in the eye’s of Google. To measure the quality of links you can use Google Page Rank as a rough guide, although the importance/accuracy of that is in question. Look at the back link profile of site’s and make your own mind up if it appears to be a quality site. Linkscape is another tool you can use to measure the authority of a site.

Link building is such an important area i’ll write an entire post on the beginners guide to link building over the next couple of weeks.

6) Read Googles guide to SEO. This is the best guide for beginners and will explain best practice SEO in simplistic terms.

This blog post is only a basic guide to help you understand a little bit about SEO. There are a massive amount of other factors to look at but hopefully this will give you a start, and begin to get your site ranking.

If you’re an SEO expert please leave your beginners tips in the comments to help extend this guide.