I just heard David Blunkett reading from his diaries, where he recounts his time as Home Secretary. I did not believe my ears when he related - as fact - an Urban Myth I have heard many times. It goes like this: an Arab-looking man drops a wallet and a passer-by runs after him to reurn it, noticing that it is stuffed full of banknotes. Arab-looking man tries to give a reward but the good citizen refuses. ‘Well I must do something to reward you. Take this advice: please do not be in London on 11 November’. Blunkett has just revealed that he took this third-hand account seriously and launched a full scale security alert as a result. he still appears unaware that it is an Urban Myth. As any reasonably intelligent person knows, these Urban Myths are related as events that happened to the story teller’s sister, brother, but clearly do not stand up to the slightest scrutiny. At the time David Blunkett was Home Secretary, responsible for the security of the United Kingdom. Blunkett’s Diaries are serialised on Radio 4, where I guess the editors had also not heard the story before.

Tags: diary, david-blunkett careers, technology,weblogurban-myth

If you need more website traffic - you can never have too many targeted visitors - here are some ideas that you can use today, at no cost, to get interested visitors to your website or blog.

A total sell-out was predicted for Adsense Templates: now it’s about to happen. Owners of “Virtual Real Estate” (VRE) are the real estate tycoons of the internet. You probably already know that, in the offline world, real estate is one of the best long-term investments you can make. I want you to know that in the ONLINE world, you can now set up your own empire of VRE and create a better future for yourself and your family.Don’t miss this, Check it out now here. John Ogden

Many website owners and SEOs (search engine optimizers) believe that trading links is the most effective way to build the hundreds of links necessary for good search-engine ranking. But there’s another way to build links that deserves your attention: content distribution. A time-honored way of getting one-way inbound links to your website is to distribute content, usually articles, for other websites to publish in exchange for a backlink. Most often, the backlink is included in an ‘author’s resource box,’ which is a brief ‘about the author’ paragraph promoting the author’s site.Content distribution has usually been thought of as a website promotion strategy rather than an SEO or link-building strategy. But there are good reasons for adding content distribution to your SEO toolkit.

SEO Benefits of Distributing Content vs. Reciprocal Linking Alone

• Links come faster. You send an email with your article to a relevant website owner. That’s it. No adding links to your site and then checking and re-checking for compliance. That means you can get more links from the time and resources you spend on link-building.
• Links are not always available through reciprocal linking. Many website owners simply refuse to do reciprocal linking. Content distribution is one way to reach this large segment of website owners.
• Links are one-way. Many SEO experts believe that reciprocal links may be “dampened” by the search engines; i.e., they will not help you rank as high as one-way links. Of course, reciprocal links are still valuable, there’s a just a question of how valuable they really are.
• Links per page are fewer. Many SEO experts believe that the higher the number of links per page, the less SEO value each link has. When a website publishes an article, the author’s backlink is often the only live link to another website on that page.

Distinct Non-SEO Benefits of Distributing Content

What makes content distribution a truly special method of link building is that it’s the only method where the non-SEO benefits may even outweigh the SEO benefits:

Drawbacks of Content Distribution
Of course, nothing good ever came easy. Any website owners who are looking for SEO magic beans will be disappointed by content distribution:

Search engine optimisation is a massive area for Internet marketing, usually if your website can not be found on the search engines your website is likely to receive little or no visitors at all. Search engine optimisation is an extremely competitive market, where nearly any webmaster will do anything to try and get that top ranking. This article discusses the big don’ts of search engine optimisation practices:

1. Do not submit to Free for All (FFA) websites
2. Keep keyword density low
3. Do not optimise pages for a wide number of keywords
4. Duplicate website content
5. Hidden text
6. Infamous “click here” links
7. Automated link exchange networks

*Don’t submit to Free for All (FFA) websites*
Many websites promise to provide a top 10 ranking for your website, in which this will actually have a negative effective to your position on the search engine ranking pages (SERPs) on the big three - Google, Yahoo and MSN. These are websites which promise you thousands of links to your website, and may get you to install some code on your website to display links. This method of search engine Optimisation is inadvisable and is strongly suggested that you stay away from these websites, it may also ban your website from the search engines if you signup.

*Keep the keyword density low Most webmasters are aware that keyword density plays a big part in search engine optimisation and usually over optimise their website. Search engines like websites which contain natural flowing text and the correct keyword density, rather than indexing a webpage that consists ofkeywords concatenated together with commas. Google prefers a lowerkeyword density than it’s competitors, usually between 3% and 5%, where
as Yahoo prefers approximately a 7% keyword density on a webpage. Use the tools at Ranks.nl to help calculate the density of keywords on your website.

*Don’t optimise pages for a wide number of keywords. Keep the pages on your website concise with a particular keyword or keyphrase. If your website is concise with a particular keyword then this will help increase your search engine ranking position within the big three. This should also be the same for outgoing links on your website, try and categories links on your website
into specific categories. If your website contains varied keywords throughout, then the search engines will be confused on what to optimise your website for.

*Duplicate website content. You should not use duplicate content on your website, these pages will most likely not get indexed, or they will have no value within the search engines. Your website may also be flagged up as SPAM, and in some extremely cases could even be banned from the big three. A website which is banned from the search engines is worth nothing.

*Hidden text. This will most certainly get your website banned from the search engines. Hidden text is an unethical method of search engine optimisation and is strongly frowned-upon by the big three. Just take your time and write good quality text for your website - you will be
rewarded in the long run!

*Infamous “click here” links. The internal linking structure of a website plays a big part in search engine optimisation. Keywords which are used within internal links also increase your position within the search engine ranking pages. Many webmasters use the infamous “click here” links when usually referring to something within their text, this is a poor way of optimising a website for the search engines. Instead, you should rephrase your sentence to
include a link which contains keywords related to the webpage you are linking to; this is an easy and effective way for increasing search engine ranking positions.

*Automated link exchange networks. Many of these websites promise to provide thousands of incoming reciprocal links to your website through simply signing up to their service. This method of search engine optimisation is usually frowned-upon, as the links you will be receiving may have no quality value and will usually flag up your website within the search engines. I have seen many websites which signup and have got their website banned.
Link exchange networks which provide natural link exchange methods, such as Swift Media UK, are an advantage to your website, as you will receive one way text links to your website over a period of time through no effort at all.
Andy Mac Donald

Tags:
diary, careers, internet+marketing, technology, weblog page+rank

This week we have been invited to two free internet business seminars in London. The last time we went we picked up some good ideas,but only escaped narrowly from spending 000s on a millionaire protege course. Afterwards we learned that past participants had not received the promised jump start to their business. Reminder to self: leave your wallet at home.

I can only sympathise with all the poor souls who signed up for TalkTalk Broadband and are either still waiting to be connected or - as happened to my partner - have had their phone inadvertently disconnected before the service has even started. Today I heard another sad story about a lady threatened by a collections agency on behalf of Plusnet. My partner had a similar experience with Tiscali when their trial offer did not deliver what it promised - it took over a year to get rid of them