So my friend Brian Wong, a really brilliant online entrepreneur, released this cool video with simple instructions on how to set up your Facebook Timeline before it officially goes live on October 13th. Enjoy!

As you know white-hat SEO is all about delivering quality to the visitor. Giving him so much that he’s going to share your site in awe. But we also know, especially with recent 2.5 Panda update taking place a week ago, that Google is putting much more stress on quality of a site itself. Whether it’s well designed, provides interesting, engaging content really matters. Matt Cutts from Google takes on this question in an interesting video, drawing a correlation between spelling and PageRank…

So, Matt declined that it’s among signals Google is currently actively using, BUT… Amit Singhal, Head of Google Search, gave a hint about what’s being considered when Google is rolling out Panda updates:

• “Does this article have spelling, stylistic, or factual errors?”

You can read the full post HERE. So, for a minute, let’s consider – why in the world Google would not use it as a signal? Other than that some problems Matt was suggesting it could pose.

Crawler perspective

Ask yourself a question:
What does Google want to deliver in search?

Here’s a piece of a very good comic from The Oatmeal:

User perspective – white-hat SEO

And since white-hat SEO focuses on impressing the reader and make him keen on sharing your links, think about a terribly detrimental effect bad spelling can have on your link-building campaigns. You, already, wouldn’t trust a source which has spelling errors, but even more certain is that you wouldn’t share it. You wouldn’t link to it. So keeping an eye on your language is a vital aspect of SEO, and overlooked can cost you a lot of time – and money.

Google team doesn’t sleep. They’ve only just announced really cool changes to Google Analytics (as you can see in my earlier posts like Google Analytics going real-time or this one) and just a second ago a new post shows up on the official Webmaster Central blog HERE. Webmaster’s Tools gets an all new look to its homepage, which is going to make the tracking of statuses for multiple websites a lot easier.

As you can see, you will be able to see all necessary issues reported just up front – no need to click through to see if everything is OK. Even if you’re managing just one site it is still very useful – saves you time clicking around trying to find out if you’re not missing out on anything.

It also resonates well with my earlier post about on-page optimization. As a website owner you really have to make sure the fundamentals – meaning features and code on your own site – are all intact. Otherwise you will put yourself at risk of:

• not ranking well for your chosen keywords
• damaging your brand – if people continuously stumble upon 404 errors or broken pages
• missing tons of traffic which can’t reach your site

Oh, this is really exciting! There will be a lot of fun with the new features in Google products! First Analytics, now Webmaster’s Tools. In the meanwhile Google has opened Google+ for registration and already has over 50 million users! Not to mention Google Apps going offline – with Gmail or Docs being available to you even if you’re in the middle of the jungle…

Hot, hot, hot news today! Google Analytics team has just annonced new real-time reporting features in Google Analytics! Until now Google Analytics could only update its data every few hours (perhaps a bit more often, but never real-time). From now on, you will be able to track what’s going on on your site just when it happens.

How to use it? Well, think about posting a new article on your blog or blasting an e-mail list of your customers. You will be able to see immediate changes in the activity on your site and see how the readers are engaging with it. For example – how actively they are sharing it on Facebook or Twitter, how many are taking action on the site, buying your products, reading your sales pages etc. etc. etc!

Running your campaigns will now be knife sharp accurate. No longer will you have to bite your nails and hitting refresh button waiting for results to come. Instead you will be able to follow all of the action immediately.

Check out the full post HERE.

Excitement!

First of all – in the next couple of days I will post a larger entry about the fundamentals of on-page SEO for websites. Whether you’re a startup or an established site, and want to make sure you’re doing your SEO right – please look out for that one, will be really valuable. I do have to say that very (VERY!) often great sites are missing out their opportunities of ranking high because they don’t fulfill the very basic requirements to allow crawlers index their sites well.

The sites I’ve been working on literally gained from 2 to over 25 positions over a SINGLE DAY (!) after doing on-page optimization update. And these shifts weren’t only happening on some distant pages. I have had sites jumping up by a few positions on page 1. of Google, simply by making sure the keywords are mentioned properly, the tags are filled in the right way and so on. So, yet again, I really recommend (I’m not very modest am I… ;)) to keep an eye on that article coming up soon. By then, I do have some SEO goodies for you today.

First of all, I’d like to say huge thanks to Wu Han for organizing yet another great Webcamp meetup in KL. Also thanks for all the warm words after my SEO presentation – it will also be available online within a few days, so if you had no chance to attend, worry not – it’s coming.

Next up – we’ve just had the pleasure to have Vinny from Google Singapore to visit us in Mindvalley to give us more insights on Google Analytics and conversion tracking. Speaking of which – Google Analytics team has just announced changes to the Analytics interface! You can find more details HERE.
What they are currently doing is polishing the design of the new interface introduced a couple of months ago. It will now be more intuitive and allow you to create Custom Reports in a bit more friendly way. So, a great features for all not really geeky website owners, who do want to track accurate data about their sites.

On SEOmoz today we have a really cool, but a bit advanced in content, article about correlation between Social Media and SEO. You can use social channels to predict search demand for particular topics or keywords. There are tools available on the web which will help you track down the topics which are currently inflating – what in turn, might give you the edge over the competitors in targeting new, or currently hot, topics in search. You can read the full article HERE.

And than, eventually, brings me back to an article on Search Engine Journal about Google +1 button and its direct impact on search. I have my personal views on that, and the information that Google will use +1 data to shift its search results. Very briefly – I disagree that it’s an easy to game metric and an invitation for spammers to spam Google+ with +1 clicks. In fact, I personally think Google +1 button metric will be extremely difficult to game. Why? Because no-one can compete with Google in collecting information about its users – hence you, yourself, give the company tons of signals about who you are, by using Gmail, Docs, Youtube, Maps and lately G+ – and more. How can a spammer setting up hundreds of fake, empty accounts, even attempt to game the system? Quite simply, his clicks will not matter at all.

I will elaborate on that very interesting topic more soon. By then – feel free to message me what you think about it. Or, quite simply – put a comment below :)

Greetings from Singapore! I’m still here after the feverishly hot Formula 1 Grand Prix weekend. Sitting in a cafe I’m wrapping up what awesome things have been happening in the search environment last week. So, my Top3 picks for you:

1. 99 Ways to Build Links by Giving Stuff Away (and Improve Your Brand Too) - a post promoted from the YOUmoz community. Great summary on how to approach white-hat link building. If you ever had a thought that building links without creating tons of articles or (god, I hope not) spinning content and automated submissions to hundreds of directories – then you just have to read this. Link building is really not that difficult, all you have to do is try to engage your visitors to the full. Why not use some freebies?
2. Matt Cutts asks for your New Year’s wishes – read through the comments, what would you like to get? What I really like about Google is that even though it’s a huge company it actually does listen to its users. Of course it’s no genie from a lamp, but the guys there really strive to deliver more and more quality.
3. Web Analytics TV #21 with Avinash Kaushik – if you don’t know who Avinash is, you should better check out his blog here. He’s the true Google Analytics guru. You will have no problems finding out more about him by just googling around. If you want to delve into Analytics more, I recommend you follow him + look for his videos on Youtube.

For a good kick off to the blog I decided to take the most interesting topic heads-on. So – let’s do it. Why would you do white-hat SEO? Honestly, don’t you feel like a loser? There are thousands of black-hats around, milking the opportunities which come and go on a daily, weekly, monthly basis. They jump on a topic, look for a junk product, or create one themselves, spam their positions sky-high and collect the cash. Quick and slick, ain’t it? Of course at one point Google adjusts their algorithm and some of the spammers’ sites are gone – but soon enough they find a detour and attack again and again – and earn more and more!

OK, let’s put irony aside. Black-hats tend to treat white-hat SEO people like suckers who want to force an open door. “Why in the world would you do white-hat SEO?”. Why would you want to be creative, innovative, take care of your visitors, polish the design of your site, try to add value to the world? So much hassle… Just write copy which uses a few psychological triggers, spam your way up high in Google rankings and milk it.

Black-hats are parasites. They will suck onto anything they find. They don’t create any value and they pollute our common web environment with tons of junk. But you know what’s even worse? Not only will they outrank reputable businesses but many of these black and grey-hats actually call themselves white-hat SEOs and they offer their services to unaware business owners. Their methods will work for a while, but a couple of months down the road Google does another update and “boom” – the site is down by 20 positions. Honestly, go on Elance, Odesk or similar, and see how many disappointed people are bidding for REAL white-hats – but in fact, they get none, because there are almost none there. And poor guys have little knowledge to evaluate that. So they end up having another poor experience and eventually many will even turn away from the web because “it doesn’t work” for them.

So, why would you do white-hat? Because if you want to build a long-term, engaging, reputable business on the web you have to make an effort to stand out. If you want to create value and if you really want to make money – you have to be creative, communicative and strive to be better and better. Ther’s no other way. It’s people who buy from you, not Google crawlers.

Sounds hard?

I have something to soothe your doutbs - no it’s not. And what’s even better – it’s FUN! White-hat SEO is for achievers, entrepreneurs who found their place in life and want to drive their businesses up. If you’re just looking for easy money on the web then white-hat SEO – and, quite frankly, no SEO – will ever help you. Honestly, ask yourself – if you’re mediocre what right do you have to claim top positions in anything? You have to show passion for what you do. You can fool Google and rank high for a while. You will drive plenty of people to your site but they will immediately bounce off it and go to someone else. It doesn’t matter if you’re a plumber or a pop star – your site has to deliver what your audience desires – and more!

White-hat SEO is essentially advertising and PR taken online. It’s about convincing people you’re so good that they should link to you, share it with friends, talk about you. Black-hats have some impact only on the web, but a great white-hat campaign will make web surfers REALLY talk about you – online and offline.

As you can see now – the question is not “why would you?” but “why wouldn’t you?”. Even more – if you deliver good service, want to grow your business and make your customers happy you HAVE TO do white-hat SEO, because that will give you so much more than webspam. And if you lack passion, if you’re looking for quick and easy money, if you’re happy selling crap then honestly – screw you. Get lost, we don’t need you and nobody in the web does.

If you’re new to SEO check out this short video and look up the names in Google. These are the guys to keep an eye on – their seriously good.

So, if you are interested in learning more about white-hat SEO – stay tuned. We have only just begun.