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Whether you are a complete beginner or you an SEO master, these sites have enough of a back catalogue and regular new information to keep you going for months!

1. http://www.seomoz.org/blog: Starting as an SEO agency they have used their blog to position themselves as a global resource for the industry
2. http://www.seobook.com/blog: A mix of practical advice, industry news and personal opinion
3. http://searchengineland.com/columns/: one of my favourite sites, the columns section covers all aspects of search marketing
4. http://searchenginewatch.com/sew_archive_experts&type=sew_experts/sem-101&issue=2009: Really good introductory articles to various aspects of online marketing
5. http://www.wolf-howl.com: This site has been around for years and it mixes advice with commentary and personal opinion
6. http://econsultancy.com/blog: The volume of posts each day can be a bit too much and some articles don’t go in to a lot of detail, but the percentage that do hit the money make it worth it.
7. http://www.toprankblog.com/: Good traditional ‘how to’ blog with some great advice for all levels of knowledge

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There are 6 different types of risk:

• Physical risk (Will it physically hurt them or anyone else?)
• Functional risk (Will it work how they want it to?)
• Social risk (Is it socially acceptable within their circle?)
• Psychological risk (How does the product fit in with their perception of themselves?)
• Financial risk (Can they afford it?)
• Time risk (Is the time it takes to buy the product worth the effort?)

Your aim should be to use your website to provide visitors with the information they need to overcome their perceived risk.

Contact us, find us & about us pages
No one likes to spend money with a faceless company with no clear way of getting in touch if there are any problems. Easy to find ‘contact us’ and if you have offices, ‘find us’ pages show people there is someone on the other side. Equally ‘about us’ pages help to put you and your website in to context along with adding a personal touch, especially if you use photos of yourself.

Money back guarantee
The inability to see a product or touch it is one of the major hurdles people have to get over when purchasing online and a product can look very different in the real world to the image on the website. You can help reduce the financial risk by allowing them to return it and get their money back. This also goes for services.

Demo of product
In a similar vein to the point above, screen shots are not always enough for some visitors. Being able to ‘test drive’ the service before they commit to a purchase is a major plus for many visitors and will increase your conversion rate.

3rd party endorsements
Having your product endorsed by a business or personality well regarded in your field will reduce psychological and social risk by creating a sense of trust through your association with them. This can be as simple as listing your blue chip suppliers (e.g. Microsoft) all the way up to getting a celebrity on board (e.g. a football apparel website hiring a footballer)

Testimonials, case studies & customer comments
Being able to see there are existing (happy) customers is important to potential customers because they don’t want to feel they are alone. You can help to Increase the credibility of any comments and/ or testimonials with the person’s names, links to follow and putting the date of their comment to show how fresh they are.

Heritage
The knowledge you are dealing with an established and stable brand is important to customers because they associate that with being trustworthy. Few website owners can claim “Since 1908” but because the internet is so new and sites come and go so quickly, a web site as recent as “since 2004” can feel like an old horse!

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To ensure the searcher a) comes directly to your website and b) doesn’t see any negative entries that can creep in to the top 10 results, it is important that you use as wide a range of branded content as possible for the search engines to spider and rank. Taking your position at number one in the SERP organic section as red, below are other methods to ensure you dominate your brand searches.

Paid search top result

It may seem strange to bid on your own brand name when you already have top organic position but with clicks likely to be as low as 5p to 20p per click you should view it as an investment in online real estate. Eye tracking research shows that people’s eyes start at the top of the SERP and as you go down the page fewer and fewer people look at that area (see the research here).  By having two entries at the top you are increasing the likelihood of a click and forcing other results further below the fold. You are also blocking anyone else bidding for the top paid spot on your brand name.

Put your blog on a sub domain

Google views sub-domains as separate entities to the main site which gives you a great opportunity to get a 2nd entry in the organic results by naming your blog something along the lines of http://blog.domain.com

Create a Facebook page

A well populated and linked to (e.g. from your main website) Facebook company profile should see your Facebook profile be shown high in the rankings. To set up a business profile go here http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php

Wikipedia page

Although the terms state that you are not allowed to write an entry about an organisation you are associated with, let’s be honest, it happens all the time. There are too many corporate entries for it no to! Google loves Wikipedia and ranks it’s page in the top 5 for countless search terms. Set up your own page to benefit from this love! Go to the home page here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page and click on ‘create account’ in the top right to get started.

Google Universal Search

Google is always trying new ways at presenting the web’s information, and it is rare to be shown a SERP that doesn’t have either some results from Google News, Product search, blog search or all three! If you don’t have one, get a Google account and start using the submission and feed features to make sure Google is picking up your press releases, blog posts and displaying your products.

Twitter

As we touched on in a previous post about Twitter’s integration in to the fabric of search, Twitter accounts are only going to become more prominent in the SERP, not less. Make sure you have an account and link to it from your home page to show Google how important it is.

YouTube channel

Following the same theory as Facebook and Twitter, a profile on such a large and heavily linked website will be shown highly in searches for your brand name if combined with a respectable amount of content and a little linking from your own site to the channel’s home page. Create an account here http://www.youtube.com/create_account?next=None

What about page 2?

How often do you go beyond the first page of Google? Probably rarely if ever, and that’s the same for the majority of searchers. The truth is, if you’re in position 11 to 20, you’re going to get crumbs, if you’re not in the top 20, you’re nowhere!

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We have now launched our Customer Control Panel and eXtend Control Panel for the iPhone and Android powered phones.

Getting started
Using your iPhone you can manage your domain names, manage all your web hosting accounts , view the system status updates, view your invoices and go to the normal control panel. To access this, using your Apple iPhone, iPod Touch or Android phone go to your standard log-in  (http://instacontrol.yourfulldomain)  and log in.

INSTAhosts new iphone control panel

Whatever your thoughts about the iPhone there is no denying it represents a step change in the way we access data and spend our time on the move and thanks mainly to the ever growing app store we have immediate access to all aspects of our digital life. The success of the app store is well documented with over 85,000 apps to choose from, 2 billion downloads, over 6.3 million apps downloaded every day, and the iPhone OS is now the 4th most used OS. Our recently launched INSTA Host  iPhone control panel based on customer feedback and demand is testament to the increasing importance of mobile internet access and business use.

The downside to the success of the app store is the sheer volume of apps there are to search through is mind blowing, so we have done it for you! Below are some of the best apps (paid and free) we have found for managing your website through your iPhone. We are sure there are plenty we could have listed, but there is a good chance we haven’t come across them yet, so if you know of any, leave a comment below.

http://analyticsapp.com/: Access all your Google Analytics data through a specially designed interface for the iPhone making it easier and quicker to pull and report data.

http://www.ftponthego.com/: “FTP On The Go” lets you log into your server using your iPhone to download and upload files, and comes with an inbuilt text editor to amend files on the fly.

http://iphone.wordpress.org/:  The official WordPress app allowing you to  write posts, upload photos, edit pages, and manage comments on your blog from your iPhone

http://www.concentricsky.com/products/iphone/: CSS, HTML, JavaScript and  PHP cheat sheets on your iPhone

http://www.code-line.com/software/: Colour code selector including Pantone, web safe colours, and HTML colours.

http://ego-app.com/: Keep up to date with your web 2.0 stats including feedburner feed subscriptions, twitter followers, Google Analytics data etc.

http://www.freetheapps.com/app.php?app=crop: Crop and rotate  images without any loss of picture quality

http://www.itunes.com/app/sourceviewer: (Direct link to iTunes) View a web page’s HTML, CSS & JavaScript

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Non-Latin characters are to be used in future

The organisation that oversees them has backed the use of non-Latin characters from languages like Arabic, Chinese, Hebrew, Hindi and Korean.

Up to now, addresses have been limited to the 26 characters in the Latin alphabet used in English (A-Z) as well as 10 numbers and the hyphen.

That has meant internet users with little or no knowledge of English may still have to type in Latin characters to access their country’s web pages.

But now, web addresses using characters from different languages will be available by mid-2010, including TLDs (top-level domains such as “.com”)

Their use has been approved by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) board at a meeting in Seoul, South Korea.

Nations and territories will be able to apply for internet address endings reflecting their name and using their national language from November 16, when ICANN’s Internationalised Domain Name (IDN) fast track process begins.

Major shake-up of web addresses planned

If the applications meet certain criteria, including government and community support and a stability evaluation, the applicants will be approved to start accepting registrations for domain names.

More than half the world’s internet users do not use English or a Latin-based language as their first language and this move will see around 100,000 new characters available for use in IDNs.

Peter Dengate Thrush, chairman of ICANN, said: “The coming introduction of non-Latin characters represents the biggest technical change to the internet since it was created four decades ago.”

Here at Insta Host we believe that a review after the first wave of applicants will give an early indication of how this change may change the evolution of the Internet, giving a glimpse of the type of TLDs which may come into use.  Whilst it may seem sound business strategy for a company to run or register a domain TLD such as “.host” the real question is whether the public will trust and use the new domains – this will be the true indicator of how “exciting” this change may be!.

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Don’t forget, from 99p. Eco Friendly, carbon neutral hosting from Instahost.co.uk

Christmas icons

1. http://www.clevericons.com/icon/christmas06/

2. http://www.webdesignerwall.com/general/free-christmas-icons-for-you/

3. http://www.iconarchive.com/category/christmas/christmas-icons-by-zeusbox.html

4. http://www.standard-icons.com/stock-icons/standard-christmas-icons.htm

5. http://dryicons.com/free-icons/preview/christmas-surprise-four-in-one/

Christmas photographic images (free)

6. http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=christmas&l=4

7. http://freedigitalphotos.net/images/search.php?search=christmas&match_type=any

8. http://morguefile.com/archive/browse/#/?qury=christmas&terms_all=christmas

9. http://www.sxc.hu/browse.phtml?f=search&txt=christmas&w=1&x=8&y=9

Christmas WordPress themes

10. http://www.devlounge.net/extras/iceburgg

11. http://wpthemes.amazing-christmas-ideas.com/cg/

12. http://www.simplywp.net/2008/11/19/hello-snowman-christmas-theme-for-wordpress/

13. http://www.blogger-template.info/blue-christmas-theme

14. http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/12/24/christmas-wordpress-theme/

Christmas CSS templates

15. http://www.free-css.com/free-css-templates/page76/happy-holidays.php#bookmarks

16. http://www.templatemo.com/preview/templatemo_045_christmas

17. http://www.entheosweb.com/photoshop_templates/christmas.asp

18. http://www.dreamweaverresources.com/holiday-templates/index.htm

Let us know of any other you would like to share!!! by leaving  a comment below

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It has its own eco-system
An entire eco-system has sprung up using the twitter platform such as twitter alerts, tweet scheduling, back tweet analysis, polls, group tweets, pictures, backgrounds, advertising… the list goes on. The more developers that come on board to create new tools and applications based upon Twitter’s platform the more likely people are going to find a use for it.

The sheer size of its user base
When it comes down to it, the number of people who use Twitter is massive! Although growth has started to slow down, it still pulls in close to 25 million unique visitors from the USA alone, as shown by compete.com’s unique visitor statistics.

Should you be on Twitter?
A lot of webmasters and business have jumped on board Twitter without really asking why? As with any form of marketing, be it newspapers, Email marketing, or paid search, Twitter is not suitable for everyone. But the reasons why you should not be on Twitter should be based upon those factors and not because you think it will have gone by 2010. It is important to understand Twitter is now firmly established as a major source of traffic for websites, a revenue generator for supporting businesses and is soon to become a vital source of data for the search engines so any question of whether it is simply a short term fad should be dismissed.

Or Is It?

Too bad the real story of the company is one of top-to-bottom incompetence.

‘Twas always thus. Twitter was never really a company; it was a feature invented at another forgotten startup, spun off into its own venture. The programmer who came up with the idea for Twitter, Jack Dorsey, was named CEO, while Twitter’s better-known backer, Ev Williams, a Webhead who struck it rich by selling Blogger to Google five years ago, dithered about how much he wanted to be involved.

Despite Williams’ seeming indifference, Twitter took off — so much so that a crush of new users strained its servers, to the point that the service became famous for its technical incompetence. (The “fail whale,” a cheery cetacean icon displayed when Twitter’s website was unavailable, now appears on T-shirts in San Francisco and Brooklyn.)

In its business affairs, too, Twitter is proving incompetent. Most Web 2.0 startups run cheaply, but Twitter faces large bills from mobile-phone companies which charge it for forwarding text messages to mobile phones; the more it grows, the more it pays. And it has yet to announce publicly a way to make money.

That’s not to say it doesn’t have a scheme. The latest one we’ve heard floated: Twitter would charge companies to have verified Twitter feeds, so users would know that a message from, say, ExxonMobil really came from the oil company. (It’s not as hypothetical as it sounds; a Twitter user inexplicably impersonated ExxonMobil this summer.) Verified accounts might then pay Twitter for every message they send, and also get prominent listing in a Twitter directory.

If that sounds like utter nonsense, the fever-dream imaginings of a desperate business-development executive high on whiteboard-marker fumes, that’s because it is.

With no real hope of making money on its own, Twitter’s best hope is a buyout. But its executives have handled that poorly, too. Dorsey botched talks with Yahoo and then Facebook; he didn’t even tell his own board of directors he was talking to Facebook about a proposed $500 million acquisition. After that, he was fired as CEO and replaced by Williams, but stayed on as chairman, a nominal job which doesn’t require his presence at the Twitter office. One prominent Silicon Valley investor is fuming that Dorsey is still on the payroll at all.

So this apparently “Mickey Mouse ” operation is the future of news? That’s not the most frightening prospect. Even if Twitter were competently run and profitable, the end result is an unreadable jumble. Look closely at the coverage, if you can call it that, of the Mumbai attacks on Twitter. Sitting at their desks, most people had nothing to add except to observe that Mumbai used to be called Bombay — the kind of message that makes you wish Twitter’s length limit was zero characters, not 140.

As more users join, the Twitter feed becomes filled with more and more noise; repetitive retweetings, back-scratching praise, and self-congratulation. A set of amateurs celebrating each other not for the quality or insight of their reporting, but its brevity, swiftness, and modish form of delivery.

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