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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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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DownThemAll!
http://www.downthemall.net/
If you’re downloading a large file (for example a website backup) it can be very irritating if you get disconnected or your computer crashes.  Typically this always seems to happen within the last 10%!
DownThemAll! is a download manager integrated into Firefox which is able to pause and resume downloads.  The neat thing about it is that its completely integrated – when you start a download you get an option to download with DownThemAll!.

Xmarks (previously Foxmarks)
http://download.xmarks.com/download/all
Thanks to the recent fashion of “small cheap computers”, it seems everybody has at least 2 computers nowadays.  With my home PC, laptop and work computer I can’t live without Xmarks – it’s a bookmark synchroniser which keeps your bookmarks identical across computers.  It has some nifty features such as bookmark profiles (so you can vary your bookmark toolbar at work for example), and if you’re on a computer where you can’t install the add-on, you can still see your bookmarks from a web page.
It’s compatible with Firefox on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux – as well as Internet Explorer and Safari.

TwitterFox
http://twitterfox.net/
If you’re a Twitter fanatic like some of my colleagues, you’ll find this simple add-on a blessing.  It adds an icon on the status bar which will notify you when someone you’re following tweets on Twitter.  You can also quickly tweet or reply to a tweet directly from your browser without loading up Twitter.

Firebug
http://getfirebug.com/
This is one for the web developers out there.  Firebug lets you inspect and alter the current webpage – allowing you to explore the document tree and CSS styles of a specific element and tweak them instantly in-place.  It’s also got a powerful JavaScript debugger/profiler that helps you track down those annoying errors.

VertTabbar
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/8045
When one of my colleagues mentioned this add-on to me, I was sceptical.  But I find myself becoming more and more attached to it.  The add-on simply moves the tab bar to a vertical position on the left-right of your browser.  This means you can have more tabs open and still see their titles.  It works perfectly on a widescreen monitor where horizontal space isn’t at a premium.

Speed Dial
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4810
Speed Dial adds a “quick launch” page to Firefox, where you can put your most used websites with thumbnails for each of them.  This feature will be familiar to Opera and Chrome users.  It can be configured to appear every time a new tab is opened, making it a good “jumping page”.  It’s just a shame it can’t be synchronised with Xmarks!

What are your favourite add-ons?  Let us know here and we can all share!!!

Or have you jumped ship to Chrome or IE8?  Let us know!

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In January Internet Explorer was the most used browser with a 50.41% share of visits and Firefox was second coming in with 10% less traffic at 40.63% of the share. However, every month so far this year we have seen a steady decline in Internet Explorer users and an increase for FireFox, Safari and Chrome. IE nearly lost the number 1 spot in |March, hanging on by 0.4%, but was finally dislodged by FF in April and has not looked like reclaiming this position since.

It is ironic that IE’s decline started at around the same time as IE8 was taken out of Beta and made available for general download and it slipped in to 2nd place the same month the final version was released. If we look at the browser version being used in more detail we can see IE6 usage is on the decline although nowhere near at the rate of IE7 suggesting the majority of IE8 users are upgrading from IE7 rather than IE6 (IE6 users really do like their browser! A note to the person who used IE 4.0 in May, please upgrade to something else, anything!)

From the data in the first graph we can see that IE7 and IE6 users are jumping ship and moving over to one of the alternatives rather than simply upgrading.

To be fair, our site’s visitors and users are inherently more technically minded than the average internet user and more involved in the development of the internet as an entity in itself and I would argue that FireFox is more likely to be used by this group. However, although the global statistics for web browser usage still show Internet Explorer is the most used browser the decline of Internet Explorer is still clear as is the rise of FireFox, Chrome and Safari.

It may seem that this can only be accelerated by Microsoft removing IE from the next Windows launch in response to the EU Parliaments anti-trust action against them,  this announcement was however treat with some scepticism.

It was also critical of the Microsofts apparent plan to sell retail copies of Windows 7 without any web browser at all, which could set up a potential Catch-22 situation in that the ploy might make it impossible for buyers to initially access the Internet at all in order to download any alternative web browser.

The EC statement said, “In terms of potential remedies, if the Commission were to find that Microsoft had committed an abuse, the Commission has suggested that consumers should be offered a choice of browser not that Windows should be supplied without a browser at all.”

The chief complainant in the European browser case against Microsoft says the move to strip Internet Explorer out of Windows 7 in Europe is an insufficient step that will not lead to better competition in the browser market.

In an interview, Opera chief technology officer Håkon Wium Lie said that with regulators threatening action, Microsoft was under pressure to do something, but said that its choice was not what Opera was looking for. Lie went on to say that Opera wants people to have access to more browsers, not fewer.

“I don’t believe this is going to restore competition in the marketplace,” he said.

Instead, Lie favours a proposal that the European regulators have been considering that would require users to be given a choice to download one or more browsers the first time they access the internet.

“We would like to give users a genuine choice,” Lie said. The remedy that the European Commission has been discussing, a so-called ‘must-carry’ remedy, would be a better solution, he said.

Microsoft acknowledged in a blog posting that regulators could still force that to happen.

“Our decision to only offer IE separately from Windows 7 in Europe cannot, of course, preclude the possibility of alternative approaches emerging through Commission processes,” deputy general counsel Dave Heiner said in the blog.

But Heiner said Microsoft believes its move puts it in compliance with European law.

“We believe that this new approach, while not our first choice, is the best path forward given the ongoing legal case in Europe,” he wrote. “It will address the ‘bundling’ claim while providing European consumers with access to the full range of Windows 7 benefits that will be available in the rest of the world.”

Is your website seeing a similar trend and what are your thoughts on how Microsoft can reclaim their dominance of the market (or even if that is possible now)?

Note: The data used in this post is taken from the top 5 browsers for each month. The percentage figures represent their share of that total and not the total percentage share of the entire site/ all browsers.

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