The new feature appears to return accurate results and gives the option of showing ALL backlinks, or excluding/including links from specific top-level-domain (e.g. .co.uk, .edu, .gov etc) domains, subdomains or domain folders. For example, you can use this filter to find all the backlinks coming from .co.uk or .gov sites.

The Live Search Webmaster Center blog posting goes on to elucidate some of the advantages of backlinks, including:

• Links show who has taken an interest in your product or service and may represent ways of gaining product feedback. They may also be potential sources of promotion.
• You can find out how what discussions are occurring about you in the world of social media by using the filter feature to target specific social media sites.
• Determining the quality of the links.

Since the number of backlinks can be very large, the tool also gives you the opportunity to download the backlinks into a CSV file for further analysis.

You can also use a negative keywords specifier to ensure that advertisements are not displayed if certain words appear in the query. A classic example would be to exclude advertisements for queries including the word: ‘free’.

Exact match ensures that you get the most exactly targeted advertisements, however, at the same time your advert will appear far less often.

Create different combinations of keywords for exact match

A way of getting the best of both worlds is to include a number of different combinations of the words and to include them in your ‘exact match’ campaign. I developed a free tool to help with this which can be found at formatclick.com. Go to the site and scroll down until you find the ‘permutator’ button. Enter a phrase and press submit and you will get a list of permutations of the phrase or phrases.

For example, if you entered:

• hosting with updates

you would get the following permutations:

• hosting with updates
• hosting updates with
• with hosting updates
• with updates hosting
• updates hosting with
• updates with hosting

Some of of doubtful use, but you may find some combinations worthy of inclusion in an exact match campaign.

Cuil’s claims to fame include a very large search index (121,617,892,992 web pages at the time of writing) and founders who (mostly) hail from Google.

The design of the site is crisp and clear with an attractive black, gray and powder blue theme. Search results are returned in a three column format and include images from the sites in the search results.

It sounds like it has got a lot going for it, but in a few tests I did, the relevancy of the results was very poor. It may look good and may have a lot of pages in the index - but if results are not what you are looking for then things don’t bode well for Cuil.

Cuil’s founders claim: “… Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance. When we find a page with your keywords, we stay on that page and analyze the rest of its content, its concepts, their inter-relationships and the page’s coherency.” Unfortunately the delivery of this seems flawed.

On the positive side it is great that competition is alive and well in the area of search. Competition creates innovation. It seems that Cuil raised a tidy sum of venture capital to get things moving, so there is also investment money to help create alternatives to the industry leviathan, Google.

So, in conclusion, I guess I am a little luke-warm about Cuil.

HitTail works by creating a small snippet of Javascript that its users add to their sites (on every page). Using this Javavscript snippet HitTail is able to track the searches that eple made to find a particular site. The searches can be viewed in real time bu logging into your HitTail account.

The core of the HitTail idea is to provide information on the ‘long tail’ of searches that people make to find a site. A significant percentage of visitors find a site based on a few keywords BUT the vast majority of visitors find the site by using keywords that are in the ‘long tail.’ HitTails’ crown jewels is a suggestion list.

The suggestion list is created using patent pending technology and creates a list of terms that HitTail believes would be worthwhile for you to create conetent about. They particularly recommend creating content using a blog or CMS because of the ease of use.

According to HitTail, creating new content based on the suggestions creates a snowball effect and further suggestions. The end result should be significant new traffic.

Visit HitTail to view some informative demo videos about the HitTail service.

I quickly learned that during development it was vital to keep checking how a site rendered in multiple browsers (and on the same browsers running on different operating systems). Having said that, there are an awful lot of browser variants out there and several operating systems.

A great tool to help with this problem is browsershots.org. All you need to do is enter the URL of the page that you want to check and then make a selection of the browsers you want to check against.

Browser alternatives to check your Web page against

Currently the following, very comprehensive selction is supported:

Linux

Dillo 0.8, Epiphany 2.22, Firefox 1.0, Firefox 1.5, Firefox 2.0, Firefox 3.0, Flock 1.2, Flock 2.0, Galeon 1.3, Galeon 2.0, Iceape 1.1, Iceweasel 3.0, Kazehakase 0.2, Kazehakase 0.4, Kazehakase 0.5, Konqueror 3.5, Minefield 3.1, Mozilla 1.7, Navigator 9.0, Opera 9.25, Opera 9.50, Opera 9.51, SeaMonkey 1.1,SeaMonkey 2.0,

Windows

Firefox 1.5, Firefox 2.0, Firefox 3.0, Flock 1.1, Flock 1.2, Flock 2.0, K-Meleon 1.1, Minefield 3.1, MSIE 4.0, MSIE 5.0, MSIE 5.5, MSIE 6.0, MSIE 7.0, MSIE 8.0, Navigator 9.0, Opera 9.23, Opera 9.24, Opera 9.25, Opera 9.26, Opera 9.27, Opera 9.50, Opera 9.51, Safari 3.0, Safari 3.1, SeaMonkey 1.1, SeaMonkey 2.0

Mac OS

Camino 1.6, Firefox 2.0, Firefox 3.0, Safari 2.0, Safari 3.0, Safari 3.1, Safari 4.0

Once you enter your URL and made a browser selection the tool goes and creates screen shots of your page in each browser/OS combination.

BrowserShots processing your site against the selected browsers

This can take some time, but once complete the screenshots are displayed on the Web page.

Your Web pages renders differently in different browsers

By hovering over each image you will see a larger version. You can also double click on an image to see a larger version.

Browsershots is a great tool for doing an audit of your current sites, or for helping during the initial design phase.

Front screen of the Spam detector Web site

I didn’t really think I would have a problem, but I tried it on one of my sites and was surprised to see the some of the CSS I had used to include a horizontal menu was showing as potential spam. What I had done was to create one large php menu file that I include in every page of my site, with each sub menu in a seperate division, like so:

<div class=”seo”>
<ul>
<li><a href=”search-engine-optimization.php”>START HERE</a></li>
<li><a href=”search-engine-optimization-prices.php”>PRICES</a></li>
</ul>
</div><!–end div id seo –>

My CSS file included the following syntax:

.seo { display: none; }
.resources { display: none; }
.about { display: none; }
body#seo .seo { display: block; }
body#resources .resources { display: block; }
body#about .about { display: block; }

The body tag of each page included an ID, e.g.

<body id=”seo”>

The result was that pages with the body tag ID of ‘SEO’ have the SEO menu included. Pages with the body tag ID of ‘resources’ have the resources menu included, and so on….

This was the technique that the search engine SPAM detector picked up.

Although this technique was not meant to be deceptive, I could not find anything in Matt Cutt’s blog or elsewhere to indicate that Google regarded using CSS in this way as acceptable practice.

To be on the safe side I decided to change my menu to include items selected by a simple php routine based on page name. Hence no need to use the display: none; CSS any longer.

One of my projects is to make a comprehensive list of SEO data needs and then go about creating a matrix to match those needs with available information tools.

Before the change the only way of getting this information was to take a guess by looking at a bar within the keyword tool that gave a rough approximation for comparison purposes between different keyword phrases.

Alternatively you could have subscribed to Wordtracker - but Wordtracker gets all ist dat from two sparsely used metacrawlers: Dogpile and Metacrawler. Its results were likely to be less accurate, especially for more esoteric and thinly searched subjects.

I ran one of my sites through the updated Google keyword tool, and for example, for the term ‘graphic design companies’ it returned 9,900 searches for June. Google says that the tool produces an approximate number, but I suspect that this is fairly accurate.

If you go to Wordtracker and use their free keywords tool to enter the same term, the results are markedly different.

The article is particularly strong in describing some of the things to beware of when talking to an SEO.

• Redirection plugin which allows you to change your permalink structure and ensures that search engines can still find pages that have already been indexed. This plugin provides many other facilities such as tracking 404 errors
• SEO Slugs automatically modifies posting ’slug’ text to remove words such as ‘what’, ‘you’ or ‘can.’
• Comments. The standard Wordpress template includes a rather blunt ‘no comments’ statement when a post has not received any comments. Joost suggests changing this to a be more friendly. I have changed mine to ‘Please leave a comment. We would love to get your insight.’

Altogether it is well worth reading through his suggestions.