The End of iTunes?

Everyone knows the popularity of video sites such as youtube, aol video and Metacafe, and many people use these websites to watch music videos of their favourite stars. The UK has recently announced that it will be restricting music videos on youtube and this week China completely blocked youtube from the whole country.



However, there's a new website which has the potential to blow youtube and even itunes out of the water. This is Spotify and is best described as an online jukebox. Users can listen to music, but not download, for free. There are the occasional ads to hear, but if that's too distracting, there's also an option to pay a small subscription for unlimited use. According to the press releases, there are over 10,000 songs being uploaded each day, and with the massive amount of internet-enabled phones on the market, who needs an iphone?

Google Image Search as a Dictionary

OK, so maybe this is a little off-topic, and hardly an SEO technique, but it is a blog by an Englishman who lives in Barcelona, and I found it quite funny so thought I'd share it (few light hearted posts now and again won't hurt, right?).

Pete Lidwell at Google Zurich posted an amusing post about his limited German getting in the way of conversations, and that he found google images like an online image dictionary (even quicker than a real dictionary, cos you don't even have to read the text!). Ovbiously this has it's limitations, and can probably only be used for physical nouns, but imagine the situation - you're in a restaurant on holiday in Barcelona, and have your handy pocket translator - be it electronic or pages of a book - and come accross the chef's reccomendation in Catalan like calçots, and have no idea what it is. Well, just get on your internet phone and log onto google images and there you go! Problem solved!

For website optimisation in Barcelona please contact me for analysis and a quote.

Great New Tool for Twitter

There's no denying that Twitter is huge. Despite the huge amount of spam and rubbish around on twitter, it's still an invaluable tool to be subscribed to, as long as you don't spend too much time on there. I've already explained before (which provoked some great comments)that for small businesses I think your time can be much better spent investing in link-building, or creating a couple more pages of quality content, instead of wasting 4 or 5 hours trawling through possible people to follow and their tweets of tinyurl links.


I also commented that the links are nofollow, and although this is not a huge problem - you still get the click through to your site, which can be a visitor/conversion, just no link juice - there's a cool new tool I found last night from those clever people at back Type. Back Type already have some great tools out there, and I suggest you visit their site and check out their products. They have an alert service a little like google alerts, which is very good and can often pick up a few alerts that google might miss depending on what time of day the alert is created.

The new tool is basically a url search on twitter. This is a great tool to use, as it will search for any url you type in - even if it's been used via a url shortening device such as tinyurl. I think this is a really cool new tool, and is a great way to sift through the mass of people on twitter who are just on there for fun, and to try and target more customers for your business. One of the quickest ways to use backtweets is to search for your competition's urls and find out who's talking about them, what they're saying, and who's following them. Check it out, and let me know what you think, I'd be pleased to hear any comments.

If you're looking to optimise your website, please contact me at Barcelona SEO for a chat about the possibilities and options for your website.

The Importance of url Structure

With regards to on-site SEO, there are some small changes you can make to your site structure which can make a huge difference. One of the great things you can ensure you do - which might not sound all that important - is to have a good, clean url for each page. Ideally, you'd like to try and include the keywords for that particular page in the url, too, but without being too spammy. Search englines will rank you higher if you do this correctly.



Google recently made a move to adjust the amount of duplicate content within the SERPs, so they clearly think it's important, too. If you look at the url for this blog post (google owns blogger) then you'll see it's also important.

I speak from experience. I have had a client who was finding it difficult to break into the top 5 results for a certain set of keywords. They had very dynamic urls which we changed to html keyword-based urls and they shot straight up to number 1. I realise that sometimes it can be a huge job, especially if there are databases involved, as the parameters and list of urls could possibly be endless, but if it's something you can consider for a small to medium sized site, then I highly reccomend it.

Want to find out more about improving your website's performance? Please contact me at Barcelona SEO and we can chat about it.

Link Building - the Importance of Anchor Text

This may seem like a really simple posting and some of you more advanced readers may want to skip this, but I think it's important to get the basic things right. I've already talked about a few strategies to link building for your website, BUT what's also equally important is how you get these links.

Anchor text basically just means the text you use for the link - the actual words that the url will direct you to. These typically would be your keywords that you have optimised for that particular page on your website. This is very often overlooked by many website owners - and there needs to be no more proof that this. That's an example of anchor text right there. I've used the word "this" but sent a completely different url in there. The link shows that the words "click here" give an organic number 1 listing in the SERPS to Adobe reader!



So anchor text linking is very important for gaining your links, but it's as equally important ON SITE. Avoid using links such as the words "next" or "following page" or "continue" - and try and really use the keywords on your website. If you have a natural web design and layout, you will be able to direct your users exactly where you want them to go, so it's just as easy to optimise your on-site links which will help slightly improve your position on the SERPs as well as letting the crawling robots know more about your site and it's structure.

Would you like to optimise your website? I offer affordable website optimisation in Barcelona and also Barcelona SEO Training in your company so you can take control of your website's destiny and start seeing improvements.

Link Building - Article Marketing

As I've mentioned on a few occasions, building links is one of the most important parts to a good SEO campaign.

One-way links to your site are also a great start to building your link arsenal, but can often be hard to attain. Link baiting is one clear way of going down this route, but if your site/blog is new then you can post something as controversial or challenging as you like but if next to no-one sees the post then it will never become viral. So there's a great way of obtaining one way links AND the possibility of generating even more from this source, too. Article marketing.



Article marketing is unique in that an article itself can become reprinted freely on any other website/blog, etc. BUT that you have two links to your site at the bottom of the article which always need to be re-printed along with the main body. So, if you write a good article about your niche, it might be re-printed on tens of other websites. If you write a great article, the viral aspect can earn you a lot of links - for free!

Now, some SEOs are announcing the early death of article marketing, with many sites allegedly using the nofollow attribute on your links. And there are now hundreds of article re-print sites offering this service. So my advice is to choose a handful of sites, and then track the links via your stats package (or Google Webmaster tools/Google analytics). Don't waste time writing an article and then trying to find all the possible sites you can - remember, google doesn't like duplicate content, so the vast amajority would be ignored anyway. The best idea is to write another article in that time, and build up your status as an expert in your field, which is great for branding and getting your name out there.

For more link building techniques and tips, contact me at Barcelona SEO - I'll be happy to discuss your website and help to plan a strategy together.