Tim Nash has been doing SEO work for a while now, but never bothered to SEO his own name, until now that is. Tim has just launched The Tim Nash experiment to try to get his site ranked at the top of the search engines when searching for “Tim Nash” if all goes as planned, you will soon find Tim Nash the IT Consultant before Tim Nash the painter. Good luck there Tim!
While checking for backlinks to the 43Ads website today I noticed a mention of the site in Chris’ SEO blog. It turns out that the site has been awarded the ‘site of the month’ award for October. This monthly award is given to a website listed in the 100 lists directory In order to be eligible for the award, one main point is that the site should pass the W3C validation and use a valid CSS file. With this being my first site designed with CSS, I’m extra proud of the award! 
The Google Webmaster Tools have been enhanced with some great new features. You can now see graphs of Googlebots activity on your website. The graphs show you how many pages the bot read and how many kilobytes of data it downloaded from your site and the average time it took the bot to read the site.
If you see that the bot is using too much of your bandwidth, you can tell it to slow down on your site. If you want more visits from the Googlebot, simply tell it to crawl faster…
Another nice addition is the link counter on the Google Sitemap. For each sitemap you submit you can see how many links the map contains. If you are creating the sitemaps on autopilot, this is a nice feature to check if big G has received what you expected it to receive.
So we all want high ranking websites, for this we need inbound links. Not just any old link will do, we need links from related websites. The best thing would be if we had full control over the page that contains the link to our site.
One place that offers this is Squidoo, they let you create your own page, called a lens, that you can fill with content and links. The system is kind of like MySpace, but for serious people. You don’t find the messed up pages with backgrounds that make the content impossible to read like on MySpace.
At Squidoo your basic page layout is set and you only control the content, making this place a much more pleasant place to visit. People really try to make their lens a place that people want to visit, this is encouraged by offering them ways to make a little money thru their lens.
I’ve created my own lens at Squidoo and it actually brings some visitors to my site. Even though it’s not a lot of traffic comming in this way I’m quite sure the lens is helping me getting a better placement in the search engines.
To get a good ranking in the search engines we are all looking for incoming links. This is one of the basic things that search engines use to rank websites in the result pages. The theory behind this is very simple: if a lot of sites link to a site, it must be a good site.
Too bad that this is not always true, people try to do whatever they can to trick the search engines into thinking that their site is important enough to show high up in the results. We all want to be up there, this is a never ending battle between the website owners.
There’s a lot of ways to get those inbound links. You can buy link-spots on other sites, trade links or add a link to your forum signature, but these are exactly the kind of links that mess up the search engines. How about getting incoming links the way they should be: one way incoming links from sites that thought you are worthy of a link from them. These kind of links are not easy to get, but once you do get them, you will notice these are worth a lot more than all the other kind of links.
So how do you get sites to link to yours? Only one thing: you will need to have high quality, unique content on your site. Until then, treat others like you want to be treated: link out to sites that you think are worthy of a link! If your page or post was inspired on some other website, or if more quality information on the subject can be found somewhere else: link there! This is what links are for. The owner of the site you link to will notice your incoming link and return the favor, if you’re worthy!