A few weeks ago Google mentioned the fact that the speed at which a site loaded would have an impact on it’s rankings. As usual, SEO world goes into minor meltdown on forums etc., but the reality is just common sense.

In a nutshell, if you have two identical sites in terms of links, relevent content etc., then Google would favour the faster loading one. Why? Simply because it’s all about the user getting to what they need to get to as fast as possible. It’s about Google’s customer experience. Just like it always has been. So, is the loading speed of your site important? Yes, but it should be anyway. No-one wants a site that takes more than a few seconds to load. That’s why many of my sites are “lo-tech”.

Here’s Google’s Matt Cutts making it even simpler to understand:

So, speed is one of 200 other SEO factors. Our job as business owners is to “best guess” the importance of these other factors. And the best guess that works best for the majority of website owners is common sense: keep producing relevent, quality content, a good user experience, and attracting good quality links from other relevent, aged, authority domains. Most of the other noise around SEO is just that: noise.

Funny this one. I started writing a web page on Sunday for a new niche I’m getting into, and I had an experimental SEO idea. Then I excitedly got up to aweber to tell all my subscribers about it, and then bottled it because it suddenly entered my head that I had no guarantee that this would work and even though I just wanted to get everyone involved so you could try the same thing for your own business etc. etc. I thought it would be interesting. But then, one of the kids fell over, the phone rang, the kettle boiled, John Craven said something interesting on the tellybox…you know the score.

So I didn’t send the email. I just conducted the experiment.

Then I forgot about it.

Then, after a number of huge business meetings this week and then a day teaching today, I suddenly remembered what I’d done on Sunday on the apple (I know it’s cool to call it a mac but it’s got a fucking APPLE on the front, not a raincoat) with all the kids climbing all over me wondering why I wasn’t playing Age of Empires* with them instead…

Bottom line: I’ve got a page into no.14 on Google out of 3.5million in a multi-multi-million ££ niche within 72 hours. Because this blog is not always read by people who like me, I’ll tell the rest of you what it is and how I did it at my seminar in 10 days (in the fag break). See ya then :-)

*some of the facts about the way I actually bring my children up have been changed to protect them from the psycopaths, wankers, pervs and craphounds that stalk this site. The rest of you are very welcome.

“The Art of Blogging for Business” seminar was held by me and Ken McCarthy in Manchester on 16th November. These are some of the testimonials we received…

Here’s what master internet marketer and martial arts guru Lloyd Irvin, Jnr. thought to the gig:

Here’s Chris Ruane:

Here’s Darryl Cygler:

Here’s Dave Muskett:

Here’s Frank Camacho

Out of interest, Frank won a place on the seminar in a competition set by Lloyd Irvin. This is the video that won him the place (glad I didn’t upset him on the day :-)…

Here’s CPA Ninja, Greg Davis:

Here’s King David from Las Vegas:

And here’s Mark Quinn…

Did you enjoy? Leave a comment.

If it’s not working properly, view it here

This is a new service shown to me by Mark Pocock this evening. I love it, but had a few problems embedding it. Social bookmark it and rate it if you like it.

How happy does it make us when we get emailed a video testimonial from one of our Inner Circle friends?

When it’s as good as this one from actors headshots specialist, Nik Gregan, very happy indeed :-)

In fact, this video deserves our prestigious “The Shiz” Award for best customer testimonial. Thanks Nick!

P.S. If you’re wondering what all the fuss is about, head over to the Inner Circle page.

On Youtube:

You can download the DVD quality video here

This is weird. Since I started talking about Internet Marketing I’ve moved into this strange world where people I’ve never met are contacting me, asking me questions, and generally being very nice. It’s mainly down to the fact that I’m now in people’s homes on DVD. It’s truly humbling to be able to publish this video testimonial on my work from 19-year old entrepreneur Glenn Bridges. Glenn has set up a charity dedicated to helping teenagers called InnerFlame.org.uk. It’s stated mission is “INSPIRING YOUNG PEOPLE TO REACH THEIR POTENTIAL”. This young man has all of the elements for success in business: tenacity, vision, intelligence and, well, see for yourself…

Thank you for your kind words, Glenn.

You can get the DVD Glenn’s referring to from here.

Here’s the experiment:

1. Pick an obscure niche or long tail keyword (I’ve chosen potato boxes)
2. Go to Squidoo.com, open an account, write a ‘lens’ on the subject. Make sure your keyword is the title of the lens (or at least in the title if someone’s already nabbed that)
3. Follow Squidoo’s “Health Check” advice and make sure you write two or three good text modules, pull in some content from amazon, youtube, RSS feeds etc. (It’s really simple to do)
4. Link to your new page using your blog (like I have here) and then email all your mates and ask them to reference the Lens using your keyword as the anchor text.
5. Sit back and see how quickly the lens rises in the rankings.
6. For the next bits, email me :-)

This is another clip from my talk at the British Library in June (Rachel Elnaugh’s Marketing Magicians). In this bit, I talk about the keyword long tail and dominating your market. Once the full DVD set is on sale from Rachel, I’ll post the link. If you are interest in learning more, click on my internet marketing course or sign up to my Internet Marketing Personal Coaching Programme.

This is a snippet from my talk at The British Library on June 2nd 2009. I’m talking here about how Google wants and rewards relevancy.

The event was Rachel Elnaugh’s Marketing Magicians and my talk was about an hour long. The whole DVD set of the event is not on sale yet, but when it is I’ll post you a link to where you can get it from. My review of the event can be found here.

We all know how important it is to have your site listed in DMOZ and Yahoo Directory for SEO purposes, but the other directory you must be in for maximum SEO juice is Best of The Web.

Submit to BOTW