Patrick Altoft's Blog

Wikipedia probably receives more traffic from Google than any other website. With over 2 million in depth articles the English version is most people's idea of a perfectly optimised site so what can we learn from it?

Most webmasters should know by now that link buying is a "black hat" search engine optimisation tactic. High profile sites are being given penalties for buying their way to the top and Google is publicly making life very tough for link buyers and sellers alike.

So why am I writing a link buyer's guide?

Google has one of the most basic interfaces on the web. In fact, the simplest pages on Google are their most profitable with most of the revenue coming from search pages and comparatively little arriving from maps, video, Gmail etc

The new Search Me search engine promises to deliver a new kind of interface and the developers no doubt hope to gain market share as a result.

In the early stages it is very important to monitor your site's reputation using something like Google Alerts or even a paid solution.

Before we discuss the launch of the website I want to focus on how to spread the viral articles most efficiently.

Before actually going "live" with your site it is important to make sure you have set up some key features to make your site stand out from the rest.

Launching a new website is a daunting prospect, so this week we have a four part series guiding you through the pitfalls and best practice strategies to make your new project a success.

Those of you who read The Times , Guardian , FT or the Telegraph this week probably heard about the campaign against Marks & Spencer by Britain's biggest union, Unite.

Anybody who knows about internet marketing probably wondered why a story about somebody using Google Adwords to bid on a brand name was such big news, myself included.

Last week I was discussing SEO with a small business owner who thought that the £60 a month he paid for optimising his website was expensive.

When I explained that a lot of companies (mine included) charge £500 - £1000 per day for consulting he came to the conclusion that his £60 per month was quite reasonable.

The issue is that some businesses still don't regard internet marketing as a professional activity in the same way as financial or legal advice.

While sorting through some comment spam today I found that one UK printing company had been dropping spam comments on my blog.

This sort of behaviour always strikes me as strange because surely any SEO company knows that links from blog comments are worthless?