Whilst considering responses it is important to take into account the balance that must be struck – on one hand comments are important to your blog and should be encouraged, on the other hand nobody wants to read a blog that is little more than a collection of spammy comments.

There are 6 possible methods of filtering out spam comments :-

1) Manual Moderation (approval) of comments – the most basic approach is that the blog owner reviews each comment and approves (or otherwise) it prior to publication. Time consuming but very effective.

2) Use of Captcha codes prior to posting – this requires a random number or word to be entered prior to a comment being submitted. Whilst this will be effective against spam comments posted by software tools it will not stop a determined manual poster. Captcha codes can be implemented via various plugins.

3) Use of blacklists – there are plugins available that will examine the source of comments and automatically bar them if they originate from known spam addresses.

4) Word based filtering – again tools are available that examine the content of the post and look for trigger words (e.g. sexual, pharmaceutical etc) and then bar the content if they are found.

5) Heuristic – there are “artificial intelligence” tools that look at user behaviour, content of post etc and “decide” if a post is spam or not.

6) Implement “no follow” attributes on your blog – whilst this does not prevent comment spam it discourages spammers as they do not get the backlinks they are looking for.

Whilst there are many approaches and tools available there is no real substitute and the overall recommendation is the combined use of the above tools but always backed up by a final manual moderation.

Whilst Google dominates the search market (with around 68% market share) there is still a sizeable chunk of the search market (approx 32%) that falls outwith Google. The main other search players are as follows

1) Yahoo – around 16% of total search volume still goes through Yahoo.

2) MSN/Windows Live Search/Bing – although only around 10% of total searches go through MSN/Windows Live Search/Bing this amount is growing month on month.

3) AOL – around 3% of the search market

4) ASK – only around 1% of searches now go through ASK.

5) The rest (e.g. My Web, Comcast, Yellow Pages etc) – only comprise 2% of the total search market when combined.

As can be seen from the above figures it is only really MSN/Windows Live Search/Bing and Yahoo that it would appear to be worthwhile expending any effort in optimizing your site for. The rest of the engines only comprise 6% of the market and hence, whilst your site should be listed in these directories, they are not worth specifically optimising for. Perhaps the best approach for this group of engines is to use an automatic search engine submission tool.

One other directory that is worth mentioning, even though it does not appear in the list of top search providers, is DMOZ.org. DMOZ is a human edited directory (as opposed to a search engine) and provides results to many other engines and directories and therefore it is worth the effort of a manual submission.

In order to answer this question you must first understand how a search engine  finds your web pages and how do you make this process easy for them (after all you want to get all your pages into their results so you should make this process as easy as you can !)

The process of web page discovery is carried out by “spiders” (automated software tools that search the web) during a process known as “crawling”.  The spiders find new content by following links found within sites or from external sites. The following of links aspect of the process is the critical element of answering the question why a sitemap is important – if the spiders cannot find the links easily then they cannot be followed and your content will essentially become invisible to the search engines.

Having a sitemap for your site clearly signposts to the visiting spiders where all your pages are and what the link structure is between them. This facilitates the spidering process and helps to ensure that all your pages are indexed.

Without a sitemap you run the risk of some of your pages not being discovered, and it goes without saying that if a page has not even been discovered then it is impossible for it to rank well in the results !.

There are many tools available to generate (and validate) sitemaps so production and maintenance of sitemaps should not be too much of an overhead and ceratainly the production of a sitemap is an extremely worthwhile activity.

Backlink checkers – verify backlinks to your site, check what anchor text they are using and just generally ensure that your backlink campaign is on track.

Link Analyzer – anlayze your inbound and outbound links to make sure all is well, also to be used to that often over looked task – verification of internal links within the site itself.

Keyword density checker – make sur ethat your pages have the correct keyword density and that you do not look like your are “keyword stuffing” your pages just to get high rankings.

Position checker – make sure that your SEO campaigns are effective and you are climbing up those positions !

URL Submitter – a vital tool to take the leg work out of submitting your site to potentially hundreds of search engines.

Social Web tools – check that links to your site are appearing on the social network sites (Twitter, FaceBook etc)

Website Speed Test – there is no point in marketing your site if it does not respond in a timely fashion – visitors will simply not wait !

Source Code tools – CSS validator, HTML validator etc – these may seem like technical tools but poor HTML and CSS can harm your rankings (as well as delivering a poor visitor experience)

Meta Tag Generator – meta tags are important in your ranking efforts and such tools are useful to help make sure you get then right

Spider Emulator / checker – you should always make sure that your site looks OK when viewed from the perspective of a search engine spider. These tools give you a useful insight in how spiders see your site and help you correct any potential errors.

Search engine spiders are automated software agents (often known as “bots”) that search the internet on a regular and controlled basis in order to discover new sites, pages and information (this process is commonly known as “crawling”)

They carry out these searches by following the hyperlinks they find within sites and pages (hence the importance of site links and backlinks – they are the signposts that the spiders follow whilst they are crawling the web).

The search engines use spiders not only to discover new sites and pages to be included in their search results but also to discover the number of links that  there are for a particular site or page. The discovery of these backlinks normally constitutes an important part of how a page is ranked within the search results.

When a spider visits or crawls a site it first looks for a “robots.txt” file as this contains important instructions for visiting robots that tell them which sections of the site to crawl, how often to visit and other important information – it is therefore important that you have an up to date robots.txt file that is in spider readable form – there are tools available to check this.

As spiders look for links having a sitemap is really useful as it provides all the links in a one stop shop for the spiders to access in an easy fashion. Anything that facilitates the efficient spidering of your site is to be recommended and sitemaps certainly fall into this category. Again there are tools available to generate and validate your sitemaps.

1) To protect your copyright – you may have html code or content that you do not want others to use and therefore you may want to use html encrypting to protect your intellectual property.

2) You may simply want to prevent others seeing hwo you have done your on page seo – by placing a html lock on your code this will prevent prying eyes from examining your on page seo efforts.

So to protect your source code use our free html encrypter.

For these reasons it is important that you run your pages and sites through a HTML validator – ours is free so why not give it a go !

The resounding answer to both these questions is – ABSOLUTELY NOT !.

We need to be very clear that all links are not equal – in fact it is possible to go even further than this and actually say that some links are less than worthless, in fact they may even actually be harmful to your ranking.

If you were to create a ranking list of possible links then this would be the order:-

1) Links from .edu and .gov domains are the “best” types of links a site can get – particularly if the site has a high pagerank as well.

2) Links from well established, high pagerank general domains (e.g. .com, .net, .co.uk etc)

3) Links from more recent, lower pagerank sites (i.e. more recently created / less well established sites)

4) General sites

Many of the “Dominate Google” tools and sites that you see that offer an apparent  shortcut to getting a top ranking on google will simply create hundreds of backlinks to your site from their existing network of sites (usually blogs). Whilst this may give a short term boost to your rankings this will not be sustainable. The quality of these links is normally very poor and you will eventually be penalised for these links and your ranking will drop accordingly.

So all links are definitely not the same and you need to invest time and effort in gathering the right type and quality of backlink for your site.

1) Keywords, Keywords , Keywords ! – many people start writing content without fully researching what they are writing about. You need to be very clear what your keywords are prior to writing anything, do not try and cram too many keywords on one page – 3 or 4 max or you need to split the piece up into smaller pieces.

2) Title – your title MUST contain your primary keywords and it must also draw the user in

3) MetaTags – anything you write should have meta tags – title, keywords etc

4) Keyword Density – make sure you do not “keyword stuff” your content – the keywords your are optimizing for should not be more than 2% o fthe word count of the entire piece.

5) Length – 250 to 500 words is optimal, less than this and you cannot get the message across effectively and any more and you run the risk of being boring and irrelevant.

6) Write for Humans – at the end of the day if the piece of writing is not attractive to humans it will not be attractive to the search engines.

7) Be original – do not Plagiarize and do not simply spin existing content – try and do something new.

Watch the page names – if you are creating web pages then the page names should reflect the keywords and title of the piece – page1.htm is not a good page name !

9) Know what your competitors are doing – you are not operating in a vacuum – do searches on things you are going to write about and see what else is being written, what people are interested in etc

10) Proof Read ! – mistakes do not look good to humans nor do they look good to spiders.

In essence the answer is no different to the answer for any other type of website – there are several techniques that you can use and these are outlined below :-

1) Articles – by writing and, more importantly, distributing articles that relate to your blog posts you can not only get your message across to a wide audience but also help to generate those all important backlinks via your authors signature. The key is to post your articles to good quality directories like ezinearticles, articlebase and goarticles. You may also wish to consider using a distribution service such as iSnare.

2) Search engine submission – by submitting your site to the many engines out there you will not only help generate traffic but also generate further backlinks.

3) Forums – by posting relevant and useful posts (complete with a signature that contains a backlink to your site) to relevant forums, you will generate further links.

4) Content – as the saying goes content is king and by having good quality, fresh content you will offer a clear incentive for other sites to link you.

5) Freebies – everyone loves a freebie and if you can offer something tempting on your blog site you will get people to link to you.

6) Comments on other blogs – if you post relevant and useful posts (complete with a signature that contains a backlink to your site) on other peoples blogs you will generate further links. An interesting slant on this is through the use of the commentluv wordpress plugin – we will deal with this in another article. A particular favorite tool of ours is “comment kahuna” – great for finding relevant blogs to post to !

This is obviously not an exhaustive list and we cover some of these subjects in other articles but hopefully we will have given you some food for thought.