An SEO Newbie learning SEO yesterday (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Of course there are a lot of SEO’s out there who know a lot more then others which is why its always recommended to have a daily read of SEO blogs to see what the latest is.

One important task for any SEO agency or department is to hold training sessions so those who have a bit more knowledge can easily train others. This doesnt always have to be run by a senior member of the department as a topic could be given to anyone to go away and research and then present back to the team.

All of this has many advantages including:

1. Presentation skills are increased massively
   To give a personal touch on this, at school and university I was rubbish at presenting in front of people. No matter how much I prepared they all went a similar way, me, stood at the front, sweating far too much and swearing under my breath as I was extremely nervous, but like most things the more you do it, the better at it you get. After being pretty much thrown into the deep end and being asked to present in front of an entire agency of people a few times I got better, more confident and the nerves, sweat and swearing all went away. I can even be amusing… but only sometimes. Getting your department to take turns in presenting to one another makes perfect sense, helps get the right skills to do better presentations when speaking to clients or potential clients.
2. Keeps people up to date with the latest goings on in SEO.
   It’s always recommended to have a daily read of various SEO blogs and attend conferences like SMX or SAScon but it’s a given that there will be some who don’t have time due to meetings and mounting client work. Or they are just lazy.
3. It can save money!
   let’s face it, training courses ain’t cheap, and whilst they may be good to get a trainee/executive up to speed quickly, it’s just as good to hold a series of training lessons internally which may work better. Internal training allows the course to be more personal, more opportunities for the trainee to ask questions and base it on the actual clients he/she will work on!

Hopefully with this new training the SEO newbie should want to read more blogs and attend conferences to increase their knowledge of SEO, and RSS readers like Google Reader makes it super easy to put a list together and share it. So do it! They may thank you with a cup of tea.

Got any comments or suggestions on how you help train up SEO newbies? Leave it in the comments box below.

Visual Guide to Rich Snippets on SEOmoz created by BlueGlass Interactive.

Really Google? You want the error page as one of your sitelinks??

It’s ok, Dan The SEO can help you with this, give the Webmaster Tools Help on Sitelinks a read. That will tell you how to fix that.

I quite like it, and it should keep more people on YouTube (not that thats hard) and hopefully it will also increase related video views.

So everyone wins!

It works in a similar way to Adobe Flash and looks very similar too with a “stage” and time lines for editing the animation transitions and so on. The main difference is that Edge uses HTML5, CSS and javascript which should allow  web designers and developers to create sites like they would in Flash (or “an SEO’s nightmare”), but with the use of HTML5 and CSS it should be more search engine friendly too, as long as there isn’t a massive amount of javascript.

Another big positive is it will be supported across all browsers (although Internet Explorer needs to be version 9) and also mobile devices including iPhones and iPads which can’t display Flash.

I used Flash a lot during my time at university creating small animations and interactive pieces,  so I am really interested to see just what Edge is like, especially now, as an SEO, I can have a play with it to see just how well optimised a site created in Edge can be.

Edge is available for free to download at Adobe Labs so anyone can have a play about with it. Once I have, I’ll write a follow up post on here.

Adobe released a preview video of what Adobe Edge can do which you can view below.

In fact, I have only ever written one note! Which is pretty rubbish.

So I ask you (well those who use Evernote) how do you use it? What do you like about it? What’s useful? Does it help you sort out your SEO tasks?

Please leave a comment below and huge thanks in advance!!

SEO chat-up lines in action

*If you try any of these then you are in danger Will Robinson, not only will you be greeted with blank expressions but most likely a slap, I have done no research, just shouted round the office like a maniac, made me realise how creative some of the guys are at MEC Manchester.

So let’s break the ice and feel free to add your own in the comments, still can’t believe Dan let me post this…

I will give you multiple links…
Will you be the anchor to my text?
If you were a link I’d make you <no follow> I don’t want to share!
Can I get a listing in your directory?
Did it hurt…?    When you fell from the first page.
I’ve set my robots.txt to allow you
Do you fancy a 3 way? No wait I mean a link…
If you were Google I’d let you rank me!
Please don’t break my link!
Do you know how to find the “top” spot?
Once you go black hat you never go back…
Look we both knew this was 302!
Wow your links look juicy!
“A rose canonicalised would smell just as sweet!”
Can I have your CTR?
I’ve been checking out your analytics – can i make you my landing page?
I Digg you
My title tag is “Available”
What part of <nofollow> didn’t you understand?
You had me at algo…
<head>?
If I said you had a beautiful <body> would you hold it against me?
Your homepage or mine?
Get your code love, you’ve pulled
fancy a blog roll in the sack?
Is that a long tail keyword in your meta description or are you just pleased to see me?

This expands on the current relationship between the two engines and will also increase the share that Baidu has in China over it’s next rival Google. Also it should increase Bing’s presence worldwide as Microsoft look to try and close the gap to Google worldwide.

Overall a good move by both engines, although I feel Bing is getting the most out of it considering Baidu’s already high market share.

It’s to celebrate what would have been Les Paul’s 96th birthday. Sadly he died in 2009 but with the legendary Les Paul guitar it’s not like he is every going to be forgotten. So it’s good to see Google hasn’t!

It’s quite fun to strum your mouse over the strings but click the keyboard button and start playing!

The intro for Metallica’s Enter Sandman can be played a bit like this

X-V-,-V-N-.-X-V-,-V-N-.

If you have made up your own tune share it in the comments below!