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A friend of mine has recently launched a blog on an unsuspecting world, starting from scratch.

She downloaded a copy of WordPress, bought some blog-only web space for a startling £27 a year and took one of the many WordPress themes and tweaked the content until it looked right to her. This all happened on June 27.

Then she regularly surfed the web news directories, pulled out the stories that caught her eye, rewrote them and stuck them on her new site at the rate of at least three a day.

Now, with a bit of a tweak here and there, and the inclusion of a WordPress plug-in that creates a sitemap on the fly, she is beginning to scent the sweet smell of success. While her blog has no PageRank and so far no-one is linking to it, she is already getting a daily index from Google and others.

I can’t tell you much more. I’ve promised that I won’t let on what the blog is called, or link to it: apparently, she’s using it as a test bed to see just how hard (or easy) it is to get top SEO purely from content. If it were me, I’d be shouting it from the rooftops, but then I’m a bloke so I have an ego to massage.

I can admit that I’m extremely jealous of her success because for technical reasons I’m still unable to add any pages to the site which is my day-job.

But my friend is right. It proves that once you take away all the coding factors, like semantic XHTML and proper linkage to and from the site, good SEO is REALLY all about content these days.

Provide good content, and provide it regularly, and Google and its rivals will come knocking.

According to best estimates of when the next PageRank update takes place, we have just 55 days to see how much daily indexing equates to good PR.

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My current project — smartlivecasino.com — is meant to be visually attractive. It’s an entertainment experience, after all.

Unfortunately, the people who originally designed the site saw it more as a work of art than a sales tool. As a result, there are loads of pretty pictures, most of which don’t even have alt-tags, and little actual text.

To the human eye it looks fine, but to any ONE — or any THING — not relying on vision there’s a problem. Strip away the imagery and there’s very little for a search engine spider to index except for a few links and disconnected phrases: not exactly what you’d call good content. No doubt we’ve all seen worse: sites where even the text is displayed as a GIF image, and an un-tagged one at that.

For good SEO any site needs words, and sentences made up from these words, and paragraphs made from these sentences. The bottom line is that only by increasing the number of words on a page can one hope to improve keyword densities to that sweet spot of between 5% and 15% of the total.

Indeed, the current version of smartlivecasino.com comes close to running the risk of agitating the search engines because the density of certain keywords is greater than 20%: to a search engine that could look like “blackhat” SEO.

But before undertaking a major redesign, can anything else can be done to improve matters?

Well, remember the bit about any ONE? If you consider the page from a disability access standpoint, there are plenty of things that could be done to make it more useful to someone with a visual impairment, or a search engine.

A good first step would be to alt-tag all the images using clear keyword-rich phrases. A stage further would be to add keyword-rich TITLE tags to images, links and any other media. Neither of these measures would disturb the look of the page in any way but they would give more content for the search engines to spider.

However, the line NEVER to cross is to include hidden text in your page, artificially increasing the keyword density by peppering it with white text on a white background or commented out phrases which bear no relation to the code. That sort of thing WILL get you in Google’s bad books.

I say “never” but it depends on what you mean by hidden; however, that’s another post …

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So my latest challenge is a website that some people my find uncomfortable. Smart Live Casino is one of the world’s growing numbers of gambling websites.

Smart Live’s “twist” is just that: it’s live roulette, streamed via webcam or broadcast on UK digital television (SKY 851 and Freeview 22) from early evening to the wee small hours, presented by attractive croupiers, in a relaxed style.

I’ve never been much of a gambler myself, although I’ve always enjoyed the spectacle of gambling events like casinos or horseracing. And the vast numbers of people who flock to the great gambling meccas like Las Vega or the Aintree Grand National show just how popular it is. For most, it’s just a hobby: a way to release tension at the end of a busy day. And for most, it’s completely harmless. Sure they may lose occasionally, but don’t we all take risks every day and aren’t we okay if things don’t go quite as we’d planned.

Still, there is an understandable air of uneasiness when it comes to the subject, especially when people don’t want to be seen to publicly endorse a lifestyle which others object to.

This has proved to be a problem in relation to our attempts to launch a Pay Per Click campaign with the world’s biggest search engine company, Google.

Google (motto: do no harm) has a strict policy when in comes to online gambling advertising — they don’t do it! Geographical casinos are allowed, as are non-profit casino games such as those used by charities at social events. And if you make poker chips or roulette wheels, or have a surefire system to beat the house, you can advertise those too. So you will see PPC ads for gambling on Google properties when you search for relevant keywords.

However, you soon learn that some of these ads are not what they seem. The URL from a recent ad for “freegamblepackage.com” was

http://www.google.co.uk/aclk?sa=l&ai=BvJfi2WVWSImMB6HmQru-5ZgKscj_ Qb3ooq8FpbeaBfCzpQEIABABGAEoAzABOAFQn4rcigJgu76ug9AKoAHH teL5A8gBAYACAdkDLsK5FNgVhxjgAwg&sig=AGiWqty1Q9aMG-bEIwSlo_el85zW6e P2EQ&q=http://www.freegamblepackage.com/%3Faff%3D52123%26c%3D1.

However, after the inevitable blank screen where the background referral script worked out where it was being linked from, the page was redirected to http://www.primecasino.com/?aff=52123, which is a rival online casino and therefore not allowed under Google rules.

What’s going on here is an affiliate scheme; not of itself illegal (even Smart Live Casino is dipping a toe into the partnership model) but in the way campaigns like the one above currently operate, it’s just downright sneaky. In the above example, simply typing freegamblepackage.com into a browser produces a lame page for another surefire system to beat the roulette wheel, but in itself it is almost certainly a satellite website run by the affiliate marketeers.

Google say they are investigating and offenders will be removed. Another campaign run by online casino giants 888.com is (at the time of writing) now pointing to a geographical casino and not their online one.

Sadly, the reality is that as soon as these scams are stopped a new one pops up to take its place.

Another SEO manager told me recently that he didn’t believe in “ethical” SEO, and he is right … to an extent. Today’s “tweak” inevitably becomes tomorrow’s “White Hat technique” and next week’s “Black Hat swindle“. I would still err on the side of Google’s “Do No Harm”, although I might add “unless you know you won’t get caught”.

Me, I’m no gambler. I always believe I’ll get caught.

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So, you know I wrote about the cuts in Google’s page rank and how it was hitting people who’d bought in links and were feeling the pain of Google’s ethical stance? Well now I’m not so sure.

Yesterday, Barablu — my latest SEO project — felt the sting of demotion too. Its page rank fell one point, from 5 to 4.

Yet (as far as I can see) Barablu has NEVER in the past operated any dodgy practices, especially link buying: I wish the same could be said for the competition. No, the loss of a PR point in this case at least must be more than a Google moral backlash.

As usual, Google are keeping tight-lipped about the reasons behind the recent PR massacre and to be sure there are many sites around who’ve suffered more than Barablu. Yet, what makes this whole adjustment even more puzzling for me is that I know for a fact that sites which don’t exist are maintaining their page rank!

Now I’m not talking about some dodgy blackhat technique: the site in question — which I shouldn’t name for confidentiality reasons — ceased operations back in July because the owner couldn’t afford (or couldn’t be bothered) to pay his site dues. It was duly decommissioned and all the pages deleted; if you go there now you get the usual 404 errors.

However, if you search Google for the site right now you’ll be told that it has 41 pages and a PR of 4, albeit with no backlinks! As they say, go figure!

Go Tell The Marines!

In truth, Barablu’s real problem is years of unwitting, benign neglect. It was first in its field — making free calls using a mobile phone — and it still out-features the competition but it languishes in the lower reaches of the search engine rankings on almost all of its keyword phrases because, until now, no-one ever said anything. A recent comment on an Italian blog summed it up: “Even if Barablu is not very visible — not advertised properly — the software offers some interesting services you should try.”

As I write, I’m waiting to unleash a new Barablu website on an unsuspecting world, but for now all I can practically do is to encourage everyone here that I can to blog their socks off about Barablu and its associated technological fields via the Barablu Blog (catchy name, don’t cha think!).

For you see, as I think I’ve been saying for a while now, Content is King! And even with the meagre resources at hand right now, Barablu’s SEO is actually improving. See you at the top … .

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