99% likely that your hosting will have almost 0 effect on any of your optimisation or ranking efforts, but if you are unlucky to have a hosting company that is prone to failures, and down times, Google and other search engines may end up penalising you for it.

No, I am not saying this will be an actual ranking penalty, instead you would find your crawl rate diminishing, especially if Google finds your site to be down on more than one occasion.

Be sure to check out the options for web hosting before you decide on a service provider.  Preparation can mean less headaches when it comes to your SEO results.

Over the years, SEO has changed considerably and what worked back in 1998 doesn’t work today and can even get your site banned for spamming activities.

Let’s take a look at the Search Engine Optimization Techniques from yesteryear…

~1998

• Titles were still important back then, but feel free to stuff them with as many keywords as you want – and it didnt matter if they were relevant to your site either
• Meta Keywords – Many search engines looked at these first!  Can you believe that.  A simple way to rank for Britney Spears!  Just fill this meta keywords with all variations you can think of it
• Content could contain lines of links too.  So could you meta description tag.  You could do whatever you wanted back then with no risk. 
• Of course, your customers still wouldn’t like your site, but who cares you were getting 250 000 hits a month!

~2010

• Titles are still high on the agenda for search engines, and using a proper SEO technique to optmize them is crucial
• Your main keyword must be at the front of the tag
• Use a synonym or money keyword in the middle
• end with your company name for branding purposes
• Meta Keywords are not looked at by most of the major search engines.  Rumour has it Ask still looks at the tag, but their market share is less that 15% in the US, and non existent in Australia.
• Meta Description is largely ignored as a ranking factor, but can have large effects on conversions.  Still it is good to have your keyword in there and a call to action, such as click here to buy online etc at the end of the line.  Keep it concise though, 2 lines or so, 150 characters.  Also, remember that Google and other search engines may only display a portion of it or not display it all, opting for a paragraph or segment of text that’s on the page itself
• Content – the king of ranking.  Still, to this day, many believe that content is at the top of the algorthym food chain.  The main course!  Keep your content fresh and try make it unique – veyr hard to do, but even if you take an idea or concept from one place you can always make it yourself
• Content Structure is a big technique when it comes to search engine optimisation.  Use heading tags in order – h1, h2, h3, even though some suggest there is more value in the other h tags than there is in an h1, it is still good to try keep them in order.  Also, try use only one of the top three tags, the other ones you could use more than once, but within the same parent tag  – dont jump from an h3 to h4 to h2 back to h4.  it just looks messy.  If you dont like the ‘style’ change it or ask your designer to.
• Paragraphs should consist of more than one sentence, and pregerably up to three or more, and each paragraph can contain your keyword or a synonym of iit.  The main paragraphs are the first one, the last one, and one somewhere in the middle
• Use bullet points to point out facts or features or benefits
• Use images too – I lack in this area, but it is good to use images for your website visitors more so than for the search engines.  A picture is worth a 1000 words
• Grammar and spell checking is important.  And make sure you are checking with your country / language enabled.  US english is different to UK which is somewhat different to Australia etc etc 
• Local – Local Search didnt exist back in 1998 and has become a major factor in todays world of SEO.  Although ranking well in the Local Listings won’t mean you rank well in Organic listings, it does have a huge impact on website traffic.  Mainly in the trades and tourism industries

Well I think I covered most of it here, at least the basics and the differences.  Remember the one unspoken rule – write your content for your customers, not for the search engines.  And always be fresh!

Currently this testing has been limited to some search results in the US as well as in Australia.  The concept and thinking behind this is that people recognise brands by name and by their icons or logos, and the thought is that this will make it easier for searchers to locate the brand and company they are looking for more easily.

Also this is a ‘paid’ service so will have very little, if any, impact on Local SEO – but it would be a good idea for all SEO consultants out there to be aware of this, as it could be asked by clients.

The basic details on the costs would be a Cost per Impression basis – different to the normal pay per click method used by AdWords – companies will be charged every time their logo is displayed, regardless if a user clicks on it or not.  This could also mean ‘paying for nothing’ and conversion rates could be very low.

Personally, this is one feature of Google I would probably not recommend.

As he points out at the end of his thoughts – Done do this!  But rather use the post as a headsup on how you could get burned…

I for one believe in being an ethical SEO consultant and would never recommend anyone to worry about harming a competitor’s site.  For one thing, if it was easy to do (which it isn’t) every major corp and minor one for that matter would be doing so, and soon, the powers that be (read Google) would discover it and put an end to the attacks – and they doing this by turning it around on the attackers.  So, once again, don’t do it.

Rather spend your time studing what your competitors are doing online, and how they are doing it.  Look at Google Places, and check out their reviews and where ‘more about this business’ is coming from (known as citations).

Check out their backlinks using tools like Yahoo Siteexplorer (Oops, sorry that’s not available any more) – try using SEOMoz’s link scape tool. 

And try getting your links on all those places – the sites with better Page Rank and the ones that are closely related to your industry or niche the better.

If you don’t have the time to do all this yourself, consider hiring an SEO company to do the work for you.

So what does this mean to all the SEO experts out there?

Firstly, perhaps a ‘simpler’ method of optimisation – it is now effectively a two way battle for search engine dominance.  Yahoo/Bing vs Google.

Secondly, a valuable source of data, Yahoo’s Site explorer is lost.  Apparently this is not going to be incorporated into the system, so we will wait and see.  There are avenues around this SEO problem, for instance you can go to www.seomoz.org and use their tools or employ other tools from ranking software and backlink checkers.  Even Google’s web master tools show more link data than it used to.

Thridly, another level of excitement has been added as SEO specialists will try dig into both ‘search engines’ and try find that missing key to search engine algorithms.

Well, thats enough from me for tonight.

Now we are in Australia, so down scale a bit… We can only guess at the number at this stage, but based on US data this is definitely the right time for ALL businesses to get in on Google Places and its easy to do.

Google Places is almost like having your own “website” in Google itself, and if you already have an existing site you can always send the traffic there as well. Free advertising, who is going to say no to that. My advice, check Google Maps now for your business, and claim it. This is your first step to Local SEO

And, in the case of Google, it was taking the engine out of that little VW Beetle and replacing it with a super power Porche engine.

So, what does this mean to blokes like you and I?  Simple, it means Google has gotten a whole lot faster at delivering content to internet users.  It means pages of your website are discovered and indexed, and thus ranked, a lot quicker and it means that fresh, new content is essential for your website to stay in its position.

SEO Tip #1

Ensure you update your website on a regular basis.  Add pages daily, or weekly but keep to the same rhythm and schedule.  Don’t upload a new article every day for a week and then don’t do anything for a month.  This will actually hurt you.

Rather upload articles over the course of the week, one ever other day is sufficient and usually I would not recommend adding more than 1 page a day.

What this does, is that Google crawls your site, and then learns that ever x amount of days it must come back to look for more information.  The more it finds the juicy content there, the more Google comes back and the more your site improves in ranking.

Content remains king.