The internet community has used symbols right from the start. These handy little signs say more in a smaller space, saving on typing and slotting in nicely with the way computers work. For some reason, though, the search engines have long had difficulty recognising symbols and punctuation marks. It appears, for Google at least, that some of these difficulties are now in the past.

Google’s team has stated that a number of the most commonly used symbols, including the hash tag, at-symbol, dollar sign and percentage symbol, will now be indexed. The change came through with a number of smaller algorithm changes not too long ago, but may have a big impact over time.

Smart site owners and the average search engine optimization company have equally avoided using symbols where possible. The rise of Twitter and an evolving social language, however, has meant that a lot of symbols can’t be avoided. If you’re trying to integrate a social media marketing campaign with your SEO, the change is good news. You can discuss the effects of SMM language on your site with us at Searchengineoptimization.co.uk.

The change may have an impact on more than just content. With symbols being indexed, Twitter’s position may become even more powerful, as more users are indexed. Site owners will also be able to directly tap into trends when hash-tagged content is indexed.

This may sound a little too dramatic for a single blog entry, but your blogging habits determine the success of every entry. If you don’t get into the habits of good blogging, your efforts – and your investment in your organic SEO – are wasted.

1. Embed links when writing. Good blogs are full of links. They are there not in the ‘link stuffing’ kind of way, but to serve as references. The best blogs constantly refer to related posts and to posts on other blogs. This keeps readers reading, builds your presence in the blogging community and, most importantly, adds to your SEO link building.

2. Socially share. Get into the habit of telling your social networks when you post a new entry. Tweet it, make it a status update, and put it out there on Reddit and StumbleUpon. Talk to us about the value of social sharing in SEO at SearchEngineOptimization.co.uk. Once you’re in the habit, this should take five minutes maximum each time.

3. Drop some references in comments. Finally, after you’ve promoted your post on social networks, promote it again in related posts. Spend ten minutes reading around the net. Question and answer sites are another good opportunity to post links.

We’ve all come across them from time to time. Headlines that are the Internet equivalent of a witty remark may be interesting but they aren’t likely to draw traffic if they don’t seem to match the search query. For example, ‘SEO: What would Mr T do?’ is something that might draw a smile from someone searching for SEO advice but is it likely to get their click? If the search is a serious one, probably not.

Does this mean you should never try to be clever or cute with headlines? No, it doesn’t. Writing an SEO headline is much like participating in search engine marketing; you need to catch attention any way you can. If you’re engaging in a high-competition area, it’s likely you’ll have to use all your ingenuity to craft titles that will stand out in the SERPs. This is something you can discuss with us at Searchengineoptimization.co.uk. The warning sign to be watched for is when you catch yourself concentrating on the ‘clever’ rather than the marketing angle.

Headlines can be extremely effective search engine optimisation tools but only if you know how to use them.

It’s easy to forget that appearance is just as important online as it is offline. Part of your internet reputation management plan should involve removing the connections to your site that simply don’t look good.

*Refresh your design every so often. Too many businesses make the mistake of thinking that their website is their office building. Offices need refurbishment every ten years; websites need it every two or three. An old design can make your business look outmoded and unable to keep up with competitors.

*Hunt down old images. It’s amazing how long things hang around on the web. Old images are easy to forget about, but they will come up in a search on your business, brand and main keywords if your organic SEO is successful. You can talk to us at SearchEngineOptimization.co.uk about this aspect of SEO. When taking care of online reputation management, search for old pages with old images and remove them.

*Prune out old links. Your link building campaign may be all about building up links, but there are some links that can do you more harm than good. If you have links between your site and outdated pages, it might be worth reconsidering whether you want to keep them. This is particularly the case with any links that have a reciprocal element.

At www.searchengineoptimization.co.uk we concentrate on what users and search engines want. Although we use a diversity of tactics, we do watch Google closely. This is because we recognise that studying Google’s performance and behaviour is an essential task of any serious optimization agency.

Recently, Google has clearly been in an ambitious phase. It has introduced Google+, showing its determination to get into the social media sector, despite previous disappointments. It has refined Google Places, highlighting its commitment to helping small businesses. It has moved to expand into the Indonesian market, illustrating its international aspirations for additional hegemony. It has even acquired an interest in facial recognition technology. Not all of these developments will be relevant to a specific campaign.

All Google’s moves must be monitored and investigated on a continuous basis. An SEO campaign is not something which can be set in motion and left alone. It must be adjusted to take into account shifts in the search world and information gleaned during the course of a campaign.

At Searchengineoptimization.co.uk we work to deliver campaigns that tick all the right boxes. In addition to making gradual improvements to the performance of the sites we manage, we invest substantially in research and monitoring. This allows us to ensure that the techniques we employ are always up-to-date. Furthermore, our search engine marketing tactics are always ethical and implemented within the rules of Google and the other search engines.

It is not enough for an optimisation company to pursue high quality optimisation campaigns on behalf of their clients. It should also provide basic information via its site content so that novice site owners can make informed choices. All site owners need to know that their performance should be measured in terms of sales not rankings in the search engine results pages. Each site owner should be conscious that unethical black hat techniques can lead to a site being suspended from the index for a considerable time period.

Newcomers to optimisation should take a little time to become acquainted with the subject before they make any decisions. There is often useful information on the sites of optimisation firms and unclear issues can be resolved by making contact with them.

Using effective SEO marketing techniques is needed constantly to ensure the business grows and develops. If you lose focus then the website will fall in the rankings and its visibility to web users will fade. There are a variety of SEO marketing methods and each should be seen as an ongoing process to ensure a good return on investment.

Link building is one such area that requires a systematic approach as the ongoing development of new links is vital to securing optimal ranking positions. Keyword management is crucial to keep a pace of the market changes around you and it is imperative that the performance of your website is tracked. If techniques such as link building are proving too time consuming then it makes sense to outsource to the experts.

At www.searchengineoptimization.co.uk we offer a wide range of SEO marketing services including link building.

Approximately 75,000 people a minute tried accessing the service as soon as it was launched, leading to bugs, glitches and crashes. The Home Office recognised the problems and urged people to ‘keep trying’.

Sorry Home Office, but that simply doesn’t wash with us. The interest in this project was huge, as underlined by a statement from site developers Rock Kitchen Harris, based in Leicester: “The site is down at the moment but it is being resolved. It has had a lot of interest, more than we expected due to the high media coverage.”

There have also been varying levels of satisfaction in regard to the figures being shown on the website, with some people saying that the figures are a wild, inaccurate view of their street, and that their communities are being misrepresented. That’s a problem for the Home Office to sort out, though. What we want to read the riot act over is the Home Office’s poor planning before the site’s launch.

Who doesn’t want to know if their street is safe or not? An official crime statistics service from the Home Office was always going to draw massive traffic to the site, and they should have made sure their servers could cope with such volumes. Our advice is always to have good, speedy servers in an SEO campaign to improve the overall user experience. Site speed has also become an important factor for search engine optimization services, but we’re more concerned with the usability aspects of having a good server.