This Google quiz shows daily questions for you to answer. As the website explains, “There’s no right way to solve it, but there’s only one right answer”.

If you struggle to solve the daily question by ‘A Google a Day’, you can get small hints. There is constantly a timer counting down, so it’s possible to find out if you have become any better the last days.

Up for a challenge? Try www.agoogleaday.com now.

SEO Specialist now has two black cabs driving around London, promoting the new campaign website called www.HowToBeFound.co.uk.

How to be found online might sound easy, but businesses often forget or take shortcuts to some of the most fundamental issues in online marketing.

One of the first and most essential steps to get right are to launch your websites on prominent domain names. It should be common sense, but we often see companies using alternative TLD (example: .info or .co), second best spellings (example: ‘z’ instead of ‘s’) or extra words making the domain name longer and confusing for end users.

SEO School vs How to be found online
SEO Specialist earlier guide, SEO School, give an overview of the most specific factors in  website optimisation, while the new campaign site discuss many of the small but important steps in the online marketing process. In addition to our recommendations for domain names, the new site feature content tips, search engine optimisation suggestions and challenges and opportunities with paid search.

The new site goes live next week, but the colourful taxi adverts with our logo are already live. Go to Transport Media for more info about the online marketing campaign and about taxi adverts in general and read their latest press release about SEO Specialist taxi adverts.

After four months without a new CEO, the 2nd most popular search engine in USA appoints Scott Thompson to take over the role.

Scott has a brilliant track record in online payments as CEO at Paypal, where he doubled the firm’s active users and its revenues.

The new CEO will need to assess options that include divesting Japanese and Chinese assets and selling a stake in itself to private equity funds.

Stock analysts are not convinced about the new CEO
Many analysts are surprised by the choice. Ken Sena, analyst at Evercore in New York, says to Bloomberg: “Scott has a great track record in payments and has proven an effective executive at PayPal and has major tech chops and international experience, but at a content company, which Yahoo has increasingly become, his experience is kind of lacking.”

Scott Thompson says in a press conference that his priorities are increasing revenue and putting the company at the forefront of innovation.

Welcome Scott; at least SEO Specialist believes in you.

These banner ads act as links and do work, but for some reason they don’t seem to be counted as a link to my site. [A flash page] uses one of my banners on their link page, so surely this should count as one inbound link to my site? I’ve been on www.Alexa.com to check who is linking to my site and Vale Wildlife isn’t mentioned. I don’t want to keep pushing other websites to use my banners if they are not counting as an inbound link and helping my search engine ranking. What am i doing wrong? Many thanks, Matthew

Our SEO Expert answer: Hi Matthew, there are three reasons why the link you mention is not showing in Alexa.

1. The page is not indexed in Google or Bing. If a page is not indexed, it’s not very likely to show up as a backlink. Further, I’d suggest using QBL, OpenSiteExplorer or some other backlink tool.
2. Secondly, the link is not showing up in the code, it’s a flash page.
3. Finally, Google might be able to algorithmically detect pages that are only made to boost rankings, such as link exchange pages, mentioning the word ‘link’ in the URL.

Banner ads like the page you created is not a useful method to gain rankings in search engines, it’s rather a method frown upon by search engines. You better discuss with webmasters from relevant sites if you have something in common or read some of the most common link building methods.

Further, Google want webmasters to use ‘no follow’ for banner ads. Finally, I suggest you try to find relevant and trusted links.

Regardless if you are dreaming about top rankings in Google, Bing and Yahoo or a new gadget – everything is possible.  All you need to do is put some efforts into it. For those looking for better visibility in search engines we recommend reading our extensive SEO guide or discussing with our SEO Specialists.

Happy new years from everyone at SEO Specialist. Remember, you can do it.

BT have joined Microsoft and Apple in suing Google. BT claims that Google has infringed BT’s patents with several technologies that are found in Google’s Android system as well as Google Search and Google Maps.

Google Music, Android, Google Maps, eBooks and Google Plus are all service that BT claims are patent infringements.

A Google spokeswomen Said: “We believe these claims are groundless and we will vigorously defend ourselves against them“.

If BT is successful then it could mean that Google will have to pay BT For every Android that is in use and you could imagine that is a lot of money.

However BT famously tried to sue internet providers including AOL and Prodigy in 2002 for patent infringements relating to hyperlinks. They wanted a license fee from every internet provider that used hyperlinks but this lawsuit failed and the judge went on to explain that the internet is not a central computer and therefore prodigy cannot be held liable, since the internet did not fringe upon the patent.

-Authority links
Webmasters love authority links from high quality website. One of them can be worth more than 100 low quality links.

-Dmoz links
Even though Google shut down their directory based on Dmoz, it’s still the most valuable link directory.

-A new content writer
New and continuously updated outstanding content can help any business to rank better in Google, Yahoo and Bing.

For more inspiration what leads to top search engine rankings, read our SEO school.

What is your favourite christmas gift this year?

SEO Specialist decided to dig into the advantages and disadvantages with using URL bar codes as an alternative to long URL’s on your website or business card. We’ve also done a short review of the most popular smartphone barcode applications (apps).

What is a barcode?

URL QR codes are optical machine-readable representation of data, showing data leading to an URL. They are most commonly used in supermarket checkout systems, but start to gain momentum among service related websites with long URLs.

A barcode can quickly be scanned with a smartphone such as iPhone, Blackberry, Samsung, Galaxy Nexus or HTC.

How can I read barcodes with my Smartphone?

There are many popular apps for reading QR codes. The six best barcode apps according to SEO Specialist is the following:

1. iNigma
iNigma scans using real time which allows the user to scan codes quickly and efficiently.

Brands supported: Apple (iPhone), Blackberry, Samsung, Nokia, HTC, LG, Sony Ericsson, and Motorola

2. Kaywa
Kaywa provides detailed data thus giving you more information compared to other Apps.

Brands supported: Motorola, Nokia, Samsung, Sony Ericsson

3. Nokia PC Suite
The Nokia PC Suite application scan barcodes and transfer content between your Nokia device and PC.

Brands supported: Nokia smartphones only

Tags supported: Calls, SMS, multimedia and videos,

4. Lynkee
“Lynkee allow you to identify goods and people on your mobile by decoding of NFC (RFID) + 2D tags and conventional product EAN barcodes with ease”, according to their website.

TAG supported by Lynkee:
Email, geolocation, products, URLs, vCards, WiFI, Calls, meCard, SMS, Text and Mobilkee.

Brands supported: Apple (iPhone), Blackberry, HTC, LG, Nokia, Samsung and Sony Ericsson.

5. Quickmark
Quickmark is very simplistic so anyone can use it without having a great knowledge about QR codes.

Brands supported: Nokia, HTC, Apple (iPhone), Samsung, LG, Sony Ericsson, and Motorola

TAGs supported: URLs, Locations, messages, contact info

6. Upcode
Upcode loads what you are looking for in seconds and its speed is the apps best attribute.

Brands supported: Nokia, HTC, Siemens, Samsung, LG, Sony Ericsson, and Motorola

For which websites can URL bar codes be most useful?

QR codes make your website more mobile aware and help make your website more user friendly for mobile users (e.g. instead of typing the URL into a tiny box you can just scan the code and the user can then access the website).

It also allows you to give more information that consumers can access easily, while feeling more comfortable buying services or products on the internet. Many people are also interested to see new innovations and this might be one of them. URL barcodes can also be helpful on events, exhibitions and other places where you meet many people and are on a move constantly.

Any disadvantages or risks with barcodes?

One problem you could encounter is if your target market generally don’t own a smart phone you are limiting how many customers you may get. But this is perhaps quite unlikely because most people in the modern day have a smart phone and if they don’t, they are probably not in your target group anyway. Other disadvantages with using url barcodes are that it might take some time to implement it the first time.

What do you think about the QR codes?

Many businesses offering services to multiple English speaking countries sooner or later face technical SEO issues such as duplicate content.

The new markup can be especially helpful for businesses using a .com domain for several markets, such as UK, the US, South Africa and Australia. It is also useful if your site is using one language while offering services for several markets in various currencies.

As always, SEO Specialist still recommend using local top level domains if possible to target European markets.

Below are a few examples where the new markup code (hreflang) can be inserted for British, American and Australian content on the same domain:

<link rel="alternate" hreflang="eng-us" href="http://www.example.com/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="eng-uk" href="http://www.example.com/uk/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="eng-au" href="http://www.example.com/au/" />

Read more about Google’s new markup here.

Are you company looking for multilingual SEO? SEO Specialist helping businesses succeed in website optimisation around multiple countries in Europe.

Talk to our SEO specialists today, freephone 0800 157 7736 or +44 790 888 1045 if you call from abroad.

The compass also had a few minor changes, making it whiter and easier to see.

What do you think about SEO Specialist’s updated logo?

In fact, it’s even quite a bit superior in many ways. So what is the catch with QBL? It cost a bit of money, but not all too much. For £16.3+VAT (19 euro) per month, you can create 100 backlink reports per month with one of the quickest and most detailed backlink tool.

Why use Cemper’s QBL tool?

The new Quick Backlink Tool provides a wide range of useful link valuation metrics, helping webmasters to find relevant links. Below is some of the function in QBL:
-Anchor text breakdown: Which is the most common anchor texts pointing to a website?
-Link status: Is the links do follow or no follow?
-Link type: Do you have most image links, redirects or textlink.
-Deeplink ratio: Show if it is startpage links and to sub-pages.
-TLD breakdown: Which top level domains link to your site?
-IP popularity: Do many different c-range IP’s link to your website?
-Link power: Is the link power from a specific site high, low or average?

A practical functionality with the QBL reports is that you can export them as excel files. The only negative is that it took a little longer than I expected to load a report (approximately 20-25 seconds), but I’m sure Christoph Cemper is working hard to improve the load time continuously. After all, it is very quick for the amount of link data you get.

Have you worked with website optimisation and used the Quick Backlink Tool (QBL)? If so, what is your experience?

For Google it shows N/A, but for Yahoo and other backlink tools I’m getting 52 backlinks. Please can you help me out.. /Mr Khan

Answer from our SEO expert:
Hi Mr Khan,
Google do not show ‘all links’ pointing to your website when typing the query you mention in their search engine. While Yahoo! Site Explorer used to show most of the links, that service is now shut down.

There are a few methods you can use to get more information about which sites giving you backlinks. Firstly, I’d recommend signing up for Google webmaster tools and Bing Webmaster tools. They both give some information about backlinks.

Secondly, there are many other reliable backlinks tools to use helping with link valuation, such as OpenSite Explorer.