New sites and blogs about search engine optimisation and internet marketing are popping up all the time. InternetHelp.co.uk in particular has caught my eye.

The site provides a range of information and resources for webmasters, from advice on choosing a domain name and eCommerce solutions, to tips for SEO. In fact that’s what I like about this site, it aims to help visitors with every aspect of running a website rather than concentrating on one thing, like SEO. Afterall, what’s the point of increasing visitors to a site if it looks horrible and isn’t designed to convert them into customers.

As well as the articles and tutorials, there is also a directory to help webmasters find designers, hosting providers and seo companies. Both the directory and some of the article categories, such as the eCommerce pages, are a little low on content at the moment, but Internet Help is definitely a site to keep an eye on because of it’s integrated approach to online business.

There has recently been a dramatic increase in the number of Indian SEO Companies being submitted to our directory of SEO resources. In fact, there have been more sites offering SEO services submitted to the directory in the past year than any other sort of site. This is good for the small business owner because it is increasing the number of options and the competition in the SEO market.

With a little knowledge of online marketing, you can do the stategic part (determining which keywords you need to target and how to target them) and then find a company to do the actual work. For example, you can decide for yourself that you need to build up the link popularity of your site (the number of links from external sites) and that a cost-effective way to do it is link building through directory submissions. So you just find a company that provides directory submission packages.

For example, Search-engines-optimization.com is an Indian company offering search engine optimization services. (Many of the companies based in India have very competitive rates because of their low overheads and labour costs). The services they offer include on-site optimisation, pay-per-click campaign management, article writing and submission, and directory submission.

Of course, cost shouldn’t be the only criteria used to choose an SEO company but it is a significant if you have a very specific part of the optimisation process that you want to out-source.

Search engines have to be able to understand and read the HTML of web pages so they can rank them in the SERPs and match them against search phrases. If the code includes errors, the search engines might not be able to read the page and all that well crafted content and link building can go to waste.

This is particularly important for dynamic database driven sites like blogs and directories, where the same error can be repeated on hundreds of pages.

These days the search engines are can deal with quite a few validation errors, but is it worth the risk? The code of his web pages is one thing a webmaster has complete control over, so it is worth making sure they are error free and as well optimised as possible.

The W3C HTML Validator is the place to go to check a page. Popular HTML editors such as Dreamweaver usually have built in validation tools and you can also find some good add-ons for FireFox that do the job.

This is pretty basic stuff, but it is surprising how many webmasters forget this (even owners of bigger sites).

Search engines interpret the non-www version of your site’s URL (http://website.com) as a different page to the www version (http://www.website.com). This means that links to your site can be split between the two versions and can also effect the accuracy of web statistics.

This re-write condition for an Apache .htaccess file creates a permanent redirect from the non-www version to the www version:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^website\.co\.uk
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.website.co.uk/$1 [R=301,L]</pre>

If there are no other rewrite rules in the .htaccess file, the rewrite engine will need to be turned on using this line before the above commands:

RewriteEngine On

A quick reminder about the Best of the Web directory promotional offer, (15% off all new directory submissions and sponsorship advertising) is over at the end of this month.

Use the promo code: WIN10K