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Ok so it's the first day of October and that means that there are just 85 days to Christmas and around 60 days till we hit the peak online shopping period. If you sell tangible products online are you ready for the Christmas rush?

We've just put two local businesses online with their own stores and hopefully we'll now have some time to overhaul one of our own online stores and get it into a lot better shape than it is at the moment. Right now we know that sales are suffering because it looks so dated but finding the time to improve it has been almost impossible.

Why isn't a first page listing working?
Steve had an interesting meeting with a client yesterday. The client's business is in a very competitive field that gets a lot of local searches in Google despite being hard-hit by the global financial crisis. The first page of Google's search engine results page for the industry is filled with monster booking sites that the local businesses are struggling to compete with and yet there is one local business that has managed to hold on to a first page listing for quite some time now.

Our client has been stuck back on page three or worse for quite some time and yet the guy on page one is struggling for business while our guy is doing a lot better. The website that's got the page one listing looks slick and professional while our client's site looks fairly basic and a little dated.

So why is a guy who is back on page three doing better than the guy one page one? There are almost certainly some offline issues here but you would still expect that a page one listing for a term that gets a lot of searches would bring in a lot of business but it's just not happening.

While this is a mainstream issue it certainly has implications for anyone who puts a lot of time into achieving a good ranking in the search engines and it's definitely worth thinking about. And while you're thinking about it Aaron Wall has a long but very interesting piece over on his SEO Book site about the worth of a number 1 listing in Google. You would be crazy not to spend some time reading it.

People are going beyond the Web for bargains
A few moments ago I mentioned the search engine results pages in a vertical that's important in this town. Unfortunately for local businesses the first page of those SERPS is dominated by large booking sites that charge the locals a fee every time someone books through them.

You might think that that's the end of the story for the locals but surfers are becoming more and more sophisticated when it comes to buying anything online ... they might be heading to those booking sites for information but not all of them are then making a booking.

Instead, once they have the information about rates etc. quite a few surfers are then leaving the booking site that they're on, searching for direct contact information for the business and then phoning them to see if they can't negotiate a better rate direct with the business.

That looks like a trend that is on the increase so perhaps there's some hope that the big sites will fade away in the future and give the locals a better chance at a page one listing. For us here in adult it's also an indication that we really do need to be pushing the budget options because most porn surfers know that they can get plenty of the porn they want to see without having to pay a premium price for it.

Obviously they do know that they're not going to find everything for free but they also know that they can get a lot of great content without paying some of the higher price points that are out there. Of course those higher price points might look more attractive for us because they pay a higher commission but you can actually earn more from the sites that offer lower commissions.

Are all links created equal?
You only have to listen and watch some of the Matt Cutts videos on YouTube to understand that not all links are created equal. While there's no such thing as a 'bad' link as far as I can tell there certainly are some links that are more valuable than others ... and here I'm not just talking about links from .gov, .edu and other authoritative sites.

If you want to read more about how search engines might look at links ... especially internal site links and links between sites that have a common ownership then head over to Seobythesea.com because you'll find a very interesting post there about how search engines may look at the anchor text used in those links.

And that's it for me today ... I would love to be able to get out there in the sun and enjoy the beach but that's just not going to happen today.