The Weebly blogging tool, which I'm using right now, is pretty good. But there's one downside that has been present pretty much the whole time I've been using it. And that is that it tends to take a while for posts to get indexed by Google. The blogs that I have on Blogger, on the other hand, get indexed pretty much immediately. (The conventional wisdom is that this is because the search giant owns that platform now.)

In any case, I've noticed a heartening trend lately. Ever since I've been sharing my Weebly blog posts on Google Plus they seem to end up in search results much quicker than before.

This might not be the actual cause, of course. Perhaps it's because I've been posting more frequently and have "trained" the search engine spiders to be quicker off the mark! Or perhaps this is a general phenomenon related to all Weebly blogs ...

Still, I think my hunch is correct. If it is then it's yet another good reason to join Google Plus and share blog posts, particularly if they are topical in nature and benefit from quick indexing.

I have only started getting into YouTube recently. But I'm glad I did. It's surprisingly easy to make little videos that will be of interest for viewers. The other day, for example, I made three short ones in the Perth CBD that I uploaded soon after. That took me only an hour or so of filming.

It should be remembered that YouTube is a massively popular search engine in its own right. Even a couple of years ago it was getting billions of searches a month.

So you can get ideas for what kind of videos to make much as you would from Google. Just use the drop down suggestion box, for example.

You can also use the free keyword tool, confident in the knowledge that keywords that are often searched in Google itself will also be popular in YouTube. (There is a similar tool for the site itself. But the data isn't that comprehensive.) 

For example, I knew that the term "Perth Arena" got a reasonable number of searches on Google. So I made a quick video of the structure and uploaded that a few days ago, making sure to use the term in the title. It's on the first page of results for those keywords, and it's had a few views already.

Now I know from my blog stats that it's easy to rank for local terms. And that brings in really good local traffic too. So I'm going to keep generating video content to get those clicks onto my blog about Perth.

I recommend that others wanting local traffic do the same. If you can find a local angle, then make a video about it. But don't just make ads. Make content that people want to share.

For example, if you're builder in Perth, you could make a video about how to build a house for the city's particular conditions. You could then get your local keyword in there. And you'd still be creating interesting and useful content.

Or say you have a cafe in Newtown. You could just wander down the street filming the buildings and crowds giving an idea of the whole atmosphere of the place. And you should put the keywords "Newtown" and "cafes" in your video title. There'd be a lot of people searching for them on Youtube. Even if your video didn't get on page one straightaway, as long as it was shareable it would crawl up the rankings and you'd be sure to get some targeted traffic to the site you have included in the description.

For a long while I focused on getting search engine traffic to my blogs and websites and simply didn't consider social media -- with the exception of Twitter, which I've been using for a couple of years now. I have finally started regularly using the other main platforms such as Facebook, Linkedin and Google Plus.

They are all great sites that help bring website visitors directly via clicks. Then there's the effect that the "social media signal" has on your general search engine rankings.

But the greatest SEO benefits come from social media when you use it to put your content in front of other bloggers and webmasters in your niche. By doing this you hugely increase the odds of garnering quality one way links to it.

All the sites mentioned above can deliver this effect. But I think the best one of the lot is Googe Plus. Sure, it's not anywhere near Facebook in size, reach and activity yet. But it's growing apace.

There are several SEO benefits that accrue when you're active on the site. Perhaps the most obvious is that getting those "plus ones" on your articles helps lift them in the SERPs. Sharing them on this social network obviously increases their number.

So it's a very good idea to join this site now, get active on it and and start to build your network. Seeing the direction it is taking -- it's already a sophisticated melding of social network and search engine -- I suspect that there will be many more such benefits to membership coming down the track. It's one site that I'm going to focus on and I urge anyone with a website or blog to do the same.

You can connect with me on Google Plus here.

Nowadays, because of Google cracking down on unnatural link profiles, building links to your websites is a lot more risky than it used to be. That doesn't mean you shouldn't do some of it, though. A few articles here and there, for example, could still be helpful.

You just have to make sure they're good quality, unique articles submitted to directories with decent page rank. And you should have lots of variety in your anchor text in your author bio-box links. Also, it's a good idea to just not use any anchor text at all occasionally.

Now a lot of website owners pay SEO companies or individual freelancers to build such links to their sites. But doing this carries inherent risks.

Firstly, they may be using spammy techniques such as article spinning, which could harm your site. Also, many of these companies offer deals in which you can buy, say, 20 articles all at once. Now if you purchased such a package there'd be a strong chance that such a number of links appearing suddenly would result in some kind of penalty from Google.

If you did suffer as a result of using such services, you'd have to get those links removed somehow. It's highly unlikely you'd be able to get the people who submitted them to remove them -- at least not for free. So you'd probably have to hand over money to a company that specialized in bad link removal. Either way, it would cost you.

However, if you were to do all of the article writing and submission yourself, there'd be a couple of advantages. Firstly, you could make sure that those articles were of a good quality and in directories that were well regarded by the search engines. And there'd be no way that you'd be able to overdo it, unless you devoted several hours a day, every day, to the task for a couple of weeks non-stop.

And in the rare event that this technique were to backfire on you and you needed to remove those links, you'd know exactly where they all were. So you could just go back to those directories, log in and remove them.

You'd be back to square one, of course, and would need to figure out how best to continue with your SEO efforts. But at least you wouldn't have had to fork out any money to neutralize the issue.

There has been a lot of talk about this latest Google update, dubbed "Penguin". Much of it had to do with over-optimization. Countless websites suffered a massive and swift drop in search engine traffic.

Clearly, many webmasters feel that they were unfairly punished. I can certainly sympathize with them, but I do see what Google was trying to achieve with this.

One of my niche websites was hit (or at least I think it was -- you never can be entirely sure with search engines!). I was angry and disappointed at first but on second thoughts I realized that I was definitely over-optimizing it.

Firstly, I had several pages that had a common two word keyword phrase in the titles. Even though the content on each page was unique and different, this was a big no-no! That was pretty dumb in retrospect but I chose to include those words because they did reflect the purpose of the pages, and I was in a bit of a rush to build the site.

Secondly, I'd done a lot of article marketing for that website. I must have submitted about 25-30 articles in the last several months. These were all unique, and not "spun". I did vary the anchor text, but in retrospect I didn't do this nearly enough. I didn't endlessly repeat exact keyword phrases but I did use some words over and over again, even if they were in different combinations.

Thirdly, I didn't pay enough attention to the pages themselves. While they certainly had some useful and relevant information on them they were pretty general in nature. I should have spruced them up more and made them punchier, more specific and informative. I was always intending to do this eventually, but basically became fixated on getting lots of article backlinks because they really did seem to work well and my traffic was rising steadily.

I wasn't trying to trick Google, but I was certainly being way too overzealous with certain techniques. Clearly, there was an imbalance between the amount of work I'd put into the on-site content, and my backlink building. Google picked this up and slapped me for it.

It's been a good lesson. Basically, the main thing to remember is to keep focusing on the content of your site. As the search giant keeps saying, build sites for people, not search engines.

So now I'm going to pretty much forget link-building -- particularly via article marketing -- for a long while. Instead I'll be putting almost all my effort into writing lots of quality content for my websites and blogs.