Towards the end of yesterday, I noticed a new article on the Information Commissioner’s Office’s website entitled ‘Must try harder’ on cookies compliance, says ICO. And I realised yesterday that this change is inevitable, eventually, with time, we’re all going to have to implement this. The consequences have the potential to seriously damage our industry, destroying jobs and I think, possibly, have a significant slow down effect on the UK economy. Let me explain a bit more about that.

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As we all get prepared for the Christmas break, here we’re looking forward to the start of the conference season in 2012.

The first conference of the year for me is the London Affiliate Conference (LAC) which will be held on 26th – 29th January, at the Old Billingsgate Market. This is always a great conference to attend aimed at the online gaming sector, and is also the only one that is free for affiliates to attend who are always well looked after.

I have 2 speaking sessions, both on Day 3, Saturday 28th January.

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I’ve just taken Christoph C. Cempers’ new tool QBL (new addition to the linkresearchtools.com suite of awesomeness) for a test drive.

Firstly you get a tonne of useful information enabling you to easily analyze competitor backlink profiles… some of the data it chucks at you would have taken ages to put together in Excel to make the appropriate comparisons. So at the very least it’s a time saver.

Then you scroll down, and you become an all powerful link building god (or at least that’s what it feels like to link geeks like us).

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[Editors Note: This will be the first of an occasional series of blogs looking at marketing, planning and branding both on and off line from one of our writers, Kelvin Collins. Kelvin has spent many years leading marketing and brand management in financial services giants such as HSBC, The Co-operative and M&S Money. He now works as a freelance marketing consultant and runs two wonderful self catering cottages in the far west of Cornwall.]

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I’ve got a theory that Google Analytics is set to become more and more comprehensive. I was doing some studying on the weekend when I saw Geckoboard mentioned in my study notes – I’d logged into Geckoboard before and not really found it all that useful (for me at least), but I logged in again and took a look around – it seemed like it was more useful, but still not great. Then I suddenly though, what if Google Analytics Dashboards allowed people to create custom widgets?

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Today I have been looking into the most efficient way to be able to perform SEO on year related events such as the Grand National and the World Cup, or generally any event, competition or regular occurrence that you as a webmaster could look to target.

This is not a secret formula that is going to give you the edge over all of your competitors as the information held within this post has been cited by professionals for a number of years but it seems that there are still people out there that are not conducting their optimisation for such occurrences in a way that would build strength year in, year out and so this is why i thought that i should take the time to reinstate this information for you!

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There has been a huge shift in the way that website owners are creating their sites and the processes in which they undertake in order to try to create the most optimised site as possible for search engines like Google but reducing your page load speed is about more than simply removing large images and the utilisation of image sprites.

Following a questions and answer video created by GoogleWebmasterHelp on YouTube that features Matt Cutts covering the Google site speed issue, it has quickly become clear that reducing the time it takes to load your site is about more than simply things that you can control, even with careful planning and optimised development.

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There was a blog post on the Inside Search Google blog a few days ago, it has a brief summary of the recent algorithm changes and it also has an excellent video discussing how they test potential changes to the algorithm (see below).

So what are these algorithm changes and what are the potential effects for SEOs?

Here are some of the more significant ones for SEOs:

Fresh Results = Good

First up is the “fresher” results update, affecting 35% of search queries. This, quite obviously, means that the more recent your content the higher it is likely to rank for some search terms – so blogs are likely to be more important now.

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