Over 11,000 people solved word games and mathematical problems in a bid to stretch their noggin muscles for six weeks in a study for the BBC. And although the screen-poking brainy-builders did get a teensy bit better in the score department, the geeks in white coats believe this was just down to practice.

While the brain trainers were solving logic puzzles, blitzing word sequences and calculating maths problems, the control group sat in their undercrackers and surfed the internet for the same amount of time. Researchers found that the mind benders did no better than the surfers.

So according to the findings, practice makes perfect but you won’t actually reprogramme your noodle to operate on any higher level that it already can. DUH!

This is a lot like your website. Unless you have an unlimited budget, you have a certain framework that you will probably have to work around. But like the brain, that’s not to say that your website can’t be maximised. There are loads of things you can do to make it operate better and it’s something of a fine art to hone the programming, SEO and content of your site to make it the best it can be. Trust us, we should know!

It is more than possible to see mind-boggling improvements to the SEO quality of your site by working with what you’ve got, in fact, it’s precisely what the folks at redsauce.com do for many of our clients! Stick that in your sudoku!

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Yep indeedy, the British institution has cottoned on to the benefits of search engine jiggery-pokery to give its news articles extra clout in the Googleometer.

From the end of 2009 the BBC has started a new initiative to stretch the titles of headlines on the BBC News website to increase their traffic via unpaid SEO. The geeks at redsauce.com can’t help but think that this is an exciting step in the right direction for SEO marketing in general and hope that more companies wise up and follow suit.

Journalists working on the news site will double up their headlines – one shorter one between 31 and 33 characters for the front page and website indexes and a longer one of up to 55 characters to get plenty of search engine results. It is fast becoming industry standard for news producers to sprinkle a little SEO magic on their work.

To the merry band of geeks at redsauce.com that’s newsworthy stuff, but this technique is just a teeny fragment of what we do. Facilitating long tail searches are just the tip of the iceberg. The real powerhouse of our SEO is content.

Great! Now let’s talk about bears.

If you were lost in the forest and a ginormous, slobbering bear was after you, you’d want something to give yourself a fighting chance, right? Now, the bear represents the world of online competition, and make no mistake, it wants to smother you with its giant paws until you choke your last feeble breath. Companies with big bucks go out and buy tanks with swivelly guns that could make even the hairiest, scariest bear do its business in the woods. In order to be numero uno they spend all their money on expensive SEO tactics, and yes they do work, but only to a point.

But for all the smaller companies out there, they have to do battle with whatever they can get their hands on, without forking out the GDP of a small country. They make the best of what they’ve got and pick up a stick – this is where unpaid SEO comes into it. Writing lots of content is one way to get yourself a stick. The more content you churn out, the bigger the stick and the better your chance of coming out on top.

Not only do companies like the BBC want to make the best content, but they want to make more of it to maximise their search rankings and readership.  This is precisely what floats redsauce.com’s boat and makes our means of marketing so darn marvellous!

But should you genuinely happen upon a bear, make your physical presence as large as possible, speak in deep, low noises and avoid eye contact. They’re real charmers.

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If I could only offer you one piece of advice for a successful online business in the next 10 years, writing content would be it.

The long-term benefits of adding content have proved to be the biggest reason for the largest of successes online.  The rest of my suggestions are based on my own experience.

1. Enjoy the power of your passion – it is very hard to be successful when you do not have passion. In 5 years you will look back and see just what possibilities there were in your industry and the many things you didn’t do because of a lack of passion.
2. Dont worry about SEO tricks  - its simply not worth it.  Work at making the best site you can.  SEO tricks and their usefulness will come and go.
3. Add at the very least one piece of content to your site daily.
4. Don’t be reckless with your site. Do not take shortcuts at any stage of its life.
5. Dont be jealous of other sites’ rankings – sometimes you are ahead, sometimes you are behind. The race is long and in the end, its only with your own business and its success.
6. Take compliments about your site but don’t become aloof, but take the insults and learn from them if they have credence.
7. Don’t feel guilty if you dont know how to grow your site further, let the users tell you how to build it and as the site grows, check analytics. It could grow in 33 million different ways and it should not be you that decides which one.
8. Read plenty of documents about SEO, but ignore most of these and read plenty of documents about your industry.  Do not ignore most of these.
9. Don’t congratulate yourself too much or berate your self either.  All decisions to make a successful site are half chance and half luck. So are everybody else’s.
10. Enjoy developing your site.  Dont worry about sites with ‘million dollar’ budgets, it will only make you sad.
11. Be nice to your family and friends and spend time with them – your site can wait sometimes, your family are much more important.
12. Understand that rankings can come and go and only hard work can guarantee some stability.
13. Work hard to keep friends within the industry – as times change, you may need these people to help you as you grow.
14. Accept certain truths, rankings will fluctuate, people will cheat the system, you WILL get lazy sometimes.  When you do get lazy, remember that you have the power to not be.
15. Respect your visitors AND Google, otherwise you never know when either one may leave you.
16. Don’t mess too much with your design – keep it nice and simple, or you may just lose friends on the way.
17. Be careful who’s SEO advice you buy, but be patient with those who supply it. Remember that not all advice is as good as James Welch’s,  Michael Martinez’s or Jeffrey Smith’s.

But trust me about writing more content.

I hope you find this list useful – have a great, successful 2010, building the best site you can.

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