Scotland 1 France 0 now Scotland knows what SEO guys feel like!!!

It was an amazing night last night for Scotland, beating one of the best teams in the world on their turf!!! Well done Scotland. Today people in Scotland are feeling what can only be said, what a SEO person feels when they eventually move up the ranks in google search results.

There is nothing better than seeing your site move above competitions after months if not years of blood, sweat and tears. SEO guys are a bit like plumbers no one really appreciates, what they have had to do to get websites up the search engines, this normally because you cannot see a lot of the work being done. Also like plumbers the client knows its working or not.

SEO is a funny old business, rather like sport. As Liverpool Manager Bill Shankly once said -'Some people believe football is a matter of life and death. I'm very disappointed with that attitude. I can assure you it is much, much more important than that.' Well sometimes it feels as thou SEO is the same as you watch google frantically for signs of change. SEO is like being the manager. You can tell everybody what to do, you can shout from the touchline but you never tell whether they are going to perform. Is your goalie (aka webmaster) going to let a sitter in ie change the way the server works without telling you. Is your striker (marketing director) going to get into his head some strange new strategy that he doesn't tell you about. Every so often it just happens you wake up one morning and you have shot to the top of the rankings... just like last night when McFadden turned and shot it straight over the goalie. Perfect. It only happens once or twice.

So my advice if you want to feel like a champion and walk down the street with your head held high when you have reached the number one slot then remember these simple rules.

• Right good unique content
• Try and add new pages to your site daily / weekly
• Use bloggers on your own site
• Make sure your site is well designed and easy to navigate for surfers and search engines
• Get inbound links from good quality sites
• Don't link to any old site be careful
• Don't try sneaky tactics like hiding text, buying link etc Google knows all the tricks

The best sites tend to have been well thought out and have lots of great content which is ideal for the Long Tail theory. Sometimes you will find you get more traffic off all the 100's of pages you've been adding rather than worrying about getting to number 1 for a specific search term. Remember one thing when you do reach number one there is only one way to go so be prepared to fight to stay up there as you will become the one to beat.

Property is it still a good Investment

I guess many people in my generation ie born in the 7o's are thinking like me, "what the hell am I meant to do about retirement!" I look at my parents and see them still having to work even though they saved into a pension fund their whole life.

With pension funds being swallowed up, or not preforming like that should, with Gordon Brown still charging crazy taxes on inheritance and capital gains on 2nd properties. What should our generation do...

I see properties as the only way I can control my money, I certainly don't trust any 3rd party company to manage my future, they have only one goal and that is to make money for themselves. With properties in Scotland still rising at a incredible rate, they still seem the best option for a UK investment in my opinion. Of course properties will go up and down, you only have to look at the 80's and 90's but at least they go up over long periods of time say 25 years. I think my parents first house cost them £2000.

Another reason I like to invest in property is if I get a tenant in, they are actually paying for my pension. Of course when you don't have a tenant you have to cover the mortgage, but that's ok cos I would have been paying into a pension fund if I didn't invest in property.

The only thing that worries me is for example the amount of flats for sale in Edinburgh is massive. I don't understand why someone would want to buy one of these new tiny flats... after about 5 years they look awful from outside as the paint starts to fall off. Some of the blocks of flats have been bought by one person which is very scary, if they have a problem covering the mortgages and have to sell quickly, will that drive the prices down on properties?

Banks seem to be keen to lend money, offering cheap mortgages and at sometimes 6 times the amount of someone's gross income. I believe for me property is the best pension fund, if done correctly you can use the banks money to create a great portfolio / pension.