So, here it is, my personal recommendations for the 5 best SEO blogs currently out there:

1. Graywolf's SEO blog. If I could only have one, it'd be this one. Regular and informative articles, including plenty of tips and 'how-to's, all arranged in quite an attractive and usable layout. Recent articles worth a look cover issues such as the use of microsites, masking affiliate links, understanding bounce and exit rates and plenty more.

2. Matt Cutts. This blog ranks highly for me for two reasons. Firstly, there is a wealth of interesting insight on offer from this experienced Google search quality engineer. However, the second point is perhaps even more valuable: I like Matt. He seems to be a nice guy who writes engagingly and passionately in a way which you don't see too often with SEO blogs. Like the good design of Graywolf's blog above, this added component is what makes the top quality content stand out against other equally correct and pertinent (but less engaging) blogs out there.

3. SEO.com and Beanstalk. Unlike the two sites mentioned above, which are run by a single author, these next two are the blogs of SEO companies which share some tips and insights as well as offering services. The rate of new articles is pretty high so they can also be worth a look as they turn up real gems every now and again though, as with most group edited blogs, you need to find the authors who click with what you're after to really get the most out of it.

4. Jim Westergren. Another individual blog, this one sadly suffers slightly from its spartan design which somewhat undersells the value of the content on offer. Jim is an interesting individual, whose posts sometimes cover more personal experiences within the framework of the wider topic, but there is also plenty of pure SEO quality there to be found.

5. Finally, just to wrap up, here's two more pretty decent group-authored blogs hosted by SEO companies: SEOptimise and SEOmoz. The former is quite accessible in terms of approach (not too much number-crunching or super technical stuff but more coverage of trends and developments on a broader level) while the latter has a good mix of interviews, polls & surveys, and some real nitty-gritty (screenshots and all) on new techniques and tools.

Anyway, there's plenty more out there for those who have more time but generally I'd say you can't go too far wrong keeping an eye on the above blogs - stick them in your bookmarks bar if they're not already there and give em a quick check every week or so in order to become a SEO genius in a matter of months (or at least a semi-competent and well-informed SEO geek).

What's nice about the Soshable post is that it really boils things down to the essentials: which are that quality content will always be the most legitimate and infallible SEO technique - and that, in this sense, Panda will never 'kill' SEO. If however your ideas of what SEO is involve farming links, scraping content from elsewhere and generally anything else that falls under the 'black hat' range of techniques then, yes, SEO as you understand it is dying with Google Panda.

Even though the wide scale roll-out of Panda did produce a few befuddled losers (generators of genuine content who could not understand why they had dropped so much in their ranking), generally the winners were all the various primary content generators which you would expect to find up at the top of Google's results and which almost exclusively offer quality and original content - the likes of techcrunch, Youtube, Mashable, and Vimeo.

That's not to say that suddenly all other factors around coding and SEO will fall away in the face of the almighty c-word ('content') - there will always be ways to optimize the rankings of quality content - but simply that there is simply no substitute for it. While good content does not guarantee a high ranking, it does at least give you a chance - without it you'll be stuck on page 14 of Google's results no matter how much of other people's content you scrape.

Anyway, it is because of this situation that the following post over at Techcrunch is very interesting - because it contains a rare example (in video form) of Google granting some sort of behind the scenes access to their most prized possession; their search algorithm. While the short clip is hardly as detailed as it could be (for the reasons already mentioned above), it does nonetheless shed some new light on how things work with one of our most used and well known technological innovations of the past decade.

The main points cover how Google amend their algorithm when it isn't producing sufficiently satisfying results for a particular search term as well as the means by which the engine decides that you mistyped your desired search term, and so displays results for what it thinks you wanted instead.

So, it's not exactly enough for developers to suddenly leap 10 pages up the search results ranking, or even to influence SEO to any extent at all, but it is interesting nonetheless - and possibly an indication that the company might be slightly more open about certain aspects of its search in the future (though probably not the ones which would really impact on SEO strategies).

(P.s. Seeing as though it's Friday afternoon, here's a little bit of unrelated but amusing tech-themed comedy from Mashable...)

The principle is essentially quite simple. First you register on various social media and web 2.0 platforms, before writing articles on each one that link both to eachother and also to the main page whose search rankings you wish to bolster.

It really is as simple as it sounds - a rare example of a tremendously effective SEO technique which requires zero development or programming experience to implement. The key to doing it effectively of course is not so much in the technical know-how of coding, but in writing effective articles which will draw attention and link well to eachother, and to your main page.

Though such a strategy has been possible (and evident in practice) for a long time, it nonetheless is now more appealing than ever before since the potential for creating a snowball effect (in a web traffic sense) is ever greater with the abundance of link sharing tools currently popular on the web (everything from Twitter, to Facebook's Like button and so on).

All in all, the link wheel represents a superb SEO strategy for those without extensive coding or development experience and one with very decent future prospects, whose efficacy will only grow the more it is employed (i.e. the more articles/posts you are able to create).

With that in mind, Mashable have constructed a very nice (and brief!) introduction on how to implement Google Analytics in your business online. There's also a bunch of handy screenshots illustrating the instructions, as well as specific info on how to modify your approach if you're using a CMS such as WordPress for example. It takes you through the main steps of adding the code, setting up the dashboard, displaying and sharing data and so on.

The final step in the manual is actually the hardest, simply because this must be decided by you - what to measure using Analytics? Which data would help you to improve your site's efficiency, your business sales, site users' experience or even help out with SEO? These are the questions you can be asking yourself once the basics of analytics set-up have been handled, hopefully on the way towards constructing a more focused web strategy.

Depending on which data you look at, GA is in use in somewhere between 49-58% of the world's most popular websites (figures are for top million and for top 10k sites respectively) so there's no question that most of the web's serious players know the value of GA - and it's also no surprise to learn that top 10 sites like twitter and Myspace are among this number. While there has been some discussion in the past about GA slowing down the performance of a site, these concerns seem to have been laid to rest with recent versions performing very well since around 2008 so it's as good a time as any to give it a go if you haven't already explored the power of GA!

The article nicely covers the four or five key aspects which need to be considered to construct an effective strategy, as well as offering practical tips on the technical side of things (championing WordPress as the optimal CMS option in most cases - with which it's hard to disagree). There's a little bit about the increasingly attractive option of incorporating video into posts, maximising 'sharing', and also the right amount of SEO to attempt (i.e. 1000 keywords in every post is overdoing it somewhat).

We've been running a blog here at etonDIGITAL for something like three or four years (like many mysterious relationships, it's hard to pinpoint when it officially began) and find it a great way to juggle various activities, from keeping people informed about the activities of the company, to participating in the wider discussions and debates of the blogosphere, a bit of SEO and so on. We do it all with WordPress and would recommend giving it a go to anyone - especially within a business context; it's highly rewarding and definitely doesn't involve a steep learning curve - especially with the help of a handy guide like the one over at Mashable right now. Go on - don't be shy, get blogging!

For example, one of the most common problems that small businesses incur is that, with effective SEO (and healthy visitor stats) it is sometimes possible to take for granted that getting users to your site represents a job well done. Perhaps more accurate would be to say that it is only half a job well done - for if users are getting bored and leaving the site soon after (without having interacted in any way) then there's certainly some room for improvement. Calls to action are not the only thing that can be relevant to this problem - but the lack of them is often one major contributing factor. The article nicely explains what constitutes a call to action, why they're useful and how to create one which is appropriate for your business/site.

Anyway, have a look over at Mashable for the full piece (and maybe browse through your business homepage afterwards if you have one) - it's a great introduction to looking at websites as they function - rather than as a goal-orientated user trying to find/get something specific from them (which is how most of us approach websites on a daily basis). This process is a bit like a musician developing his/her ear to recognise in one simple sound a specific element of theory at work - and the likely effects it creates. Likewise, you only get a better business website if you develop your eye to more accurately interpret the background functions of each and every component of a/your site!

The whole thing is not unlike the episode wherein villages and streets were recently discovered on Google maps (including one called Argleton in N.W. England) which did not in actual fact exist - leading many to suggest that this might be an instance of a modern equivalent of a 'trap street': the practice whereby a cartographer invents a small side street which exists only in his map as a way of uncovering those who have simply copied it (and thus also the fake street) without doing their own mapping.

Well, this latest incident is more of a big deal perhaps since Google's latest trick has ensnared rather a bigger fish - Microsoft's search engine Bing, now accused by Google of copying their results instead of generating their own independent ones. According to Google, they have developed a number of 'synthetic queries' which essentially connect two search terms that actually have no connection whatsoever and thus, shouldn't ever coincide in a genuine, un-manipulated search.

The problem for Bing is that not long after Google instated these synthetic queries into their algorithm, they started showing up also in Bing's results - suggesting that they were actually coming from Google's algorithm  - i.e. that Bing was simply producing what has been called a 'cheap imitation' of Google's results. The way in which Google claims this is coming about is not as simple as Bing linking direct to a Google search, but instead involves IE 8 and its mechanisms for collecting data which, in conjunction with the Bing toolbar, are working to provide info on what people are searching for and the results other engines are providing so that Bing can match this in some (slightly impoverished) way.

Bing, perhaps unsurprisingly denies the accusations, and they have their own version of how the events can be explained, but if you look through Google's detailed post on exactly how they have seemingly exposed Bing (it genuinely is quite fascinating) it seems hard to accept the Microsoft rebuttal. If Google is right then the entire episode could be summed up by saying that Bing's (relatively weak) position in the search market is artificially maintained by Microsoft's dominant position in the OS market, where Windows prevalence ensures that IE is still the number one browser - and thus provides a tool for propping up Bing (legitimately in the eyes of the law, but not in a way that many would accept as fair or particularly laudable).

Have a click over to Mashable to see what you think of the various examples, most of them are very simple attempts to create humour based on a subversion of the user's expectations of previous 404 pages (for example, we don't expect to see a notice informing us to 'stop inventing file names' or to 'go home'). As well as being a nice bit of fun, the 404 page represents an opportunity for every site developer (no design is without one in some form), and is a somewhat unique format for a bit of a joke and maybe some clever branding.

All in all, I never thought I could enjoy browsing 404 pages for fifteen minutes - but as a result of the work of some very creative designers, and a great post on Mashable, I have just done exactly that. Nice to see that what was once an oft-neglected component of any and every website is now a commonly utilised way of improving and enhancing user experience.

First up, it's worth mentioning that the massive gaming expo that is/was Gamescom 2010 went off this weekend with excellent attendance figures, leaving the blogosphere buzzing with anticipation about some of this autumn's forthcoming titles. By the looks of it, the last quarter of the year, as well as the first one of next year should be pretty solid for the industry - with some sure-fire releases drafted for the Christmas run-up. For some top-notch summaries of all that you missed (if you weren't able to make it down to Cologne over the weekend) be sure to check the Guardian Tech feature on the event, and also Gamespot's in-depth coverage.

Next, I just wanted to draw your attention to a post on Techcrunch today by MC Siegler, on the way Facebook Places might change the way people approach their social graphs on the network. Some readers may remember that this was something I was discussing last week, in relation to the question of users becoming more selective about their Facebook 'friends' now that Places has been launched. Well, MC Siegler raises an excellent point on the same topic - and one which I hadn't considered last week: the possibility of introducing a two-tier 'friend'/'follower' system to Facebook's social graphs, so that you don't have to cut off all ties completely with people you only know a bit (but wouldn't like to engage with via Places). This sounds like an excellent idea to me, and I'll be following with interest whether or not Facebook agrees (and implements such a system).

Now, after all that serious stuff, here's a mildly entertaining SEO story (I know that phrase sounds odd - but it's true). Basically, UK newspaper, The Daily Mail, has recently advertised for a new SEO technician for their online content. The interesting part is the fact that they didn't put the ad in any of the places you or I would look for it - but instead in their website's robots.txt file (which, in theory, only uber-geeks would be frequenting - exactly the skilled types that the Mail is after for the position). It's not often that SEO generates curious little headlines as this episode has done, so if you have any interest in the subject - be sure to check it out.

Anyway that's your little round-up for now. Before I finish, one serious warning: anyone that uses Paypal should check out the info about a recent large-scale phishing scam, which has seen users robbed of thousands of dollars. Despite initial fears that Apple's iTunes was to blame for the breach, it seems that this is now not actually the case - either way, check your security and beware the phishers!