Search Engine News

Dec 21st 2007: A History of Search Engine Optimization May Help Us Understand Today's SEO Process

By Donovan Baldwin (c) 2007
	Anyone involved in any sort of Internet marketing sees the term, "search engine optimization", or SEO, everywhere these days. Everybody throws it around as if they were experts on the subject. It crops up again and again in forums and advertising alike. People offer their "SEO services" for fees ranging from a few bucks to hundreds or even thousands of dollars. Everybody seems poised to offer free advice on how to effectively incorporate SEO into YOUR website. However, hardly anyone ever comes out and says WHAT search engine optimization really is! So, as we explore the history of SEO, let's try to get an idea of what it is and what it does. At its simplest, search engine optimization is just the art and/or science (often more art than science) of making web pages attractive, or MORE attractive, to the Internet search engines. Obviously, most Internet businesses will consider search engine optimization to be one of THE major factors of any search engine marketing plan or program. So, how did a need for "optimizing" a website so as to attract the attention of search engines come about? Well, back in the dark ages of the Internet, say the mid 90's, was when the arcane art of SEO began to blossom. Maybe it was the Renaissance, but "dark ages" is easier to spell. However, search engine optimization was pretty basic back in those days. As a matter of fact, many of the available "search engines" back then really weren't much more than web crawling (sorry Spider-Man) directories eventually extracting a bit more data from the site than was submitted originally by the website owner. Even in those dark days, a good quality search engine was able to perform some discriminatory evaluation and assign a weight, or search engine rank, based on the relevance of the site's informational content, and other data, such as keywords, description, and textual and graphic content, to certain topics and queries. Unfortunately, although the web crawler, or spider, of the search engine was able to extract a certain amount of data, a large portion of a site's ability to achieve high search engine rank depended on material submitted by the webmaster. Webmasters aren't stupid, you know, and they soon realized that by using various techniques they could increase their site's search engine rank. One such technique was manipulating content by increasing the usage of keywords, often to huge multiples which might be hidden in the background of the site, for example. In this way they could increase their website's search engine rank. A higher rank meant more visitors, which usually meant more money. A fact the webmasters easily understood. Enter the search engine algorithm. "Algorithm" is possibly one of the least understood words commonly found on the Internet. All it means is the system, or instructions, which, in this case, the search engine follows in its quest to rank websites. To be absolutely silly, a search engine owner could decide that his or her algorithm will include instructions to assign the lowest rank to websites with the word "blue" in them. The point is that the magical, mystical ALGORITHM is simply the set of instructions that has been provided to the software that the search engine uses to assign search engine ranking. Now, it isn't as if search engine algorithms didn't exist before, but, as with cops and robbers, as the webmasters got better at subverting the existing algorithms, the search engines tweaked their algorithms to counter their tricks and ploys. One major change was that search engines began to place less faith on the presentations and protestations of the webmasters and developed software capable of investigating the site itself and forming conclusions on what it actually found there. Instead of the webmaster filling in a form providing a title, description, and a bunch of keywords which was checked by a "Mortimer Snerd" indexer which said, "Yup, Mr. Bergen. Them keywords is there, all right, and there's a bunch of 'em!", the search engine software began to look more deeply for itself and make logical, or at least quasi-logical, determinations about what it found. BREAK FOR THOSE UNDER 50: Okay, 200 per cent of Internet users are people nowhere near my age, so here's the skinny on Mortimer Snerd. Back in the 1930's and into the 60's, I believe, there was a popular ventriloquist named Edgar Bergen, father of Candice Bergen. He mainly worked with two dummies, Charley McCarthy and Mortimer Snerd. Charley McCarthy, although a smart aleck, was usually dressed in tie and tails and seemed to be up on the comings and goings of society. Bergen's other major dummy was Mortimer Snerd, a hick straight off the turnip truck who believed whatever he was told...and believed it literally. Back to search engine optimization. Okay, rather than just accepting the webmaster's word that keywords "weight loss", "diet", and "exercise" were applicable to the subject matter of the site and then checking to see if those words were there, the software began looking at a long list of factors. It would check the domain name, and the words used in the title. It would check to see how often keywords appeared, how close they were together, and the sequence in which they appeared. It would check such things as what the "ALT" attribute attached to images contained, and what the META tags had to say. Most important of all, it would check the textual content of the site to get a major feel for the way all these things came together and how they matched the claims of the webmaster and the expectations of the search engine's clients. Now you see why so many people say, "Content is king!" However, for a major search engine such as Google, website content alone was not enough to insure that its customers were seeing the most valuable search results and that websites were getting the most accurate page rank. Therefore, Google developed a system known as "Page Rank" which also looks at the number of incoming links to the site. In other words, how many other sites around the Internet considered this site relevant to the interests of their clients and hence of value to the interests of the search engines' clients. As search engines became bigger and more powerful, and as webmasters became more inventive at circumventing their algorithms, the major search engines such as Google made their particular algorithms tightly controlled secrets. This has made it extremely difficult for amateur webmasters and search engine optimization services alike to predict exactly which technique or tactic was going to be the most successful for achieving a high web page rank on a given search engine. However, some deductions have been made based on the pages and sites that DO seem to achieve high page ranks with Google and other search engines. Techniques such as picking a relevant domain name, including important keywords and phrases in the title, having keywords show up in such places as the image ALT tag, and stressing keywords through the use of headline text and by placement at the beginning and end of the page are all of importance. Having lots of inbound links from relevant sites is important as is internal linking (the development and value of the sitemap is another important topic). Over and above all the smooth moves, however, it appears that as search engine algorithms expand their capabilities, based of course on the instructions they have been provided, they begin to approach the viewpoint of the human website viewer. As a human would ask, "Does this site make sense and provide relevant data in an understandable manner?", so too are search engines becoming more interested in the structure and content of the website. Search engine crawlers are becoming more efficient as well in simply finding your site if someone somewhere has considered it important enough to provide a link from their website to yours. This is another reason why links from other pages can be important for getting your website indexed in the first place as well helping get it a good page rank. As in the good old days of the Internet in the previous century (I needed to say that), the most common means of offering your website to a search engine for its consideration is by a simple task of filling in a form. You will notice in the modern era, however, that the search engines are asking you for less and less information about the site. They prefer to go and get it themselves. On the other hand, filling in the form does not guarantee immediate, or even soon, indexing of your site...if it happens at all. From the viewpoint of the search engine or the human visitor, while various techniques of search engine optimization are important, the quality of the content provided to your visitor is probably going to be the best search engine optimization method of all. About The Author Donovan Baldwin is a 62 year old bodybuilder, internet marketer, and freelance writer living near Fort Hood, Texas. He is a University of West Florida alumnus, a member of Mensa, and is retired from the U.S. Army after 21 years of service.. He has recentily teamed up with Global Domains International (GDI), and offers information on his involvement with this international company at: http://donsdomains.ws/ .

Dec 18th 2007:  

FLASH Presentation on How Google Works!

Dec 14th 2007:  

Blog Update (December 14, 2007): Rogers Replies re Web Ambushing: White is Black, Up is Down, Ignorance is Strength

Update (December 10, 2007 3:30 PM PST): Rogers has now publicly confirmed the activities described below.

Greetings. Please observe closely the image to your left, showing the home page for Google Canada (click the image for a full-sized, full-resolution version).

Does anything seem a bit odd about the normally clean and pristine Google front door? What the blazes is all that ISP-related verbiage taking up the top third of the page? Why would Google ever give an ISP permission to muddy up Google's public face that way?

Well, as you've probably already guessed, Google didn't give this ISP any such permission. The ISP simply decided to modify Google on their own, demonstrating a real world example of ISPs Spying On and Modifying Web Traffic that I was discussing yesterday.

Just brought to my attention today by a concerned reader who chose Google for his example, what you're looking at is reportedly an ongoing test by Rogers in Canada, scheduled for deployment to Rogers Internet customers next quarter.

In case you're curious, "ISNS" on the test Google interception page apparently stands for Internet Subscriber Notification System. For the morbidly curious, here's the javascript and associated code that enables this procedure, which can presumably be applied to any http: (unencrypted) traffic.

While Rogers' current planned use for this Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) and modification system (reportedly manufactured by "In-Browser Marketing" firm "PerfTech") is for account status messages, it's obvious that commercial ISP content and ads (beyond the ISP logos already displayed) would be trivial to introduce through this mechanism. By the way, PerfTech is even using Google for one of its linked promotional examples on the PerfTech home page. I wonder if they bothered to ask Google's permission for that?

Anyway, the fact that there's an opt-out present for future account status messages on the Rogers page insertions hardly changes the extremely problematic and network neutrality unfriendly aspects of such situations, as I noted in yesterday's blog item.

Question: Will Web service providers such as Google and many others, who have spent vast resources in both talent and treasure creating and maintaining their services' appearances and quality, be willing to stand still while any ISP intercepts and modifies their traffic in such a manner?

I can't say for sure of course, but I suspect that a likely reaction might be discerned by paraphrasing Bugs Bunny: "Eh, he don't know them very well, do he?"

Posted by Lauren 

Blog Update (December 14, 2007): Rogers Replies re Web Ambushing: White is Black, Up is Down, Ignorance is Strength

The Day in Search on Dec 10th 2007:  SearchCap

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.

From Search Engine Land

• When Links Are Dead But Not Forgotten
  Five years ago, in June of 2002, I was helping announce and build links for Home Depot's Online Kitchen & Bath Design Center. Have a look at the announcement I ran on my URLwire site here. Notice that the URL Home Depot used for the design center was http://www.homedepot.com/designcenter/....
• Some GMail Accounts Wrongly Disabled As Spammers
  IDG News and Search Engine Roundtable discuss the "inappropriate disabling" of an unknown number of GMail accounts late last week. Google was apparently going after spammers and got a little overzealous. The company said that the outage affected less than 1 percent of all users and reportedly all the accounts...
• Microsoft To Be Exclusive Ad Provider To CNBC.com
  Microsoft announced today that it would become the exclusive third party provider of contextual and display advertising on CNBC.com, which reportedly has 2.6 million monthly uniques. While NBC and Microsoft already have a relationship, this deal is indicative of a bigger push by Microsoft for third party ad syndication. Microsoft's...
• Coming Layoffs At AOL, Yahoo?
  Silicon Alley Insider is predicting impending layoffs at AOL and recommending them at Yahoo. Alley Insider's Henry Blodget says that layoffs would be good for Yahoo and "Demonstrate that CEO Jerry Yang can make the tough, unpopular decisions necessary to get this company humming again." I think that he's correct...
• LinkedIn Redesigns, Adds Features
  LinkedIn has responded to the challenge of Facebook by joining OpenSocial and today launching its developer platform as well as a new look (still to come) and host of new features. They're described in some detail on VentureBeat. The design changes include a new homepage, an emphasis on activity feeds,...
• MSN Introduces Advertising On Mobile Portal
  Not long ago Microsoft's MSN relaunched its WAP portal. Today the company is introducing display advertising (graphical and text ads) to MSN Mobile in the US market. (Mobile display advertising is already present on MSN in Belgium, France, Japan, Spain and the UK.) According to AP, inaugural advertisers include Bank...
• Google Tweaks "Host Crowding" Algorithm To Reduce Results From Same Domain For Search
  Friday I reported that Google would be treating sub domains like sub directories. That turned out not to be a 100% true. Matt Cutts clarified at his blog that Google tweaked their “host crowding” algorithm to reduce the amount of search results shown from the same domain. The examples I...
• TechTicker, Yahoo's New Tech Focused Investor Portal
  Yahoo to Start Internet Program for Technology Investors from New York Times reports Yahoo is going to launch a new technology finance portal named TechTicker next month. The portal will focus exclusively on technology companies and stocks. Brian Nelson, Yahoo spokesperson said the portal would offer daily streaming-video segments, blog...
• Google News Updates Algorithm: Sourcing Story Updates & Local Context To News
  The Google News Blog announced they have updated their algorithms to become more relevant and fresh with news. The first update Google told us about is that they are not offering news from the original source, but now they will update the news cluster to show updated information from a...
• Links & SEO: The Huge Link Value Factors Survey
  Wiep Knol has surveyed 17 well-known and respected SEOs in the industry all about links. His survey asked questions exclusively about links and the value they had on search rankings. There were about 40 factors included in this survey. You can find the full survey results over here but if...
• Searcharazzi Saturday Spectacular: The Larry Page Wedding Details
  Now that the “who attended which conference this week" gossip chatter is over, we have a bigger question: Who is attending Larry Page’s wedding today? As previously reported, Larry is getting married today and Searcharazzi is reporting to you live from an undisclosed location at the island location, if...
• Local Online Ads Will Reach $12.6 Billion In 2008, Local Search Will Bring In $5 Billion Of That Total
  Using an expansive definition of the marketplace, Borrell Associates says that "local online advertising" is worth $8.5 billion today. That number consists of local search, "local banners" and local video. Banners is the biggest spending category and video the smallest. But Borrell expects local search to grow substantially to become...

Nov 30th 2007: Facebook Retreats on Online Tracking

By LOUISE STORY and BRAD STONE

Faced with its second mass protest by members in its short life span, Facebook, the enormously popular social networking Web site, is reining in some aspects of a controversial new advertising program.

Within the last 10 days, more than 50,000 Facebook members have signed a petition objecting to the new program, which sends messages to users’ friends about what they are buying on Web sites like Travelocity.com, TheKnot.com and Fandango. The members want to be able to opt out of the program completely with one click, but Facebook won’t let them.

Late yesterday the company made an important change, saying that it would not send messages about users’ Internet activities without getting explicit approval each time.

MoveOn.org Civic Action, the political group that set up the online petition, said the move was a positive one.

“Before, if you ignored their warning, they assumed they had your permission” to share information, said Adam Green, a spokesman for the group. “If Facebook were to implement a policy whereby no private purchases on other Web sites were displayed publicly on Facebook without a user’s explicit permission, that would be a step in the right direction.”

Facebook, which is run by Mark Zuckerberg, 23, who created it while an undergraduate at Harvard, has built a highly successful service that is free to its more than 50 million active members. But now the company is trying to figure out how to translate this popularity into profit. Like so many Internet ventures, it is counting heavily on advertising revenue.

The system Facebook introduced this month, called Beacon, is viewed as an important test of online tracking, a popular advertising tactic that usually takes place behind the scenes, where consumers do not notice it. Companies like Google, AOL and Microsoft routinely track where people are going online and send them ads based on the sites they have visited and the searches they have conducted.

But Facebook is taking a far more transparent and personal approach, sending news alerts to users’ friends about the goods and services they buy and view online.

Charlene Li, an analyst at Forrester Research, said she was surprised to find that her purchase of a table on Overstock.com was added to her News Feed, a Facebook feature that broadcasts users’ activities to their friends on the site. She says she did not see an opt-out box.

“Beacon crosses the line to being Big Brother,” she said, “It’s a very, very thin line.”

Facebook executives say the people who are complaining are a marginal minority. With time, Facebook says, users will accept Beacon, which Facebook views as an extension of the type of book and movie recommendations that members routinely volunteer on their profile pages. The Beacon notices are “based on getting into the conversations that are already happening between people,” Mr. Zuckerberg said when he introduced Beacon in New York on Nov. 6.

“Whenever we innovate and create great new experiences and new features, if they are not well understood at the outset, one thing we need to do is give people an opportunity to interact with them,” said Chamath Palihapitiya, a vice president at Facebook. “After a while, they fall in love with them.”

Mr. Palihapitiya was referring to Facebook’s controversial introduction of the News Feed feature last year. More than 700,000 people protested that feature, and Mr. Zuckerberg publicly apologized for aspects of it. However, Facebook did not remove the feature, and eventually users came to like it, Mr. Palihapitiya said. He said Facebook would not add a universal opt-out to Beacon, as many members have requested.

MoveOn.org started the anti-Beacon petition on Nov. 20, and as of last night more than 50,000 Facebook users had signed it. Other groups fighting Beacon have about 10,000 members in total. Facebook, they say, should not be following them around the Web, especially without their permission.

The complaints may seem paradoxical, given that the so-called Facebook generation is known for its willingness to divulge personal details on the Internet. But even some high school and college-age users of the site, who freely write about their love lives and drunken escapades, are protesting.

“We know we don’t have a right to privacy, but there still should be a certain morality here, a certain level of what is private in our lives,” said Tricia Bushnell, a 25-year-old in Los Angeles, who has used Facebook since her college days at Bucknell. “Just because I belong to Facebook, do I now have to be careful about everything else I do on the Internet?”

Two privacy groups said this week that they were preparing to file privacy complaints about the system with the Federal Trade Commission. Among online merchants, Overstock.com has decided to stop running Facebook’s Beacon program on its site until it becomes an opt-in program. And as the MoveOn.org campaign has grown over the past week, some ad executives have poked fun at Facebook users.

“Isn’t this community getting a little hypocritical?” said Chad Stoller, director of emerging platforms at Organic, a digital advertising agency. “Now, all of a sudden, they don’t want to share something?”

Facebook users each get a home page where they can volunteer information like their age, hometown, college and religion. People can post photos and write messages on their pages and on their friends’ pages.

Under Beacon, when Facebook members purchase movie tickets on Fandango.com, for example, Facebook sends a notice about what movie they are seeing in the News Feed on all of their friends’ pages. If a user saves a recipe on Epicurious.com or rates travel venues on NYTimes.com, friends are also notified. There is an opt-out box that appears for a few seconds, but users complain that it is hard to find. Mr. Palihapitiya said Facebook is making the boxes larger and holding them on the Web pages longer.

Mr. Green of MoveOn.org said that his group would be tracking the effects of the latest changes before deciding if it would still push for a universal opt-out.

The whole purpose of Beacon is to allow advertisers to run ads next to these purchase messages. A message about someone’s purchase on Travelocity might run alongside an airline or hotel ad, for example. Mr. Zuckerberg has heralded the new ads as being like a “recommendation from a trusted friend.”

But Facebook users say they do not want to endorse products.

“Just because I use a Web site, doesn’t mean I want to tell my friends about it,” said Annie Kadala, a 23-year old student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “Maybe I used that Web site because it was cheaper.”

Ms. Kadala found out about Beacon on Thanksgiving day when her News Feed told her that her sister had purchased the Harry Potter “Scene It?” game.

“I said, ‘Susan, did you buy me this game for Christmas?’” Ms. Kadala recalled. “I don’t want to know what people are getting me for Christmas.”

Nov 29th 2007 is Google Changing Their Algorithm?  

The following is from Internet Business Entrepreneur Chris Compton's Blog.

A friend showed me the following page a few hours ago:

http://www.google.com/experimental/a840e102.html

This is an experiment Google is conducting which allows users to “rate” web pages directly in the search result area.  You can bet they will use this data in their algorithm.

People will tell Google when a “spammy” site is found.  But this sort of data is already being collected by Google.

When you click to a site in the search results, then immediately click the “back” button due to the poor result… Google knows.

When you linger on a page and never return to the search results because you found what you were looking for… Google knows.

You can bet they are already using such data in their algorithm.  If certain sites have a lower than average “stick” rate, they are likely given a negative mark for that keyword.

So this seems to be more of a user interface change than an algorithm change.

Time will tell.

- Chris
(end article)

Click fraud would be of most interest.

Still 11/29/2007:

Adobe, Yahoo Testing PDF Ad Service

by David A. Utter on Thu, 11/29/2007

A beta test of Ads for Adobe PDF Powered by Yahoo opened for publishers, offering placement and tracking of contextual ads alongside Portable Document Format content.

PDF has been an appealing format due to its ability to preserve the look and feel of a document, while providing it to others in an easily accessible way. The free Adobe Reader became a fixture on computer desktops as adoption of PDF increased.

Yahoo has managed to score a significant win by beating ad competitors like Google and Microsoft to the opportunity to mine the PDF space for advertising revenue. Adobe and Yahoo announced the new program for delivering dynamic contextual ads in PDFs this morning.

The opt-in program pulls ads from Yahoo's network to place in a panel next to the PDF content. Each time the PDF is opened, the ads will be refreshed to keep timely and relevant ones in place.

Publishers gain the ability to track their ad performance in the PDFs. Yahoo Publisher Network senior VP Todd Teresi called this a "previously untapped opportunity" for advertisers to gain exposure, and publishers to derive revenue from these documents.

The program picked up some big name participants for this initial beta. CondeNast's Wired, IDG InfoWorld, and Reed Elsevier were among those named in a statement from Adobe.

To participate, publishers register and then upload their PDFs so the ad functionality can be enabled for the document. After that has been completed, the publisher distributes the PDF as usual.

InfoWorld's participation is of particular interest. The long-time trade journal scrapped its print magazine in opting for an online-only, ad-supported presence. If profitable, we expect to see other print publishers express interest in trying out the program.

Another interesting possibility comes to mind with the PDF advertising. The hot Amazon Kindle electronic book reader has the capability to pick up PDF content, a feature Amazon currently lists as being experimental in its ability to convert them for readability.

If Amazon works out PDF conversions, the EVDO network supporting wireless content delivery to Kindle could work as a conduit for the PDF ad program too. Since Amazon has its own interest in delivering ads, there could be issues with this idea, however.

Nov 28th 2007:  Structure Search Coming To Yahoo

Yahoo to offer structured Web search from Macworld reports Yahoo is going to launch a new structured search component to their web search engine.

Web search is typically considered "unstructured," where there isn't a real method of comparing sets of results side by side, in a data comparison grid structure. Yahoo hopes to offer structured search for certain types of queries to help aid the searcher in their information retrieval process.

Ricardo Baeza-Yates, Yahoo’s vice president of research for Europe and Latin America, said they will likely start offering structure search for e-commerce sites and similar online applications. Baeza-Yates would not give a date for the launch, but he did tell Macworld that "it could happen fast."

You can already see forms on structured search on search engines like Ask.com and Google.

For example, a search at Ask.com for ipods returns structured data from Ask.com Shopping.

An other example is a search at Google for rent apartment in manchester, which shows drop downs in the search results, enabling you to better fine tune your search through Google Base (a form of structured search).

Yahoo also has elements of structured search; for example, a search on Tom Brady returns results from Yahoo Sports.

Structured Search and Chicken-Egg

Barry Schwartz reports that Yahoo plans to roll out a "structured search" (article above) functionality in the near future.

The example Barry gives of existing forms of structured search currently available - a Google search for "apartments for rent in Manchester" that brings up dropdowns and drilldowns facilitated by Google Base - illustrates both the challenge and the promise of search as it moves into an era of greater richness and user control. The main challenge is in terms of adoption by information providers. (Back to the metadata issue. Who puts it together? Who bothers to participate? Is Google Base weird for allowing any old protocol to rule? Who decides which protocols get featured in raw Google queries?) Google Base hasn't been widely adopted as a repository of data, so until it is, experiments in presenting info to users will be halting.

I'm looking forward to discussions of these and similar issues on the Orion Panel on Universal, Blended, and Vertical Search, next Monday Dec. 3 at SES Chicago.

Another can't-miss panel on that day explores privacy and community in this emerging phase of social media.
Posted by Andrew Goodman

Nov 21st 2007:  The Big Google PageRank Slap - Perception Is Everything
by Titus Hoskins

Recently Google did a major PageRank update where a lot of sites were downgraded. Many experts believe this PageRank update was Google's response to link selling - sites which sell links lost points in their PageRank.

Google measures all web pages on a scale of importance from 0 to 10, which is shown in a small green pixel bar on browsers carrying the Google Toolbar. PageRank is "supposedly" measured by the number of backlinks to your site.

Online democracy in action, a link is a vote for your site. The more votes you have the higher your site is ranked. At least that's how it was supposed to work until a lot of high PR sites started selling links and put a monkey wrench into the whole system.

The latest update may be a smart move on Google's part to curtail this practice; who's going to buy a link from a PR2 or even a PR4 site? Besides this could be more than a warning that your site will go down even further if you continue to sell links.

Now this is more of a cosmetic change in PageRank than a real change in your true rankings in Google. Just because your PR goes down doesn't mean your keyword rankings or traffíc from Google also goes down.

I saw some of my sites go up, some stayed the same, but my major site took a big hit - falling from PR6 to PR4. This was more of a devastating blow than I expected mainly for psychological reasons than actual consequences. After years of building the best content you can muster and constantly getting quality one-way links, to see that PageRank drop was very disappointing and hits to the core of your online work.

I have been around for a while so I have experienced many Google Updates - anyone remember the Florida Update? I also keep my ears peeled to discussions of the latest updates in Webmasterworld and Stompernet, and I even read Matt Cutts when I get real nervous... so I knew not to panic just because of the sudden drop in PageRank.

I also knew what most of the SEO experts were saying was true because my major keywords stayed the same and my Google traffíc actually went up. But that's little comfort when you're talking about Google; you immediately go into overdrive and try to figure out where you went wrong. What caused the drop - because whether PageRank is meaningless or not, you're still going in the wrong direction.

I saw many of my competitors drop too, but many stayed the same and a few even increased in PageRank. What are they doing right; what am I doing wrong? I don't sell links but does Google think I am selling links was my main concern? I even moved one external link from my main page to another part of my site, just in case Google is mistaking that as a paid link.

  Welcome To Webmaster's Paranoid Hell!

For SEO reasons I have very few external links on my main page. Can't see why Google downgraded my main site. I have been at PR6 for years.

Herein lies my main beef - with Google you don't really know where you stand; you are constantly walking on eggshells. No matter how good your content or your site is - one misstep and you could be in the doghouse. All your hard work can be taken away in a heartbeat.

It wouldn't matter so much if it was one of the other two major search engines downgrading your site but this is Google.

Free organic traffíc from Google is vital to any online site or business. I would take traffíc from Google over any other source of traffíc on the web, except for traffíc coming from my articles on other sites, and even that traffíc probably originated from a search in Google.

Google and Google PageRank have always been important to me - that's one of the reasons a sudden large drop causes so much concern. There's another important reason Google PageRank is important to me.

Most SEO experts mistakenly believe PageRank is meaningless because Google is not giving us the true ranking of any site or revealing all the backlinks, which is supposedly one of the major factors in how Google ranks sites. While this fact is obviously true, it has caused many to jump to another conclusion.

Because Google is not giving us the real ranking, many webmasters have dismissed PageRank as a vital element in their sites. Don't make the same mistake.

Google PageRank is extremely important if you're doing business on the web. The higher PR you have, the better. But it has nothing to do with keyword rankings or first page SERPs.

What many SEO experts fail to realize (not really their business) is the whole "perceived" value of PageRank.

Google, hate it or love it, has become the most respected company on the web in the eyes of the majority of the web's users. It carries enormous weíght and prestige. The "perceived" value of a high PR7 or PR8 is extremely valuable.

We are not talking about link selling; we are talking about how a perspective business partner or customer will treat your site or business.

Say you have two identical sites you want to do business with online and you discover one is a Google PR2 site and the other is a Google PR8 site - which one would you choose to do business with? Honestly?

From first-hand experience, I know any online company or marketer will get more business offers and be offered more partnerships/joint ventures if you have a high Google PR site than a low one. It will make a difference to your bottom line.

PageRank is important. PageRank has meaning. Even if it has little bearing on your SERPs rankings or Google traffíc, PageRank can greatly influence the success of your online site or venture. Don't ignore or dismiss PageRank as a meaningless relic that didn't quite work out as Google had planned for it in the first place.

  High PageRank Will Always Be Valuable

The day Google gives its own site a PageRank of PR1 or PR2 instead of the current PR10 - that's the day you can dismiss PageRank as truly meaningless.

November 16th 2007: A Slippery Slope: Google Owns a Search Engine Optimization Company
by Scott Buresh Medium Blue
If you own or work with a search engine optimization company, or even if you're just hoping to better your search engine placement, then you are probably aware of the recent acquisition frenzy that took hold among the major search engines. Google paid $3.1 billion for DoubleClick, Microsoft paid $6 billion for Aquantive, and Yahoo paid $680 million for the 80 percent of Right Media that it did not already own and another $300 million for BlueLithium. The companies purchased are all intended to help widen the advertising range of each of the engines in question, and to take advantage of increasingly sophisticated behavioral-based ad-serving technologies that the acquired companies owned.

What many people failed to realize was that when Google purchased DoubleClick, it now was also the owner of a very large search engine optimization company called Performics, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of DoubleClick.

This fact is of course raising some eyebrows in the industry. Google has consistently maintained that there is no way that people can pay for better search engine placement in the organic index, a stance that the company still claims applies despite this recent purchase. In fact, a portion of Google's published guidelines about SEO says, "While Google doesn't have relationships with any SEOs and doesn't offer recommendations..." In another portion, Google says "While Google nevër sells better ranking in our search results..." However, anyone who hires search engine optimization company Performics is of course now paying Google for better search engine placement. It seems like a pretty black and white issue, but Google would obviously prefer that it was kept delightfully blurry.

  A Serious Conflict of Interest

One would think that Google, aware of the controversy that would come from the fact that it now owned a search engine optimization company, would be eager to spin Performics off quickly in order to avoid the appearance of impropriety and of selling search engine placement. Not so, says the official Google/ Doubleclick acquisition FAQ:

Q. What will Google do with Performics?

A. Performics is part of DoubleClick, and we are acquiring it as part of the transaction. We have no plans to dispose of it at this time.[1]

All right, so Google owns a search engine optimization company and seems prepared to hold onto it for a little while at least. Yes, there seems to be a huge conflict of interest. Yes, there appears to be a large double standard. Yes, Google appears to have abandoned its long-standing principles regarding organic search engine placement in the interests of profít. But surely, the search engine optimization company that it bought will quickly be forced to follow the guidelines that Google has published for companies that are looking for a search engine optimization company. Right? Well, no.

Here is a verbatim quote from the guidelines that Google provides to people thinking about hiring a search engine optimization company:

* Make sure you're protected legally. For your öwn safety, you should insist on a full and unconditional money-back guarantëe. Don't be afraid to request a refund if you're unsatisfied for any reason...[2]

On the surface, this advice seems solid enough, but as an owner of a search engine optimization company, I can tell you how impractical it is. What would prevent a company that achieved fantastic search engine placement using my service from asking for its monëy back, claiming that it is unsatisfied? "For any reason" is a very slippery slope, and apparently Google agrees – Performics does not provide a guarantëe of any kind. How do I know? Simple -- one of my employees called and asked. We also have it in writing from an email we received from one of their sales reps.

  What Are Google's Options?

Let's be charitable and assume that in the heat of the acquisition Google has forgotten to update the page of advice that it has created for website owners. This leaves only four things that can happen:

1. Status Quo: Google keeps this advice up on the page and Performics continues to provide no guarantëe regarding search engine placement. We'll call this the "hypocritical" scenario.

2. Performics gets in line: Google leaves the advice up as is and forces Performics to provide an unconditional money-back guarantëe. We'll call this the "free SEO from Performics" scenario.

3. Guidelines change: Performics maintains zero guarantees for search engine placement but Google modifies the advice to remove the inconsistencies pointed out in this article from its advice section. We'll call this the "shareholder's delight moneygrubber special" scenario.

4. Google spins off Performics and removes itself from the search engine optimization industry. We'll call this the "sanity over dollars" scenario.

I'm not betting on which of these scenarios is most likely. Some time back I would have picked #4, but as I pointed out in a recent article, Google has already crossed an invisible line by offering free advice about organic search engine placement to its biggest pay-per-click spenders.

Google owning a search engine optimization company -- a slippery slope, indeed. What does this mean for those hiring other companies and looking for great search engine placement? We will just have to wait and see.

  References:

[1] What will Google do with Performics

[2] Google Webmaster Help Center

The Great SEO Lie Exposed
By Stoney deGeyter - November 6, 2007

I'm not a Google hater. In fact I have no real problems with Google other than the standard fare. I don't always agree with what they do and they, at times, appear to be quite hypocritical. Many would simply chalk that up to big-business. But Google's no Enron, at least not yet. My only real problem is that Google tends to talk out of both sides of its proverbial mouth, and expects the SEO community to take them at face value. But we really can't anymore.

I had an alternate title for this post: "Ask not what Google can do for you, but what you can do for Google". We're moving into a new age where we have to pay closer attention what Google does -- despite what Google says.

I smell deceit in the air

If I asked you to tell me the biggest lie perpetuated in the SEO industry, what would you say? Now before you answer, notice I didn't say "biggest lie perpetuated by SEO's". Sure there are plenty of those, whether deliberate or out of ignorance, but none reach the status of being one of the greatest all-time self-serving lies of all time when it comes to SEO. A lie, which many have bought into, but has very recently been exposed for what it is. And here it is:

Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"

That quote is pulled directly from Google's Webmaster Guidelines, and it's great advice. Unfortunately, Google has shown that, as much as we may want, we really can't build websites for "users" alone. And if search engines did not exist, websites would be developed differently than they are today.

This particular lie was exposed very recently when Google fired a warning shot across the bow of many high-profile sites by lowering their toolbar PageRank. This was in response to an update to their help center discussing their policy on paid links.

Not all paid links violate our guidelines. Buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web when done for advertising purposes, and not for manipulation of search results. Links purchased for advertising should be designated as such. This can be done in several ways, such as:

• Adding a rel="nofollow" attribute to the < a > tag
• Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file

You'll notice that both of the solutions Google provides for disclosing paid links have nothing to do with the site visitor. In fact, neither solution does anything to benefit the user or even informs them that you've used paid links. No, these solutions benefit someone, but it's not the website visitor. That's quite the contradiction from their longstanding rule of doing things to your site for users rather than the search engines.

Turn to the left and cough twice

And therein is the great SEO lie that Google has been kind enough to expose for us. Google says that you shouldn't make changes to your site solely for search engines. However, they are more than happy—neigh, they demand—that you make changes that fill in for their own algorithmic shortcomings. Changes that would never be made if we based it on the answer to the question, "Does this help my users?"

Welcome to a new SEO generation, where Google has us by the, uh, well, you know. In the past, webmasters have been the ones in the drivers seat, manipulating Google and other search engines to give us the results we want. That manipulation has now become a two player game. We're still free to ask what Google can do for us, but don't be surprised when Google demands we give a little back. And that they are more than willing to squeeze their grip a tad bit if that's what it takes to get our attention.

The cat is out. The lie has been exposed. I can live with that, but let's not continue to pretend that it's only users that matter anymore. Google has made it clear that Google matters. And Google cares about themselves far more than they care about their users. The only thing left to do is for Google to stop pretending otherwise. They do that and a little tug here and there won't be so uncomfortable.

 

November 6th 2007
PageRank of Google shifts as websites across the entire web see their pagerank drop several notches including high quality authoritative sites.   This older style site was a PR5 now down to an embarrassing PR1 which pushed me to start the web re-design process from scratch... which has been very exciting laying out the roadmap to a common sense, straightforward SEO plan of action at the clients pace and budget producing results at every level.  At any rate, the below article will give some insight into the goings on of the Google PageRank lately.  Follow the article links for related additional news.

FIRST PLACE POSITIONING

8 Things We Learned About Google PageRank
October 25th, 2007 by Loren Baker, Editor

Yesterday, Google lowered the Toolbar PageRank of many sites in many different online verticals, in what may be a permanent or temporary message to sites about selling links.

Google also lowered the Toolbar PageRank of many sites which do not sell links, so the link argument may not even be relevant. Until Google comes out with a statement on the changes in PageRank, we may be beating this argument into the ground. Especially since blog networks and major media sites were also included in the update, which seems to be hand delivered from the Google gods.

However, there has been a lot of coverage about Google PageRank over the last day, and if anything, the public is becoming more educated on the separation between Google Toolbar’s PageRank and how Google ranks a site.

Search Engine Journal is now a PageRank 4 or a PageRank 6, depending on what datacenter your toolbar is working off of. We were PageRank 7 for several years and have not, in my opinion, done much to offset this PageRank.

We have hundreds of thousands of incoming links and have never purchased a link to this site.

Here are 8 different notes about the Google PageRank ‘update’ (this could be a PageRank hiccup) from yesterday”

1. PageRank is not an indicator of Google traffic or Google Rankings.

Since May 2007, our Google search referral traffic has doubled and now stands at 45% to 50% of our incoming daily traffic. Search Engine Roundtable reports similar findings.

In fact, Search Engine Journal’s traffic from Google Search has shown a sharp increase over the past month, possibly due to some changes we have implemented (or the popularity of the subjects we cover).

2. Firing a PageRank Warning Shot

Google is not the Internet, but is all powerful. A drop in Google Toolbar page rating system leads to advertisers pulling out of sites, link deals being broken, widespread fear of paid links hurting site ranking and traffic.

In my opinion, by flipping the switch on changing the PageRank of some sites, Google is trying to send a message that they have the power to turn this search marketing industry over on its head. But they have not issued a rankings change.

3. Target the Authorities, But Not the Wrong Doers

Does lowering Search Engine Journal’s PageRank to a 4 stop a multi-million dollar industry from shutting down? No.

Do we deserve to be publicly humiliated or targeted by Google for having a couple of links in our ad section? No.

Are we still an authority site? Yes, of course.

Google targeted the PageRank of high profile sites in what is becoming a trickle down effect. ‘Engadget got hit, I better stop before I get hit too.” Yeah, but hit for what?

4. PageRank stands for PR, or Public Relations

I’ll let these Forbes quotes from Rand and Barry speak for themselves.

“The bottom line is that people are able to manipulate Google’s rankings by buying links, and Google has to do something about that,” he said. “Today, they sent a huge statement to some of the most popular blogs on the Internet, and particularly those in the search industry.”

Search engine marketer and blogger Rand Fishkin agrees that the pagerank shift was likely meant to send a message to link buyers and sellers. “Google has said in many conferences that this number isn’t accurate, that it’s a rough signal but shouldn’t make any determination about a site,” says Fishkin. “This is meant to be a more public way of saying,’we know what you’re up to.’”

5. NoFollow is a Sign of No Trust, We Trust Our Sponsors

Barry Schwartz says it best:

I trust my sponsors, I value their sponsorships and I couldn’t do what I do without their financial support. Some sponsors can’t afford huge sponsorships, so they sponsor in their ways. It is what enables this site and many other sites to function and operate on a daily basis. I turn down sponsors all the time because they are simply not relevant or useful to my reader. I hand select them and for them to be on my site, means I trust them. Why nofollow someone you trust and want to thank? Is that a slap in their face? Will I have to and will they continue to sponsor? Time will tell.

6. PageRank is not a Marketing Metric

If anything, yesterday’s PageRank change helped remind us that PageRank, like Alexa and other questionable ratings services, is not a pricing or marketing metric. A link from a PageRank 7 site is not going to have more vale than a link from a PageRank 3 site. The value is in the context of each site, the anchor text and other values. Don’t buy links based on PageRank, and don’t sell links based on PageRank. Come on, that’s just so 2002!

Doug Heil did a great job of discussing his view on this in our Search Engine Journal Comments area:

I’m don’t understand why Google displays the bar anymore. It’s purpose was to get good public relations a long time ago. It’s not needed now. It only serves “text link brokers” and those who sell pagerank text links. In other words, it’s totally useless. It actually always has been totally useless as a “rank” indicator.

Why the SEO industry has made a big deal of the green bar all these years is something I’ve never been able to understand. Oh sure; Google may have created the metric, but it’s the SEO industry who has been their very own worse culprit in spreading the BS and falsehoods about the bar.

7. It’s Time for a Better System than PageRank

SEOBook’s Aaron Wall speaks up:

Since Google is demoting PageRank’s viability as a site’s global authority score perhaps this is a time for Yahoo to bring back WebRank, or Ask to launch something like CommunityRank. The Google-webmaster relationship is fraying. This presents an opportunity for whoever wants to take it.

8. Lowered PageRank Leads to More Quality Links

Search Engine Journal was linked to yesterday from Google Blogoscoped, SEOmoz, Forbes.com, Search Engine Watch, Techmeme and Sphinn among other quality and authority sites because people’s toolbars changed around the world. Great link bait! Thanks Google :)

November 1st 2007
The below video link at the end of the article below gives you an overall look  at the main areas of site optimization.  These things provide a good foundation, which is needed to compete for a competitive first place ranking.  The main points covered which have changed little over the years are first to:  focus on the right keyword phrases with experienced keyword research and then:  develop or optimize a search engine compliant site structure for effective spider-ability. 

FIRST PLACE POSITIONING

 

Expert Strategies for SEO by Mike McDonald

Optimizing your site for search engines can be challenging and time consuming. It's a game where the rules are always changing and there is no shortage of outdated and just flat out bad advice readily available. So, what should you be doing? How should you be approaching the whole search engine optimization mess?

When creating your SEO strategy, due diligence mandates that you not just take the word of the first self-styled SEO expert that just 'shows up' in your inbox one day. Beyond that it's an even better idea to look for consensus viewpoints among established and recognized experts in the field.

So, where would an SEO expert start with a site? That's what we wanted to know. What are some of the common themes, concepts, ideas and practices all of these guys would agree on? We put these questions to four leading SEO guys.

We got some good ones too.

• Rand Fishkin, CEO of SEOmoz.org, sure he wears funny shoes, but he's an SEO rockstar of the first order by anyone's definition.
• Eric Enge of Stone Temple Consulting, a regular and veteran of the SEO conference scene.
• David Brown of Top SEO Consultants. SEO, forums, podcasts, blogs - if you know a buzzword, David's probably been there and done it already.
• Brian Mark from Toolbarn.com. Brian is an admin at WebProWorld forum and last year Toolbarn made the list of top 100 Internet retailers. 'Nuff said.

Obviously, you can watch the video to get the info first hand, but for those of you who prefer to stick with the text here are some of the more interesting points made:

All of these guys agreed on the importance of having a crawlable site. Dump the pull down navigation windows, take it easy on the java script, don't get nuts with Flash dominated pages. Always use distinct titles and descriptions from page to page. Watch your achor (link) text - you don't want to use things like 'click here' or 'home' for your navigation because they don't mean much to search spiders.

David Brown specifically mentioned the concept of the KEI, or Keyword Efficiency Index when thinking about and choosing keywords you want to focus on. KEI is important and it's one of those things you can show off to your non-SEO friends to make them understand how smart you are because it has a very impressive looking formula:

KEI = (DS^2/C) = (DS/C * DS)

It's actually not as complicated as it looks, and there is a great definition of KEI at StrictlyCSS.com.

Eric, Rand and Brian all mentioned how important the content of your site is to your SEO efforts. This is particularly true in terms of garnering those all-important inbound links to your site. As Rand observes specifically, search engines rank based on two factors; relevance and popularity.

Relevance is fairly self-explanatory, but the popularity angle is more interesting. You want your on page content to be popular - not necessarily with engines themselves (because they don't care) and not necessarily popular with your customers --- you want your content to be popular with other people in your field. Similar sites with similar topics, targeting the same kind of areas Links from those kinds of sites/pages are extremely valuable inbound links.

Obviously, this isn't to say to ignore your customers and end users when you create your content. Simply that you should also be thinking about the attractiveness or linkability of your content to other people sites within your subject area. At the end of the day, nothing will move you further, faster than quality inbound links.

Speaking of inbound links, the general consensus of all of our experts in the video is basically the more the merrier. They all stress the importance and value of having relevant inbound links with good, keyword specific anchor text, but none of them seem to have any qualms or issues with HOW you go about getting them. A couple of guys just flat out admit that they will, and have, paid for sites to link to them.

That said, they also all agree that if you do buy links, you should be smart about it. Be selective about the types of links you buy - make double sure they are relevant etc and just basically keep it under your hat.

There's plenty more info in the video. Be sure to check it out. If you feel like we left some major point unexplored or have suggestions or ideas for future video interviews, let me know about it and we'll see what we can come up with.

October 31st:  Google Gets More Social With New Network
By AP/MICHAEL LIEDTKE

(SAN FRANCISCO) — Google Inc. is setting up a distribution network for social networking applications, adding a new twist in the Internet search leader's brewing rivalry with rapidly maturing startup Facebook Inc.

Although Google confirmed its plans late Tuesday, its new social networking platform won't be unveiled until later this week.

Google hopes to build a one-stop shop for software developers who create tools that make it easier to share music, pictures, video and other personal interests on social networking sites like Facebook and News Corp.'s MySpace.com.

The popularity of these applications, also known as "widgets," has grown dramatically since Facebook opened its Web site to accommodate outside developers five months ago.

Facebook now hosts more than 8,000 widgets, helping to boost its worldwide audience to about 50 million users and elevate its market value to $15 billion after Microsoft Corp. paid $240 million for a 1.6 percent stake in the Palo Alto-based company last week.

Microsoft trumped Google in the bidding for a piece of Facebook. Google's bigger social networking ambition is believed to be one of the reasons Facebook decided to deepen its partnership with Microsoft instead.

Google now hopes to attract many of the same applications thriving on Facebook to its own network, dubbed "OpenSocial."

The system is set up so the participating software developers will only have to code their applications once. Google will then ensure they are compatible with all the Web sites in its network.

The early participants in OpenSocial include social networking destinations like LinkedIn, hi5.com, Friendster and Ning, as well as the Web sites of business software specialists Salesforce.com Inc. and Oracle Corp.

Google also will feature the applications on its own social network, Orkut, which hasn't attracted much traffic outside South America.

OpenSocial's combined audience will exceed 100 million users, according to Google.

The list of developers feeding applications to Google include three of Facebook's most popular Widget suppliers — Slide, RockYou and iLike.

Mountain View-based Google won't try to make money from the OpenSocial network right away but hasn't ruled out the possibility of eventually inserting ads into the applications.

"There is no question Google will benefit from this," Joe Kraus, a Google product manager, said in a Tuesday interview. "Google's role is highly intertwined with the Web, so anything that makes the Web a better experience tends to help Google."

While Google muscles into the social networking scene, Facebook appears to be gearing up to grab some of the advertising revenue that has been pouring into Google. Facebook is expected to discuss its plans for its own advertising network during a Nov. 6 event scheduled in New York.

Facebook already has proven to be thorn in Google's side by recently hiring away some of its top engineers.

October 25th: Google Slams Paid Links? Good or Bad?
 
Another under-the-radar-of-the-real-world blog firestorm erupted yesterday over high profile page rank drops. Google dropped visible PR of many blogs and mainstream news sites presumably as a penalty for selling links.

Should Google penalize sites that sell links? Comment here.

No one except Google really knows for sure why PR dropped for these sites but it certainly looks like an extension of September's paid directory massacre. This time Google targeted some well-known sites in the search marketing world and mainstream news too.

Sites include niche blogs like Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Roundtable, ProBlogger and nationally prominent sites such as WashingtonPost.com and Forbes.com. ( More here)

The reactions around the web fall into four categories. Again... these are not my opinions, just a synopsis of what I have read from hundreds of comments in blogs, articles and forums.

1. Google Is Justified
This should come as no surprise, after all Google warned us. Paid links hit at the core of why we all love Google ... its quality search results. Google is perfectly justified in taking steps to protect the integrity of its SERPS.

Lowering page rank of those who sell links levels the playing field for all of us who don't sell them. It is Google's search engine and they can do what they want in order to keep it great and even improve it. Comment here

2. Google is Out of Control
Google sells links and should not penalize others for selling them too. Why should Google be able to tell me how to link and whom to link to? What is wrong with linking and why should I have to put a no-follow tag on a link when I genuinely like a site.? How does their algorithm know that I received payment for a link?

Google is simply out to crush competition. Don't they remember their roots? It was the webmasters who were the first adopters of Google's search engine. It was us who made you rich Google!  One blogger called it a Google "bitch slap!" Is Google retaliating against me for criticizing them in my blog?

Is Google the next Microsoft? All of us lowly web peasants should ask forgiveness from our beloved Internet King! Google, you are a competitive monopoly who should realize that your actions impact the livelihoods of thousands of Internet entrepreneurs. Comment here

3. Why Me? Please Give My PR Back!
I don't sell links anymore. I have removed all the links that look like they are paid. Now please reinstate my page rank! I want to thank all of my sponsors and I hope that they will keep this PR drop in perspective and continue advertising with me. I really don't sell links, I am simply thanking my friends and partners for their support.

I am sorry I did not take your prior statements more seriously. Google, I thought that you were talking about link farms, not quality content sites like mine that sell a link here and there. I literally spend 60 hours a week writing unique content and I have now removed the links that look suspicious.

I was just kidding when I suggested my page rank loss was because I stopped using Adsense. I have written you asking for my page rank back and I am waiting for your response. Comment here

4. Denial and Deflection
This is only part of an overall page rank adjustment. When the dust settles my page rank will be back to normal. No one should pay attention to PR anyways, it has nothing to do with the value of your content.

Google is doing this for show, it is not at all reflective of their internal page rank used in the search algorithm. My pageviews have gone up, not down since my page rank was lowered. I didn't lose any sleep over it and you shouldn't either! Comment here

--- --- ---

Is Google justified with lowering the page rank of sites that sell links because it messes with their search results? Or, is Google out of control and simply protecting its turf as some have suggested?

Should Google quickly reinstate the PR of sites that stop selling links? Does page rank really matter anymore? Will a lower page rank eventually cause a drop in traffic?

October 17th: 8 Methods of Adding More Content to Your Site

Content is king and your content site is your kingdom. When the adage "content is king" was first coined, the web was, in many respects, a simpler place for Webmasters. Creating a website with ten to twenty pages of keyword rich content would generate excellent search engine results and a mass of traffíc as a result. Note that keyword rich has now been replaced by keyword optimized – a subtle difference, but a difference nevertheless.

However, the web evolved (difficult to imagine that it's only now considered web 2.0). With the evolution of the web came a much greater demand from web users. Where the static content site was once the epitome of everything good about the Internet, that is less true of the most recent incarnation of the World Wide Web. Your website visitors demand more, but are you able to provide it? We look at various methods of including more content on your website.

  More Pages

OK, we'll deal with the most obvious method first. Add more pages. It's simple and it might be considered old school to many, but it still has a place. The more pages of content you have, the more information you can provide and the more keywords you can target. The math is simple and the technique is devastatingly simple.

Try to add new pages for new topics and, if a particular topic looks like being too verbose, split the page down into several parts. Hostíng plans usually allow for a lot of disk space so you should have no problems with space limitations in this respect. Content Management Systems are often included as part of a hostíng control panel, again making it much easier to add more pages to your website.

  Add An Article Directory

This is a similar approach to adding more pages in many respects except that it allows for a slightly different structure. An article directory is an excellent way to provide visitors more information on the topic of your site. Articles can be categorized, and include deep links to the appropriate pages of your site.

Articles are very marketable, in the sense that if they are well written, other websites may be inclined to link to the article or even republish it in full with all links to your site left in place. If you simply want to add more content, and use the resulting pages as online real estate, then you could consider accepting article submissions from other authors and Webmasters. You receive free content while the authors receive exposure.

  News Section

News items related to your industry or even your business can be a good excuse to regularly add content. As a general rule they will contain what will turn out to be reasonable long tail search results and you can optimize the pages. Good news or press releases may be picked up by other industry news sites providing you with more exposure as well as genuinely useful content for your site.

Let's not overlook that it's always good to brag. Modesty will not win you customers, so if your business or website achieves something big then brag about it. Inform your customers how they too can benefit and the advantages that your news gives to them.

  Forums

Some believe that the forum is becoming outdated by more modern web 2.0 applications and portals. While this may be true, the forum can still be used to your advantage although only in the appropriate circumstances. Forums provide a means for people to communicate with one another, and if you can create a vibrant and lively forum, you will instantly attract regular visitors.

The forum can also be used to direct your website visitors. If there's a particularly hot topic, then link to it from one of your pages. If somebody (even you) posts a particularly beneficial post, then link to it from one or more of your pages. Conversely, you can also point forum readers to the main pages of your site. It is possible, with certain forum applications, to replace all instances of a word with a link to one of your pages – a quick way to flow traffíc into your main site.

  Blogs

Who hasn't heard of blogs, right? They caused a huge debate when first introduced. Early bloggers claimed they would be the future of the Internet while more skeptical marketers and Webmasters decided their popularity would dwindle eventually. The former certainly came true and it seems there are blogs everywhere, within every industry, and on every conceivable topic.

Blogs have been turned into books, books into blogs. Blogs have even been turned into TV series and, again, vice versa. If you're not blogging then you're not communicating because a blog really does provide a superb way of communicating with your visitors and your customers. And, you guessed it, it allows you to add a lot of good content to your site and will usually draw good search engine traffíc for your efforts.

  Frequently Asked Questíons

An old favorite of the Internet marketer. The FAQ page serves a number of purposes, but primarily it is used to prevent an excessive number of telephone calls and emails with simple questíons. An FAQ page can also be used to highlight some of the main benefits of your service or product. For example, if you sell trainers, and deliver them the next day, one of your questíons could be:

"Q - How long before my Nike trainers are delivered?"

"A - We provide next day delivery on all orders placed before 2pm"

That's a very simplistic view, but it can help to sell your product. Also ensure that you include some of your more important keywords through the questíons and answers.

  Knowledgebase

A knowledgebase is essentially the next step up from an FAQ page. Instead of having a single page with all of your questíons and answers you would create an article or short article that concentrates on one question or one tutorial. Once you have built up a good number of these you have an excellent point of resource, a good way to attract visitors, and a method of keeping unnecessary customer communications to a minimum.

  Feeds

RSS and XML feeds are not new, but they are good for adding content to your site. Look for other sites within your industry that provide feeds and embed them into a page or several of the pages of your site. This can help with SEO because the better feeds update regularly and the search engine spiders believe your site content updates regularly.

These are just some of the more basic but effective methods of adding more and more content to your website. Anything that enables you to add more words has the ability to help improve traffíc and conversions, and provide your customers with an invaluable resource that they will hopefully return to time and time again.

If you don't already have a blog, then get one. At least one. You can combine a blog with other methods of adding content. For instance, you can add other people's articles, or your own articles to the pages of your blog. Alternatively, you can use a blog as the news section of your website. They are easy to design and typically very easy to establish and integrate into your website.

About The Author
WebWiseWords crafts various forms of web content. If you are looking for anything from article writing to blog writing, then visit the WebWiseWords site today.

October 16th:  61 billion searches conducted worldwide in August

"More than 750 million people age 15 and older or 95 percent of the worldwide Internet audience – conducted 61 billion searches worldwide in August, an average of more than 80 searches per searcher. [...]

Google Sites ranked as the top worldwide search property in August with 37.1 billion searches conducted. [...] Yahoo! Sites ranked second with 8.5 billion searches, while Baidu.com, a Chinese language search engine, followed in third place with more than 3.2 billion searches."

October 11th:  Small Business Guide to Optimizing Universal Search
by Lee Odden

The buzz in the search marketing media and increasingly, the business press, on the importance of unified or universal search is gaining momentum and is unavoidable.

Small and medium sized business web site owners and webmasters are now presented with the challenge of making sense out of the recent rash of search engine interface and functional improvements and how to adjust their online marketing efforts accordingly. Many are not sure what to do. Hopefully this short guide will shed light on the fundamentals and give some basic direction on next steps.

Early this summer Google rolled out one of the most significant changes to its search engine ever called Universal search. This update was followed a week or so later by Ask.com announcing Ask 3D. After a leak and then a more official announcement late September, Microsoft Live officially announced the 2.0 version of it's search engine to include universal search features and Now Yahoo and has followed suit with their version of Unified search, being called the "new Yahoo! search". What does all this mean for most businesses marketing online?

What is Universal Search?

First, I should explain what Google Universal, Ask 3D, Live Search and the new Yahoo! Search are, and how they're different from the way search engines have traditionally retrieved and displayed search results. As an overview, the latest and greatest versions of the popular search engines include more than the text based web pages in the search results that we've all been used to the past 10+ years.

These "upgraded" search features from the major search engines now also find and bring back results in varying media formats including: images, news, local listings, video, blog posts, products and more depending on the particular search engine. But let's break it down a bit further.

Ask and You Shall Receive

Ask 3D means bringing in three dimensions of search into one set of search results, i.e. the three columns in the search results page. For example, if you search for "Shrek 3", on the left are additional suggested search terms and related searches to other movies. In the middle are paid listings with regular text based results below. On the right are search results from images, video, Wikipedia and other sources depending on the query.



One of the big challenges in making search a positive experience for users is to deliver the right answers according to the searcher's intent. Searching more content sources than just web pages allows the search engine to deliver extra sets of relevant content that people may be looking for rather than making them sort through the typical web page results to find the content they're looking for or worse, have to perform yet another search on another specific type of search engine.

Ask 3D is unique compared to Google Universal, Live Search and the new Yahoo! search because it most distinctly separates the different data sources on the page.

Google's New Universe

Google Universal blends Images, Maps, Books, Video, and News into the standard search results page. If we use the "Shrek 3" query again as an example, you'll see listings from YouTube mixed in with the web pages including a preview image and the option to watch the movie trailer right within the search results. Normally, you'd have to click and visit another web page to do that.
 
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So rather than having to perform unique queries on Google, Google News, Google Images, etc individually, Google Universal searches all of those databases and returns the best matches in one set of search results. Findings reported in a recent study by Enquiro show that searchers are more engaged with content throughout the unified search results page rather than just the top 3 listings.

That makes sense because if you search for something and see a video thumbnail in the middle of the search results page, it will draw your attention - provided the title and description text are relevant of course.

Microsoft Search is A-Live!

The new Live Search promises better relevance, speed and look/feel enhancements as well as enhanced search results for queries related to "high interest" categories like: Health, Entertainment, Shopping, Celeberaties, Local, and Video. When a search is performed, like our favorite "shrek 3", you'll see video thumbnails displayed near the top of the standard search results with related searches suggested on the right. One neat, and surprising to me, was that the video clips play when you put your cursor over them. No clicking necessary.
 
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It's A New Yahoo

With the new Yahoo! search, the same unified search characteristics apply. Yahoo searches it's various databases or indexes of content and brings them back into one set of search results as you can see in this "shrek 3" example search. One interesting feature is that when you search for something location/event oriented, you get a set of results at the top of the page sorted by category, date and most popular. That information comes from Yahoo site, Upcoming.org. The other more notable feature of Yahoo's new search is the "search assist" feature that suggest phrases as you type.

 
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While each version of "unified search" is slightly different, they all share the same characteristics of bringing back content from multiple data sources with the intention of providing a better user experience.

Why do these changes with the search engines matter to search marketers and web site owners?

First, it creates an online marketing challenge. A web site might have enjoyed certain positions on key terms within a search engine only now to find that their ranked web pages have been pushed down by video, image or local search results.

To address the situation, web site owners are faced with the proposition of making the effort to optimize their video, image, blog, local, news and product content. That's easier said than done, because in most cases, small businesses have but a smattering of those content types at their disposal. If you don't have the content format, you certainly can't optimize for it. Even if you did, optimizing video for example, is a different thing than optimizing for news search.

The business of optimizing content for search engines just got a lot more complex.

With Challenges Come Opportunities

Many businesses won't even notice why their search visibility has changed until it's far into the game. Some will resort to beefing up their paid search campaigns, which you'd think might be an objective for the search engines, and some will roll up their sleeves and tackle the opportunity head on. With unified search results, there exist additional, high profile exposure opportunities where none of that type previously existed. The way for smart marketers to approach these opportunities is with a holistic perspective.

Optimizing holistically starts with an inventory of a company's digital assets. Text, images, audio and video are all considered along with the incorporation of keyword messaging across company communications. Matching digital assets with channels of distribution provides marketers with even more opportunity to reach customers since each channel (blogging, email, media relations, social networking, forums, etc) can drive traffic independently as well as improve standard search visibility.

If a small business is not in the habit of creating content in multiple formats, then it will mean change. In fact, substantial changes may be necessary with content creation, approval and publishing processes along with the need for ongoing education. The key is to identify those content creation processes that are already occurring that could be altered or leveraged for the purpose of publishing more media content online. Process changes will still be necessary, but if a business can use some of what they're already doing with other marketing promotions to improve their search visibility in a world of universal search, it will save effort, money and enable results more quickly.

Optimizing for Universal Search in Action

An example might be a situation where a new product is being released. In such a situation, many small businesses will post a new product page with a photo on the web site and email their list of industry publications and local reporters the announcement. They might even post a press release.

To take advantage of such a situation where unified search results can be leveraged might include the same process of updating the company web site with the product content. Such an effort would also include creating content in additional media formats, such as shooting a short video with an engineer or product manager explaining some of the features/benefits of the product. Just about all digital cameras can take a few minutes of video. The video can be edited with free video editing software like Windows Movie Maker to add credits or even add background music.

Promoting a Good Image

To leverage image search, the image file names could use keywords relevant to the product. Alt text used in the coding of the web page describing the image could do the same as well as a short text caption beneath the image. The image(s) can be submitted to image sharing web sites like Flickr.com with relevant keywords in the image category, title, description and tags. The description of the product on the image sharing site can include a link back to the product web page on the company web site.

Associating relevant keywords with the image will help media or image search engines understand what the image is, and subsequently categorize and rank it. The link from the image description on the image sharing site can send both visitors and search engines to the product page.

Video is the New Rock Star of Search

The product page on the company web site can also include the short video to give visitors another way in which to learn about the product. Embedding the video in the product web page also gives search engines another media format to index and display in unified search results. Submitting the product video to video sharing web sites such as YouTube.com with a relevant, keyword-rich description will make it even easier for the video to appear in video search and unified search results.

To take it a step further, you could upload screen captures of the video to image sharing sites and link back to the video from the description. The image and video could also be packaged with the press release to provide the media more interesting and engaging ways to learn about the new product. Submitting the press release via wire services can also leverage new search visibility. There are many more steps possible in promoting such content ranging from social bookmarking to blogger relations to the creation of viral linking campaigns, but this is a start, a foundation.

Making Universal Search Easier is Hard Work

The overall idea is to create, optimize and promote the kinds of media formats (text, images and video in this example) that both customers and search engines will respond to. Making it easy for search engines to find your text, images and video means it will be easier for those representations of your product to show up in unified search results.

It may sound like a lot of work but this is the reality of the new search. Optimizing relevant media formats to meet the information channel and format consumption preferences of customers is what will allow small businesses to continue competing against the "big guys" on the web.

The upside is that a substantial increase in media types being indexed by the new search engines all linking to a company web site will provide the kind of advantage standard search engine optimization no longer offers. In other words, optimizing for the different media types provides a competitive advantage.

The Work Will Never End But the Benefits Are Long Term

As long as there are search engines, there will be some kind of optimization for improving search engine visibility. What small business marketers need to consider are all the digital assets they have to work with and enable content creation, optimization and promotion processes to give both search engines and customers the information they're looking for in the formats they'll respond to.