But with all the information and features packed into many of today’s websites, it can also be more difficult for site visitors to first of all determine whether or not a website will contain the information they need and then find it on the website. Installing a site search box can provide several advantages to help your site visitors - and also benefit your marketing function in the process.

Site Search Satisfies the Customer’s “I Want It Now” Attitude

Installing an internal site search box can help visitors find what they need more quickly. With web users still looking to find what they need as fast as possible, confusing navigation and cluttered design are more likely than ever to prompt an “on-to-the-next-site” response.

Internal site search is undoubtedly the quickest way for someone to find what they’re looking for on a large and complex site. An internal site search helps visitors get around navigational structures that may be confusing to them. This is especially important for sites that are constantly adding new content. As the site continues to grow, many users will find the site search function to be a valuable tool in helping them find what they need.

Site Search Makes a Website More Customer Centric

Installing an internal site search also means you can transform your website from a static “one size fits all” style to a more “customer-centric” approach. More and more, websites need to simultaneously cater to different types of website users - knowledge seekers, prospects, buyers and long-term customers. Internal site search helps you do this, as it helps those seeking knowledge find and assess your resources more easily.

Site Search Appeals to the “Searcher” Type of Site Visitor

Different people prefer different types of navigation tools. For example, if someone uses a search engine like Google to arrive at your website, they are more likely to prefer the same search method for finding information within your website. It’s not uncommon for site visitors to look immediately for the site search box when they arrive at a website.

Site Search Arms Marketers With Data

Marketers can benefit tremendously from installing an internal site search function. With the right analytic tool, internal site search can provide a wealth of information about who visits your site and how they navigate around it.

Site search data can provide insight into customer desires, intent, and behavior. While a customer might tell a different story if asked for feedback in a focus group or online survey, for example, site search data can reveal exactly which pages they looked for and found, which searches intrigued them to continue reading as well as those that prompted them to leave the site. This will contribute to the conversation when analyzing conversion rate performance across content and site sections.

Site Search Provides Insight into Personas and Usability Issues

Site search can provide usability data without the expense of setting up testing facilities. When the usage data and click path from real users is saved and available for viewing and analysis anytime, a marketer can see where searchers encountered difficulty. Looking at this data across multiple users can give clues to areas of the site that require updating and expansion, for example.

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Adding typical searched on phrases to flesh out descriptions of the various personas using your site can also help enrich the entire web team’s understanding of the types of people using the site. This information will be particularly helpful to any copywriters who are preparing content for selling pages and product descriptions, etc.

Site Search Brings Ideas for New Products

Users’ searches can even inspire new product offerings. If you see that many visitors are searching your site for a particular type of product or service that you don’t yet provide, it may be time to consider developing an offering to serve that underserved need. Especially if your site is already bringing traffic for those particular searches, your company may do well to act on this informal market research.

Site Search Reveals New Keywords

You may end up finding new keywords you weren’t aware of, allowing you the chance to tweak your content so more users will find the information they need on your site. Perhaps some of your pages that you feel are relevant to a specific topic are missing a few of the terms people are actually searching on. In that case, you’ll have the option to add them as appropriate and further refine your content, making it even more targeted to your users.

In addition, those keywords can be added to your search marketing campaigns, perhaps offering a chance to reach a wider audience on the Internet than originally anticipated. In order for your company to remain competitive online, you need to be open to the new ways people are finding and disseminating information. Site search is an exciting utility for websites looking to evolve their websites according to user demands.

Editor’s Note: So, if you want to add search to your website, what are your options? There are a number of free and commercial solutions available on the Web but below are several of the former:

Services:
Atomz
PicoSearch
FusionBot
Google Custom Search

Scripts/Software:
Perlfect Search
WebDevelopersNotes.com - Provides 2 pages of site search solutions.
Resource Index - Numerous Perl and PHP search scripts can be found here for DIY webmasters.

About The Author
SEO Advantage is a search engine optimization company that helps businesses harness the revenue generation potential of their websites. Find us referenced in books such as Writing Web-Based Advertising Copy to Get the Sale and the BusinessWeek bestseller The New Rules of Marketing & PR. Visit www.seo-advantage.com today for more information.

What Is Google Social Search?

As we become increasingly connected online, we start to build around ourselves a community of people that we have regular contact with and websites where we spend much of our time. This is called our social network. Now Google has worked out a way to measure and leverage these individual social networks so they influence the search results we see. Those results therefore become more relevant to us and more influential over time.

Google determines your social network based on the connections found in your public Google profile. Connections are classed as either direct connections or secondary connections. Your Gmail chat buddies and contacts are direct connections, as are connections from links listed in your Google profile (e.g. people you follow on Twitter, LinkedIn or FriendFeed ). Secondary connections are those publicly associated with your direct connections (e.g. the people that your friends follow on Twitter).

To see your social profile on Google, login to your Google account and visit the social dashboard. The first time you do this, Google will collect all the social data it has stored about you, based on your Google Profile and public content, and build what they call your *social circle*.

After Google builds your social circle, whenever Google’s algorithm determines that your search experience will be improved, it annotates regular web index data with social data customized from your social circle and adds this information to the bottom of your search results.

You MUST be signed in to Google to see this. If you’re not happy with the results, say from Twitter, you can delete your Twitter account from your Google profile to prevent published info from your Twitter connections being added to your social circle.

You can also add or block Google contacts so you don’t see information from them in your social circle. In the reverse, you can choose what content you want to make public, based on your published Google profile.

How Does Social Search Work?

Google Social Search has been in experimental mode since October, but this week it’s been rolled out to full public Beta, meaning you should now see social content in your search results on Google.com. Google hasn’t rolled Social Search out to their regional sites at this stage, but this is expected soon.

To see social search results in action, login to your Google account, then run a search. You’ll see the heading *Results from people in your social circle* towards the bottom of the search results page. For example, if I run a search for *music blogs* on Google.com, I get the following social circle suggestions:

Because Matt Burgess and Tim Burrowes are in my social circle and have blogged about music, I see their content at the top of my social circle results.

If you want to see more social results, click on the *Show Options* link at the top left of the page and click on the *Social* link in the side menu under *All Results*. This will bring up search results sourced entirely from your social network. You’ll also see a list of your friends and connections under the menu heading *All People*. You can click on a particular name in the list to bring up more results from their public content.

Next to your social circle results are two links that are new additions to the service added to coincide with the public rollout: my social circle and my social content (pictured). These take you to your social circle dashboard that I linked to earlier.

The *my social circle* tab displays your extended network of online contacts, as well as the pathways that connect you. Clicking on the *my social content* tab brings up your public social media profiles, taken from your Google profile, that might appear in other people’s social results (pictured).

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Judging by my social search experiments to date, I believe Google has been collating social results for some time. A key observation is that relevance seems to win over freshness in the social influenced search results - some of the top results in my social circle were from 2008.

How Do You Take Advantage of Social Search?

1. If you haven’t already done so, create a Gmail account and create and flesh out your Google Profile immediately.

2. Join more social sites if you want your content to appear in the SERPs of your direct and secondary social circle networks, particularly the primary ones Twitter, Flickr and FriendFeed.

3. Optimize your social media content (tweets, FB and LinkedIn status updates, blog feeds, etc.) for target keywords to ensure your social content is shown in a wider number of social circle SERPs.

4. Gmail and Chat contacts get top billing in your social circle so choose your Gmail buddies wisely or drop them from your profile altogether.

5. Consider the type of social content that is popular and most often shared within your networks. Concentrate on building similar content in your public social media profiles to ensure it gets syndicated via your social circle.

6. If Universal Search wasn’t enough of a punch in the gut to convince you to optimize your multimedia content, consider Social Search to be that punch placed a little lower. Your shared photos just became another content channel.

7. Become more picky about who you follow and what social feeds you subscribe to. They have just become influencers in your every day search results.

What if I Don’t Like It?

If your particular social circle seems a little lightweight or top heavy, you can control what results you do and don’t see under your social search results. You can choose to either delete a social network from your Google profile (such as Twitter or Facebook), or drop a specific contact from your network.

You can ignore the social results at the bottom of the page when signed in, or if you don’t wish to see any social search results at all, simply conduct your searches while signed out of your Google account.

About The Author
Article by Kalena Jordan, one of the first search engine optimization experts in Australia, who is well known and respected in the industry, particularly in the U.S. As well as running a daily Search Engine Advice Column, Kalena manages Search Engine College an online training institution offering instructor-led short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and other Search Engine Marketing subjects.

Google has a dedicated version of its search engine called Image Search which helps find images. Claiming to be the most comprehensive image search facility on the web, it has billions of images from websites already within its index. When searching for images, you can tailor the search for various sizes and choose a specific type of image you’re looking for, such as a photo, clipart or head shot.

When clicking on a image, the image will load as a preview in one frame, whilst showing the website the image is from in a frame below. This gives you the option of visiting the website or enlarging the image to full size. Google Image Search is popular. It actually gets more traffíc than Yahoo, Window Live Search and Ask Jeeves.

Why is Google Image Search Important To Me?

As mentioned, Google Image Search gets more traffic than supposed major search engines in the UK, typically getting more visits than websites such as Amazon and MySpace (Source: Hitwise). This means Google Image Search is a potential source for traffic to your site, and although perhaps not as targeted as conventional search, implies that people are actively searching for what you provide.

The biggest reason to start optimizing for Google Image Search is that it is not as competitive as normal search, despite the great amount of traffic it can provide. Although ranking well in Google Image Search itself does not help your conventional search engine rankings, a byproduct of ranking well in Google Image Search could mean this will happen eventually because of the viral potential.

How Do I Get My Images onto Google Image Search?

You cannot submit images in the same way you can submit your website or sitemap to Google. Results are entirely shown by Google’s algorithm after indexing all websites it finds. Google’s imaging spider is called Google Image Bot. It crawls the web and indexes all of the pages it can find. Being a program, it cannot ’see’ images, so it has other ways of determining an image’s relevancy. These factors are:

1. Descriptive Image Name

When optimizing a website, we have talked about relevancy in other articles. It sounds obvious, but you have to talk about what you do. Integrating keyword phrases into this content is essential and makes a genuine difference to rankings. In a simplified way, this is no different for images.

Your images should be named after their subject. For example, if you want to come up in Google Image Search for David Beckham you should call it something along the lines of ‘david-beckham.jpg’ as opposed to something generic such as ‘photo1234.jpg.’ Likewise, if you have a folder full of David Beckham images, name the folder descriptively too.

2. Compliant Images

Creating accessibility compliant images works in hand with being descriptive and relevant. There are a number of criteria you have to meet to have an officially compliant image. These criteria are:

• A ’src’ attribute specifying the URL of the image
• A width and height declaration of the image in pixels
• An ‘alt’ attribute that describes the content of the image
• A ‘title’ attribute that contains a text description when hovering over the image

The ‘alt’ and ‘title’ tag are specifically important for optimization as they are way of building in keyword phrases, e.g. David Beckham. Below is an example of how the code and image should look for the David Beckham image:

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3. On Page Optimization

If you’re reading this far, you probably know a fair amount about Search Engine Optimization. In order to get your images ranking well in Google Image Search, you’ll need to have the whole page optimized towards that image. Therefore, try not to be optimizing the page for more than one subject, such as mixing David Beckham with Kevin Pietersen (he’s a cricketer for the Yanks reading this!).

You should concentrate on being descriptive for the Title and Meta tags. One of the more important factors specific to Image Search optimization is not only concentrating on relevant content, but specifically the content in close proximity to the image. Bear this in mind when setting the layout of the page!

4. PageRank and Backlinks

Another factor shared with general Search Engine Optimization is that Google will rank an image higher if it is on an authority page. This means a page that has backlinks and consequently, a relatively good Google PageRank. Try to generate backlinks to the specific page by visiting forums, blogs and other websites related to the subject matter. Also be sure to internal link to the page so it is indexed quickly and gains some PageRank from your established pages. For both inbound and internal links, make sure they have descriptive anchor text.

5. Website Relevancy

Although important, PageRank isn’t as important with Image Search as with ranking on Google’s main search engine. Website relevancy counts for more, so if you had a whole website dedicated to David Beckham, this would be better than having a single page. If this isn’t possible, try to create a ‘theme’ within your website where you create more than one page about the subject matter. You should then inter-link these pages.

Website Relevancy is considered of growing importance within the SEO world and should be factored into your website wide optimization planning.

6. Image Storage

Related to relevancy, Google’s Image Guidelines suggest saving all related images in the same folder. If Google can see you concentrate on this subject, this could potentially boost your ranking within Google Images. Likewise, if you talk a lot about the chosen subject across many pages, you may want keep them under a well titled sub-folder.

About The Author
Rob Fenn is an SEO specialist, working within the Webtacular department of the website design firm Sixth Sense ESP, which focuses on Internet Marketing for SMEs. Outside of SEO, Rob is also a Google AdWords Qualified Professional.

Here are some of the ways to get one way links pointing to your website.

1. Articles

Writing articles is an excellent way for you to get free publicity. Getting an article published is free. The publicity you receive by having your article published in a newspaper, magazine or website can be worth thousands of dollars in equivalent advertising space. Well written articles yield better results than advertisements and earn you respect from customers who see you as an expert in your field.

So what exactly is an article???

An article is a short piece of information that aims to educate and inform people about something, which they may be interested in. They are usually between 500 and 3,500 words long and at the bottom of each article is a link to your website as well as a resource box about your company. An example would be my resource box at the bottom of this article.

By writing and distributing these articles you are sharing information, which displays your expertise and gains you trust and credibility. No amount of advertising can gain you either trust or credibility.

The best articles are ‘tips’ or expert pieces. People are looking for guidance and will purchase from experts who show them how to solve their problems.

Writing articles may seem to be a daunting task, but you can get your articles written by professional writers at very reasonable costs and then distributed by various online services, such as Submit Your Article or The Phantom Writers.

Also don’t forge to set up “Google Alerts” so that you can see whenever your articles are published on various websites. The great thing about articles is that if your articles are well written they will spread virally, meaning that people will pick up the articles from article directories and include them on their website.

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Over the last couple of years video has become a popular marketing strategy, as it can quickly generate traffic and interest. Unfortunately many people are still afraid to use it and think it’s difficult to do. So now is the perfect time for you to get ahead of your competition.

One of the major advantages of videos to traditional written marketing is that it saves your visitors a lot of time understanding what is being offered and there isn’t much effort required on their part. Start the video and everything is explained to them right there and then. Hearing and seeing you tell them about your products or services has more credibility and allows you to connect to your visitors on an emotional level.

Another great advantage of video marketing is that if you use the right keywords in your video’s tags, you have a much better chance of reaching high rankings in many search engines.

3. Submission to Relevant Directories & Search Engines

Your website should be submítted to as many directories and search engines as possible, especially those relevant to your country or industry.

4. Blogs

A blog is basically a journal that is available on the web. The activity of updating a blog is “blogging” and someone who keeps a blog is a “blogger.” Blogs are typically updated daily or weekly using software that allows people with little or no technical background to update and maintain the blog. Blogs give you an increased presence on major search engines, like Yahoo! and Google. If you use Blogger (Google’s Blogging Tool), every message you post creates a new page on Google so in a very short time you could have a lot of pages pointing to your website, bringing you lots of new visitors.

5. Media Releases

Having a story written about you and your business will not only bring you lots of new customers (free for you), but will also provide you massive credibility. Stories about you in the media are far more believable, powerful and attractive than any ads you could possibly run. People will trust and respect you instantly. A media release (also called press or news releases) should provide enough details to be informative, but it should leave out just enough information to be tantalizing so that the media person calls you to find out more.

About The Author
Ivana Katz of Websites 4 Small Business makes it easy for you to get your business on the internet. If you’re looking for a professional and affordable website designer, visit www.web4business.com.au and download a website plan for free.

By cornerstone I mean it is the key to basically all of my online earnings. Without article marketing I wouldn’t be a full-time online marketer - it’s as simple as that. No articles, no income.

Articles bring in the targeted traffíc. Articles build those all important one-way backlinks. Articles build those even more important top rankings in Google for your chosen keywords. Articles build your online reputation and credibility in the eyes of your visitors.

I was struggling on the web for around three years before I wrote my first article. “10 Reasons To Put RSS On Your Site” which is still on around 8,000 sites around the web.

Writing was always a passion of mine, but it was more on the creative side, although I did work briefly as a reporter for a very small community newspaper. Looking back on it, I believe (perhaps falsely) that I had to gain all those years of experience before I could start writing articles about it.

Which was the totally wrong attitude to take since anyone can research a favorite subject or topic and write a short informative article on it. Most of us have been doing that since grade school - it is the same as writing a report or an essay.

Only with article writing you actually see monetary returns almost immediately. Surfers search for an answer in the search engines, your article pops up, they read it and then clíck the link to your webpage where you have conveniently placed your affiliate links or your products.

A Small Percentage of Those Article Readers Will Buy Your Products and You’re in Business.

Over time, all those backlinks in your resource box at the end of your article will make your keywords rise in the search engines, especially Google. Then as someone searches in Google - your site pops up, they click thru to your webpage and a small percentage of these visitors will buy your product or affiliate product displayed on your page.

Smart marketers will also start building a large list of prospective customers by offering a free guide, ecourse, ebook or software program to get those visitors to sign-up to your list. These marketers can then do follow-up with all these potential customers.

That in a nutshell is an article marketing model or funnel which thousands of online marketers and webmasters are using. And have been using for years.

But Will Article Marketing Remain Effective in 2010 and the Coming Years?

More than likely the answer would be yes but the web is constantly changing and there are other games worth playing. The same kind of marketing system could be done with Videos, Blogs, Social Networks and even with Twitter. Your options are more varied…

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Likewise, you can place your articles or links to them on FaceBook, MySpace and the other social networks. I find getting your articles on Digg, Reddit, Stumbleupon… can bring in a lot of traffic and improve your rankings.

But the Question Remains - is Article Marketing as Effective as It Once Was?

My own answer and personal opinion is no since it’s effectiveness has been watered down somewhat because every “tom dick and harry plus sally” is doing it. Everybody has discovered how writing short informative articles on the topic of your site can be very lucrative.

When I wrote that first article five years ago, I was ‘writer #1561′ with Ezinearticles. Now they have over 242,000 writers!

Back then, I found your article was placed on a lot more sites mostly because there wasn’t that many articles out there and competition was much, much less than it is now. More people writing more articles simply means your article falls into a bigger pool of other articles.

I believe video marketing is at the stage article marketing was at around five years ago. So turning your articles into short “how to” videos would probably be a wiser move and you would have a lot less competition. You can also place your marketing into the whole Video/Youtube craze that is still bringing in tons of traffic and interested customers.

However, the popularity of free article directories have grown and some of these sites have very high traffic numbers. Here are some of the main ones I use:

• EzineArticles
• GoArticles
• iSnare
• IdeaMarketers

And I also like to place my articles on important but perhaps lesser known sites such as:

• PromotionWorld
• SelfGrowth
• American Chronicle
• Buzzle

However, article marketing is still a very good way to get your site and name on the web. It can still bring in traffic and help build those all important backlinks and search engine rankings. This is one marketer who will not be giving up article marketing any time soon.

Some of my most effective techniques for article marketing are:

• Place your targeted keyword phrase in the title, usually at the beginning.

• Make sure your article is informative and supplies the information a reader is searching for - but always try to motivate the reader to click your links in the resource box for further information since your main objective is to get the reader to click thru to your site.

• Most experts say to keep your article short, around 400 - 700 words, but I have found longer articles of 800-1500 words do really well.

• Place your targeted keywords in the anchor text of your resource box links, that’s the underlined clickable part. Vary these keywords to avoid keyword spamming.

• For very important sites, try writing an exclusive unique article for that site alone.

• Always spell-check and proof-read your articles. Grammar hasn’t ever been my strong point so what I do for finding the correct usage of some tricky phrases or words - I do a search in Google with “quotation marks” to find out which one has the most links/usage… I go with one that has the most links, even if it’s wrong. Thousands of people are making the same mistake. Many marketers do the same thing with misspelled keywords.
While they can be expensive, I also like using paid article submission sites such as SubmitYourArticle, ThePhantomwriters and Isnare… mainly because article marketing has been so profitable for me, I don’t mind pouring some of those earnings back into those sites. It saves me time and extends the reach of my articles.

Article marketing will continue to be one of your best ways to build backlinks, raise your rankings and bring in potential customers to your site. It still works for me and hundreds of thousands of other webmasters - it should also work for you.

About The Author
The author is a full time online affiliate marketer. His livelihood is derived from & dependent upon search engine marketing & daily monitoring of targeted keywords, mainly within Google. He runs numerous sites, including: Free Marketing Tools & Internet Marketing Tools
Titus Hoskins Copyright 2009. This article may be freely distributed if this resource box stays attached.

We’re going to cover a few different types of resources below and I’m going to try to keep this article to a reasonable length so let’s begin …

Media

When there’s a breaking story or you want an expert opinion on a subject, a good first place to hit are the media sources in that industry. The SEO industry is no different and there are some impressive albeit often unconventional media sources. Some of my favorites are:

Webmaster Radio

Webmaster Radio is an Internet-based radio station with some great programing ranging from affiliate marketing to PPC to organic optimization and much more. With shows hosted by experts in their fields from Danny Sullivan (Search News) to Dave Szetela (PPC) you’ll find solid information that is well-rounded. I’d list my favorite shows but what I like may be different than you and what I need to know may be different than what you need to know, so look through their programming and either listen through your work day as I often do or download the podcasts for later listening.

WebProNews

WebProNews offers up-to-the-minute information on virtually every event. They have reporters writing constantly and have other scoring SEO blogs and other news sources, compiling the information in one place for easy access. They also have great articles by third-party writers and a very active readership that is proactive in their commenting. Definitely near the top of my go-to list when I’m looking for news and current feedback.

Addme

This site is difficult to classify as it fits into a couple categories but I decided to include it under media as that’s my primary use. They include tools, resources, a directory and much more on their site. My primary use of this site is for the articles and newsletter.

Search Engine Watch

No list of SEO resources would be complete without including Search Engine Watch. This site is the one that started it all. Search Engine Watch provides everything from fantastic articles and breaking news to search engine stats and an awesome forum. A definite bookmark.

Blogs

As with many industries - blogs are a great way to keep informed on the latest goings-on in the SEO realm. The trick, however, is figuring out which blogs are worth reading and which authors are truly knowledgeable. Over the years I’ve read many blogs and to be honest - I still do. Below are some of the key blogs I reference on a regular basis.

SEO Book Blog

Aaron Wall over at SEO Book has an excellent blog worth reading on a regular basis. I have yet to visit his blog and not find some tid-bit of information that was worth reading either because of the information itself or because often he’s just entertaining. Another to add to your weekly reading list.

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It’s nice to get it from the horse’s mouth. For those who don’t know - Matt Cutts is the head of Google’s Webspam team. He blogs about Google, technology and occasionally his cat. One has to read what he writes knowing that he’s a Google employee and as such can’t really give away the farm, BUT he gives tons of great advice, insight and tips. The perk being that you don’t have to ask if following his advice will get you banned.

SEO By The Sea

Bill Slawski (the author) focuses his attention on the more technical side of things with tales of patents, algorithmic possibilities, statistics and functionalities. For many, his would be one of the more dry blogs if not for his gift with words and ability to make even the most bland of subjects palatable. You don’t need to visit his blog daily but adding it to your weekly journey through the web is recommended.

SEOmoz Blog

What blog list would be complete without the inclusion of the SEOmoz blog. Rand Fishkin and crew keep their visitors up-to-date on some great research, news and SEO tips. From opinion pieces to months-long whitepapers, you’ll find useful information. Again - not necessary to visit every day but a weekly pass is always worthwhile.

Forums

Forums are a great place to gather information, especially on current events such as ranking updates. That said, reading forums can be a risky thing. Almost anyone can join a forum and post their thoughts. While this format allows us to capture a wide range of information and knowledge - it also results in less qualified people giving advice as well. So while I recommend reading forums, I also recommend taking things with a grain of salt - at least until you figure out who’s who.

SEO Chat Forums

The SEO chat forums are easily one of the largest and most popular of the SEO forums. They cover a HUGE array of issues from Google and social media to Alexa rankings and (hold your hats) Ask Jeeves (that’s right - the forum’s been around for THAT long). Users worth noting are rustybrick, fathom, and randfish.

DigitalPoint Forums

DigitalPoint is also an ancient forum (2000 - ancient by web standards at least). It covers a wide range of topics from SEO to PPC and affiliate programs. Some users worth noting there are shoemoney, daven, and, of course, digitalpoint. A great place to ask your questions. Heavily visited and they have a ranking system for their users so you can get a decent feel as to whether they’re reliable.

SitePoint Forums

There are a variety of reasons I like SitePoint and I own a number of their books. Their forums focus on design and development (not SEO), but every SEO needs resources on the design and development side.

Newsletters & Other Resources

Of course there are other resources that every SEO or webmaster needs to be able to get their hands on. Here they are:

Google Webmaster Guidelines

These are the guidelines set out by Google telling you what you can and can’t do and what tactics to look out for. Worth a look over periodically as they do change from time-to-time. If you’re heading into the forums for advice, you’ll definitely want to take a gander at the guidelines first to make sure that if you get led astray - at least you’ll know what can get you banned or penalized.

About The Author
Dave Davies is the CEO for Beanstalk Search Engine Optimization, Inc. Beanstalk offers organic SEO services, consulting, link building and SEO copywriting services. While they provide their SEO from Victoria, BC they are proud to serve the world.

Beyond that, you need to address a number of additional SEO tactics before you get too deep into your redesign. The reason you need to keep SEO front and center during this time is twofold: so that you do not lose your previous traffic, but also so that you can gain additional targeted search engine visitors when the new site goes live.

Here are 6 SEO redesign secrets your developer may not know…ignore them at your peril!

1. Creating Your SEO’d Site Architecture

Search engines look explicitly at how all your pages are linked together in order to determine their place within the site. Pages that are linked from every other page will be given more weight than those that are only linked from a few others. This is all considered a form of internal link popularity, or in Google language, internal PageRank.

Recommendation: During your redesign, don’t bury too deeply within the site any content that was previously bringing targeted search engine traffic. Ensure that any informational content that will be focused on the more competitive keyword phrases (for example, product and service pages) is high up in your site hierarchy.

In addition, all content contained in a specific category should be cross-linked via some sort of sub-navigation within that section.

2. Categorization and Avoiding Duplicate Content

When people are seeking information from a search engine, they usually have a question, a problem, or a need for specific information. The search queries they use at Google and the other engines reflect this. The more ways you can categorize your content for the various target markets you serve, the better.

Recommendation: Be sure that all top-level pages answer the potential searcher’s (your potential customers’) questions, and that it’s clear that your products and services can solve their problem. In addition, you also have to ensure that regardless of how someone found any piece of content on your site, they always end up at the same URL to avoid PageRank splitting and duplicate content issues.

For example, if a specific product can be classified as both a product and a service, it makes sense that it might be listed under both categories. However, the page (URL) that the potential customer eventually lands on, regardless of which category they started in, should always be the same.

3. New Content Management System and Changing URLS

If URLs must change in the redesign due to a new content management system or back-end coding, search engines may take some time to index the new URLs as well as give them the same weighting they gave the previous URLs due to URL age factors.

Recommendation: It’s critical to 301-redirect all old URLs to their relative counterpart within the newly designed website. This will pass the link popularity of the old URLs to the new ones quickly, as well as ensure that site visitors don’t receive 404-not-found errors.

This will be easier if the new URL naming is similar to the old one, because you can use automated methods. If URLs must change completely with no correlation to the names of the old URLs, and hand-redirects are required, you’ll want to at least redirect all the top-level pages, as well as those that you’re sure receive keyword traffic from search engines. But, ideally, every URL should be redirected if at all possible.

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4. Coding of Navigation Menus

Links contained within the navigation of your website should be coded in a search engine–friendly manner so that they are visible and crawlable. Some DHTML and Flash menus are invisible to search engines, which causes the pages linked within them to not receive the internal link popularity they should receive.

Recommendation: Make sure all navigational menus are coded with CSS that is visible to search engines. In addition, avoid drop-down box links as the main form of navigation (CSS mouseovers are fine). You’ll also want to ensure that all content can be reached by hard-coded links – don’t force the user to go through any kind of search box menu because those are traditionally search engine unfriendly.

5. Custom HTML Elements

While some level of automation for titles, metas, headers, URLs, and alt attributes for images can be helpful, it’s critical that your new website’s content management system allow you to create custom descriptions for these as well.

Recommendation: Make sure the content management system has fields for custom title tags, meta descriptions, heading tags, etc. There should be no limit to the number of characters allowed in these fields either, because every page may need a different number of words and characters.

6. Session IDs and Other Tracking Links

It’s best not to use session IDs to track visitors, but if your system must use them, you’ll only need to feed the “clean” URLs to the search engine spiders – otherwise, they may get caught in an infinite loop, indexing the same content under multiple URLs.

You’ll also want to avoid any sort of campaign tracking links appended to URLs because these can split your link popularity by causing your content to be indexed under multiple URLs.

Recommendation: If this type of tracking is inherent in your system, use the canonical link element to maintain one URL for every page of content.

Don’t be surprised if your developer isn’t happy to receive some of these “secrets.” He or she may feel that their authority is being usurped or their creativity is being hindered. Just remember that it’s your website that you’re paying them to create in a way that will make you the most money possible. Let your developer know up-front that these things are non-negotiable. If they tell you that they can’t do any of the above, start looking around for a new developer – ASAP!

While there will always be a few unexpected bugs to work out when your site goes live, you won’t have to be afraid of losing your search engine visitors as long as you know what you’re doing. We’ve successfully helped many companies through this transition without any glitches. At the end of the process, there’s nothing like the feeling of having your beautiful new website launched. But more than that, there’s great comfort in knowing that the people looking for what you provide will continue to be able to easily find you in the search engines.

About The Author
Jill Whalen, CEO of High Rankings and co-founder of SEMNE, has been performing SEO services since 1995. Jill is the host of the High Rankings Advisor newsletter and the High Rankings SEO forum.

Actually, we already have the new FTC Guidelines which came into effect on Dec. 1st of 2009, but how these new rules are enforced will play out in the coming year as test-cases are brought to court. Basically, these new rules call for absolute disclosure and full transparency regarding Testimonials and Endorsements when a product or service is being offered for sale. Any business (monetary) relationship between the endorser and the company must be made known to the potential buyer. Obviously for those in online or affiliate marketing this could have a great impact if these new rules are strictly enforced. Just imagine all the website owners and bloggers who slap a few banners or affiliate links on their sites to cover hosting or operating costs… will they now have to disclose all these business arrangements?

For professional affiliate marketers and the companies/products they’re promoting, these new guidelines could cause potential headaches and/or legal ramifications since a general blanket disclaimer on their sites will no longer be suffice. To help solve this problem, many of the major companies are now placing an “affiliate” tag on all their banners and making it obvious a business relationship exists with its affiliates. In addition, many online marketers are placing additional disclaimers, affiliate seals and in other ways making it known certain links are indeed affiliate links and a relationship does exist with the product and/or services being promoted.

With these new guidelines, another big issue is email marketing, one of the major marketing techniques of most online marketers. Will a full disclosure be necessary for every email sales pitch? Savvy web marketers know the key to increased sales is in the “follow-up” and the “cookie-ing” of potential buyers; how will the new Guidelines affect this very effective marketing practice? How all these new rules or guidelines play out will make next year a very interesting one for marketing on the web.

Despite this, perhaps the greatest cause for upheaval in the coming year will be Google. There are countless reasons why Google will be a major game changer in 2010 for online marketing. Ever since Bing and more recently the potential Bing/Yahoo competition, Google has gone into complete overdrive, implementing new changes and debuting new programs like there was no tomorrow.

First, we have Google Caffeine which Google is introducing (full force) early in the new year. Google Caffeine, which is a major overhaul of its search engine, will no doubt cause many a marketer some sleepless nights as the total fall-out becomes evident. Other Google updates in the past (Florida Update comes readily to mind) have wreaked havoc on many top ranking sites, but this time Google is doing things a little differently and have even given webmasters a beta version of the new search engine. Still, rightly or wrongly, many online marketers are bracing themselves for the full impact of Caffeine. Will it mean smooth sailing or a stomach sickening roller-coaster ride for marketers and webmasters?

Second, we have the introduction of “Real Time” search which will be featured in Google’s SERPs. This will make the social media sites like Twitter, FaceBook, MySpace… much more important. Again, the implications for online marketers could be enormous since many can now reach the first page through a different route. Will it also mean more “Real Time” spam? But more importantly, will it mean a greater marketing opportunity for the online marketer who exploits it?

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Third, we are seeing Google moving more and more towards “Visual Search” with the introduction of Google Goggles for mobile phones. Just take a picture and you get the Google results instantly - no typing, just point and click. Just envision countless clueless teenagers or more importantly helpless shoppers suddenly being empowered with knowledge and wisdom. Could do more for education since the invention of the printed word and the info-commercial combined. Talk about scary! But will the implications for web marketing be just as revolutionary and enlightening?

Fourth, Google has made it known through its spokesperson Matt Cutts, that site-loading times will be a ranking factor in the new improved Google. Also, proper and correct page coding will also be more important if you want your site to be at full advantage. Broken links will be a big “No-No”, while linking out to important related sites a big plus. All this is only logical, Google’s main product is and has always been its search results, anything which improves those results and provides a more pleasing experience for the Google user should be front and center. Obviously, one way for Google to stay on top, is to provide the best search results to its users.

Fifth, in order to please the end-user, Google is also moving more towards “Personalized Search” which will make SEO and ranking in the top spot for your chosen keywords a total nightmare for many professional SEOs and online marketers. If everyone can choose their own top results, isn’t SEO more or less, a lame duck? Again, the ramifications of personalized search will further play out in 2010, but will professional marketers like what they see?

Finally, while no one would argue Google is King of the Hill when it comes to online search, will all these new changes strengthen or weaken Google’s grip? Will the combined Bing/Yahoo be able to give this giant some much needed competition? Or will Google’s main competition come from an unlikely source, such as big name multi-national corporations who are moving their operations online. Can these big-name keyworded domains start directly pulling in the majority of the web’s traffic, making all search engines secondary? As people become more web savvy, will they go directly to what they’re looking for on the web, bypassing the search engines altogether - including the mighty Google? Such a scenario could have greater consequences for the affiliate marketer since a direct line to a company’s site or product will obviously mean less sales for the online marketer, who really works in coordination with the search engines, either through organic search or PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising in these same search engines.

Overall, the new FTC Guidelines and recent changes to Google, will make next year one of the most interesting times to be pitching anything online. Throw into this the full effect that a combined Bing/Yahoo might bring to the table, and you have the recipe for a tumultuous white knuckle ride, until the dust finally settles and marketers make adjustments like they always do. Until then, hold on because things will probably get a little hectic for many web marketers before we see the light at the end of the tunnel.

About The Author
The author is a full time online affiliate marketer. His livelihood is derived from & dependent upon search engine marketing & daily monitoring of targeted keywords, mainly within Google. He runs numerous sites, including: Free Marketing Tools & Internet Marketing Tools
Titus Hoskins Copyright 2009. This article may be freely distributed if this resource box stays attached.

These are cases of successful, memorable branding. Michael Jordan is retired from professional sports, the frogs haven’t been on television in years, and wassup has almost faded from day to day use in the American pop culture vocabulary. However, every one of these elements remains identifiable, and mentioning them to most people will get the typical, ‘oh yeah!’ response to memories of clever marketing, cementing the image of the brand in the viewers’ minds.

Branding is the creation of these memories. However, recollections of a product being indisputably linked with a particular name, image, or slogan can be a double-edged sword.

MCI Communications was one of the most successful challengers to the AT&T ‘Bell Monopoly’ consortium between the late 1960s and early 1980s. MCI managed to push through the breakup of the Bell coalition and allow new players to enter into the field of telecommunications. MCI pioneered many telecommunications innovations, such as Single Mode Fiber Optic Cable, when other companies were content to rely on existing standards. They were one of the first companies to provide the now standard idea of ‘in-network’ calling, where MCI customers got discounts when calling other MCI customers. MCI was one of the big, significant players in the telecom world, so why isn’t their name still synonymous with innovation?

Because it is now synonymous with the words Worldcom, Enron, and scandal.

In 1998, MCI merged with another company to become MCI Worldcom, launching a widespread televised and online advertising campaign featuring notable actors such as Sam Neil of Jurassic Park fame. The MCI brand became inextricably linked with the Worldcom brand. Then, on June 26 2002, the Securities Exchange Commission launched a full inquiry into reported auditing and financial irregularities, resulting in allegations of fraud. By July 21st, less than one month later, it was revealed that Worldcom stock was inflated by $11 billion, and the company entered into chapter 11 bankruptcy. MCI was ultimately bought out by Verizon, and the legacy of a once innovative telecom company was left in the same repository as Arthur Anderson, Enron, and the other big financial fraud stories of the early 21st century.

While this is an extreme example, it is a caution worth considering for anyone interested in making a brand name for his or her product in today’s market. The world is more connected, more informed, and more critical than ever, and while a legacy of good choices can create a strong brand, a reputation for poor or improper decisions can and will conspire to bury a once successful company forever.

Many times, no one can predict what will make a brand into a particular success or failure overnight. However, every company can take three common sense steps to protect their brand and the products it represents.

1. Promote a Quality Product

Quality talks - if a product works, then it has a certain degree of merit that puts it ahead of competition. If a company puts the time and effort to get a quality product onto the market and markets the brand in such a way that the actual qualities are stressed, people will remember.

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As an example, Tylenol is an effective painkiller for post-surgical use. It is not a homeopathic remedy relying on word of mouth and supposed benefits, but has demonstrable, measurable effects on human pain and healing.

2. Be Informed About the Brand’s Use

Knowing not just what one is putting out, but what is being done with it in the market, is crucial to proper branding. To continue with the example of Tylenol, many advertisements stress that doctors frequently prescribe it, more than any other over the counter analgesic. Knowing that doctors were using their product allowed Tylenol to make a powerful claim and keep the information in people’s minds.

3. Be Prepared to Take Responsibility for the Brand

As seen in the MCI case, scandal led to the irrevocable decline of a once-powerful brand. Conversely, Tylenol managed to take what could have been a public relations nightmare and came out stronger than ever as a result. When Tylenol executives found out that tampering had led to poison getting into the product supply, poisons that killed Tylenol consumers, they pulled every current Tylenol product from the shelves of stores. They investigated each of their production facilities, solved the problem, and then launched an informative campaign letting people know when and why it was safe to come back to their product. This disaster could have led to the death of the company, but the executives’ willingness to take responsibility and act, rather than covering up and denying fault, saved-a brand that is still powerful to this day.

Again, these are examples of extreme events. Only a tiny fraction of companies ever take their investments down the path of fraud, and almost no one will have to deal with their product becoming a poisonous vector. However, they illustrate the case that a brand is a powerful association for people to make, and that like any part of a business, it requires information and action in the proper degrees.

What Does This Mean to Me and My Website

Normal advertising just informs the consumer about a product and a company’s brand identity. With digital advertising, the consumer can be more involved in the brand image. In this interactive domain, a company can listen to consumers who make comments on their website or blog and act on negative feedback before it becomes uncontrollable. They can try out different advertising strategies to learn which products they should continue to develop and which new features a product should have.

Effective digital branding allows you to identify a singular position and establish your distinctive voice in the marketplace and incorporates all three of the above-mentioned branding points. You’ll be promoting a quality product. You’ll use social media strategies to keep informed about your brand’s image and you’ll take responsibility for your brand, to guide and shape it to its best advantage.

Branding takes time and thought. Digital branding takes time, thought and an interchange with your consumers. Engaging your customers in your brand in a relevant way is the key to successful online branding.

About The Author
Enzo F. Cesario is a Copywriter and co-founder of Brandsplat. Brandcasting uses informative content and state-of-the-art internet distribution and optimization to build links and drive the right kind of traffic to your website. Go to www.Brandsplat.com or visit our blog at: www.brandsplatblog.com

In this article, we will describe the influence that SMO currently has on search engine marketing. We will also give you the rules of engagement for executing an effective social media optimization campaign. We’ll explain what SEO social media is, and the advantages of hiring an experienced SEO consultant to spearhead your social media optimization efforts.

The Influence Of Social Media Optimization On Search Marketing

Search marketing has always relied upon exposure in the search engines to drive targeted traffíc. For years, gaining that exposure was based solely upon the development of your site and generating links pointing to your site. Both are still important today. However, social media optimization has shifted the landscape of search marketing.

Google once maintained several disparate search platforms for blogs, videos, news, and similar types of “social” content. Each functioned as a separate search engine with its own set of organic listings.

A few years ago, Google blended the listings from each platform into a system called Universal Search. Bing and Yahoo have since incorporated similar systems. Universal Search is now used as the primary index. That means blogs, videos, and news have been incorporated into the natural listings, pushing many sites off the first page. This is one of the reasons social media optimization has become a critical piece of search.

Another factor that has influenced search marketing is the increased ranking authority given to Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, and similar sites. These too, have quickly gained control of a significant amount of search territory.

Social media optimization preserves your current natural listings while helping you to gain even more search exposure. By using blogs, videos, and social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook, you can capture a greater number of organic positions.

Your Social Media Optimization Campaign: Rules of Engagement

There are several rules of engagement for launching and executing a social media optimisation campaign. If you ignore them, your SMO efforts will be far less effective than otherwise.

First, you should do everything possible to encourage your audience to link to your site. Integrating a blog is valuable because your content can be updated over time, attracting loyal readers. Encourage readers to bookmark, tag and “Tweet” your blog posts by installing a button plug-in.

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Third, you must be able to identify your market. Social media optimization relies upon the connections you establish with niche communities. You need to properly target them in order to engage them and generate content. This is true whether you’re engaging them through YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, or your blog.

Fourth, integrate tracking tools to measure and monitor the success of your social media optimization campaign. Track mentions of your site and company. Watch your site’s progress in the natural listings for your main keywords. Generate linking reports showing inbound links pointing to your domain and specific pages. Tracking your metrics is crucial in order to determine whether your SMO campaign is effective.

SEO Social Media Optimization Explained

Each of the elements of a social media optimization campaign that we have described thus far dovetail seamlessly with SEO. The ongoing content creation, tagging and bookmarking, attracting inbound links by being a resource for your audience - these are essential for pushing your website higher in the search engines’ listings. SEO social media optimization leverages a new set of tools to accomplish the same goal as SEO: more exposure for your site on Google, Yahoo, and Bing. The challenge is knowing how to use those tools effectively.

The days of launching a basic SEO campaign within a competitive space and watching your site rise in the search engines’ results are long gone. SEO has become far more complex than it was a few short years ago. This is why many companies have made the decision to hire an SEO consultant. Social media optimization has transformed SEO from a relatively straightforward strategy into a complicated science. Having an experienced hand at the wheel helps to navigate the uncertain terrain.

If you want to boost your exposure in the search engines’ listings, consider social media optimization a priority.

About The Author
With 20 years in marketing, advertising and 10 years in internet marketing, Rostin Reagor Smith is on the cutting edge. Combining Social Media Optimization with more traditional SEO and SEM methods, RRS is a consulting firm specializing in enhancing clients’ online presence and managing their public relations online. SEO, SEM and ORM, Online Reputation Management, are combined in this successful formula. www.RostinReagorSmith.com