At the Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose, WebProNews attended the session on how SEO can help save the publishing industry, a quite interesting topic, considering the controversy the industry has been experiencing of late.

The session looked at challenges, tactics, and opportunities unique to online publishers. It covered solutions for technical obstacles, duplicate content and CMS issues, writing keyword rich headlines, training the editorial staff and updating the publishing culture from print to online. Essentially, the session was designed to educate participants on how to save jobs by leveraging SEO, driving traffic, and putting ad dollars back in publishers’ pockets, as described by SES.

Liesel Kipp, VP Global Head of Product Management at Thomas Reuters shared four tips:

1. Show the value of SEO
2. Data is the key to your success
3. Set goals and show how you will beat them.
4. Evangelize, evangelize, evangelize.

Kipp says Reuters was able to increase its visitors by 500% in 5 years, and that you have to constantly talk about search and SEO. According to Kipp, relationship building is critical, and you should talk about your successes and failures.

BusinessWeek Search Marketing Manager Ulli Muenker offered some more tips on the subject:

1. Spread the SEO Excitement  in Editorial.

- get the high level buy in

- find seo champions in the editorial team

- create peer relationships to overcome skepticism

How:

- show projected traffic increase

- show competitor’s search traffic results

- demonstrate the before and after effect of page increase

2. Conduct Regular Training

What:

- run regular individual and small group training sessions

- train the trainer for new hires

- engage external SEO editorial consultant

How:

- Limit group training to 10-12

- Create a relaxed environment with cookies, lunch and learning

- give them what they need to learn

3.  Make Editorial Part of the Success

- Create SEO friendly article headlines.  Online headlines are different than print headlines.  Write straightforward headlines. No puns, sarcasm or jokes online. It just doesn’t work! Just bring in keywords so that people understand the message.

- Write sub-headlines under the headline. Write keyword rich sub headlines. Include keywords, synonyms and derivatives.

- Use keyword-rich link text. Use keywords when linking to other internal pages. Check connecting landing page’s keywords.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution SEO Manager Allison Fabella offered these tips:

- location, location, location. In your sections front load your title tags with Location such as "Cobb count News / ajc.com.  The same goes for meta descriptions, url’s, and headlines and sub-headlines. Also, use H1 and H2 tags.

- It is so critical that your CMS is setup to be able to implement these tips. This is key to your success. There are a lot of CMS’s out there… make sure your SEO team approves. Once you purchase your CMS, make sure you stay involved. This may make you unpopular. Also, make sure your sitemaps are part of your requirements.

- Sitemaps are your newspaper’s best friend. Site maps help get along structural road blocks built into bad site architecture. Use both web sitemaps and news sitemaps (Google News). Group your sitemap into different sections. In each sitemap include no more than 50,000 stories. Also, follow sitemap protocols. They make a less than perfect sitemap more perfect!

Tribune SEO Director Brent Payne talked about Twitter for media companies. He said there are 4 account types that publishers should set up. They are:

- RSS feed – Do not follow people back from this account, follow your own accounts.

- Get your celebrities involved. Make it a job requirement to have a Twitter profile. Most of our broadcast personalities are required to make 4-5 social connections per day.

- Let employees Tweet. "I am an example of that. I have the second highest Twitter account of employees at the Tribune." Talk to them about legal issues and ground rules but encourage them to do that. Understand that mistakes happen from time to time. But do not officially endorse these twitter accounts as official voices of the company.

- Building a persona. Tribune created the colonelTribune, which is actually tweets from 4 or 5 of us. Create a character that your audience can connect with personally. Spend time to create a decent avatar. This is our best twitter account with 300,000 followers!

Payne says you then need to promote your Twitter profiles. One way to do this, that the Chicago Tribune did, is to recreate your masthead with the Twitter names of writers instead of the actual reporters. He also says to use the Twitter directories, and to use big ones like Twellow and Wefollow.

Engaging the locals, he says (Twellow’s feature TwellowHood is a great way to find the btw – my words, not his ). He suggests having a Tweetup and inviting top journalists or TV personalities and top referrers and bloggers. He also recommends taking a lot of pictures for "longer promotional shelf-life". "Don’t buy the alcohol," he warns though. Trouble could arise.

Finally, Marshall Simmonds of the New York Times and Define Search Strategies. Define "the almighty tag." He says they ask their editors to "enhance" titles for SEO. They want to see links off the domain in order to become a resource and an authority. He also said journalists didn’t have linking in their head, and that it’s ok to link out.

A couple more interesting items Simmonds shared include:

- "We pushed back our registration wall to 8 clicks and crawlers to 5 clicks. Google quit crawling the New York Times in 2005. Yahoo crawled our registration page 5 million times. They literally kept crawling it."

 - "If you are not keeping in constant communication with your IT Department they are going to screw it up. It is a constant issue. There is also the problem with template roll-backs. We put a lot of check lists in front with the IT Department. This goes for marketing as well. The Ad Department is eventually going to try to sell an advertisement that is going to hurt search traffic as well."

That about does it for that session. Some very interesting tips on SEO education for publishers. Stay tuned to WebProNews for further coverage of the Search Engine Strategies conference.

Just last month, Facebook announced that they would allow users to choose a custom username, a.k.a. vanity URL, for their Facebook profile. A post on the Facebook blog warned users to:

"Think carefully about the username you choose. Once it’s been selected, you won’t be able to change or transfer it."

Well, that’s not true anymore. You can now change your username, but only once. At the time of this writing there is no official announcement from Facebook about the username change option.

Are you dissatisfied with your initial Facebook username choice? Let us know.

It’s unclear when Facebook added this new option, but we’re sure some Facebookers will appreciate it, as ReadWriteWeb points out. If you wish to change your username, go to the "Settings" tab at the top of your profile and click on "Account Settings". The second option down is "Username", just press "Change" and pick your new username.
 
Last month, Mashable put together a pretty comical list of the "15 Silliest Facebook Vanity URLs", maybe some of those users would like a mulligan on their initial username choice.

Will you be changing your Facebook username? Tell us.

Just last month, Facebook announced that they would allow users to choose a custom username, a.k.a. vanity URL, for their Facebook profile. A post on the Facebook blog warned users to:

"Think carefully about the username you choose. Once it’s been selected, you won’t be able to change or transfer it."

Well, that’s not true anymore. You can now change your username, but only once. At the time of this writing there is no official announcement from Facebook about the username change option.

Are you dissatisfied with your initial Facebook username choice? Let us know.

It’s unclear when Facebook added this new option, but we’re sure some Facebookers will appreciate it, as ReadWriteWeb points out. If you wish to change your username, go to the "Settings" tab at the top of your profile and click on "Account Settings". The second option down is "Username", just press "Change" and pick your new username.
 
Last month, Mashable put together a pretty comical list of the "15 Silliest Facebook Vanity URLs", maybe some of those users would like a mulligan on their initial username choice.

Will you be changing your Facebook username? Tell us.

Google’s Matt Cutts frequently posts useful tips for webmasters on the Google Webmaster Central YouTube channel. The short clips generally offer valuable nuggets of info that can have an impact on your site’s performance in Google.

In these videos, Matt always answers questions submitted by users, and in a recent one he answers the question: "How do meta geo tags influence search results?"

Noticed changes in your ranking based on geographic info? Discuss.

Cutts says it’s not something Google really looks at at all. He says they do look at:

- IP Address
- gTLD
- ccTLD

He also points out that there’s a feature in Google’s Webmaster Tools where you can tell it that your site pertains to a specific country even though it’s a dot com. "Typically the geotags that are in meta tags are not as useful and We don’t tend to give those as much weight if at all," says Cutts. He suggests spending your time:

- trying to make sure you have the right domain name

- trying to make sure you have the right IP address if you can

- If you have content (even if it’s geo-located) even if it’s a sub-domain or a sub-directory, you can specify it in Google’s Webamster Tools. You can tell it that certain content is relevant for a particular country.

These are good things to keep in mind if geographic information is important to your site. Have you used the Webmaster Tools Feature Cutts refers to? Tell us about it.

It’s happened to all of us. You wake up one morning feeling like a million bucks, you stretch and if you’re like me, you notice the eye-rolling as once again your significant other catches you with a toothbrush dangling from your mouth and a laptop or iPhone in front of you while you check rankings and emails. And then it happens – you start your browser with a search phrase already set to display and you notice that your site no longer holds it’s previous position and the move is not in the right direction. We’ve all faced it and the longer you’ve been an SEO or website owner the more times you’ve seen it happen. But still … what do you do? To quote the immortal Douglas Adams, "Don’t panic."

Believe me – I know how hard it is sometimes. It’s easy for me to say this to clients when I see an engine fluctuating or a site has dropped only a position or two and we’re working to react but it’s a completely different thing when it happens to you and (might I add) a good reminder to SEO’s as to what our clients go through. But I still haven’t answered the question have I? What do you do? What … do … you … do?

There are five basic steps one must take when their site drops (I like to keep things simple and a 5 step check-list is a great way to do that). These steps assume that to start with you had a well-optimized website with good SEO practices followed. If you don’t then the reasons you dropped are pretty clear but if you’ve got a well-optimized site and your site has fallen – then this is for you. You should:

1 – Build Links

It’s very difficult for people to not want to do something proactive when they notice their site drop. I know – I’ve been there. One of the easiest things to do to keep yourself busy while working on the other 4 steps below is to build links. Building good, solid links to your site will never hurt and will only help you out so even if one of the later steps might show you other actions you need to take (or not take) you’ll never go wrong with some solid link building and if nothing else – it’ll make you feel like you’re doing something and stop you from doing other things that might do you more harm than good.

I’m not going to go into all the different types of links you could build or what the anatomy of a good link is. Many articles, forums and blog posts have been written in the past and are easily found online. I’m sure if you monitor a few good SEO forums you’ll find more being written every day. If you can – find articles by Eric Enge. While he doesn’t give it all away (who does?) – you won’t go wrong taking his advice and even seasoned SEO’s are likely to learn a thing or two from reading his work.

2 – Relax For A Couple Days

Before you rush to your favorite site editing tool – relax. Slight tweaks in content are unlikely to make much of a difference (if any) to your rankings. If you’ve got solid, well-optimized content and suddenly your site’s fluctuating – cramming in a few more instances of your targeted phrase will likely do more harm than good.

Now – when I say relax I basically mean, don’t touch your site. There are steps (such as link building) that you can work on including the analytical work noted below. Just don’t go editing all your copy to try to chase some tweak in Google’s algorithm. Relax.

3 & 4 – Analyze The Sites That Have Out-Ranked You (Onsite And Offsite)

One of the best things you can do is to take a look at the sites that are out-ranking you to find out what they’ve done. This will tell you two things: One – are there some good tactics that you’re missing, and Two – are these rankings likely to hold or are they flawed? There are two areas you’ll want to look at and those are the onsite optimization and the backlinks.

When you’re looking at the onsite optimization you need to only briefly look at their keyword densities, H1 and title tags, internal linking structure, number of indexed pages and the amount of content on the page. Remember: I’m assuming that (as you were ranking previously) you have a solidly optimized website with some good SEO practices and content guidelines followed. If you look at these and compare the newly ranking sites with your site and with other sites that have held their positions and dropped you’ll get a feel for whether there are trends. If there are common traits among the sites that have moved up then you may be on to something. Remember the common trends among the sites that have climbed and held and also remember what they have that the sites that have dropped do not. Remember: there may be no common trends or nothing you can find out with this small a sample. Once this step is complete it’s time to move on to backlink analysis.

Backlink analysis is a good practice to undertake every few months regardless of updates but definitely necessary now that you’re dropping. What you need to do now is to analyze the backlinks of the sites that are out-ranking you. Depending on the competition level this can be a brutal task in that it’s not just about numbers. You should use Yahoo!’s link:www.domain.com command and visit many of the sites in your comeptitors backlinks. What you’re trying to do is get a full view of what their links look like. You’ll also want to download SEO Link Analysis (A Firefox extension you’ll find at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/7505/). When you’re doing a backlink check it automatically displays the PageRank and anchor text of the backlinks though I’d still HIGHLY recommend visiting a good many of the sites to see what kind of links they are.

Once again you’re going to be looking for the architecture of the backlinks of the sites that are moving up. What tactics they’re using, what their links look like on the page, what anchor text distribution they’ve got. Once again you’re going to compare that with other sites on the rise, your site and other stable sites to see what is common between those that are climbing and holding their grown vs those that have fallen.

Once we’ve collected this data it’s time to act. Collect all the common traits that the climbing and holding sites have and …

5 – Take Action

You’re done waiting around preforming the tedious task of link building. You’ve got your data and you’re ready to launch into action and get some stuff done. But wait (oh no – did he say wait again?) is action really the best thing?

When you’ve pooled your data you need to decide what it means. Let’s take for example a situation where the newly ranking sites have very low word counts and tons of footer links (looks paid to me). Do you REALLY want to follow their lead? The question you need to ask yourself in this case is do the factors that are apparently working RIGHT NOW overall going to provide better or worse results? Is less content more or less likely to results in a satisfied visitor? Do paid footer links help Google deliver quality results over the whole of the Internet? In these cases the answer is easily "no" but your findings might be more subtle such as an extremely disproportionate use of targeted anchor text among the ranking sites or sp@mmy copy with keyword densities at 8 or 10%.

What you’re in a position to do now is figure out a moving-forward strategy. If the common trends among the top and improving sites are bad or sp@mmy then you know the algorithm will correct itself eventually and you shouldn’t chase it. If you need to do something – build some additional links and look for new phrases to rank for on other pages to help stabilize your traffic when individual phrases decline.

If you find that the factors that have created the new results are legitimate and will lead to better results overall you know you need to make some changes to what you’re doing and fortunately – with the research you’ve just done you’ve got a great starting spot in that you can probably get some great resources and tactics from the lists of backlinks and onsite optimization you’ve just collected.

It may take hours or even days to properly perform this research but then – you needed something to do while your rankings are down. It might as well be productive.

As you may know, Google’s Matt Cutts frequently answers questions from Google users on the Google Webmaster Central YouTube channel. There are a couple recent ones in which he addresses questions about directories and how they contribute to a site’s rankings.

The first question is:

Will Google consider Yahoo! Directory and BOTW (Best of the Web) as sources of paid links? If no, why is this different from another site that sells links?

When Google looks at whether or not a directory is useful to users, Google looks at: 

- What is the value-add?

- Do they go out and find entries on their own or do they only wait for people to come to them?

- How much do they charge?

- What is the editorial service that’s being charged?

"If a directory takes $50 and every single person who ever applies in the directory automatically gets in for that $50, there’s not as much editorial oversight as something like the Yahoo! Directory, where people do get rejected,"  says Cutts. "So if there is no editorial value-add there, then that is much closer to paid links."

The second question is:

We sell a software product, and there are 100s of software download directories on the web of varying quality. Could submitting our product to all of them hurt our rankings or domain trust/authority?

Answering this question, Cutts makes it clear that they are only talking about a software product ( .exe file), and not a website. "If it’s only a software product, then I wouldn’t really worry about it," he says. It wouldn’t hurt your website to have a link from those directories, he says.

If the directories are low quality, Google tries not to score them highly, but it doesn’t hurt to have your software listed in them.

Google is traditionally the main area of focus when it comes to search engine optimization. With the search engine giant so far ahead of the game in terms of search market share, it’s not hard to understand why.

Search is changing though, and there are always new elements coming into play. Since social media has come into its own, more opportunities and questions have come along with it. Now Microsoft is going for Google’s throat with a new search engine and an aggressive marketing campaign. What this means for the future of search market share is yet to be determined, but there’s no denying Bing is capturing some attention, and that means there are people searching with it. Altered your SEO strategy for Bing? Tell us why.

SEO for Bing

Microsoft’s stance on search engine optimization really doesn’t appear to be all that different from Google’s. You’re not going to get the same results on both Google and Bing in many cases, but that is after all why the two can co-exist. The real difference is in how the results are presented, and not as much in how the two determine quality and relevancy.

Bing and Google have separate algorithms, but both like quality, relevant links and good content, as opposed to deception and spam. Bing in fact, hasn’t really changed much (from Live Search) in terms of crawling.

"There have been no major changes to the MSNBot crawler during the upgrade to Bing," Microsoft says in a Bing white paper for webmasters (pdf). "However, the Bing team is continuously refining and improving our crawling and indexing abilities. Note that the bot name hasn’t changed. It will still show up in the web server access logs as MSNBog."

Sidenote: Webmasters will want to acknowledge that Microsoft has increased the size limit of sitemaps from 10,000 URLs to 50,000. Google is also now supporting up to 50,000 "child sitemaps" of sitemaps index files.

Like I was saying, the biggest difference between the two search engines is in the presentation. Bing of course separates (some) results into categories. This has worried some search marketers, but Microsoft says good SEO will work just as well with this set up. Bing also has the explore pane (navigational menu on the left-hand side of search results), which corresponds with the categories in the SERPs. In some ways, this is similar to Google’s recent addition of "search options."

I discussed what Google’s search options would mean for SEO here. Basically, I just broke it down section by section, and you could do the same thing with Bing I think. Look at the keyword phrases you want to rank for, and see how Bing breaks it up. Let’s say "cell phones" for example. Bing gives you categories like shopping, brands, buying guide, providers, accessories, images, videos, and local.

This tells me that you want to play up the appropriate categories on your site, so that it shows up in the relevant categories on Bing. If you sell accessories, place emphasize that, and you’ll probably have a better shot ending up in that category. With Bing, it’s not about getting to the top of the SERP. It’s about getting to the top of the right part of the SERP. I’ll let you in on a little secret. Having quality and relevant (to that part of the SERP) content is the best thing you can do. Incidentally, this will probably help your cause in Google (and other search engines) at the same time.

"Ultimately, SEO is still SEO. Bing doesn’t change that. Bing’s new user interface design simply adds new opportunities to searchers to find what the information they want more quickly and easily, and that benefits webmasters who have taken the time to work on the quality of their content and website design," says Microsoft.

Curious About What Bing Looks for in Links?

Rick DeJarnette of Bing Webmaster Center recently posted a pair of blog posts looking at what makes some links good and some bad. You may find some of these things familiar:

- "If you don’t feel you can endorse the quality of the content at another site, you shouldn’t be linking to them."

- Don’t seek links from sites whose content isn’t worthy of your endorsement.

- Links to and from your site should be relevant to your site (or at least the page you’re linking from/to)

- Focus on quality, not quantity. Few highly relevant links are better than a bunch of crap links

- Avoid "bad neighborhoods" like dedicated domains or IP ranges that do nothing but set up meaningless link exchanges.

- Avoid hidden text

You can’t stop bad links coming to your site. "We take the approach that bad inbound links won’t adversely affect your site ranking unless most or all of your inbound links are from bad sites," explains DeJarnette.

But in a nutshell, that’s essentially where Microsoft stands on SEO practices, or at least what they are giving to the public.

Social media Really Is Important to SEO

Social media definitely enters the SEO equation. "Effective social media management can be a tremendous source for generating buzz, those all-important inbound links and just plain direct referral traffic," says Mike McDonald of WebProNews, as he discusses a recent interview he did with SEOmoz CEO Rand Fishkin.

More WebProNews Videos

Facebook

Copyblogger has an interesting article about how Facebook is "killing SEO." I think that’s a bit sensationalist, but the points made by author Mike Wasylik are valid, nonetheless.

"The rise of Facebook creates a growing segment of the web that’s completely invisible to search engines – most of which, Facebook blocks – and can be seen only by logged-in Facebook users," he says. "So as Facebook becomes ever larger, and keeps more users inside its walled garden, your web site will need to appear in Facebook’s feeds and searches or you will miss out on an important source of web traffic."

"What’s the best way to keep your links in front of Facebook users?" asks Wasylik. "The ever-more-important linkbait strategy."

The term linkbait sometimes carries a negative connotation, but generally, again, it’s just good solid content that people want to link to.

Twitter

Twitter has gone from a confusing (to many) communication tool/social network, to that plus a way to  find information in real time. This means that it is a good idea to tweet regularly. When someone performs a search on Twitter, they are searching right now. The fresher the tweet, the more likely they are to see it.

But Twitter’s search implications are not limited to its own search. "Although Twitter is a social media tool meant to create community and relationships, it does have an SEO value," says Mihaela Lica at Sitepoint. "For example, Twitter can affect positively your Alexa rankings by sending visitors to your pages. Usage data is a sign of quality for Google and all the other search engines. If you can make people come to your site via Twitter, then this is an SEO advantage you cannot afford to miss."

With both Twitter and Facebook, good content that you create will be shared. The links within the social networks may not boost your rankings, but they can lead to more links outside of them. Either way, it is added exposure.

Wrapping Up

The roots of search engine optimization really haven’t changed that much. Creating great and fresh content is still your best bet. That’s what people will share, and that’s what will be considered relevant for searches it pertains to. For some great SEO tips and items of note, check out these recent articles:

What’s the Future of Search?

SEO Checklist with Vanessa Fox

SEO Ranking Factors for 2009

Could Comments Hurt Your Search Engine Rankings?

Google Improves Flash Indexing Capabilities

Google Changes to No-Follow on the Horizon?

Are SEOs the "Bad Guys?"

Google vs. Bing – Side by Side

What changes have you made to your SEO practices as a result of Bing’s release? Twitter? Facebook? Tell us what tweaks you’ve made.

I am a strong believer in the idea that comments increase the value of articles. This holds true on small blogs as well as large news sites. Comments expand the conversation, and can provide insight into the original subject matter that was lacking from the piece to begin with.

It is my opinion that the more discussion there is around any given topic, the more informed the reader is likely to be once they finish reading. That said, there are certainly plenty of useless comments out there as well. I’m referring specifically to spammy ones, and they can do more than just damage the reader’s experience, but in some cases, they may even affect search engine rankings.

Google Search Quality Analyst Fili Wiese recently tweeted about (hat tip to Barry Schwartz) an article from Richard Baxter at SEOgadget, which details how some spam comments appear to have affected the ranking of a specific page of his in Google’s search results.

Breaking out some Google Analytics data, Baxter shows us that one of his most popular keywords for driving traffic to his site had him ranking high in a search for that keyword until a few spammy comments about things like "hairy asian men naked," "nude female superheroes," and "large nipple galleries" were left on the page. Shortly after that, the page fell out of the rankings, but was re-included within 24 hours once the comments were finally deleted. See Baxter’s article for a graphical analysis of how all of this went down.

The moral of the story here is that while encouraging comments on your articles/blog posts is a good thing, it is also in your best interest to keep spam at a minimum. Sometimes this is easier said than done, but if you know that your rankings might be affected, you will have a little more motivation.

"Comment spam, missed by Akismet," says Baxter. "Don’t get me wrong, I think Akismet is amazing, but it can miss some types of comment spam. It’s probably my fault for not adding a verification or a CAPTCHA to my comments are but I don’t enjoy the experience on other blogs personally, so I choose to leave that off."

To be clear, Google has not come out and said that these spammy comments directly lead to a penalty. Even Wiese simply said the article was an interesting read. I would hardly call this confirmation. Baxter’s analysis is quite intriguing nonetheless.

Isn’t there something just inherently ‘Internet-y’ in speculating about what the future will bring? Personally, I always enjoy chatting with smart web-savvy internet folks about where we are headed with ‘this’ or ‘that’ in the future.

At SMX Advanced in Seattle this year I asked Rebecca Lieb about what she is reading in the tea leaves insofar as search is concerned. Here are a few key concepts I considered the big takeaways from the discussion.

More WebProNews Videos

Social Media:
Rebecca believes we are going to see search engines spend a lot of time and effort developing ways to integrate social and behavioral data into search. We all know about Google’s appetite for data. Most people even on the periphery of the industry have a really good idea (and a nagging worry?) about how much data Google has about our search behavior.

What about Facebook?  What about Twitter?  Facebook goes a little different direction than what your behavior is, they know more than what we do… they know what we like. They know this because we tell them.  We tell them our favorite colors, our favorite bands and where we like to go on vacation.

We tell Twitter about ourselves too, but most importantly with Twitter, we tell them what we are doing ‘right now’.  Think a search engine wouldn’t be interested in knowing what you are doing ‘right now’ when you are doing a search?  Maybe?

If you can get past the slightly creepy aspects of this concept, the upside of it all is that we will probably have better search engines.  All of this data we are feeding the machines about ourselves is going to make the machines exponentially better at interpreting what we ‘mean’ when we type in a query. Pretty soon, who knows? They may know more about what we want than we do.  Won’t that be nice?  Instead of typing queries into search bars, we can just request optimal instructions.  Be a big time saver…  Gives the ‘Feeling Lucky’ button a whole other slant too, doesn’t it?

There’s an App for That:
Rebecca seems to be of the opinion that search, particularly mobile search, might slip through the fingers of the giant aggregators like Google and Bing.  She believes we are going to see an uptake in usage and mobile search marketshare going to specialized search apps like Urban Spoon.

There may still be 3 or 4 of you out there thinking ‘meh, mobile search’ but pay attention to the part in the video where Rebecca points out that “30% of Google search in Japan is coming from mobile search”.  That’s a lot of search. Think that % is going to go down? Clearly I can’t speak for everybody, but personally, I think this smartphone thing might have some legs to it.

Say Hello to your Customer:
Another memorable Rebecca quote (well praraphrase at  least) from the video is; “people are really realizing that monitoring reputation management is more and more a part of search”. 

As social media data makes it’s way into search engines, companies better have a good idea about the potential impact – good and bad – they may be looking at when ALL of their customers have the potential to air their opinions. 

The guy that bought the ‘XL Blue Beach Widget’ last week and left a 3 page rant about how bad it sucked and how horrible your company was to deal with, could more and more find his way to the top of search results for your ‘XL Blue Beach Widgets’.  What happens if your ‘XL Blue Beach Widgets’ normally make up 30% of your seasonal spring internet sales?  That could get ugly.  Say hello to your customer.  If they wave, wave back. 

Search, as Rebecca points out is becoming more and more of a 2 way street.  Your clients are informing your market strategies already now more than they ever have.  This influence is only going to grow.  If you are thinking about your Search strategy and have another group in your organization working on your Social strategy….  you guys need to hang out more. A lot more. Go to lunch, have drinks after work, become room mates (if you are management, consider handcuffing these people together) – whatever it takes.  Social and search get a little closer every day.  If search is vital to your business, then social is vital to your business, you may just not know it yet…  But it’s coming.

It’s happened to all of us. You wake up one morning feeling like a million bucks, you stretch and if you’re like me, you notice the eye-rolling as once again your significant other catches you with a toothbrush dangling from your mouth and a laptop or iPhone in front of you while you check rankings and emails. And then it happens – you start your browser with a search phrase already set to display and you notice that your site no longer holds it’s previous position and the move is not in the right direction. We’ve all faced it and the longer you’ve been an SEO or website owner the more times you’ve seen it happen. But still … what do you do? To quote the immortal Douglas Adams, "Don’t panic."

Believe me – I know how hard it is sometimes. It’s easy for me to say this to clients when I see an engine fluctuating or a site has dropped only a position or two and we’re working to react but it’s a completely different thing when it happens to you and (might I add) a good reminder to SEO’s as to what our clients go through. But I still haven’t answered the question have I? What do you do? What … do … you … do?

There are five basic steps one must take when their site drops (I like to keep things simple and a 5 step check-list is a great way to do that). These steps assume that to start with you had a well-optimized website with good SEO practices followed. If you don’t then the reasons you dropped are pretty clear but if you’ve got a well-optimized site and your site has fallen – then this is for you. You should:

1 – Build Links

It’s very difficult for people to not want to do something proactive when they notice their site drop. I know – I’ve been there. One of the easiest things to do to keep yourself busy while working on the other 4 steps below is to build links. Building good, solid links to your site will never hurt and will only help you out so even if one of the later steps might show you other actions you need to take (or not take) you’ll never go wrong with some solid link building and if nothing else – it’ll make you feel like you’re doing something and stop you from doing other things that might do you more harm than good.

I’m not going to go into all the different types of links you could build or what the anatomy of a good link is. Many articles, forums and blog posts have been written in the past and are easily found online. I’m sure if you monitor a few good SEO forums you’ll find more being written every day. If you can – find articles by Eric Enge. While he doesn’t give it all away (who does?) – you won’t go wrong taking his advice and even seasoned SEO’s are likely to learn a thing or two from reading his work.

2 – Relax For A Couple Days

Before you rush to your favorite site editing tool – relax. Slight tweaks in content are unlikely to make much of a difference (if any) to your rankings. If you’ve got solid, well-optimized content and suddenly your site’s fluctuating – cramming in a few more instances of your targeted phrase will likely do more harm than good.

Now – when I say relax I basically mean, don’t touch your site. There are steps (such as link building) that you can work on including the analytical work noted below. Just don’t go editing all your copy to try to chase some tweak in Google’s algorithm. Relax.

3 & 4 – Analyze The Sites That Have Out-Ranked You (Onsite And Offsite)

One of the best things you can do is to take a look at the sites that are out-ranking you to find out what they’ve done. This will tell you two things: One – are there some good tactics that you’re missing, and Two – are these rankings likely to hold or are they flawed? There are two areas you’ll want to look at and those are the onsite optimization and the backlinks.

When you’re looking at the onsite optimization you need to only briefly look at their keyword densities, H1 and title tags, internal linking structure, number of indexed pages and the amount of content on the page. Remember: I’m assuming that (as you were ranking previously) you have a solidly optimized website with some good SEO practices and content guidelines followed. If you look at these and compare the newly ranking sites with your site and with other sites that have held their positions and dropped you’ll get a feel for whether there are trends. If there are common traits among the sites that have moved up then you may be on to something. Remember the common trends among the sites that have climbed and held and also remember what they have that the sites that have dropped do not. Remember: there may be no common trends or nothing you can find out with this small a sample. Once this step is complete it’s time to move on to backlink analysis.

Backlink analysis is a good practice to undertake every few months regardless of updates but definitely necessary now that you’re dropping. What you need to do now is to analyze the backlinks of the sites that are out-ranking you. Depending on the competition level this can be a brutal task in that it’s not just about numbers. You should use Yahoo!’s link:www.domain.com command and visit many of the sites in your comeptitors backlinks. What you’re trying to do is get a full view of what their links look like. You’ll also want to download SEO Link Analysis (A Firefox extension you’ll find at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/7505/). When you’re doing a backlink check it automatically displays the PageRank and anchor text of the backlinks though I’d still HIGHLY recommend visiting a good many of the sites to see what kind of links they are.

Once again you’re going to be looking for the architecture of the backlinks of the sites that are moving up. What tactics they’re using, what their links look like on the page, what anchor text distribution they’ve got. Once again you’re going to compare that with other sites on the rise, your site and other stable sites to see what is common between those that are climbing and holding their grown vs those that have fallen.

Once we’ve collected this data it’s time to act. Collect all the common traits that the climbing and holding sites have and …

5 – Take Action

You’re done waiting around preforming the tedious task of link building. You’ve got your data and you’re ready to launch into action and get some stuff done. But wait (oh no – did he say wait again?) is action really the best thing?

When you’ve pooled your data you need to decide what it means. Let’s take for example a situation where the newly ranking sites have very low word counts and tons of footer links (looks paid to me). Do you REALLY want to follow their lead? The question you need to ask yourself in this case is do the factors that are apparently working RIGHT NOW overall going to provide better or worse results? Is less content more or less likely to results in a satisfied visitor? Do paid footer links help Google deliver quality results over the whole of the Internet? In these cases the answer is easily "no" but your findings might be more subtle such as an extremely disproportionate use of targeted anchor text among the ranking sites or sp@mmy copy with keyword densities at 8 or 10%.

What you’re in a position to do now is figure out a moving-forward strategy. If the common trends among the top and improving sites are bad or sp@mmy then you know the algorithm will correct itself eventually and you shouldn’t chase it. If you need to do something – build some additional links and look for new phrases to rank for on other pages to help stabilize your traffic when individual phrases decline.

If you find that the factors that have created the new results are legitimate and will lead to better results overall you know you need to make some changes to what you’re doing and fortunately – with the research you’ve just done you’ve got a great starting spot in that you can probably get some great resources and tactics from the lists of backlinks and onsite optimization you’ve just collected.

It may take hours or even days to properly perform this research but then – you needed something to do while your rankings are down. It might as well be productive.

Google’s Matt Cutts frequently posts useful tips for webmasters on the Google Webmaster Central YouTube channel. The short clips generally offer valuable nuggets of info that can have an impact on your site’s performance in Google.

In these videos, Matt always answers questions submitted by users, and in a recent one he answers the question: "How do meta geo tags influence search results?"

Noticed changes in your ranking based on geographic info? Discuss.

Cutts says it’s not something Google really looks at at all. He says they do look at:

- IP Address
- gTLD
- ccTLD

He also points out that there’s a feature in Google’s Webmaster Tools where you can tell it that your site pertains to a specific country even though it’s a dot com. "Typically the geotags that are in meta tags are not as useful and We don’t tend to give those as much weight if at all," says Cutts. He suggests spending your time:

- trying to make sure you have the right domain name

- trying to make sure you have the right IP address if you can

- If you have content (even if it’s geo-located) even if it’s a sub-domain or a sub-directory, you can specify it in Google’s Webamster Tools. You can tell it that certain content is relevant for a particular country.

These are good things to keep in mind if geographic information is important to your site. Have you used the Webmaster Tools Feature Cutts refers to? Tell us about it.

Google’s Matt Cutts frequently posts useful tips for webmasters on the Google Webmaster Central YouTube channel. The short clips generally offer valuable nuggets of info that can have an impact on your site’s performance in Google.

In these videos, Matt always answers questions submitted by users, and in a recent one he answers the question:

How do meta geo tags influence search results?

Cutts says it’s not something Google really looks at at all. He says they do look at:

- IP Address
- gTLD
- ccTLD

He also points out that there’s a feature in Google’s Webmaster Tools where you can tell it that your site pertains to a specific country even though it’s a dot com. "Typically the geotags that are in meta tags are not as useful and We don’t tend to give those as much weight if at all," says Cutts. He suggests spending your time:

- trying to make sure you have the right domain name

- trying to make sure you have the right IP address if you can

- If you have content (even if it’s geo-located) even if it’s a sub-domain or a sub-directory, you can specify it in Google’s Webamster Tools. You can tell it that certain content is relevant for a particular country.

These are good things to keep in mind if geographic information is important to your site. Have you used the Webmaster Tools Feature Cutts refers to?

As you may know, Google’s Matt Cutts frequently answers questions from Google users on the Google Webmaster Central YouTube channel. There are a couple recent ones in which he addresses questions about directories and how they contribute to a site’s rankings.

The first question is:

Will Google consider Yahoo! Directory and BOTW (Best of the Web) as sources of paid links? If no, why is this different from another site that sells links?

When Google looks at whether or not a directory is useful to users, Google looks at: 

- What is the value-add?

- Do they go out and find entries on their own or do they only wait for people to come to them?

- How much do they charge?

- What is the editorial service that’s being charged?

"If a directory takes $50 and every single person who ever applies in the directory automatically gets in for that $50, there’s not as much editorial oversight as something like the Yahoo! Directory, where people do get rejected,"  says Cutts. "So if there is no editorial value-add there, then that is much closer to paid links."

The second question is:

We sell a software product, and there are 100s of software download directories on the web of varying quality. Could submitting our product to all of them hurt our rankings or domain trust/authority?

Answering this question, Cutts makes it clear that they are only talking about a software product ( .exe file), and not a website. "If it’s only a software product, then I wouldn’t really worry about it," he says. It wouldn’t hurt your website to have a link from those directories, he says.

If the directories are low quality, Google tries not to score them highly, but it doesn’t hurt to have your software listed in them.

Google is traditionally the main area of focus when it comes to search engine optimization. With the search engine giant so far ahead of the game in terms of search market share, it’s not hard to understand why.

Search is changing though, and there are always new elements coming into play. Since social media has come into its own, more opportunities and questions have come along with it. Now Microsoft is going for Google’s throat with a new search engine and an aggressive marketing campaign. What this means for the future of search market share is yet to be determined, but there’s no denying Bing is capturing some attention, and that means there are people searching with it. Altered your SEO strategy for Bing? Tell us why.

SEO for Bing

Microsoft’s stance on search engine optimization really doesn’t appear to be all that different from Google’s. You’re not going to get the same results on both Google and Bing in many cases, but that is after all why the two can co-exist. The real difference is in how the results are presented, and not as much in how the two determine quality and relevancy.

Bing and Google have separate algorithms, but both like quality, relevant links and good content, as opposed to deception and spam. Bing in fact, hasn’t really changed much (from Live Search) in terms of crawling.

"There have been no major changes to the MSNBot crawler during the upgrade to Bing," Microsoft says in a Bing white paper for webmasters (pdf). "However, the Bing team is continuously refining and improving our crawling and indexing abilities. Note that the bot name hasn’t changed. It will still show up in the web server access logs as MSNBog."

Sidenote: Webmasters will want to acknowledge that Microsoft has increased the size limit of sitemaps from 10,000 URLs to 50,000. Google is also now supporting up to 50,000 "child sitemaps" of sitemaps index files.

Like I was saying, the biggest difference between the two search engines is in the presentation. Bing of course separates (some) results into categories. This has worried some search marketers, but Microsoft says good SEO will work just as well with this set up. Bing also has the explore pane (navigational menu on the left-hand side of search results), which corresponds with the categories in the SERPs. In some ways, this is similar to Google’s recent addition of "search options."

I discussed what Google’s search options would mean for SEO here. Basically, I just broke it down section by section, and you could do the same thing with Bing I think. Look at the keyword phrases you want to rank for, and see how Bing breaks it up. Let’s say "cell phones" for example. Bing gives you categories like shopping, brands, buying guide, providers, accessories, images, videos, and local.

This tells me that you want to play up the appropriate categories on your site, so that it shows up in the relevant categories on Bing. If you sell accessories, place emphasize that, and you’ll probably have a better shot ending up in that category. With Bing, it’s not about getting to the top of the SERP. It’s about getting to the top of the right part of the SERP. I’ll let you in on a little secret. Having quality and relevant (to that part of the SERP) content is the best thing you can do. Incidentally, this will probably help your cause in Google (and other search engines) at the same time.

"Ultimately, SEO is still SEO. Bing doesn’t change that. Bing’s new user interface design simply adds new opportunities to searchers to find what the information they want more quickly and easily, and that benefits webmasters who have taken the time to work on the quality of their content and website design," says Microsoft.

Curious About What Bing Looks for in Links?

Rick DeJarnette of Bing Webmaster Center recently posted a pair of blog posts looking at what makes some links good and some bad. You may find some of these things familiar:

- "If you don’t feel you can endorse the quality of the content at another site, you shouldn’t be linking to them."

- Don’t seek links from sites whose content isn’t worthy of your endorsement.

- Links to and from your site should be relevant to your site (or at least the page you’re linking from/to)

- Focus on quality, not quantity. Few highly relevant links are better than a bunch of crap links

- Avoid "bad neighborhoods" like dedicated domains or IP ranges that do nothing but set up meaningless link exchanges.

- Avoid hidden text

You can’t stop bad links coming to your site. "We take the approach that bad inbound links won’t adversely affect your site ranking unless most or all of your inbound links are from bad sites," explains DeJarnette.

But in a nutshell, that’s essentially where Microsoft stands on SEO practices, or at least what they are giving to the public.

Social media Really Is Important to SEO

Social media definitely enters the SEO equation. "Effective social media management can be a tremendous source for generating buzz, those all-important inbound links and just plain direct referral traffic," says Mike McDonald of WebProNews, as he discusses a recent interview he did with SEOmoz CEO Rand Fishkin.

More WebProNews Videos

Facebook

Copyblogger has an interesting article about how Facebook is "killing SEO." I think that’s a bit sensationalist, but the points made by author Mike Wasylik are valid, nonetheless.

"The rise of Facebook creates a growing segment of the web that’s completely invisible to search engines – most of which, Facebook blocks – and can be seen only by logged-in Facebook users," he says. "So as Facebook becomes ever larger, and keeps more users inside its walled garden, your web site will need to appear in Facebook’s feeds and searches or you will miss out on an important source of web traffic."

"What’s the best way to keep your links in front of Facebook users?" asks Wasylik. "The ever-more-important linkbait strategy."

The term linkbait sometimes carries a negative connotation, but generally, again, it’s just good solid content that people want to link to.

Twitter

Twitter has gone from a confusing (to many) communication tool/social network, to that plus a way to  find information in real time. This means that it is a good idea to tweet regularly. When someone performs a search on Twitter, they are searching right now. The fresher the tweet, the more likely they are to see it.

But Twitter’s search implications are not limited to its own search. "Although Twitter is a social media tool meant to create community and relationships, it does have an SEO value," says Mihaela Lica at Sitepoint. "For example, Twitter can affect positively your Alexa rankings by sending visitors to your pages. Usage data is a sign of quality for Google and all the other search engines. If you can make people come to your site via Twitter, then this is an SEO advantage you cannot afford to miss."

With both Twitter and Facebook, good content that you create will be shared. The links within the social networks may not boost your rankings, but they can lead to more links outside of them. Either way, it is added exposure.

Wrapping Up

The roots of search engine optimization really haven’t changed that much. Creating great and fresh content is still your best bet. That’s what people will share, and that’s what will be considered relevant for searches it pertains to. For some great SEO tips and items of note, check out these recent articles:

What’s the Future of Search?

SEO Checklist with Vanessa Fox

SEO Ranking Factors for 2009

Could Comments Hurt Your Search Engine Rankings?

Google Improves Flash Indexing Capabilities

Google Changes to No-Follow on the Horizon?

Are SEOs the "Bad Guys?"

Google vs. Bing – Side by Side

What changes have you made to your SEO practices as a result of Bing’s release? Twitter? Facebook? Tell us what tweaks you’ve made.