If you own a website, having an account with Google Webmaster Tools is invaluable. It can provide you with a wide variety of information about your site, its traffic, and how Google perceives it. In particular, webmasters just starting to learn SEO have many questions, and Google Webmaster Tools has the answers.
http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Google-Optimization-Help/SEO-FAQ-Answered-by-Google-Webmaster-Tools/

It’s like every SEO marketer decided that “social media,” was the ticket to a sweet consulting gig. It’s important to distinguish that the people who have championed the cause for social computing are often deeply involved with the “social media” community.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/redux_lets_move_away_from_social_media_and_get_dow.php

Real-time search is still an emerging concept. At this point, using a real-time search engine will bring you results by time/date. This doesn’t always cater to relevancy, which is why there is still a lot of work to be done in this field. Real-time search is much more basic (at least so far) than say, Google Search. Social media by nature is viral. Real-time search is nothing more than putting things in chronological order.
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/09/02/tips-for-getting-found-in-real-time-searches

For those who value Google’s often delayed toolbar pagerank, Google is giving you all a nice New Year’s Eve present – the annual page rank update.  It seems Google is now making this an annual gig as it also made a toolbar pagerank update the same time last year.
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-toolbar-pagerank-updating-for-new-years-2010/15855/

Social builds links. SEO needs links. Most users, when reading an article they enjoy, don’t skip back to Twitter to grab the shortened URL. They simply grab the URL from the address bar already open above the article. Fast and easy for the user means downstream link building for you, so take advantage of this by making sure the Social Media program running at your business is aware of your needs.
http://searchengineland.com/6-new-years-resolutions-for-in-house-sems-32347

If you go to Google.com and type “hamburgers,” “shoes,” “candy,” “grills,” “beer,” and hundreds of other terms of ambiguous local intent, Google will almost always show you local results on a map that’s tied to your IP address. Today, Google intentionally showing less local results for web design / SEO queries. For example, [web design sacramento] doesn’t display local listings today. This is an accurate representation of user intent.
http://searchengineland.com/google-hides-seos-web-designers-32671

According to a comment on DigitalPoint forum, if you are interested in improving your Google SERPs, then it’s your Google backlinks you should be analyzing. If you are interested in improving your Yahoo SERPs, then by all means use the Yahoo site explorer.
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1632350

Times Square was evacuated earlier today when the bomb squad was called in to inspect a suspicious parked van. It turned out to be nothing, but as people were scrambling for information they would have been better off doing a search on Bing than on Google. Google was perfectly capable of showing the best realtime results. The problem is that the best results were hidden on Google’s realtime updates page and Bing’s Twitter search page, which combines Tweets with headlines. Google’s realtime results which show what people are saying on Twitter provides much more relevant information than its stale news search results on the main search page.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/12/30/realtime-search-off-bing-beats-google/

Using YouTube may become a much less passive experience in the near future. Google applied for a patent on a “Web-based system for generation of interactive games based on digital videos,” and several facts point to the search giant moving ahead with the idea. Considering that YouTube can already handle annotations and time markers, this concept would be easy enough to implement.
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/12/30/google-gets-patent-for-youtube-gaming

Content duplication has been a buzz topic in SEO for a while now. There is still the lingering perception that there is some sort of duplicate content penalty despite repeated assurances from multiple Googlers to the contrary. Penalty or not, it is clearly the case that the site where content originates may not always rank best for that content.  Google wants to do their best to make sure they keep the content of their results pages as distinct from one another as they can.
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/12/30/content-syndication-is-your-friend

Sometimes the ideal AdWords strategies are counterintuitive. If you’re in a competitive market, you need to use every optimization tactic you can. Both your quality score and competitor bids are factored into the price of your AdWords clicks. Once your keywords and ads have a good history, CTR is the biggest factor in quality score. Before you have any clicks, however, your quality score will be hugely impacted by how Google predicts you will perform.
http://searchengineland.com/four-unobvious-strategies-for-improving-google-adwords-profitability-32132

The mobile web is a fascinating space that is still in its infancy. As online usage increases regardless of the device used, accessibility is going to be the next lever to increase online usage.
http://searchengineland.com/top-10-reasons-your-website-should-go-mobile-32566

According to a comment on cre8asiteforums, no-follow links are not worthless. Yahoo Answers is no-follow yet it still generates a decent amount of traffic.
http://www.cre8asiteforums.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=74205

Some people think that the traffic you get might be worth more than the page rank. It might be easy way to get traffic without a high page rank. Not sure how good the traffic converts so you might want to make another site and try that one first.
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1626573

According to a comment on DigitalPoint forum, Alt tags help some visually impaired visitors who need to use text readers to understand a page format and so should be used. They can’t see the images, but can detect text in ALT tags. In addition to this, they also help you rank better with search engines.
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1627876

Hitwise tweeted this morning that Facebook reached the number one most visited site in the US for the first time ever over the Christmas holiday, pushing past Google. That means pretty much Hitwise is comparing Facebook’s overall traffic to only one aspect of Google, Google web search. Potentially, some visits to Google’s personalized home page might also be in there. But also potentially, a chunk of Google traffic isn’t being counted correctly.
http://searchengineland.com/hitwise-facebook-more-visited-than-google-on-christmas-32554

The Reuters article suggests that there has been some growth in Bing’s Chinese usage since its launch in June. The Chinese Internet is heavily censored by the government, which has been an ongoing source of controversy for American companies and search engines doing business there. Google and Yahoo have been roundly and repeatedly criticized for their participation in that censorship.
http://searchengineland.com/microsoft-hopes-to-grow-bee-ying-bing-share-in-china-32527

Collecta has announced a real-time search tool that taps into content posted on MySpace. The dedicated MySpace search includes the public comments, blog posts, videos, photos, and links that are posted by MySpace users. It can be accessed at myspace.collecta.com for now, and Collecta says the MySpace content will eventually be incorporated into its primary real-time search results on collecta.com.
http://searchengineland.com/collecta-launches-myspace-search-32521

According to a comment on SEOChat forum, Yahoo indexes faster than Bing. Bing places more value on on-page content but tend to index new pages really slow.
http://forums.seochat.com/yahoo-search-optimization-60/yahoo-seo-strategies-277538.html

SEO now spans into the reaches of social media like most would expect – hence the rising interest in SMO (social media optimization). This is fascinating from an SEO perspective, as those that work in broad, organic visibility roles are no longer considering organic SERPs from a pure website optimization/link-building perspective but through a multi-channel optimization.
http://www.seo-scoop.com/2009/12/22/is-the-only-protectionist-orm-strategy-one-that-embraces-optimised-social-media/

Google’s announcement of personalized search for everyone has stirred a lot of mixed reactions from the search industry. Personalized search will mean effectively manipulating influencing your users to click on your listing. And then there’s the launch of Real-Time search results from Google (just a few days after the rollout of personalized search). So expect conversations your favorite social media sites like Twitter and Facebook to show up in your respective search results. Personalized and real-time search was definitely the next step for Google (and probably for the rest of the search engines).
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/personalized-real-time-search/15739/

Google Wave was officially launched in beta a couple of weeks ago and already plenty of people realize its potential usefulness. URL Search is going to get more and more popular once more and more waves are being created: it allows to find all waves linking to a particular page.
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-wave-search/15785/

Google is getting serious about realtime search, adding Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace streams into results and adding a recent “updates” option which is addictive. But behind the scenes Google is also getting ready to push out an entirely new way for indexing the Web. Codenamed “Caffeine,” Google has been testing it since last summer in one datacenter, and is now getting ready to push it out across all of Google.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/12/28/google-caffeine-faster-search-index/

Today, two consumer groups, Consumer Watchdog and the Center For Digital Democracy, have asked the FTC to block the deal on anti-trust grounds and possible privacy issues. In a joint letter to the FTC (embedded below), the two groups say that Google’s acquisition of AdMob would lessen competition in the mobile advertising market, having a potentially negative impact on consumers, advertisers and application developers and others. AdMob is the leader in the mobile advertising space, which is chock full of competitors, including Greystripe and others.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/12/28/consumer-groups-lobby-ftc-to-block-googles-acquisition-of-admob/

Following October’s release of Google Analytics new features, Google has just released another set of very cool new features. Among them is “Annotations,” a tremendously useful new feature both to analysts as well as executives, who are usually not up to date on granular details about website activity.
http://searchengineland.com/google-analytics-adds-new-features-31624

It is highly recommended working on the website’s sections to make sure both people and search engines would find and scan them easily. If your site contains a lot of content pages, why not adding some links from your HTML made pages to accurately guide people towards finding and visiting them. For the search engines, creation of XML files would be great since by using a single file, all of your main pages would become accessible.
http://www.bing.com/community/forums/t/647128.aspx

Onpage optimization is only one small part of the search engine ranking equation. Optimizing your website as your sole tactic will not help you to get to the number one spot on Google (for anything competitive at least). There are no set rules for achieving high search engine rankings. The search engines keep their algorithms secret in order to avoid manipulation.
http://www.seo-scoop.com/2009/12/16/learn-seo-how-to-do-onpage-search-engine-optimization/

Mobile advertising is poised to become a huge growth area, with research firm Kelsey Group seeing the market grow from just $160 million in 2008 to $3.1 billion in 2013. eMarketer projects mobile advertising spending in the US will balloon from $648 million in 2008 to over $3.3 billion in 2013. While some believe search will account for the biggest chunk of the market, others expect geo-aware advertising, another way of bringing “relevant” ads to users, to have a bright future, too.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/12/26/location-based-mobile-advertising-platform-adlocal-enters-america-wants-to-win-with-japan-know-how/

Right now ‘quantity’ still rules on the Web, ‘quality’ is hard to find. Perhaps that’s why Reuters is betting on the subscription model – it hopes that consumers will just subscribe to quality content, thereby removing the need to search for it. What Demand Media, Answers.com and AOL are doing is having a much greater impact on the quality and findability of content on the Web.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/content_farms_impact.php

There are a number of reasons that press releases can be great for search. They’re great for spreading word to the media (journalists/bloggers), they can contain links, when used with credible news wire services, they are often looked upon with some authority.
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/12/21/press-releases-can-have-a-long-search-shelf-life

In the US Yahoo still ranks as number one but Google News reportedly falls down the list below the traditional news domains, such as NY Times and CNN. However, over at Nielsen (via Editor & Publisher) the numbers appear to be quite different than the comScore data above — especially the ranking of Google News.
http://searchengineland.com/yahoo-top-news-site-google-second-people-spending-more-time-with-fewer-sites-32451

Search engines today serve over 25 billion queries a month in North America alone, with the lion’s share of those queries serviced by Google. But it’s never too early to watch out for the new kid on the block. Facebook today handles over a billion queries a month, and that number is growing. With such a large audience, it’s hard to believe they will allow those searches to go un-monetized for long.
http://searchengineland.com/five-search-marketing-predictions-for-2010-32014

More people around the world get their news online from Google News than from CNN or the news properties of the New York Times. In November, 2009, according to comScore, Google News attracted 100 million unique visitors worldwide, making it a larger news site than CNN (66 million) or the combined properties of the New York Times (92 million). But do you know who is even larger? Yahoo News, with 138 million unique visitors worldwide.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/12/23/google-news-cnn/

Google published a long manifesto on the “meaning of open” in the form of an email to all employees republished as a blog post. In it, senior VP of product management Jonathan Rosenberg, makes an eloquent argument for why open systems always win and urges Google’s employees to always strive to be open when designing products. An open Internet spurs innovation and brings more consumers on board, which ultimately means more searches and increased use of Web applications.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/12/22/google-open-when-convenient/

In a Security and Exchange document filed on Tuesday night, AOL plans on cutting about one-third of their staff, about 2,300 people. The filing said, “the Restructuring will include the reduction of approximately a third of the Company’s current employee base, which will be conducted on a voluntary and involuntary basis.”
http://searchengineland.com/aol-to-cut-staff-by-one-third-32446

A recently released Google Labs product called Fusion Tables allowed users to grab data from spreadsheets, text documents, PDFs and other sources and create compelling, comprehensive visualizations from a merged data set. Google has just announced it’s releasing an API for Fusion Tables. The API integrates with Google Maps, App Engine, Base Data and Visualizations APIs, as well, to allow for motion charts, timelines, graphs and maps with all the data available and running on Google’s infrastructure.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google-fusion-tables-visualization-api.php

According to a comment on Bing forum, the principles of good SEO which Google has in their basic SEO guide are applicable to all search engines. Design a good clean, clear, validated website, with lots of one-way backlinks. For Bing specifically, there are few other things that can help which includes backlinks containing keywords and webpages containing keywords. Also ensure that you have correct meta-tags in your page headers and Bing relies on these more than Google does.
http://www.bing.com/community/forums/t/652128.aspx

Worldwide, the iPhone alone accounts for about 33% of mobile web traffic and IDC predicts the number of mobile web users will hit one billion by 2010. As the technological barriers come down, people will increasingly use their phones on-the-go to access social networks, search, read content and find location-based information.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/10_ways_social_media_will_change_in_2010.php

Jeremy Stoppleman, the CEO of Yelp, has walked away from an all-but-signed deal to be acquired by Google for more than half a billion dollars. Then something happened that made Yelp reconsider the deal. Over the weekend they notified Google that they were not going to sell, say multiple sources.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/12/20/yelp-walks-away-from-google-deal-and-half-a-billion-dollars/

Aol is telling a good story, but Citi analyst Mark Mahaney isn’t buying it. AOL is probably the toughest Internet turnaround story, he says in a report today, citing “28% Y/Y decline in its Subscriber base and 38% Y/Y decline in its EBITDA.” He recommends people buy Yahoo, which “will almost surely revert to growth before AOL.” Mahaney also notes that Aol was the only top 5 web property in the U.S. to have year over year declines in visitors.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/12/23/aols-deteriorating-fundamentals-not-a-hit-with-analysts/

Google has issued a statement regarding the company’s pending acquisition of AdMob. This deal will benefit developers, publishers, and advertisers by improving the performance of mobile advertising, and will provide users with more free or low-cost mobile apps. Google says since the announcement, they have seen a quite positive reaction from advertisers and publishers, who are “enthusiastic” about the possibilities the deal might bring.
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/12/23/google-provides-an-update-on-the-admob-acquisition

Google has shared the top retail searches for the 2009 holiday season. These results are based on the company’s Insights for Search tool. Google has been encouraging retailers to start looking ahead to the rest of the Winter season with regards to what people will be searching for: things like Valentine’s Day gifts, Prom dresses, wedding planning, ski equipment, etc. On a positive note for retailers, new research from Market Force Info finds that a good percentage of consumers intend to “splurge” on at least one item over the next few months.
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/12/23/google-shares-top-retail-searches-for-the-holiday-season

The PEW Internet and American Life Project just released new information about use of the internet by Latino adults in the United States. Understanding who’s online and how they search is core to success in search acquisition beyond simply ranking well.
http://searchengineland.com/latinos-online-how-changing-demographics-of-those-online-impacts-search-32326

ReadWriteWeb is reporting from “sources close to the project” that Yahoo will shut down MyBloglog next month. MyBlogLog doesn’t hold the blogging community’s attention today the way it did a few years ago, but if the report is true, it will disappoint many who continue to use the service.
http://searchengineland.com/yahoo-to-close-mybloglog-32371

According to a comment on DigitalPoint forum, if a site is banned from Google’s index, linking to it is an extremely bad idea. Google will think you are voting for a banned site and they’ll just move you out of SERP.
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1623137

Direct Traffic in Google Analytics can be very up-and-down from a day to day basis as you can never really predict how many people will type in your url directly, click through from an email, or click through from a ‘favorited’ link in their browser. That always leaves direct traffic graphs looking a bit jagged. Nevertheless, direct traffic does seem to stay inside the same range as it goes up and down.
http://forums.seochat.com/search-engine-optimization-28/mysterious-direct-traffic-activity-290899.html

YouTube videos are one of the most shared stuff on Facebook and Twitter. So, the YouTube folks joined the rage with its own YouTube URL shortener.
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/youtube-joins-the-rage-on-url-shortener/15699/

We are in the midst of the largest algorithmic changes to Google’s relevancy since the Florida Update of 2003, and perhaps even the largest change for how marketers approach search since Google and Inktomi revolutionized the concept of citation based rankings. What makes this change so important is that the future of search, whether it be Search “2.0″ or Caffeine oriented, is based on much more than the relevancy factors of content, links, queries and relevant infrastructure.
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/2010-a-new-age-for-search-marketers/15711/

Dialogue is in the air: Google’s newly announced focus on real-time search and the rumors of a possible acquisition of Yelp (one of the key consumer-focused local dialogue repositories) both bear witness to the increasing prominence of consumer chatter on the web. The most frequently used feature is the ability to compare key phrases and aggregated opinions with a specific competitor.
http://searchengineland.com/dialogue-is-the-new-marketing-paradigm-32233

In competitive paid search, the wrong landing page will cost you money. Search results pages usually beat sub-category pages on more general searches, but only if the site has robust search results.
http://searchengineland.com/choose-your-paid-search-landing-pages-wisely-32053

SEO is becoming more social these days and any online campaign must consider things like blogs, Twitter activity and other social media. With this said, and if we focus on Twitter for a moment, there are some ‘SEO’ benefits to using Google’s URL shortener. If a service such as tinyURL or Bit.ly fails or is taken offline, each and every link posted on Twitter using these services, would become deadlinks – an issue which would create havoc in the social world.
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1617583

It has been observed by the SEO community over a number of years that search engine rankings in Google are influenced by a so-called “geo-targeting” aspect of the domain (TLD and registrant’s background location) and its hosting location. Search engines like Google has been doing its best to return the most relevant search results to their users. One of the ways they have improved dramatically concerns how “geo-targeting” has been handled by the Google algorithm.
http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Google-Optimization-Help/Geo-Targeting-Techniques-in-Google-for-SEO/

Search industry expert Danny Sullivan followed Google’s real-time search coverage of Murphy’s death closely. He found that Google’s real-time results were “wildly out of sync” with the results on Twitter itself. He noted that while Google’s most recent result would say that it was 2 minutes old, Twitter would have 700 more results rolling in.
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/12/21/just-how-real-time-is-googles-real-time-search

For us, search marketers, there is another benefit of seeing online security flags while we browse: this works as an additional help for SEO diagnostics because security flags can easily be the reason of low rankings. LinkExtend provides aggregated ratings for computer safety, child safety, company ethics, and popularity. Safety results come from eight online services giving you a safer browsing experience.
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/page-security-status-google/15641/

Organizing your paid search keywords into the right ad groups can be a difficult task for even the best search engine marketers. Many times, a keyword may seem to naturally fall into multiple ad groups. The engines tell us the best practice is to not have the same keyword in different groups, because then the platform determines when each should run so you lose that control. Control is key to great paid search management because if there are too many unknown variables, the data might be unclear and your optimizations may not yield the expected results.
http://searchengineland.com/how-to-group-your-keywords-plus-qa-with-wordstreams-larry-kim-32123

Google’s universal search, and blended search in general, continue to profoundly alter the SEO landscape, offering new opportunities for visibility. Yet old-school SEO tactics virtually ignore both universal and blended search.
http://searchengineland.com/smx-west-techniques-to-adapt-thrive-agenda-posted-32241

If your page is well optimized, then your title element should contain the targeted keyword phrase(s) for that URL. And the keyword phrase(s) from the title element (and slight variations) “should” be the phrases most often used to find the page in the SERPs. By using all of the keywords from the title in the meta description, you should maximize the percentage of times that your meta description is shown as the Google snippet. Google will almost always show your meta description as the search snippet if the meta description contains ALL of the keywords from the user’s search phrase.
http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4045085.htm

According to a comment on DigitalPoint forum, domain register has nothing to do with search engine ranking. Even the hosting company has nothing to do with it in most cases. Only when you geo target your site, local host “may” help a bit but only when the competition is tight.
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1603045

Microsoft recently launched some new features for its Bing search engine, and among those was the integration of some Wolfram Alpha data. Just like that, it seemed to dawn on the search industry that maybe this thing could indeed play a significant role in the future of search, perhaps not as a standalone engine, but maybe behind the scenes.
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/12/18/wolfram-alpha-open-to-other-conversations-like-the-bing-deal

Google Press releases are not only great ways to spread the word about any announcements your business might have. They can also drive traffic, particularly from search engines. This is not news, but it’s a commonly overlooked fact.
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/12/19/how-press-releases-can-be-great-for-search

An interesting post from Elliot compared the number of searches in a month on Google versus the number of visitors received on type in traffic domains. He used the Google Keyword Tool and looked at the traffic of domains to compare the two. The results showed that longer domains received less type in traffic as a ratio to Google searches relative to short domains.
http://searchengineland.com/google-search-volume-compared-to-type-in-domain-traffic-32136

The death of actress Brittany Murphy is probably the first test for Google’s new real time search results. Earlier this year, when Michael Jackson died, it took several minutes for the news to make it into Google despite the extraordinary number of searches it was getting.
http://searchengineland.com/brittany-murphy-death-googles-real-time-search-results-32247

A small technology firm sued Microsoft this week over the software giant’s choice of name for its new search engine. The smaller firm, Bing! Information Design, claims in its lawsuit, filed on Wednesday in St. Louis, that Microsoft’s Bing search engine violates its trademark on the use of the word ‘Bing.’
http://www.internetnews.com/search/article.php/3854231/Bing+Dinged+For+Trademark+Infringement.htm

Multiple reports say that Google is in negotiations to acquire Yelp, a site that caters to reviews of local businesses. Mike Arrington claims to have confirmed this with “multiple sources,” and says the price is at least $500 million. Yelp has an interesting page in which it squashes 9 “myths” about the service. Yelp says you don’t have to buy advertising to rank highly in Yelp search results, and that the only paid reviews are in clearly-marked ad form.
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/12/18/google-reportedly-considering-yelp-acquisition

Whether you’re a very large, already successful company or a small startup, the same rule applies if you want to make money online: increase your ad revenue or sales. This rule even applies to Microsoft, one of the most successful companies of all time, which is why they’ve recently partnered with OpenX.
http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Search-Engine-News/Microsoft-and-OpenX-Team-Up/

According to a post in Search Engine Journal, Googlers should be enjoying this: hardly can they say a word, there follows a wealth of guessed and speculations. This time Matt Cutts is said to have mentioned that their 200 variables in Google algorithm and already plenty of people started looking for them.
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/200-parameters-in-google-algorithm/15457/

Google Blogoscoped reports that one of his readers noticed a “Google Guru” link in his Google Account page. Google Guru was launched in January 2007 in Russia as a social question and answer site. Google’s rumored, potential Aardvark acquisition might play into this offering. Aardvark calls itself a “social search engine” but it’s more specifically as an “answer community.”
http://searchengineland.com/google-relaunching-google-answers-as-google-guru-32199

While Google has recently announced its support of the canonical tag across different domains, Bing says it’s still working on supporting the canonical tag on a single domain, and suggests webmasters should rely on other means to manage duplicate content. Bing’s spokesperson pointed to this Bing Webmaster Center blog post with its advice for webmasters on handling duplicate content. Bing also says it’s focusing on “more scalable” solutions to removing duplicate content in its index and search results.
http://searchengineland.com/bing-still-working-on-canonical-tag-support-32163

Charging for content-related services goes against the grain of what most Internet users have come to expect, with Apple’s iTunes the biggest notable exception. Ad agencies typically rely on research firms like comScore for independent rankings of the most-visited sites.

http://www.internetnews.com/webcontent/article.php/3853016/Social+Media+in+Search+of+Profits.htm

Meta description tags aren’t used by Google as a ranking factor, so tweaking them won’t make you rank any higher. However, the meta description tag is often used by Google to show the abstract that appears in the search results. As a result, a well written meta description tag is more likely to entice people to click on your listing rather than your competitors listing.
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1616763

Reports indicate that Yahoo will be rolling out its own version of real-time search results today. Google of course did this earlier in the week, but Yahoo’s offering will not exactly be real-time.
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/12/10/yahoo-rolling-out-something-kind-of-like-real-time-search

Much like with Google’s recently launched (for everyone) personalized search results, or any other universal search results for that matter, the addition of real-time results is just one more element that can add to the challenge of getting organic results to show up high on the page. As iEntry CEO and WebProNews Publisher Rich Ord noted when talking about personalized search, this could give marketers more cause to focus on PPC, where they have more control over their campaign.
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/12/11/what-googles-real-time-search-means-to-seo-ppc-reputation-management

Speed has been a consistent theme with the company over the past year or so, with the release of various tools and announcements. It has become quite evident that Google places a great deal of importance on speeding up the web. Google recommends that you watch the load times over a short period of time to see what’s stable, because you may see spikes here and there. If you consistently see high load times, that is probably representative of what most people see.
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/12/14/things-to-consider-if-page-speed-is-to-become-a-ranking-factor

Perhaps the biggest challenge for an e-commerce SEO is that all e-commerce sites are conceptually identical. Virtually any site consists of products organized into categories, a shopping cart, and a checkout page. Accordingly, search marketing success for e-commerce sites is predicated less on innovation than possessing an expert understanding of factors that impact search marketing efforts.
http://searchengineland.com/5-essential-concepts-for-e-commerce-seo-31713

Fast Flip, the Google experiment that aims to make reading news online more like reading a newspaper or magazine, has expanded its list of sources. When Fast Flip launched in September, it had three dozen publishers on board. With today’s announcement, the number and variety of sources has grown.
http://searchengineland.com/googles-fast-flip-expands-to-90-sources-32119

Sree Kamireddy, Bing Program Manager and self-proclaimed “Privacy Champ” has written a post on the Bing blog discussing how Microsoft handles your Bing search history information. Search History on Bing is available for four weeks at this point. Removing history removes it from the actual service and prevents the history from being displayed on the site, but it doesn’t actually delete the info from Microsoft’s search logs.
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/12/15/microsoft-addresses-search-privacy

“Google absolutely does not like influencing ranking of other sites in footerlinks. If dynamically changing the anchor text to a favourable keyword and deeplinking to other domains seems like a good idea, trust me it isn’t”, according to a comment from SEOChat forum.
http://forums.seochat.com/google-optimization-7/best-internal-linking-structure-for-a-group-of-local-domains-289907.html

Latest comScore data for November search volume is showing a slightly unexpected result. For the second time Bing managed to beat Google in terms of total US core search volumes, while Yahoo’s search volume continues to go down.
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/bing-beats-google-in-search-volumes-for-november/15556/

YouTube just released their Year End Top Video Report for 2009. Some of the fastest rising search terms are correlated with the most watched videos list. The fastest rising search in terms in each month also pertains to whatever made it to the headlines.
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/and-the-fastest-rising-youtube-search-is-inauguration/15567/

Many webmasters will be happy to know that Google has announced its support for using the rel=”canonical” link element across different domains. Yahoo and Bing have not (yet?) announced cross-domain support for the rel=”canonical” link element.
http://searchengineland.com/google-supports-cross-domain-canonical-tag-32044

Both Google and Bing have coveted the “status updates” that users make on social sites like Twitter and Facebook. Updates often contain great content, such as information that doesn’t exist anywhere else on the web or which can be mined to see the popular links that are being shared. Having updates is essential for anyone who wants to run a real time search service.
http://searchengineland.com/google-bings-unequal-facebook-status-update-deals-32105

If you have a sitemap, you don’t have to list all your pages but it’s good to list the pages you consider important. More important than sitemaps is getting other sites to link to you. Better to have search engines find a link to your site, on another site, than to have to tell them about the page in your sitemap and have good internal link paths through your site, so search engines can find all the pages.
http://forums.seochat.com/google-optimization-7/home-url-in-google-sitemap-required-289652.html

Important point to note while creating the internal linking structure is to promote important pages by linking to them from several pages of the site. For example, you could link to “featured products” on the home page, and have these links dynamic so that they change every week.
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1613623

For starters there are simply too many potential factors out of the average SEOs control that can affect the over-all conversion rate on a given website/page. Most certainly SEO and conversions are related and can play together. As SEOs we need to understand them and tailor targeting strategies accordingly. But our job is to bring ‘targeted’ traffic. This is not the same as being involved in the conversion optimization process.
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/conversions-seo-metric/15497/

Yesterday Google announced the launch of its new URL shortening service which will be used in conjunction with the Google Toolbar and the Feedburner RSS service, where it is currently being tested. Google is planning to make it available as a stand-alone product once they’ve proven it to be useful and if well received.
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/will-you-use-the-google-url-shortener-goo-gl/15515/

The recent discussions about Google emphasizing the importance of page load speed has seen more international search marketers considering whether they should host their website locally or centrally. Unfortunately, as is typical with many announcements from search engines, a lot of rushed assumptions are made. In this case, some assume that hosting speed will be measured by Google’s bots travelling the globe from California and that therefore the hosting speed will not reflect what is actually happening to users locally.
http://searchengineland.com/page-load-speed-the-local-hosting-issue-31828

Following in others’ footsteps, Yahoo says it’s now showing its local shortcut on certain queries that don’t include a local modifier. Google started doing the same thing this spring, and Bing also offers the same feature, so Yahoo is playing a bit of catch-up here. But Yahoo’s results will, in some cases, be better because, when available, it uses the location that users provide via their Yahoo Profile; Google and Bing both rely more on IP-based targeting, which is far from accurate for some users.
http://searchengineland.com/yahoo-showing-local-results-on-non-local-queries-31955

Google is testing a new interface for their Image Search feature. The interface allows you to see an infinite number of image results in the search results, simply by scrolling. This works similar to how Bing Image Search currently works, where you do not have to use the pagination to see more results.
http://searchengineland.com/google-images-testing-infinite-scroll-search-results-31878

For many companies, an ideal world involving Search Engine Optimization would be simple, quick and a one-time task to check off a list. An organization would create a website, optimize its content for target keywords and promote the site. Soon, the website would acquire a strong number of inbound links and start ranking for those target keywords. In reality, SEO isn’t just about adding keywords and linking. SEO is increasingly social and sits at the intersection of multiple business functions outside of marketing including public relations, customer service, recuitment and branding.

http://www.toprankblog.com/2009/12/top-5-reasons-for-ongoing-seo/

According to a forum, Google has never used meta keywords content. Google makes a lot of changes. But 99.9% of the changes they make are designed to keep people from tricking or gaming their system. As far as good, foundational SEO goes, it’s all the same as it was a decade ago. It’s just that there’s more competition now than there was a decade ago so you have to do more things right to rise to the top.

http://www.highrankings.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=42479

Guest blogging is one of the most powerful ways to build your brand and site popularity. By guest posting you expose your business to a wider audience and have an opportunity to link from really powerful sites. It is also a great way to reach the niche influencers and build solid contacts.

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/seo-blogs-guest-posts/15194/

The citation method of ranking indexed content is flawed. It is based on human aid, and any technology based on the work of humans is always going to have flaws. Links are the product of what elicits an emotion from website owners, and the link builder that can tap these emotions is going to be able to manipulate the most important element in search rankings.

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/the-psychology-behind-link-giving/15374/

According to a report on Wednesday, Yahoo is in the process of identifying as many as 400 engineers who may be headed to Microsoft after US government regulators do their anti-trust review and clear the companies’ search deal. The formal agreement between the two companies closed at the end of last week.

http://searchengineland.com/yahoo-readying-for-bing-integration-by-identifying-engineers-who-will-become-part-of-microsoft-31699

Google announced they added universal search results directly in Google Suggest and a “quick scroll” feature as a Chrome extension. The Quick Scroll Chrome extension will help you locate the keywords on the page you clicked on from the Google search results page.

http://searchengineland.com/google-adds-universal-results-to-suggest-quick-scroll-in-chrome-31724

Google search got a real-time upgrade and started to integrate Tweets from Twitter in real-time into search results. So it makes sense for Google’s Search Appliance (GSA) to now include tweets from Twitter next within enterprise’s internal Search Appliance results.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/12/10/google-search-appliance-goes-tweet-crazy/

XML sitemaps are useful if you are having crawling or indexation problems on your site. That is, if search engine bots are not visiting or indexing your pages correctly. If you are not having such problems, however, having an XML sitemap is not essential.

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/html-sitemaps/15360/

Yesterday was the first day of trading for the “new” AOL, an independent company with a market cap of $2.5 billion dollars. Next year Google’s search deal with AOL expires. Microsoft will want to capture that relationship and traffic. Tim Armstrong will want to play both off against each other and start a bidding war of sorts.

http://searchengineland.com/aol-returns-as-independent-company-31626

Different countries will have somewhat different looking MSNs, which it turns out is the source of roughly 45% of Bing’s query volume. Thus MSN is critical, at least for now, to Bing’s continued success. If MSN grows and gains users Bing will presumably gain and grow query volumes. One of the very nice features of MSN is the “local edition” area, which contains news and other local information.

http://searchengineland.com/msn-bings-not-so-secret-weapon-31659

Google recently partnered with BabyCenter on a joint research study looking at how moms use search. “These truths reveal to marketers that motherhood creates a unique search window during which a valuable connection can be made,” says Jenny Liu on the Google CPG blog. “To make sure that messaging is getting through to Moms, marketers need to make sure they appear prominently on the first page of results when Moms enter both broad and specific queries into a Search Engine.”

http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/12/09/google-finds-moms-to-be-search-pros

For SEOs, however, there is a more immediate opportunity with Bing than hoping it gathers some market share from Google(*). Linkfromdomain is a search operator that is unique to Bing. It returns the pages that are linked-to from a domain.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/linkfromdomain-a-linkbuilding-tip-for-use-at-bingcom

A post in SEO Black Hat forum says that in 2010 is the year Bing gets serious traction. Even without the Yahoo deal, they’re set to go from 10% market share right now to more than 15% by Dec 2010.

http://seoblackhat.com/2009/12/05/petty-google-on-bing-search-results/

When Google announced their real time search additions, many were probably left unimpressed. After all, they are jumping on a bandwagon created by the popularity of Twitter’s search platform.

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/why-real-time-search-should-interest-seos/15330/

Although local shopping search engine Milo.com has been around for two years already, it is only now that the site is going full blast as it leaves beta stage. Before you start thinking that Milo.com is just another local shopping search engine that will only tell you specific online deals, well actually it does more than that.

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/local-shopping-search-engine-milo-com-goes-mainstream/15335/

Direct linking is the practice where an affiliate buys paid search advertising using your URL as the display URL in an ad, yet actually linking from the ad to the affiliate’s own landing page. These links will often go through multiple levels of redirects before finally landing on your web site. The redirects may contain cookies for other brand holders (a practice known as “cookie stuffing“—often generating revenue for the person doing the cookie stuffing).

http://searchengineland.com/protect-your-brand-from-dead-affiliate-links-31255

The ability to search for ads is being rolled out to the Ad Review Center, part of the new AdSense interface. Right now, only a small set of publishers have access, but Google says they’re working on extending it to more as additional publishers are invited to test the new interface.

http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/091208-005943

In the near future, Google Maps on mobile phones will also start including businesses as points of interest. Google calls these “smart maps” internally. “They are selected based on their PlaceRank,” says John Hanke, VP of Google Earth, Maps, and Local. PlaceRank is like PageRank for places It tries to figure out how prominent a place is based on factors such as “references on the Web, reviews, photos,” says Hanke, “how many people know about it, how long its been around.”

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/12/06/google-local-maps-qr-code/

Google has extended its personalized search functionality to users who are not even signed in. This goes for Google users around the world, in over 40 languages. What this means is that when you search with Google, it will provide results that are aimed at higher relevancy to the individual user, as opposed to relevancy for the average person.

http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/12/07/google-personalizes-everybodys-searches

The advent of real-time search has led to the need for real-time search engine optimization (SEO). SearchMonkey allows users to customize how results appear in Yahoo SERPs. CNN added RFDa to video on test sites and saw a 35 percent increase in the number of indexed videos in Google Search video. In addition, there was a 22 percent increase in videos showing up for targeted keywords.

http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/12/08/media-tactics-for-ranking-in-real-time-search

Among the big internet companies Yahoo has been the leader in mobile advertising to date. However Google recently bought both AdMob (in a highly publicized announcement) and Teracent (in a less publicized one). Both companies’ assets combined offer a range of powerful capabilities in mobile display advertising, including generating dynamic creative elements to take advantage of location, demographics, behavior and context, on the fly.

http://searchengineland.com/will-mobile-drive-growth-for-yahoo-31140

Telecoms, cable companies and search engines are fairly routinely asked to divulge information about their users’ activities (and even location in the case of wireless carriers) by the government and law enforcement. Disclosure of this information and the fact that they charge for these “spying” services would potentially upset or outrage users and badly damage their images as consumer friendly businesses.

http://searchengineland.com/yahoo-engaged-in-effort-to-remove-spying-guide-from-public-view-31428

Google’s new realtime search wouldn’t be complete without Facebook updates. At the tail-end of today’s Google search event Marissa Mayer announced that Google will start to include realtime results from Facebook as well as MySpace. While Twitter and MySpace is making available everybody’s updates (or at least the public ones), Google right now will only show updates from public Facebook pages, which are generally fan pages.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/12/07/google-facebook-realtime-search/

According to a comment in DigitalPoint forum, fresh content doesn’t mean that you should necessarily change content on your existing pages. The engines don’t think less of your page because its content hasn’t changed in 5 years. If your page has already been optimized well via on-page/on-site optimizations and is ranking well then it’s highly recommended to not change it.

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1603635

Yahoo has just rolled out its Ad Interest Manager which according to Yahoo is a new consumer tool which aims to make online advertising, particularly interest-based more transparent.  This, according to Yahoo is one way of building up user trust.

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/yahoo-launches-ad-interest-manager/15264/

Voice is a key aspect of Google’s mobile strategy to make mobile search easier and keep search front and center in the mobile user experience. Another impressive feature of Voice Search was the integration of translation: a user speaks a question or query in one language and it’s translated in real time into another. (This was an experimental feature.)

http://searchengineland.com/google-mobile-announcements-voice-languages-whats-nearby-goggles-31374

So finally, we’ve got Google Real Time search, as the company has announced. The results automatically flow with new information — and if that’s annoying, you can use the “Pause” link at the top of the section to stop them. What you can’t do is remove the section entirely, if you don’t like it.

http://searchengineland.com/google-launches-real-time-search-31355

According to a comment in DigitalPoint forum, Google was crawling Flash with homegrown tools long before Adobe gave them the specs for reading their binaries a little over a year ago. But though they know how to index text from within a .swf file better these days, Flash STILL sucks from SEO’s perspective.

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1600865

Microsoft and Yahoo quietly announced Friday that they have finally signed off on their landmark search in exchange for ad revenues deal. The agreement between Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) and Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO) has been almost two years in the making. Most recently, the two companies revealed in late October that there were still details to be worked out before they could sign the agreement.

http://www.internetnews.com/search/article.php/3851401/Microsoft+and+Yahoo+Sign+on+the+Dotted+Line.htm

Microsoft has announced the addition of a number of new features to its Bing search engine. The company says it has been examining the trends in search and in feedback, and is working to accommodate these. Perhaps the biggest addition to Bing is that of Wolfram Alpha’s algorithms and “expertly curated data”. Wolfram Alpha will help power Bing’s results for nutritional information and math searches. http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/11/11/bing-gets-a-bunch-of-new-search-features

Google’s Matt Cutts discussed some of his own predictions for search in a recent upload to Google’s Webmaster Central YouTube channel. One thing Matt stressed is that Google is always looking for new types of data to search. Cutts says Google will continue trying to find new ways to extract “good data” from the web. He mentions Google Squared (which is still in an experimental stage)  as an example of doing so. Google Squared, in Google’s words, takes a category and creates a starter ’square’ of information, automatically fetching and organizing facts from across the web.

http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/12/05/google-shares-search-predictions