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As an SEO, I know that my industry is constantly changing and evolving. That is one of the reasons why I truly love marketing through the search engines. One upcoming change will be the release of what has been code-named “Google Caffeine,” which can be beta-tested here. It will be a new, more powerful version of Google’s search engine technology. You can read more about it from the Google Webmaster Central Blog.

Because I rely on search engine optimization to grow my client’s businesses and my personal websites, I pay attention anytime Google gives out little bits of information regarding the future of their search engine.

The following quote from Google tells us a lot about this new project’s role in the future of search:

“It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness, and other dimensions.”

That one sentence tells us just about everything we need to know about the future of Google search. It tells us where we need to be moving to stay ahead of the curve in our industry. Here is how we can do it:

1. Site & Indexing Speed: Google is going to be crawling more sites, more pages on those sites, and adding them to their index much faster. We have known for years that Google and the other search engines love fresh content. The problem is that there is so much new content hitting the internet every single day that they needed to come up with a solution to keep their index up-to-date with the latest news and information. The key here is that you need to continue to add new content to your website often. As Google increases their indexing speed, your new pages will get picked up faster and you will rank better.
2. Accuracy: Websites that will continue to dominate the search engines will be the ones that can properly match up the keywords people are searching on with the content of what they are actually looking for. I believe Google is not only interested in which sites people are actually clicking on, but what their behavior is like once they arrive at the particular website. The key here is that you should take all the time you need to make sure you are targeting the proper keywords, that the content on your website is related to the search term, and that it is enticing enough to keep visitors interested. Conversion optimization will also play a huge roll in converting more of your visitors into buying customers. One thing I always tell my clients is, “I can bring you traffic, but what good is the traffic if it doesn’t make you more money?” This is true regarding targeting the wrong keywords and having a crappy web design that doesn’t convert the traffic.
3. Comprehensiveness: Google will continue to favor “authority” sites. You know, those sites that do an excellent job of completely covering their niche. The key here is that if you want a website that ranks incredibly well for your main keywords, you better be ready to put in some blood, sweat, and tears. Google wants to see and rank sites that are thorough and comprehensive resources for the people who are looking for information about a particular topic. This is exactly why it is crucial that you continue to build new pages on your website that rank for each and every one of your relevant keywords. Remember, Google continues to show that they prefer larger, older websites that are loaded with useful information.

This information is nothing new. These are the things we are currently doing for our clients and that you should be doing now to increase your search engine rankings. However, there are many websites who are not doing these things and will fall far behind when Google finally releases their new search engine technology.

That is why you need to get started TODAY! If you do, you will be far ahead of your competitors who push aside this information and you will develop what is known as a competitive advantage.

Good luck!

Over the past few months, discussions have been going on in the Webmaster Center Blog regarding how to optimize a site! Recently, Kristin Meldahl of Bing highlighted some of the recent information that the Webmaster Center team has published on optimizing site architecture in their SEM 101 column. The information appears to be useful to webmasters and web publishers. There are four recent posts that focuses on various aspects of site architecture optimization, such as file/page issues, links, content and page meta information. The posts are:

Site Architecture and SEO – file/page issues (SEM 101)

Making links work for you (SEM 101)

Architecting content for SEO (SEM 101)

Head’s up on tag optimization (SEM 101)

The series of posts is indeed very helpful and useful for webmasters. For more information on site optimization, keep visiting the Webmaster Center blog .

Recently, there has been a lot of buzz about real-time search, but is it necessary? First, let’s look at the current state of search and crawl.*

Unless your site is decidedly authoritative, like CNN.com, you’re likely to get crawled as Google indexes more authoritative sites that are linking to your own. Your site will end up on a particular crawling schedule.

The lengthening or shortening of the crawl schedule, with blogs especially, is largely determined by the amount of new content found on the site each time it’s crawled. In the chart below, the diagonal lines represent getting crawled by the search engine and the ominous black spots represent posting new content.  In this case, if you haven’t posted in a while, you’ve probably worked up a fairly large interval between crawls. If you suddenly return to posting on a consistent schedule, over time the crawl interval will be narrowed until your content gets indexed soon after posting.

In essence, you can and should train Google to index your site more frequently by posting new content regularly or by getting new backlinks to your site.

Real-time indexation is just what it sounds like. Content is indexed and searchable immediately upon publication. None of the big three engines are there yet.

Is real-time indexing by search engines (and hence real-time search) inevitable? It’s starting to appear so.

Twitter is already considered to be real-time, though it’s far from a genuine search engine. Microsoft seems to have tweaked Bing to place higher value on more recent news. In tests, Google Caffeine, the new under-infrastructure version of the search giant, seems to be indexing a lot more pages and giving higher placement to the newest content than the current version. And Facebook’s FriendFeed acquisition suggests they’re definitely eyeing the real-time search space.

Real-time search helps anybody who reads or writes content with a short shelf-life. If you post about an in-progress disaster, a celebrity death, or a limited-time offer, your content is hot one minute, cold the next, so quick indexation by search engines means that your content will be found while it’s still relevant. You would probably gain a good amount of site traffic just by riding the wave and capitalizing on long-tail searches, regardless of how frequently you post.

The real-time search goal has plenty of obstacles. Real-time indexation takes a mountain of data computation power. Plus, algorithmically, how do you consistently showcase an on-scene Twitterer’s play-by-play updates over the Huffington Post side commentary during a crisis? Or do you? You can’t use backlinks as a determinant. Authority is negligible. One practical solution would be to house real-time search separate from regular search, just like Google News is separate from the primary index. Regardless, real-time search is only as valuable as the relevance of the top-ranking content and is likely to look different from today’s version.

Until we get there, the most important thing you can do now is get your site as close as possible to real-time indexation using the available SEO techniques.

• Create good content on a consistent schedule, applying other relevant SEO tactics to optimize your site, and building up your authority
• Create sitemaps for your site so search engines know which pages to crawl
• Use NoFollow tags on non-critical pages as a way of shining a light on the more important ones
• Submit your site and content to directories and social bookmarking sites
• Work on building links from more authoritative sites pointing to your own

*For clarification, crawling (or spidering) is the method search engines use to populate their data repositories so people can search using their websites. It involves running programs called bots (or spiders) that go from link to link scouring web pages and returning information to be indexed.

I heard something on the radio a few weeks ago that stuck with me and made me think about the basics of SEO. The line went something like this, “You have to have the fundamentals down before trying any of the fancy stuff. ” So before you go out and try to do things like PR sculpting or any of the other advanced techniques you hear about, get the basics down.

SEO can really be broken down into three essential areas: Architecture, Content, and Links. These are the basics of SEO that you need to understand and get right first. Let’s take a look at some key points to understand in each of these main areas.

Architecture – Can Your Site Be Crawled?

One of the first problems that a website has to address is whether or not their site can actually be crawled by the search engine spiders. You can have the best content in the world, but if the search engine spiders can’t get to it you won’t reap the benefits! Here are some things you can do to help your site be more crawl-able:

1. Avoid things like JavaScript or Flash navigation. Both of these kinds of navigation are not crawled very well by search engines at this time. This could change in the future, but for now it’s best to just avoid JavaScript and Flash navigations.
2. Keep your site’s architecture as flat as possible. Don’t have tons of levels in your architecture. Keep pages as close to the root as possible. In other words, mysite.com/folder/product is much better than mysite.com/category/subcategory/other-folder/product.
3. Stay away from parameter strings in URLs. By having parameter strings in URLs you could have multiple versions of the same content and will have to learn how to properly use the canonical element. You can avoid this by not using parameters. Instead, have a static URL for each page whenever possible. For example, mysite.com/productname.html is much better than mysite.com/?prod-id=abc123&cat-id=def456.
4. Use internal linking appropriately. Whenever it makes sense, link to other pages in your site from within the content of the page. Don’t just rely on your navigation to get people (and search engine spiders) to where you want them to go. (More about internal linking.)
5. Sitemaps are your friends. Make sure your site has both an HTML and XML sitemap. (More about sitemaps).

Content – Is It Optimized?

Once you have your website’s architecture set up the right way, the next step is to make sure that your content is well-optimized to help your site rank for your main keyword phrases. Here are a few basic guidelines to follow:

1. Don’t target too many phrases per page. You may have a list of 50 keywords you want to target, but you should only focus on 2-3 main phrases per page. Create other pages around additional phrases as needed.
2. No spammy stuff! Don’t do any keyword stuffing, alt stuffing, meta spamming, or any other spammy techniques. They don’t really work well anymore anyway.
3. Use your keyword phrases in titles, header tags, etc. By using your keyword phrases in your titles and header tags you can give them more emphasis.
4. Use your keywords in your content. Don’t just rely on your titles and header tags. Don’t overdo it; make the text read naturally but make sure you include your keywords and variations of them in the content.

Links – Getting Juice from Other Sites

Setting your site up the right way is one step, but getting traffic to your website takes a lot more than just using keywords on your pages. The other big key to getting a good rank on the search engines is to get other sites linking to you. By getting these links you are showing that your site has credibility and is worth ranking well. Here are a few quick tips to keep in mind when you’re building links:

1. Use a variety of techniques. There are a lot of things you can do to build links: directories, articles, social bookmarking, forums … the list goes on and on. Mix up what you’re doing and get a variety of link types coming into your site. (More about link building)
2. Spread your links over a lot of domains. It’s important to get a lot of links, but it’s also important to get a lot of links spread over many domains. If you follow tip #1 this shouldn’t be much of a problem for you.
3. Use keywords in your anchor text. One problem that I’ve seen over and over is that someone will build links to their site using either their name, their business name, or their URL. This is nice if that’s what you want to rank for, but if you want to rank for a keyword phrase you have to use that phrase as the anchor text of your link.
4. Use a variety of anchors. Don’t just use the same keyword phrase over and over again. Mix it up so that you aren’t spamming one phrase too much. This will help your link building look more natural.
5. The work is never done. Don’t think you can just submit to a bunch of directories and your work is over. SEO is an ongoing process.

While these tips don’t cover everything you need to know about the three main areas of search engine optimization, this is enough to get you started. Spend some time looking over your site to make sure that you are doing these basics. Then, if you want, you can try to get a little fancy.

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A few days ago, Google introduced “Search with My Location” for iPhone 3.0 that allowed users to locate specific location without even inserting the exact place where they are. In addition, Google recently announced a new search feature for Google Maps and a feature for Google Maps for Mobile.

With the help of the first feature users can perform multiple searches on the same map. The feature provides driving directions, identify various gas stations, golf courses, supermarket and more, along the way. For each landmark you are looking for, Google Map will plot colored round circle.

Here’s an example:

The Google Maps for Mobile version 3.2 now supports layers is the second feature introduced. Now, some devices will be able to support all the various layers, to lay on top of the maps. Some of the common examples of layers are geographic content, local search results, Latitude friend locations, Wikipedia and more. Moreover, you also have the option to add your own My Maps content as a layer.

To activate the layers on Google Maps for mobile 3.2, press “2″ key or select Layers in the menu. Currently, this feature is only available for Symbian S60 and Windows Mobile phones. However, more devices will soon support this feature.

Yahoo recently launched its new and improved homepage for web users. For months the forthcoming of Yahoo homepage had been known, but it was released yesterday around 4:30 Eastern.

Here’s the screenshot of the previous Yahoo homepage :

However, Yahoo will not replace the older homepage for now, rather an opt-in choice will be provided for interested users. Here’s the new Yahoo homepage:

The new homepage is less cluttered as there are lesser buttons and modules. Even the search option is somewhat more prominent. In the new design, search has been integrated into the rest of the page and is more visible.

In the previous homepage, left column of Yahoo properties was a static list but now it’s a customizable menu that turns into an RSS reader or dashboard. Users also have the option to add or remove applications. Yahoo has also created a wide range of widgets for launch, but users can add any third party site with RSS feed capability. As a result, third party developers can add their own application to the gallery.

Tapan Bhat, Yahoo executive, states that “Yahoo will recommend widgets to users based on their browsing and click-stream behavior. The process of adding or removing “applications” is simple and basically involves a single click.”

For instance, if a user takes the mouse over “My Favorites” application, a new window will open, which will allow him to see the site as well as the content.

The right side of the window contains a new and contextually relevant ad unit that can be targeted to the content of the page. Yahoo gave the example of a movie opening targeting users looking up movie showtimes from a Yahoo movies application.

With the help of the new sliding fun-to-serious scale users will be able to adjust the news that they view on their Yahoo’s homepage.

Yahoo has also started “bucket testing” a new look and feel for search results that informs users about what’s happening on the homepage.

Here’s an image showing Search Monkey widgets that effectively turns into search filters:

The new Yahoo homepage will be released first to U.S users, followed by the UK, India, France and other countries thereafter.

In the present times, we can rightly say that the business world is dominated by the internet. Various reports suggest that most of the users resort to search engines for help when searching for some information. Therefore, it is important that your website is in a good position in the search engine result page (SERP).

Here’s a list of common SEO errors that most businesses make during the website designing phase:

1. Keyword StuffingIt was first reported in the early 1990s that it helped achieve number one spot in Google. However Keyword stuffing your metadata is not only against Google’s guidelines but also increases unnecessary traffic flow to your website. Therefore, when you decide keyword, make sure they are relevant to your website’s content. It is essential that the content is written based on the readers and not the search engines. You will be penalized if your website is found over optimized.
2. Splash PagesIt is the first page that a user views when he/she logs onto your website. These pages are normally Flash object with a “click here to skip” button or a large static graphic that occupies most of the screen’s space with a “continue” button. One of the reasons why these pages don’t work is because they are not optimized for search engines to crawl. It contains little content for search engines to index, so it’s considered of little interest and ranked highly.

   Therefore, if you need a splash page for your website make sure they are optimized correctly with text and graphics for the search engines to read and index.

3. ALT tagThis tag was designed specifically as an alternative to an image. This helps with usability especially for the visually impaired. You can also use this tag to index your pictures correctly. Most of the search engines provide an “image” search facility, which acts as an important source of traffic to sites. Keep in mind that if your products have been indexed and tagged properly then image search could act as another source of revenue for your site.
4. Flash WebsitesThese websites have a great look, with moving images, sliding navigation and sleek designs. However, most search engines don’t prefer them, as they can’t view the text given within a Flash object and so can’t index your content. In order to make Flash objects more search engine friendly, Adobe, Google and Yahoo have recently introduced “SEO Technology Center for Flash” to improve search engine ranking for Flash based websites. Adobe still recommends an HTML version for websites.
5. Duplicate ContentIf the content in your website is duplicate then you can be heavily penalized by Google. E-commerce sites generally have duplicate content, as a store selling the same products may have similar content. These sites have access to product feeds to such websites, which they will either upload or copy & paste from other websites. In order that the search engines have fresh and unique content to index ensure to write original content.
6. Purchase of SEO ProgrammesMost SEO websites promise to offer number one position to your site in Google. Since their main aim is to get your URL and a small amount of money. But it is impossible and have a negative impact on your site as many of the techniques applied could be ‘Black Hat’. Applying such techniques on your website could get you blacklisted by Google.
7. Competitors LinksWith so many websites around and proving to your customers that you have the best products, you may be tempted to link to your competitor’s products or website to get a “vote,” which Google views as a recommendation. Remember, if your website haS high quality relevant links, the more of a trusted source you become which will improve your search engine rankings.
8. Link Farming/Link SpammingYou may have come across many advertisements, which offer the option to submit your website to hundreds of directories. One of the major threats of link farm websites is that they have content of low quality and treated as spam by Google.
9. Non-utilization of Meta
   
   Every page in a website has three main areas were you can include content to, such as the TITLE tag, DESCRIPTION tag and the KEYWORDS tag. To ensure that your site is search engine friendly it is important to write each tag correctly. However, your site can be punished if found with tags stuffed with keywords that are irrelevant to your website.
10. Never Avoid Google GuidelinesFinally, be aware of any changes made to the Google Webmaster Guidelines.Google constantly changes its search engine algorithm and any failure to these guidelines will affect your website’s rankings.

Sure, your website has traffic, but is it the right traffic? Are the people frequenting your website finding the information they want? Many times, website owners are so concerned with the number of visitors, they lose track of what those visitors are doing, or even if they are the right type of visitors. So ask yourself, “Do I have the right traffic coming to my website?”

To address this question, look at your major keywords. Take a minute and determine whether the information on your website is relevant to your keywords if searched for on Google, Yahoo!, or Bing. There are a number of times where I have seen the content of the website irrelevant to the keyword the site owner is targeting.

Second, take a look at your analytics and see what traffic the search engines are sending your way, and what keywords people are using to find your site. In Google Analytics, click on the “Traffic Sources” tab, and then click the “Search Engines” option in the submenu. From here it will give you a list of the different search engines that have sent traffic (both paid and unpaid) to your website. Click on a particular Search Engine, such as Google, and you will see a list of terms that were searched when they found your site.

Your results will look similar to this.

This report shows search patterns and keyword terms. It also provides a better understanding of how people are finding your site, and what keywords are being used. This list shows what Google finds to be relevant to your website as well, allowing insight to how Google views your site.

When reviewing the report, take a close look at the bounce rate of keywords used. This indicates whether visitors are finding their desired information on your website. Consider the example above, the keyword “hsplit download” (third from the top), has an extremely high bounce rate of 96.36%, indicating that the 110 visitors more than likely did not find the information they expected from the website. Compare that to the first term on the list “802.11bg wlan driver,” which has a bounce rate of 31.86%. From this report it is easy to determine that the content/page referring to “hsplit download” needs to be refined, and reworked.

Studying analytics will deliver an understanding of past trends, and help you make decisions on how to revise  content  to provide better results. But if you are starting new, or want a better idea of how to prepare for future traffic, there are other ways to plan for the right traffic. Last month David Scoville wrote an excellent article on getting toknow your target market, and learning from a basic focus group. He offers a simple way to find out how to understand the way your “right traffic” thinks.

When I first dove into SEO and SEM, I was taught a valuable principle when planning for keywords and targeted traffic: People who are doing research on a topic use broad keywords to gather information. Once that information is gathered, people search vary specific and generally use “longer tail” phrases to find and purchase a product.

An example of this principle would be when someone is interested in getting a website hosted; they may look up a general keyword such as “website hosting.” However, when the person makes the shift from researching the product to buying the product, they are more likely to be more specific in their search and my look for “VPS PHP web server.”

What does this mean to you? Well the conversions from a visitor to a buyer are more likely to happen with longer tail keyword searches, meaning you will have more of the “right traffic” coming to your website. Now it is apparent that there is less traffic overall associated with the more specific and sometimes longer tail keywords, but the traffic that is coming to your site is more qualified and has a better potential of converting, and that is far more important than just trying to build high traffic numbers.

Take time to evaluate your current traffic, and see what trends in your analytics can help you improve your visitor’s time on the website. The goal of proper SEO is to not pretend to be the most relevant to the search, but to actually BE THE MOST RELEVANT. Sure you have traffic to the website, and when all is said and done all traffic is good traffic, but only the right traffic will keep the website up and the bills paid.

One word changed my life forever one day back in late 2007. I was a blogger then, frustrated with a blogging platform that couldn’t satisfy my needs. Why didn’t I have simple root access to my blog, enabling me to change whatever I felt like? It was my blog, with my name emblazoned on the front page, yet I couldn’t command it to perform tasks not already pre-formed in its little e-head.

Ok, enough with the sappy story. For real now. Two years ago I took friend’s advice and moved my first blog from Blogger to self-hosted WordPress. I have never looked back. Today I would like to make the case to you that a WordPress blog is what you need to give your web presence the lift it needs. Let’s not talk about the hosting and the domain name purchase, and the code, and all that stuff. That is for another day. Let’s talk about a few features WordPress provides that will make it easy for you maintain an SEO-friendly blog.

First, WordPress makes changing your URL structure effortless. Why should you care about your URL structure? Well, would you rather be telling Google that your site is at “http://www.mysite.com/?p=123″ or at “http://www.mysite.com/my-first-post/”? That is correct. You want to put your site’s best face on for Google, and WordPress makes it as easy as typing a few letters into a blank field. Brilliant.

Next, WordPress uses “plugins” to make a whole host of SEO tasks as simple as can be. One of these plugins automatically creates an XML sitemap for your blog, effectively giving Google a map to your site. This makes for a much faster indexing in the search engines, since it is never a bad idea to throw a bone (or a fly) to search engine spiders. Another plugin puts a little bit of text at the bottom of blog posts that contains a list of related posts. I like that one because it links to other similar posts I wrote in the past but maybe just forgot about.

By far my favorite plugin for SEO is All in One SEO Pack. This plugin takes some of the most important site optimization tasks that lots of folks just might not know how to do, and makes them ridiculously easy. These people might have heard that they need a good keyword rich title tag, good H tags, meta description, meta keywords, and so on. But they just don’t know how to change them. All in One SEO has a field for all those things, plus a bunch of other title formats and header options. Don’t even think about messing with code when there are plugins for things like this.

Finally, WordPress makes updating your main site content almost enjoyable. You already know that you need fresh content every so often to keep the search engines happy with your site. But writing a post in WordPress doesn’t require any knowledge of tagging, categorizing, pinging to notify others of your new content, or anything of the sort. You don’t even have to know how to write the code for a link. Perhaps that’s commonplace these days, but the process is simply seamless in WordPress.

If you are looking for a way to be able to accomplish some SEO on your own time, and you want a solution that will do pretty much anything you want it to, give WordPress a try. There are so many people out there designing plugins and attractive themes for WordPress that it’s impossible to keep track of them all. All I know is that you will find a solution that is a pleasure to work with, and it will do a lot of good for your site with the search engines.

For more blogging tips, check out Scott’s recent post on 25 Freshest Summer Blogging Tips.

“Hundreds and thousands of times, for her I searched in chaos, suddenly, I turned by chance, to where the lights were waning, and there she stood.” –Chinese Song Dynasty Poem

The name Baidu was literally taken from an ancient Song Dynasty poem written about the persistence of searching for the ideal. Well la de da! Ain’t that dandy. Sure it is. Baidu lives up to its Chinese origins. It is a combination of innovation and tradition in this increasingly fast paced SEO world.

“What a piece of work is a [search engine], how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god.” -William Shakespeare

Often times “thems folks out west” misunderstand the ways of the East. Unfortunately this cultural misunderstanding seeps into SEO. What do we know about Baidu? How does it work? Why should we even care?!

Why “Do the Baidu”

Firstly, it’s relatively easy to understand. Just think, Google, five years ago. Baidu does work much like Google and Yahoo once did in the late 90’s early 2000’s but has come through with some quality innovations. “Pin-yin” is a new search feature that allows users to enter search queries in the more phonetic English alphabet as opposed to Chinese characters. This makes for a quicker search for the user and search engine alike.

Secondly, Baidu focuses on the quantity of links as opposed to quality of links. Good news SEO’s, bad news users. The way to get “quality” links according to Baidu is to create a lot of links with Chinese characters as anchor text. Even better is to have completely Chinese content, with anchor text included. However, Baidu doesn’t necessarily take into huge consideration where the anchor text comes from. Just make sure your content doesn’t include adult content, or anti-China material. That’s definitely a Baidu “no no.”

Thirdly, Baidu has a “load capacity friendly” spider. That means it won’t overload your site with visits, and will obey the robots.txt agreement.

Optimizing tips for Baidu

1. Brush up on your metadata vocab because your gunna need it. Baidu, like Google, puts emphasis on the title. However, unlike the all-knowing Google, Baidu also looks at other metatags such as description and keywords. Make sure it is relevant.
2. Always include an Alt tag with images. It’s an easy code adjustment and can add more relevance to your site.
3. The higher your keyword density in your content, the better. Whoa there tiger, don’t get too hasty, 6-12% density will do just fine.
4. Try to get hosted in China; Baidu is a local search engine. If you can’t do that, get a local domain like a .com.cn. That’s should do the trick.

References:

• http://www.shanghaiexpat.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=1104033
• http://www.metamend.com/baidu-search-engine.html
• http://www.filination.com/blog/2007/03/25/chinese-baidu-search-engine-optimization-seo-in-china/
• http://www.evancarmichael.com/SEO/1185/Search-Engine-Optimization-for-Baidu.html