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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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Earlier this year there was a lot of talk about a possible Microsoft acquisition of Yahoo. As we very well know the deal did not push through. This time we can be sure that Microsoft is a lot happier having finally inked an important deal with Yahoo.

Microsoft and Yahoo have signed a 10-year agreement stating that Yahoo will be using Microsoft’s Bing as its search engine. In turn Yahoo will be the one taking care of the search advertisements appearing next to the Bing results both for Microsoft and Yahoo.

This is big news indeed because Yahoo Search will no longer be as we know it. The partnership is obviously strategically advantageous to both since they still lag behind the search giant Google. Microsoft did see an increase in market share when they rolled out Bing but ended up making a dent not on Google’s market share but on Yahoo’s. With Yahoo Search’s users migrating to Microsoft it is clear why Yahoo would want to use Bing to power their own engine. As for Microsoft this is a good sign that , as Nick Wingfield of Wall Street Journal put it, the tide is finally turning and “that things may be finally starting to look up for Microsoft.”

Google of course be on its toes with this news but since they have never been one to rest on their laurels it won’t be a challenge they will really be too afraid of. Add to this fact that search users, being deeply ingrained in their habits, will likely not be migrating to Bing in droves despite the new deal. I believe that it would take something more revolutionary than Bing for people to feel that the effort of shedding their old habits (however little that effort may be) is worth the reward of using a search engine (or whatever it maybe be called in the future) they are not familiar nor comfortable with.

In the meantime what is great for SEOs about this news is that with Microsoft and Yahoo using just one engine we now have one less engine to keep track of. At the same time this also means that we’ll have to ramp up our efforts in learning more about Bing and what makes it tick. We cannot discount its combined market share.

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Microsoft-Yahoo Tie Search Tie Up

I don’t know everything. I’m really, really close though. In fact, I pretty much have everything down except for the finer points of string theory. That, and how Roland Emmerich (Director of Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow) was able to make more movies after the Godzilla catastrophe.

In all honesty, there are actually a lot of things that I don’t know, and more importantly, a lot of things that I can never know. Like Women. It’s just the nature of the universe.

Here are three items that SEO’s just don’t know, and CAN’T know. It’s not that we don’t want to know them; it’s just that they are either kept secret from us by the search engines, or it is a physical impossibility (meaning we can’t look into the future).

1. Google’s Algorithm. We don’t really “know” Google’s, or any search engine’s algorithm. When it comes to actual calculations, or how a search engine brings up a specific listing, we don’t know anything specific. Search engines keep it an extremely closely guarded secret. Some SEOs suspect that even if we did obtain access to the algorithm and code, it wouldn’t change our practices anyway, so there’s no point in trying.
2. When a site will rank. This should be obvious, but it is still a big issue for many site owners. When it comes down to it, we have no certain knowledge of any timeline for SEO to work. Any estimates that SEOs provide are based off of past experience and successes. Even then, the ranges can vary greatly, especially from industry to industry. Some sites see (some) progress in a month or two, others take as long as 6 months to a year.
3. Where a site will rank. Anyone who claims to get you to a specific position in Google is lying. For that reason, be extremely cautious of guarantees and promises incorporated with SEO contracts (look at my earlier post about shady SEO deals). Just like the timeline for when you will rank, we can create estimates (never guarantees) for where your site will finally place.

Any rational person may think, “You don’t ‘know’ anything!” In response, I reply, “That is true.” Except that these are the things that SEO experts DO know:

1. We know what Google and other search engines are looking for. Google wants relevant results that motivate surfers to return to the search engine. We understand Google’s guidelines, from information provided from the search engine, as well as from years of testing and experimentation.
2. We know that good SEO Practices WILL make a site rank. Although the timeline might be hard to pin-point, if work is put into the site, and the right SEO practices followed, ranking is the natural by-product
3. No one can claim that a site will be #1 in Google, as there are numerous factors that play into that, many of which are unknown or misunderstood. Be careful thinking that you should be #1, because sometimes it’s just not possible.
4. Your rank will be better with SEO than without. You absolutely will see results from SEO.

There are a lot of misconceptions about SEO (search engine optimization) and what it can and cannot do for a website. Hopefully we can clear this up. If you are going to invest your hard earned money into SEO, you should at least know some of the basics, what you’re getting into, how SEO can help, and what you can expect in return. Below are common misconceptions regarding SEO.

SEO takes place on your website.

To some degree this is correct. Your site can be optimized by changing meta titles, meta descriptions, adding relevant content and header tags, etc. However, there is so much more involved. Think of an iceberg. You only see about 10% of the berg, while there is 90% under the surface that is not visible. This is the same for SEO work. There are a lot of things you don’t see in SEO, such as link building, article submissions, keyword research and coding.

Companies can do all the SEO work for under $1000.

Unless they are going to do a whole lot of work for free this isn’t true. This amount simply doesn’t pay for all the necessary things that need to be done in a quality and successful SEO campaign. If you’re going to get SEO work done, please don’t fall for these false claims and quick traffic schemes. Look into finding the right SEO company for your needs and your budget.

SEO stops when my site is optimized.

This is a big mistake many people make. SEO work is an ongoing process.  If you stop doing SEO work, you will soon feel it in decreased traffic and income. Once you’re fully optimized and ranking well in the search engines, keep it up! If you don’t, your competitors will, and you will find your site slipping in the SERPs.

“My friend is going to handle the SEO…”

As nice as this would be, you’ll find you won’t get the results you want unless your friend is willing to log a number of hours. SEO is a full time job. To get the best results, it requires constant monitoring and updating. Most times this is more than friends are willing to do. There is so much to learn, and the industry is changing all the time! Look at SEO techniques 10 years ago compared to today, and you will see what I mean.

White Hat SEO Techniques

Although Google does not disclose the search algorithms, they are clear about ethical SEO techniques and what can and cannot be done with SEO on a site. If you decide to mess with these rules, Google can and will red flag you. This means you won’t be showing up on Google for a few months, which completely defeats the whole purpose of SEO work.

This has covered a few basic SEO misconceptions. SEO really can be your best friend, just make sure you get it done correctly! Never be satisfied with your SEO work, as there will always be something that can be improved or needs to be done.