Google’s latest update encompasses the following, as written by Google Fellow Amit Singhal on the company’s official blog:

Personal Results, which enable you to find information just for you, such as Google+ photos and posts-both your own and those shared specifically with you, that only you will be able to see on your results page;

Profiles in Search, both in autocomplete and results, which enable you to immediately find people you’re close to or might be interested in following; and,

People and Pages, which help you find people profiles and Google+ pages related to a specific topic or area of interest, and enable you to follow them with just a few clicks. Because behind most every query is a community.

Check out the video below to see the new features in better detail.

I’m actually loving the idea of integrating personal results with Google’s search engine. What’s especially comforting is the company’s emphasis on the privacy of these results. Singhal states, “when you’re signed in to Google, your search results-including your private content-are protected by the same high standards of encryption as your messages in Gmail.” Kudos for security, Google.

If you’re not keen on seeing a bevy of personalized results, then Google has introduced a handy toggle feature to revert your search results back to their traditional settings.

As we’ve mentioned before, Google+ is a huge trump card for the company, and incorporating profile information with search results is a diabolically genius way to keep Google+ at the top of users’ minds.

What are your thoughts? Will personalized results lead to higher relevancy, or will it just clog the front page? Let us know in the comments.

Major search engines like Google and Bing have been hard-pressed to respond to the issue of content farms for a while now, and Google’s most recent “Panda” update was designed to crack down on these websites in a large way. Impacting around 12% of websites, this algorithm change was debuted back in February. Now, the results are in and it looks like content farms are finally being dealt a good dose of Internet justice.

Panda’s Effect

The alrogithm change that went along with the Panda Update essentially gave more relevance to websites which regularly publish unique and original content, thereby lessening the significance of content farms in a big way. Reported by New Scientist magazine, University of Glasgow computer scientist Richard McCreadie found after studying 50 popular content farm search queries that “Google and Microsoft have won a major victory” by pushing low-quality hits away from the top 10 results.

McCreadie focused on search queries which were “known to be a target of content farmers,” such as “how to train for a marathon.” He observed the queries in March and August, and over this timeframe, lower-quality sites that were once present in the top 10 results had disappeared by August. In their place were more reputable and freshly updated websites, such as Runner’s World magazine in the instance of the “how to train for a marathon” query.

McCreadie’s study focused on major search engines, but Google’s Panda update has proved to be more effective than efforts taken by Bing. We’ll see how content farms fare in subsequent updates – hopefully, shallow sites are pushed even further down in place of sites that have the information people actually need.

What’s your take on content farms and the Panda update? Let us know in the comments!

Sorry, back to the point at hand…during this process I noticed something – while we’ve come a long way in web technology; the internet, much like life, seems to be rather cyclical.

So take a look at the case I make below, and ask yourself this question. Is it just me, or is there an uncanny similarity between what Google has been slowly rolling out over the last few years, and the old AOL software that you would get on a CD 15 years ago?

In old AOL we had a web browser, email, file storage, favorites, channels, people, stocks quotes, perks, weather, etc.

Now, let’s compare to Google. In modern day Google we basically have a similar setup. We have a browser, with a bunch of tabs for different actions. We can browser with Google search. We can store files in Google Docs. We can look at stock quotes in Google finance. We can communicate with groups of people in Google’s new social platform Google+. We can shop with Google shopping. We can get “perks” or deals with Google Deals. We can browse information by “channel” as AOL would call it, or “group” as Google calls it in Google groups. We can check the weather by searching weather in Google. We can save our favorites in Google favorites.

Perhaps the way people access the internet may have changed, but the things people want to do online haven’t changed that much. And thus, much like AOL’s conquest to be the central hub of the internet in the dial-up age, Google is making the equivalent play for the broadband age.

This newest update, being dubbed “Panda 2.2″ is likely to continue Google’s quest of identifying good quality content, original authors and we suspect a continued focus on incorporating social [media] elements.

A few things to embrace  for effective optimization if the changes fall in line with what we expect:

• No duplicate content. Do not repost articles from other sites as your own. And don’t repeat the same content across your site all over the place. You’ll be ok with a footer line or something simple, but if you are duplicating a lot of the content on your site, this will seem less valuable to Google and will penalize you.
• Think about using some of the new markup for authors that Google seems to be pushing. It will help identify and mark content as original source.
• If you are a local business, use the location markup – this is a definite.
• Continue to incorporate a full social presence into your online marketing efforts. Cross-link your Twitter, Facebook, blog and website(s). Make sure to allow commenting and social participation with your website.
• Utilize good solid content, with meaning for your audience. Including images to the extent they are helpful (Google likes a few, but not a ton) and make sure to appropriately tag images with alt tags.
• Keep you site code clean. We’ve been helping a ton of clients with this problem lately. If you site loads slowly and you have considerable mark-up and validation errors, it’s going to hurt your rankings.
• Utilize smart and natural optimization. We can’t stress this enough. You need to optimize for sure, and do it well. But it needs to be “value-add” optimization rather than “value-suck” optimization that makes your content harder to read and less natural. Remember the goal is to share content and have it understood by humans, not robots.
• Don’t be tempted to over-optimize. This has been the case since 2002/2003 and it still holds true today. When in doubt, opt for less. Or call us and ask.
• Inbound links from topically relevant sites will continue to be as important as ever. But don’t think about buying links from “spammy” link farms. This will crush your optimization.
• No duplicate content.

If you’ve been hit hard by Panda, or have any thoughts or comments, feel free to chime in below.

Here is what a “tag” looks like:

Do tags make sense for your business? If you are a small, locally owned business, or a franchise style organization, tags could make sense. You’ll pay $25 per month, but you listing will definitely stand out and it allows you a very simple method for differentiation, which can make all the difference for a small business looking for a way to pull out of the pack. Quick back-of-the-napkin math tells us that I would if a customer is worth well in excess of $25, then if you get just one more customer from implementing this, then it’s probably worthwhile to give it a shot. You can run a more detailed ROI analysis, but it might not even be worth it given the small cost of a test campaign. And for the first 30 days, its even free.

Tip: If you are going to give Tags a shot, try using a unique offer that you’re not using somewhere else so you can track the results and measure if it’s returning a positive return for you.

Let me illustrate with a true story. We have a client whose competitor spent quite a bit on a radio promotion. These ads had a call-to-action that drove people to the web. When it comes to radio commercials, as it would happen, consumers do one of two things: 1) they remember the brand name of the company running the radio commercial, but don’t know the URL so they search for it in a search engine, or 2) they can’t remember the brand name, but remember something about the brand or product, so they search for whatever they remember.

So what if you set up a campaign and targeted the competing product name, as well as the competitors frequently searched related keywords? Well, we did. When a consumer did a search after hearing the radio commercial, they would see our client’s ad on top of the search results. We ended up getting traffic that came from another promotion, saw our client’s ads and got interested. We also earned thousands of impressions, each of which is an opportunity to build our client’s brand in the mind of a consumer who is actively engaged in the research phase, looking for a product our client sells. This is about as good as it gets when it comes to branding. Maybe they click on our ad and visit our client’s website and make a sale – great. Maybe they just see our client’s ad, near the top of the search results page when searching for a competing product – also great.

This is just one example of when it can pay to use PPC to build a brand. Hang in there for another few lines and I’ll explain a few more.

Reasons
• Competitor names and products – If you’ve ever been involved in a competitive speed sport such as running, cycling or car racing, you may have heard of the concept of “drafting”. This is concept of aerodynamics where one competitor takes a position directly behind another to allow the front competitor to break the air resistance. The spot directly behind the front competitor will be in the slipstream of the leader, which allows the follower to observe less wind resistance, allowing the “drafter” to conserve energy, build speed and more easily shoot past the competitor in the front. The concept of utilizing the leader’s energy for your gain also applies to marketing. As illustrated in the original example, there is a great opportunity to attain brand recognition and association within a specific marketplace. Often you can “draft” your competitor, thereby gaining advantage from their larger budget and offline promotions.

• Synergy with organic optimization – So your brand comes up on top for your name in the organic search results. Perfect. But what about all the competing messages on that page, and ads from your competitors? There are plenty of studies that have shown that you will often achieve a higher click-through-rate when your PPC ad is shown along with your organic listing, for both products and your brand name. But be careful, sometimes this can have a cannibalistic effect, and you should look for the net ROI change to make sure this isn’t happening in your instance. Here’s a great article about how to measure to make sure you are not cannibalizing your SEO results.

• Supporting offline campaigns – Using PPC to support an offline campaign is a great way to use PPC to build your brand. When you are running an offline promotion, whether PR, TV, Radio, Print or even a social campaign, it’s important to have PPC ads in place to support whatever your potential customers might be searching. This is your opportunity to associate your brand or product with their search. However, keep in mind that your competitors have the opportunity to “draft” by utilizing some of your offline campaigns to attain additional traffic and brand building. Bottom line, just be aware of this activity and don’t leave this gap open for your competitors to steal your mojo.

• Bidding for brand names, products, tag lines and associated keyword phrases – If you don’t have the top organic listing this is particularly important. It’s a good idea to associate your brand with the consumers’ search phrases, particularly when those phrases cover your industry or product. When the consumer is searching for a tag line that you are using, or hoping to use in the future, this is also your opportunity to further associate your brand with this tag line.

• Misspellings – It always amazes me when I do a search for a company and spell it wrong. Frequently the company website will not come up high in organic listings, and even worse, they won’t have a PPC ad waiting there for me. This is an opportunity to correct a brand mistake, build your correct brand name (spelling) and to direct a nearly lost customer to your web property. And best yet, more often than not, the cost for these PPC clicks is very low.

There are many more strategies to employ, but these should be a few good ones to consider when developing your paid search campaign strategy. Here are a few tips to remember when running a PPC campaign for Brand Building purposes.

• Make sure the keyword(s) you are bidding on are featured on the landing page(s) to which you are sending consumers. This will help keep PPC bid costs down by increasing quality scores, and will also help increase conversion when consumers get to your landing page.

• Make sure to show your brand or product name clearly in ad copy – too often I see ads that would be great branding ads, yet they lack a clear brand name and message. Don’t forget the most important thing in building a brand is… the brand.

• Make sure to put the brand name in the display URL – again, it’s critical to show to help reinforce the credibility of your brand name by showing it again in the URL.

• Make sure to bid aggressively enough to get a top spot – sometimes when you are running a campaign for the purpose of generating sales and ROI, the 3rd or 4th spot might generate the best return on your investment. When you are building your brand, this is a different story. If your ad falls in the 9th position on the bottom of a page of PPC ads, you will not be seen as a leader in the category that the consumer is researching…if your ad is seen at all.

• Don’t forget the content network – if the purpose of building your brand is to associate it with a specific need/category/product in the consumers mind, the content network does just this. It shows your ad next to an article discussing a particular topic that is relevant to the keyword you have bid on. It’s not perfect, true, but it will certainly get you a great number of brand-building impressions for a low cost.

While PPC is often one of the most cost efficient ways to drive direct sales, don’t forget the value of building a brand through paid search. In a world where you, and your client, could use every advantage possible, this is yet another powerful way to realize great gains with little expense.

Love the idea? Hate it? Feel free to shoot me an email, or discuss below.

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NOTE: This article was written for, and first appeared on the www.agencyside.net website. It has been edited slightly and modified a bit just to better suit the readership of this website.

1. Competitors
In many cases a few industry leaders will dominate a web space. If you are starting a new website, or simply trying to topple a giant, you need to be aware of what the competition is doing well, and what it is not. Often the highest traffic keywords will have a group of 5 to 10 major competitors competing for them. In many industries, the large players will either have full-time SEO staff or will have SEO agencies on retainer, performing intensive organic search optimization. This can make it a time intensive and costly proposition to try to “dethrone” one or more of the leaders by getting a top 5 ranking in Google for a highly competitive keyword. To circumvent this problem, it’s often a good idea to start with a ranking analysis of your competitors. Determine what keywords they are ranking well for, and which ones they are not ranking well for. This will indicate areas of great opportunity for organic optimization. From there, spend time optimizing the keywords your competitors are not ranking well for. This will give you the advantage in niche areas where your website can be a leader.

2. Excessive Optimization
Excessive optimization, often called “keyword stuffing” is just as detrimental in 2010 as it was in 2009, 2008, 2007 and 2006. People often ask me “what is the percentage of keywords” or “keyword density” that you can have on a page before the page should be considered “stuffed”. While we utilize a simple formula at Lucid Agency to give a general barometer, to be honest, it’s just as easy to follow this simple rule of thumb. If you can read a page and not tell that it is written for SEO purposes, and it sounds informative and readable for humans, then chances are it is not over-optimized. For example, did you realize that this section is optimized for “excessive optimization”? Probably not, because it was written to be informative and just happens to contain that keyword two times. Organic search rankings are intended to list the most useful and credible websites at the top of the list, so write with that objective in mind.

3. Not Utilizing Social Media in SEO Strategy
Social media is a great way to garner both traffic and inbound links, both of which are helpful for the objective of SEO – getting more qualified traffic to your website. While many search engine optimization strategies focus on the on-page and off-page elements of organic optimization, they often neglect social media. There are simple ways to utilize social media in search. A simple way to start is with a blog and a twitter account. Write a few good blog posts on topics relevant to your industry of expertise, providing useful information. These articles could be articles, picture posts, videos, interviews, white papers; really anything that your intended reader would find useful. Submit these blog posts via XML sitemap to the search engines. Then utilize a following of those interested in what you have to say on Twitter, and put up teasers to your blog posts. If you do this well, with any luck, some of your followers will put up links to your blog on their websites and blogs, gaining you both direct traffic from their reads, and also in bound links from their web properties.

4. Lack of Original Content
As they say in the world of search engine optimization, “content is king”. This has been the rule for many years, and is likely to prevail as one of the foremost guidelines in SEO. Search engines like content that is unique and new. And they like a lot of it. So just create a lot of good content and you’ll end up working wonders for your SEO campaign. If possible, lightly optimize this content and let the rest take care of itself.

5. Lack of Quality Links
Nothing new here…links are the foundation of the Google algorithm and what originally separated them from the other search engines. If you consider Google a great “democracy” of sorts, and each link from a credible website as a “vote” for your website, then it’s simple to see that he with a lot of votes and a clear, in-depth message shall be the winner. Recently, other search engines have followed suit, and it’s no longer just Google valuing these links, but the other search engines as well. In addition, it’s also important to make sure you have links from many websites and that the websites are credible (not link farms). Further, there is some value to the outbound links on your website. When it comes to outbound links, search engines like to see a few links to valuable and related websites.

6. Slow Page Load Times
From many accounts, the new algorithm Google released last year, fondly named “caffeine”, we noticed an importance placed on page load times. This makes sense. If Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information, and provide the best results to those searchers looking for this information, they wouldn’t be doing a great job if the top ranking websites loaded very slowly, or didn’t load at all – thus providing a terrible experience to searchers. To remedy slow load times, try cleaning up code, taking out extraneous flash or third party loading galleries. If this doesn’t help, try a “fresh rebuild”, i.e. having a developer go through and rebuild the website in nice clean new code.

7. Website Structure Issues
If your website has a complicated or unintuitive directory structure, you may want to think about redoing it. The directory structures that work best for top organic rankings are the ones that are simple and intuitive, as this will help search engines and website visitors identify where in the website they are. Search engines use a directory structure to try and determine a relationship between different categorical items and pages on your website. If your structure makes no sense, it can only be detrimental for your rankings, and often the user as well. Fortunately, this is easy to fix up-front, and if you have a website running on a popular CMS platform such as WordPress or Expression Engine, there are many free plugins you can get to quickly and easily adjust the directory structure of your website. If you have a website that sells products for the construction industry, you might have a directory structure like ##www.plumbing-co.com/supplies/welding-supplies.html##, where you would list all of your welding supplies, which would be clear to both search engines and users alike.

8. Inaccurate or Duplicate Page Titles
Search engines give significant weight to website pages that are clear in their content focus. Titles are one of the best ways to indicate the intended focus of a website page. It is a best practice to include a unique, descriptive and lightly optimized title for your website pages. Don’t utilize keywords that are not relevant to the content of the web page, just write something that is useful and accurate, and if it can include the keyword then perfect. Remember titles are shown in search engine listings, so you want your title to be informative and compelling. After all, you are not only trying to get the top listing in Google, but you want people to click on your listing as well.

9. Missing XML sitemaps
XML sitemaps are a very simple way to make sure websites with many pages, and frequently changing content, are thoroughly and accurately indexed by search engines. Since search engines love fresh content, it is advantageous to make sure your website utilizes an XML sitemap, to ensure your “fresh” content is found and indexed quickly. XML sitemaps are simple to make and most web developers can implement them quickly.

10. New Websites
If you work in the SEO field, you’ve most likely had more than one potential client come to you with little more than a checkbook and a domain name. Often this potential client will want to “rank number 1 in Google” for their keyword-de-jour. While most agencies will gladly develop a plan to accomplish this, one of the largest barriers is something that cannot be fixed with any amount of money. Google and Bing (MSN and soon-to-be Yahoo) value the length of time a domain has been in existence. This is something often referred to in SEO slang as “the sandbox”. According to many industry experts Google reportedly puts new websites in something of a sandbox for a while, in an attempt to thwart large scale link efforts for new websites. While this is more theory than fact, Google engineer Matt Cutts has said that there are elements of the Google algorithm that may have an effect such as what has been described as the sandbox. What we can tell you is that we’ve noticed it certainly takes a little longer to get rankings for a new website than an older website. This is partially because of the generally lower number of existing links going to new websites, as well as the variety of other issues that are usually present with many new websites. To best counter this problem, get a new website up quickly, and slowly build up links to the website after the initial launch.

In closing, many of the issues hindering successful optimization aren’t particular difficult to solve, nor do they take a PHD in mathematics to figure out. Follow some simple tried and true optimization techniques, develop great content, get the word out, track your results and the rankings will take care of themselves.

Google: http://www.google.com/addurl/ (no account needed)

Yahoo: http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit (you will need a Yahoo account to submit a site to Yahoo)

Bing (MSN): http://www.bing.com/docs/submit.aspx (no account needed)

However, don’t go deleting your Meta Keywords just yet. This blog post by Randy Duermyer illustrates a test they did showing that Yahoo does utilize Meta Keywords currently in their algorithmic ranking. When the company doing the website removed the Meta Keywords from a website, the rankings in Yahoo dropped. When the Meta Keywords were restored, the rankings returned. Here is another article describing Yahoo and MSN using Meta Keywords.

1. On-page Optimization
2. Off-page Optimization

Both are equally important, although implementation of a successful strategy for each is drastically different. On-page revolves around the changes made to the website itself to increase indexing and optimization of strategic keyword phrases. Off-page optimization refers to the strategic implementation of a plan to garner high rankings though link baiting, submissions, social participation and other tactics.

Want proof that off-page organic optimization is important? Deal. Check out the screen shot below. Notice how “Google’s Sandbox test site for Google Caffeine” is coming up for the 2nd organic search result for the keyword “Caffeine”. Well that’s strange. We might expect the Wikipedia entry and perhaps even Starbucks, but Google’s test search engine code-named Caffeine? This isn’t because the site is optimized for the keyword “Caffeine”, but rather because there are a ton of websites linking to it that are discussing “Google Caffeine” in their articles and often within the link to the Caffeine sandbox. This is unintentional off-page optimization.

off-page-optimization