Welcome to another edition of ‘7 Days of Search and Social‘ – I hope this edition finds you well and 2k10 is rocking so far (busy, but fun over here).

Last week was the kind of week a geek like me dies for. There were a ton of great blog posts, plenty of humour, lots of geeky IR stuff (including an IR post with profanity.. wicked cool!) and even a bunch of interesting patents. Actually, one of the longest search patent names I’ve ever seen. Truly a week that was a blast to follow. On that note…let’s not waste more time with my idle banter, we’re a lot to get to!

Lead Story

Help stop the madness!!

A few week’s ago some pals and I were joking via Twitter that there should be a dedicated place for ranting and otherwise going off. You see, I tend to keep a certain demeanour when writing this newsletter or even on my blog. Sure, ranting once in a while… but it’s not the same as losing it.

Just for sh*ts and giggle’s I poked around and noticed that SEObulls**t.com was available. The rest as you’ve likely figured out, is history.

Some of the first posts;

1. Stop Offering SEO Services You Bloody Dimwits!
2. SEO Toxin: Directory-like URI Structures
3. Bulls**t Prevails When Good SEOs Do Nothing
4. Confusing acronyms create chaos

We’ve taken to calling it, ‘SEO Group Therapy’ in that it has become a place that is fostering discussions. An unexpected side effect. It is a (reasonably) open door policy for posters and I look forward to it’s continued growth. If you like your SEO stories with a bit of humour (and profanity at times), drop on by. Also be sure to follow us on Twitter and Grab the Badge!

And away…

Talk of the town

Search Geek Central

Search Patents

/end SOSG session

‘7 Days of Search and Social’ is a joint effort from Search Engine Journal and the SEO Training Dojo to bring you the latest in SEO and Social Search news. Each week (on Tuesdays) we’ll be posting the highlights of the most recent (SEO Geeks) newsletter here on Search Engine Journal.

Be sure to grab the SEJ feed for the latest or sign up to the SEO Dojo newsletter to get it straight to your inbox.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Weekly Search & Social News: 02/09/2010

Welcome to another edition of ‘7 Days of Search and Social‘ – I hope it finds you well. We’ve made it over the hump and January is in the bag. That means the year is in full swing and there should be no excuses for not having great posts out there. Unless, well, yer like me and entirely swamped. Sigh…Ok, fine. We’ll not stress it.

Last week was though, somewhat quiet out there. Not a ton that jumped out at me from the blogosphere and really only the IR/Geeky world and Social Search seemed to make their average goodiness. Even the patent world was slow!! Dammit!! This all has me thinking of expanding on the hundred or so blogs I follow. If you know a good search blog that may not be on my radar; send me a Tweet @SEOdojo

And away we go…..

Lead Story

Microformats on the grow

I don’t think I can stress enough how important it is for SEOs to have a strong understanding of microformats/RDFa. You see, once upon a time, my fav IR geek (Marie Claire Jenkins) and I argued about the adoption of the semantic web. Being in the IR world she would go on and on about how great the semantic web is/will be.

I, for my part, would always take the position that until;

• Tools and implementation for webmasters became easier we would be unlikely to see much of it
• Until something happens to create financial motivation for webmasters/companies to implement it, adoption will be low.

Well, more and more the folks at Google have been dabbling in microformats/RDFa over the last year and THIS, is most certainly the type of motivation I am talking about in point B. Followers of the newsletter know we’ve been talking about it for some time now and it can’t be stressed enough that you MUST start to learn more about it. Last week Google expanded their rich snippets approach as noted in these posts;

• Google Adds More Answers & Info To Search Results
• Google Search Just Got a Little Bit Smarter: Highlights Answers to Factual Questions

And one of the SEO Dojo members, Pete Young, also had a post this week worth reading; SEO and Rich Snippets – Crucial to your 2010 armoury.

It is time for ALL of us to start getting into them… I can’t stress it enough folks… Get on it NOW!

Talk of the town

Search Geek Central

Search Patents

/end SOSG session

‘7 Days of Search and Social’ is a joint effort from Search Engine Journal and the SEO Training Dojo to bring you the latest in SEO and Social Search news. Each week (on Tuesdays) we’ll be posting the highlights of the most recent (SEO Geeks) newsletter here on Search Engine Journal.

Be sure to grab the SEJ feed for the latest or sign up to the SEO Dojo newsletter to get it straight to your inbox.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Weekly Search & Social News: 02/02/2010

Welcome to another edition of ‘7 Days of Search and Social‘ – As we draw near to the end of the first month of 2k10, the search world is getting a little more active. Sadly, for this geek at least, we were very light on search patents again this week…. Grumble… mumble…

SEOmoz released a new tool, some people jumped on it (cough * Sebastian * cough), Google was talking semantics and another fella came to light that was trying to trademark SEO. And for the first time in a while, Michael Martinez was relatively quite.

So grab some of your fav beverage and let’s dig into this week’s edition shall we?

Lead Story

SEO being trademarked AGAIN?!?

I try to avoid making one of my own posts/topics the lead story, but this week it couldn’t be helped. You see, for those that missed it, we had a fella’ named Jason Gambert that tried (unsuccessfully) to trademark the term, ‘SEO’. That all blew over… until now.

It seems that he has competition. It came to my attention that one Clinton Cimring has also thrown his hat in the ring. What is almost more interesting is the ORM (rep management) job he did with it. As noted with this Twitter entry;

• “..seriously, we need to talk about actually important stuff, not who trademarked SEO; like pugs in purple monkey costumes!!!”

If he believes that someone trying to TM the acronym (and potential charge for it’s use) isn’t ‘serious’ then maybe he should be the one wearing a purple monkey suit; just sayin’.

You can read more on the trail in this post or Barry’s coverage over on Search Engine Land.

Talk of the town

Search Geek Central

Search Patents

/end SOSG session

‘7 Days of Search and Social’ is a joint effort from Search Engine Journal and the SEO Training Dojo to bring you the latest in SEO and Social Search news. Each week (on Tuesdays) we’ll be posting the highlights of the most recent (SEO Geeks) newsletter here on Search Engine Journal.

Be sure to grab the SEJ feed for the latest or sign up to the SEO Dojo newsletter to get it straight to your inbox.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Weekly Search & Social News: 01/26/2010

First, A Word on Spam Conduits

Dave Naylor introduced me to the term Spam Conduit a while ago. The term is basically the description for a page on a high quality domain being used to gain search rankings, thus traffic. Spammers use these doorways to dump traffic from third party sites onto their affiliate sites.

This is what allegedly “dumb” spammers are doing when they create submissions on social sites that do not pass link equity. They were never after the link equity. They were there to borrow the domain authority of the site to rank for terms, and send the traffic on to their properties.

Online Reputation Management

ORM has become an all encompassing term, like search marketing, or social media. In reality, this topic can be segmented into several verticals in and of itself. Some companies are in need of management of their reputation in the blogosphere, others on social networks, and far more find themselves in a reputation war in the search engine results pages.

Many people have had their businesses online severely impacted by negative sentiment in their search results. Sites such as RipOffReport.com lead the list of those that offer consumers a voice to air grievances.

They also offer a tool for competitors, ex-employees, and others to destroy honest business owners reputations and revenue generation capabilities. Some of these sites themselves have questionable operating practices.

This post is not an ethical discussion about the voice of the consumer, it is a discussion of tools available to marketers to accomplish results.

SPAM Meets ORM

In an attempt to clean up their search results, many companies begin to create keyword rich properties, hoping to knock out the negative sentiment. The issue here is that the new sites lack what is making the negativity float to the surface.

Complaint sites are huge, and carry tons of equity. On top of that they are not a hub, rather they simply hoard link juice.

You have to fight fire with fire.

In order to displace a equity driven search placement you must create an equity driven search placement. This is when it is time to create social profiles, unearth existing articles and content, and create a comprehensive map of your branded assets online. Choose the 10 you want to populate the first page. Try to stick with pages you know float quickly to the top of the results:

Twitter.com
Facebook.com
Youtube.com
Wikipedia.com
Any major publication
Aged forums
Wiki.Answers.com
Yahoo Answers

You get the picture…

Wait You Aren’t Done!

You aren’t going to just create profiles on these sites and hit a homerun with your ORM initiative. The next step is to look at the individual ranking factors for these sites, and optimize the individual pages to get them to the point of being useful.

For example, Twitter profiles rank well based on a steady flow of unique content, having a quality group of followers flowing internal equity to the profile page, and external link equity.

In the end, you can raise most of these through links. And since these aren’t your sites you can throw tons of links at them with little worry. All kinds of links. This is where many campaigns stall. How do you capture tons of links, in a relatively natural manner, that are permanent?

“The key to controlling your reputation in the SERPs often boils down to how many links you can point at optimized pages on powerful domains. By leveraging the value of your existing social profiles, and a quality linkbuilding program you can regain control of your reputation,” says ORM specialist Todd Friesen.

If you get stuck you are safe with almost any linkbuilding initiative because you aren’t putting your site at risk. You are only risking your conduit page.

No Rep Issues?

Sweet. When you are done patting yourself on the back, get to work securing your online presence. Go about the above process regardless, and make it that much harder for your online business to be put in an uncomfortable situation.

Don’t become a complete spammer. Don’t go out writing a Wikipedia page for your local pizzeria; that’s silly. But use your brain. A Facebook fan page for the pizzeria and a Twitter profile are useful beyond ORM, and offer your customers value.

Final Word

Is this an end all be all for ORM online?

No. Nothing online is ever an end all be all strategy, but this is a highly effective strategy for not only cleaning your reputation in terms of the search engine results, but also protecting your brand.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

What Spammers Can Teach You About ORM

Welcome to another edition of ‘7 Days of Search and Social‘ – It was a somewhat quiet world out there last week. Sure, we had Google changing the way Brits spell (or did they) and also news of using Twitter follower counts as a metric. But other than that, I didn’t come across a whole lot. We really do seem to start the year slow in the search world. Oh, and if you need a good laugh, see ‘the Google Toilet‘ in the Video section :0)

None the less, there is plenty of reading for the obsessed search geek… Enjoy!

Lead Story

Google wants to change UK laungage; NOT

This story was easily my personal fav last week. For those that missed it, Google was offering to supplant the ‘z’ version of ‘search engine optimization’ for the traditional (and more appropriate) ‘s’ in the spelling. More here;

• Americanize This! Google Changing My Search Spelling By Default (my personal Fav) – SEO Chicks
• Is Google Changing The Queen’s English? – Media Post
• Google Now Corrupting Lingual Identity - Search Engine Journal
• Google is trying to change the English language - Blogstorm
• Showing Results For Search Engine Optimization? But I Searched For Search Engine Optimisation – Hobo SEO

Now, why is it so titillating? You see there is every reason to believe that this was no more than a result of the weighting of a few processes. Right away I went and searched the data from Google Insights (here) and Trends (here). As you can see, around last September there was actually a shift in which was being searched more.

If I had to guess, the geo/language systems that rank (and do NLP) were mucked up and the actual query data (of ‘z’ seemingly being more common) produced the effect. This would certainly be an unforeseen situation.

At the end of the day, Google stated it was all a bug in the system where they were suggesting American English spelling refinements. In a statement they said, “We have temporarily rolled back the change while we fix the problem.”

Me? Looks like a query analysis weight took the raw data and was over-riding the geo-signals… Which means spell correct/recommendations are likely query driven. But we may never know for certain.

Talk of the town

Search Geek Central

Search Patents

/end SOSG session

‘7 Days of Search and Social’ is a joint effort from Search Engine Journal and the SEO Training Dojo to bring you the latest in SEO and Social Search news. Each week (on Tuesdays) we’ll be posting the highlights of the most recent (SEO Geeks) newsletter here on Search Engine Journal.

Be sure to grab the SEJ feed for the latest or sign up to the SEO Dojo newsletter to get it straight to your inbox.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Weekly Search & Social News: 01/19/2010

Welcome to another edition of ‘7 Days of Search and Social‘ – Happy New Year to those of you now back in the grind… erm… I mean…’swing of things’. Did you miss me last week? Of course ya did! I want to wish all the best to the SEJ readers and search geeks world-wide; I hope 2k10 rocks for you. Oh and my own personal mission is to see less of the BS and drama our industry tends to have… Will that happen? Not likely. But one can dream ya know.

Ok, so last week was a pretty quite one out there as far as things go and that made things ever so much easier for this reporter. I have a feeling this week is going to bounce back with a vengance. The only area that didn’t seem to take the week off was the search patents dept. – we have a few interesting ones there.

And away we go…..

Lead Story

The trouble with testing

To get the year rolling, why not look at one of my fav pet peeves; testing. There are HUGE problems with being able to test effectively considering the fact we have so few of the variables. Case and point; the recent data published by the folks over at SEOmoz.  In this case the ‘ol ‘PageRank Sculpting’ was being put to (and taken to) task. This one seemed to ruffle more than a few feathers… More details;

• PageRank Sculpting with Nofollow Still Works – SEOmoz
• A comment on SEOmoz’ latest bogus PageRank sculpting test
• SEOmoz Decision Making Flowchart

Now, for the record I’ve never really been a huge proponent of the concept as I believe proper structure and internal/external linkage is a better way to deal with PageRank management. But, I’ve also never really tested it formally.

What is interesting in all of this is that people are generally whacking the testing on a near personal level, than providing counter ‘evidence’ to the claims. I’d really like to see less of that in the new year. Actually, I made it through 09 without ranting/going-off on anyone… woo hoo!

Anyway, it was a fun drama to start the year with… let’s get moving along shall we?

Talk of the town

Search Geek Central

Search Patents

/end SOSG session

‘7 Days of Search and Social’ is a joint effort from Search Engine Journal and the SEO Training Dojo to bring you the latest in SEO and Social Search news. Each week (on Tuesdays) we’ll be posting the highlights of the most recent (SEO Geeks) newsletter here on Search Engine Journal.

Be sure to grab the SEJ feed for the latest or sign up to the SEO Dojo newsletter to get it straight to your inbox.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Weekly Search & Social News: 01/05/10

Welcome to another edition of ‘7 Days of Search and Social‘ – First off, HAPPY HOLIDAYs to all those partaking. May you and yours have a safe and relaxing time! Now, I had thought things would start to slow down as we got closer to the holidays, but not so. We had a lot of interesting posts, patents and toys out there, although there was no real ‘big story’ for once (c’mon Google, yer slipping).

And away we go…..

Lead Story

SEOs take the bait again

This week’s top story has no links. That’s a first. Why because to me the top story was about Robert Scoble joining a long line of line of those before him that baited the community. I tell ya, I am as passionate as the next fella, but I don’t believe we need to collectively FREAK OUT each time somebody puts a worm on the hook.

And it is like a pack of dogs barking at a passing car anytime some known bloggeritte decides to take a swipe at the SEO community, because… well… it’s worked so we in the past for others. I mean seriously people, I understand that protecting our domain is important, but I can’t help feeling like I am watching the sheeple being drawn to the slaughter.

Why oh why the links? If anyone understood the world of links, it would be us. Why link to Robert (or anyone else’s) post? I generally don’t bother with these drama’s and have rarely written about them (as I don’t see the feckin point) – if I did though, it would be a link to a SERP or someone else’s coverage… or nofollowed… or whateva’ – but we’re not doing that are we… Thus is succeeds and happens again. Duh

Ok? So there is no coverage of that story beyond this point

Talk of the town

Search Geek Central

Search Patents

/end SOSG session

‘7 Days of Search and Social’ is a joint effort from Search Engine Journal and the SEO Training Dojo to bring you the latest in SEO and Social Search news. Each week (on Tuesdays) we’ll be posting the highlights of the most recent (SEO Geeks) newsletter here on Search Engine Journal.

Be sure to grab the SEJ feed for the latest or sign up to the SEO Dojo newsletter to get it straight to your inbox.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Weekly Search & Social News: 12/22/09

I was reading up on Google acquisitions yesterday and although Google’s acquisition this year is not as many as previous years, particularly 2006 and 2007, Google’s acquisitions in 2009 certainly made sense with their landmark acquisition of AdMob as their most expensive buy.

But looking at Google’s 2009 acquisitions from a quality, and not quantity perspective, we see that the company is focusing its takeover of other companies in two major directions : Mobile & Google Apps. The speeding up of the web is essential to growth of mobile computing, whether on the netbook or smartphone, and judging on where Google has put most of its research and development in 2009 : Google Chrome OS, Google powered netbooks, Google Droid Phone and Android Mobile OS … the ability to condense data into a stream which can make the most of our current 3G and mobile networks’ definition of mobile broadband … while also enhance the usefulness of cloud computing, both are essential to Google’s future.

Here’s a look at the companies Google acquired in 2009 :

• On2 – Acquired on August 5, 2009 for $106,500,000 ; On2 is a video compression applications company. As of today, Google has not made any move yet on how it is going to make use of On2, but utilizing it as part of Google Wave and Google Video (which is being tested in GMail Chat) could make cloud conferencing more of a streamlined and less expensive possibility and assist with the adoption of Google Apps by businesses and governments (Washington DC and Los Angeles are currently saving millions using Google Apps).
• AdMob – Google’s most expensive acquisition of 2009 made it to spend $750,000,000 last month. This could very well fit into Google mobile advertising business and AdMob is the preferred monetization tool of mobile application developers who use AdMob to earn money with free iPhone apps and other downloadable mobile tools. Google will use AdMob to syphon part of Apple’s monetary market in 2010 and integrating AdMob into Google AdSense is an important part of Google’s long term strategy to corner the mobile development market.
• Gizmo5 – Acquired the same day when Admob was acquired, Gizmo5 is a VoIP company. Google had to spend $30,000,000 for this company, obviously to beef up its Google Voice service, which is again, an essential part of not only Google’s mobile aspirations, but also Google Apps.
• Teracent – An online display advertising company bought for an undisclosed amount. Google is definitely going to use this for its AdSense program and further expansion into the world of display advertising … or the DoubleClick side of AdSense. While Teracent may not be an obvious mobile oriented acquisition, it will assist Google in better monetizing display advertising by assisting Google’s advertisers with putting together display ads which bring results and sales. The more money Google and its advertisers bring in, the more profitable Google becomes. In my opinion Google beefing up its advertising is a direct target on the Yahoo & Microsoft partnership, as both companies, especially Yahoo, have strong display advertising networks and power display advertising on various online newspapers. Now that Google is bringing the news onto the mobiles and netbooks in an easy to read fashion with Google Fast Flip (the mobile connection), expect Google to make a strong push to work with these same publishing outlets.
• AppJet (Etherpad) – This online collaboration tool is obviously geared for Google Wave, an essential part of Google Apps and cloud communication.
• DocVerse – Although still in the planning stages, it looks like Google will soon be acquiring DocVerse, another collaboration tool which allows users to work together around Microsoft Office documents, much in the same manner that Google Docs allows contributors to work on Docs on Spreadsheets. Yet again, another jab at Microsoft and way to streamline applications and make Google Apps an even stronger service in 2010, especially as Microsoft upgrades Office Live.

There has been talk of an acquisition of Yelp by Google over the weekend, which could be the largest Google acquisition since YouTube, if not the most important acquisition by Google ever. (Update: It looks like the deal is off, as TechCrunch reports that Yelp walked away from the negotiation table).

Yelp would be the central offering of Google’s mobile services and would finally complete Google Local with a Google powered review service, instead of its aggregation of other services. With Yelp off the table however, and Google apparently sitting on over $500 million to spend before the end of the year, are there any other companies they should be acquiring?

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Google’s 2009 Acquisitions : Focus on Mobile & Collaboration

Life is a funny thing! As humans we all want to be successful and happy. Each year goes by (faster than we would like) full of goals, failures and accomplishments. Ultimately it is up to us as individuals to reach for the stars and fulfill our desires.

Below you will find a list of five things that you can do to end this year in a way that will make you happy, successful and ready for the New Year! But remember, it is up to you and no one else to make it happen.

If you are reading this, more than likely you are a Business, SEO, or Social Media minded person; and for that very reason I have focused the items below on you.

1. Life – The number one item that you need to do today to end this year with a bang is to evaluate your life. The reason why this is number one on my list is because if you can’t take care of yourself, then how are you going to take care of your family, job, or business?

Focus some time today on going back through notes, files, and papers, really anything that you can find that has your 2009 resolutions or goals that you set earlier this year. If you can’t find anything or you didn’t put anything together then that is just fine, stay with me though.

Next thing you need to do is review your resolutions or goals.  (If you don’t have any, then take a minute to think of some things you wanted to accomplish in 2009.). Take your list and review what you have accomplished this year. Don’t get down on yourself if you didn’t do as well as you would have liked. It is an effective process to evaluate yourself once and a while.

Now what I want you to do is throw that list in the garbage. You don’t want to focus on these items anymore. That doesn’t mean that you can’t have some of the same goals and ambitions that were on this year’s list. However, the list needs to be updated and reevaluated to make sure you are on the correct path to achieving your goals.

It is time now to motivate yourself. If that means writing down more goals, then do that. If it means putting together a vision board, then you can do that. Just inspire yourself to do whatever it takes to be successful.

2. Family – All of us have some kind of family in our lives, and if your family isn’t happy then it is very hard for you to be content with yourself and successful. Spend some time the next couple of weeks to show sincere love to those who matter most!

Notice I used the word sincere above. I find that my mind wonders a lot even when I am with family. Take some real heartfelt time this holiday season to show your appreciation to those in your life that make you who you are.

3. Business – Whether you work a 9 to 5 job or you own your own business, we all want to improve our bottom line (revenue). The problem is that most of us are chasing money when we should be focusing on relationships.

The world has become a recommending society instead of a searching society. Just take the search engines for example; they are changing their search results to focus on recommendations of others. If you are building relationships of trust (or what I call Building Social Equity) then more people will recommend you via their social networks. According to Entrepreneur Magazine, reviews and recommendations play a huge role in Consumer decision making. Check out these stats:

• 62% of shoppers read consumer-written product reviews online.
• 80%+ say their purchase decisions have been directly influenced by reviews.
• 70% of shoppers share product reviews with their friends, family and colleagues.
• 18% of consumers say they look for more product information online or in other locations in addition to looking on the product’s packaging.

So now is the time to make that shift from following the cash to really understanding your target market and giving them what they desire and need. One simple way that you can do this today is to create a survey or poll and send it to all your customers, prospects, friends, family, etc. Ask questions that are focused on the person and what you can do to help them. This will show the individual that you care about them and that you genuinely want to help them. Once the feedback is received, do everything in your power to give the people what they want and desire. You will be surprised at how much people will appreciate your efforts in trying to help them. Your relationship with them will begin to blossom.

4. Search – Most of the people that read this blog are involved in one way or another with SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Whether or not you are involved in this community or even interested, I personally believe that any business or entrepreneur can benefit from having an online presence.

Here are some SEO activities that you can do today to end 2009 on the right foot. First, links, content, and relevance are key to having a successful presence on the search engines. This is where you need to focus much of your time and efforts. Build a plan of attack to help you fulfill your objective which should be to rank number one or at least on the first page for your desired keyword/phrase. To help you get on the right path, check out my recent article at SEJ called “The Top Ten Reasons Your SEO Sucks”

The most important thing to remember is to be consistent in your efforts to produce valuable relevant content and then attract related inbound links from the World Wide Web. Loren Baker wrote a great article on Natural Link Building that everyone should check out. There is another amazing Link Building Evaluation guide by David Snyder that I suggest you read it.

5. Social – With the revolution of Social Media, it has become more important than ever to learn and understand the ins and outs of this evolving marketing path. I believe social media is simply another channel that individuals and businesses should use to grow their business. As I mentioned in #3, growing your bottom line these days is all about the relationships, and with social media in play it has never been easier.

Here are a couple of warnings and tips if you choose to use social media as one of your marketing methods:

• Don’t forget to be a part of the conversation.
• Provide value.
• Be authentic.
• Don’t focus on yourself, focus on others.
• Use social media tools and sites that fit your business.
• Consistently spend time building your reputation and brand.

Now, today, this instant, is the time to fulfill your dreams and attain your passions. You can’t do this sitting around hoping it will just easily come to you. Hard work always trumps good luck. As the 2009 year comes to an end, make sure you reevaluate your path, focus on the ones who matter most, build relationships of trust, and provide valuable relevant content by being part of the conversation.

Garrett Pierson is Founder and President of New Generation Consulting, a consulting firm specializing in search engine optimization, social media, website conversion, and success. He is the creator of Building Social Equity 2.0 a “SEO Meets Social Media” training course. Garrett can be followed on Twitter @garrettpierson

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

5 Ways to End 2009 with a Bang

Welcome to another edition of ‘7 Days of Search and Social‘ – Well, maybe it’s the holidays or maybe it was SES, but the world was a little quieter than usual last week. But that’s no problem as the behemoth that is Google put out (yet another?) big announcement/roll-out with Real Time Search. That was enough to feed the savages on its own.

Other than that, it was busiest in the Local SEO world and well… if you aren’t on your game with local… Get on it! Enough rambling, let’s get to it.

Lead Story

Google does Real Time

It goes without saying that the big news last week was Google rolling out their Real Time Search system. Back when Google announced their partnership with Twitter we wondered what they’d be using it for. The social search experiment didn’t seem like it was the entire reason… Now we know…

Coverage;

• Google Launches Real Time Search – Search Engine Land
• What is Google real time search – Search Engine People
• Why Real Time Search Should Interest SEOs – Search Engine Journal
• How Google Real-Time Results are Ranked - StepForth
• Google Enables Real Time Spam and More – Outspoken Media

And of course some reactions that came along;

• Observations of Google’s real time search results – Make it Rank
• The anatomy of a deceptive Tweet spamming Google Real-Time Search – Outspoken Media
• Search & Real Time Madness – Search Engine Land

For the record I’ve only personally done some limited testing. But we did do a lot of it with the other RTS engines back in the fall. As far as stacking up against the competition, OneRiot is likely still a little better…

Talk of the town

/end SOSG session

‘7 Days of Search and Social’ is a joint effort from Search Engine Journal and the SEO Training Dojo to bring you the latest in SEO and Social Search news. Each week (on Tuesdays) we’ll be posting the highlights of the most recent (SEO Geeks) newsletter here on Search Engine Journal.

Be sure to grab the SEJ feed for the latest or sign up to the SEO Dojo newsletter to get it straight to your inbox.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Weekly Search & Social News: 12/15/09

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.

Emotion Self-Regulation

The concept of emotional self-regulation is defined as:

being able to properly regulate one’s emotions. It is a complex process that involves the initiating, inhibiting, or modulating the following aspects of functioning

The concept is based on being able to understand the following:

1. internal feeling states (i.e. the subjective experience of emotion),
2. emotion-related cognitions (e.g. thought reactions to a situation),
3. emotion-related physiological processes (e.g. heart rate, hormonal, or other physiological reactions), and
4. emotion-related behavior (e.g actions or facial expressions related to emotion).

Broken down; many of our actions are guided by emotions that originally fueled by thoughts brought on by stimuli around us. These actions in turn have results, that often fuel future thoughts, and thus the cycle continues.

When looking at this concept it is important to also understand the gamut of emotions the human mind deals with. Robert Plutchik defined emotions and their polar opposites through the creation of the following wheel:

Understanding these concepts can unlock a marketers understanding of many actions of a consumer, and the same can be said for the link builder. Linking is an action, and that action can be elicited by many emotions. The most basic of these is the initiation point of the link buy. The thought of someone confronted with an offer to sell a link is “I can monetize this site I have built” and the following emotion is contentment in the material concept of payment, the action is the link. The psychology of someone giving a link can be broken down by this cycle, and by creating quality initiation points that cause Thoughts that cause desired emotions, a link builder can skillfully achieve links for any website.

The Psychology of Link Bait

Joy: A Case Study

This flickr.com image went viral. The contrasting posters are funny on their own, but combined with the concept that someone had to create the second poster to counter the first, it adds to the humor. Humor elicites joy, and people want to share that joy/humor with others. This caused the image to retain nearly 500 links almost 6 months after it appeared on the Digg.com’s front page.

Interest: A Case Study

SEOmoz’s Search Ranking Factors is a huge link sponge in our industry. It is an impressive piece of content that evolves. This is often called “resource” based content by link baiters, and resources like any other content bring forth action based on emotion. Search marketers want to know the most important factors to focus on in their campaigns, SEOmoz initiates the thought through this content, the marketer wonders if the factors are the key they are looking for, this elicits interest, and in response they read the factors and share them on social media sites and their blogs.

Admiration/Contempt: The Double Edged Case Study

Barney Frank Confronts Woman

This piece of content is very interesting. That is because depending on political stance your opinion will change, and thus your emotion. Supporters of the healthcare plan in question felt admiration for Barney Frank for standing up to insane comparisons of Obama to Hitler. On the other hand people that did not care for the healthcare legislation felt their contempt for the concept fueled by the woman’s questions. Looking through the backlinks you will see a mixture of supporters and detractors linking.

Beyond Link Bait

This concept is why link bait captures links, but it can work for all link building. All that a builder must do is work backwards. The desired result is always a link, the builder must decide what emotion is going to achieve this action from their target, create a targeted thought process that will elicit this emotion, and a piece of content that will bring this thought into the targets mind.

A great current example of this is Invesp’s 100 Most Influential Internet Marketers campaign. Their goal is to get links from the top internet marketers in the industry. In order to get that action they want to elicit an emotion of pride. The thought that brings for this feeling is the marketer realizing “I am regarded as one of the top practitioners at what I do.” The initiation point for this is the campaign itself, and the badge that is given to winners to display their pride in the achievement.

This can work for tactics as basic as begging for links. You want the link, and you know one of the most basic desires for all humans to feel is pride, so you need to make the target think that the compliments you bestow on them are so great that the only way to pay back the swelling of pride they feel is with a link. This can be initiated via email, twitter, or even blog comment.

This is obviously a much lower converting tactic as it is hard to get web owners to think your puckering up is anything more than disingenuous.

The crux of this concept is creating a compelling reason for a website owner to take action to link. So often this is what people jumping into link building lose site of. They look at link achievement like a puzzle, “why would anyone link to me”, you have to create the reason, and put it in front of your target in a manner that leads to their voluntary buy in.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

The Psychology Behind Link Giving

Welcome ot another edition of ‘7 Days of Search and Social‘ – I hope you are well and getting well into another week in the trenches. It was a somewhat quiet week out there as far as kick ass blog posts, (although ‘Dave baiting’ is in season) but we did make up for it with a bunch of tools and even some patents of interest. Of course the big news was from the fine folks at the Googleplex with the announcement that personalized search is now default for everyone; logged in or not.

Anyway, let’s get on with it shall we?

Lead Story

Personalized search starts freaking out SEOs

When the news broke on Friday that Google was now personalizing ALL the results, not just those of people that are logged in, started an all-to-familiar echo in my ears. I could hear it already, ‘Rankings are dead’ – ‘Everyone sees a different SERP’ and the like. You can almost visualize the posts and new services that this would bring.

I am here to tell you now, that this isn’t necessarily the case. You see, we recently did some testing (2 rounds actually) and found that it was only a small percentage of the SERPs that would change, and that under only certain circumstances. That part, as far as we know, hasn’t changed any.

I’ve spent a massive amount of time looking into how search engines conduct personalization through implict/explicit user feedback… I know that of which I speak.

For more read my post; SEOs guide to Google Personalized Search - Coverage from Pete Young – Oh, and as expected, SEOs are freaking out (apparently)

Now, let’s get on with it shall we?

Talk of the town

/end SOSG session

‘7 Days of Search and Social’ is a joint effort from Search Engine Journal and the SEO Training Dojo to bring you the latest in SEO and Social Search news. Each week (on Tuesdays) we’ll be posting the highlights of the most recent (SEO Geeks) newsletter here on Search Engine Journal.

Be sure to grab the SEJ feed for the latest or sign up to the SEO Dojo newsletter to get it straight to your inbox.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Weekly Search & Social Coverage: 12/08/09

Welcome ot another edition of ‘7 Days of Search and Social‘ – last week was fairly quiet on most fronts except for the blogosphere which seemed to be churning out the goodiness with no slow down (for the US holiday). My personal fav, of course, was Yahoo’s re-release of the ‘User Sensitive PageRank’ patent (also known as personalized PageRank). This method is used by both Google & Yahoo… here’s some more on Google and Personalized PageRank.

Anyway, let’s get on with it shall we?

Lead Story

One of the more interesting stories last week was the fact that News Corp. is considering blocking Google and working out a (paid) deal with the folks at Microsoft for their various properties. There was plenty of buzz including those that felt it was non-news since Google is the king of the playground.

I think the one thing many folks are missing is the fact that this isn’t about search as much as perception. People have often pointed out that Google is entrenched as a brand. That Bing and Google’s SERPs aren’t that drastically different. This is a public relations boon more than anything. Something to take a slice outta’ the mighty G’s rep dominance.

So I say kudos to them… I am all for seeing some closer competition in the space and with recent (modest) gains in search share for Bing, this news keeps it interesting. Also, as content developers, it should be VERY interesting should the engines actually respect the access to our information. To me this is good development on a few levels…

Here’s some coverage;

News Corp May De-List Themselves From Google & Partner With Microsoft Bing – SE Roundtable
Will Bing Marry News Corp? – SEO Journal
Microsoft-News Corp. Talks: A Marriage Made in Hell? – Search Engine Watch
Could Microsoft-New Corp.’s Deal Mean Sharing Ad Profits? – Media Post (including yours truly)

Talk of the town

Search Geek Central

Search Patents

/end SOSG session

‘7 Days of Search and Social’ is a joint effort from Search Engine Journal and the SEO Training Dojo to bring you the latest in SEO and Social Search news. Each week (on Tuesdays) we’ll be posting the highlights of the most recent (SEO Geeks) newsletter here on Search Engine Journal.

Be sure to grab the SEJ feed for the latest or sign up to the SEO Dojo newsletter to get it straight to your inbox.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Weekly Search & Social News: 12/01/09

Welcome ot another edition of ‘7 Days of Search and Social‘ – I hope you are well and getting well into another week in the trenches. Last week was a particularily busy one in the blogosphere which made it even harder to try and keep the list managable. Even in the world of patents it was a busy one. I sure hope you have your reading caps on because this edition is a HUGE one. As such we’re also not going to have a ‘lead story’ as there is so much to cover and nothing really stood out as the ‘big story’ for me…

Anyway, let’s get on with it shall we?

Talk of the town

Search Geek Central

Search Patents

/end SOSG session

‘7 Days of Search and Social’ is a joint effort from Search Engine Journal and the SEO Training Dojo to bring you the latest in SEO and Social Search news. Each week (on Tuesdays) we’ll be posting the highlights of the most recent (SEO Geeks) newsletter here on Search Engine Journal.

Be sure to grab the SEJ feed for the latest or sign up to the SEO Dojo newsletter to get it straight to your inbox.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Weekly Search & Social Coverage: 11/24/09

Welcome ot another edition of ‘7 Days of Search and Social‘ – I hope you are well and getting well into another week in the trenches. As is the case with most conferences, things were a bit slow out there as the PubCon effect was in full swing. ut have no fear as they’re always good for an announcement or two (Matt had a few interesting ones). Over the last week he spoke about Cafeine going live, page load speed as a ranking factor and the web rchive block as a spam signal (kinda WTF on that one in this corner)

Anyway, let’s get on with it shall we?

Catching a buzz in the new year

This week it was a stand off between Matt Cutts…and well, Matt Cutts, for the story of the week (for me at least). While news of page load speed being a new ranking signal did pique my interest, methinks that news of Cafeine going live in the new year is more comment worthy for the moment.

Here’s the thing, people are always talking about this ranking change, that indexation level change…which has been more than a little irritating. For the more seasoned among us, there is a long list of major named changes that you’ve already been through; some more influential than others.

This is much more relative to the Big Daddy update which was more about infrastructure than search quality really. With this one, it is best to keep in mind that it is mostly about the processing power.

Think about the new signals such as social search, deeper personalization, crawling upgrades, greater spam detection and the like. Any changes we see that affect actual rankings/referrers is to be seen in the near future; ENALED by the upgrade. Don’t start looking for immediate affects…this one will be long term (Matt posted about it here – and for those that missed it, the original Matt interview on it)

Talk of the town

Search Geek Central

Search Patents

/end SOSG session

‘7 Days of Search and Social’ is a joint effort from Search Engine Journal and the SEO Training Dojo to bring you the latest in SEO and Social Search news. Each week (on Tuesdays) we’ll be posting the highlights of the most recent (SEO Geeks) newsletter here on Search Engine Journal.

Be sure to grab the SEJ feed for the latest or sign up to the SEO Dojo newsletter to get it straight to your inbox.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

A week worth of treats for SEO geeks

Why would one want to use a content management system? The major benefits include: (1) the ability to easily create and publish web content with no programming language knowledge required and (2) the ability to connect multiple websites and multiple users under one handy dashboard. With Pixelsilk content management system we have yet another benefit: easily optimize your website for search engines.

No, it is not about SEO automation like you may think: this is about creating clean, SEO-friendly websites – it’s about making the process easier and clearer (even for an absolute newbie), not about automating it.

I had a great time talking to the company representative last week who walked me through the whole process of adding and optimizing web content with Pixelsilk CMS, so I am sharing that experience with you today.

I don’t have huge experience with web-based content management systems (as I normally don’t use any) but I really liked Pixelsilk for the main reasons:

• It is very flexible: enjoy full control over your HTML, CSS, and overall SEO;
• It is really user-friendly and doesn’t take any time to figure it out (so should be easy to get your team work with it).

Here’s a quick feature overview (with some SEO focus of course):

Create new pages

Adding new content is easy and straightforward, I don’t think you will ever need any tutorial to do that. Just click on "Manage Pages" and you will be taken to a handy dashboard where you can add and edit pages with just a few clicks of a mouse:

The editor looks very much like Microsoft Word. From there you can add and edit text:

1. Easily interlink pages (just choose another sub page in the drop down);
2. Easily insert images, slide shows and other media;
3. Easily adjust the font, etc.

You can also create various types of pages with different content structure: for example, articles, lists, press releases, etc:

Change the URL structure:

With just a few clicks of your mouse you can set:

• The actual URL string;
• The URL extension;
• The re-directed URL, etc:

Optimize for keywords

Meta tags and titles optimization

Pixelsilk uses Bruce Clays’ SEO Toolset that provides keyword optimization recommendations:

• Go to "Page information" section (accessed via the admin panel or, in case you are logged in, right from the website public interface);
• Notice a separate block to the right (which says it is powered by SEO Toolset);
• Click the "Keywords" tab to see words suggested to you by the tool based on on-page and competitor research (you can also add any words manually if you want);

• Now click through to "Title", "Meta description" and "Meta keywords" tabs to optimize your site with the keywords:

You will see which words you should optimize for and where you currently stand (compare the "Goals" and "Now" columns):

You can introduce changes right on that same page and see how your SEO improves:

Thus, you have full control over your SEO: following the recommendations (to the desired extent) as well as creating "real" unique and catchy titles and meta descriptions.

Page copy optimization

While creating or editing content via the rich editor, you can click through "Search suggestions" to see how prominent your keywords are within the on-page copy – see if your keywords were used in:

• The body text;
• H1 and H2 tags;
• On-page links:

Pixelsilk for E-commerce

Pixelsilk can integrate with your e-commerce cart to utilize full HTML and URL control for your product pages and categories, all the while managing your product data from only your cart.

Pixelsilk communicates with your e-commerce cart via the open and flexible API, bringing products and categories into Pixelsilk, allowing full control over layout and SEO rendering.

Here are a few of the ecommerce-friendly features you will find inside:

• Streamlined internal/external linking;
• Customized Alt attributes for images;
• XHTML compliant content editor;
• Automatic HTML/XML Sitemaps
• Full HTML control
• Store and site Ongoing Connectivity

Multi-site management (Partner Portal)

This is another feature most of us will love: the Partner Portal saves time with multi-site management from one location. It is an easy way to manage user accounts and site
elements across your client channel.

By assigning a Web site to a particular group, all site assets will be available to that group. In plain English, that means you can leverage your work to any of your clients or new clients with a click of a button.

The Partner
Portal allows you to leverage work to your clients across:

• Design themes;
• Controls and tokens;
• Content page types;
• Images;
• CSS, JavaScript or any system file;
• User access.

External script support

Like I said, Pixelsilk is really flexible: you can easily integrate any popular third-party script or tool, like Google analytics, Twitter, ecommerce cart… you name it:

More useful features

While this post revolves around the SEO tools and options Pixelsilk offers, there are quite a few other cool features you should like:

• Create and generate a sitemap to submit to Google Webmaster Tools and other search engines;
• Add users with different roles: permissions can be on a project level or on page level (allow editors to access only selected pages);
• Add and manage images (upload and organize images in albums as well as edit images on the fly by changing the size or cropping them):

Our verdict

Pixelsilk can make the process of creating websites much easier: it allows to save much time developing and optimizing websites, managing clients’ projects and distributing tasks among your team members.

What do you think?

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Pixelsilk: SEO-Friendly Content Management System

How are we this week my fine SEO geeks and phreaks.. last week was a pretty busy one out in the search blogosphere. Lots of great search stuff including another look at microformats and RDFa, some interesting patents and even an announcement here on SEJ for the new tools be offered in conjunction with the gang at Raven SEO tools (a newsletter sponsor no less). A lot of folks are at PubCon this week, for those of you that aren’t…. we have a TON of great reading to keep you busy…

So let’s get it on shall we?

Lead Story

Start thinking semantics!

OK, admittedly there is no real ‘lead story’ this week as no one theme really jumped out. That being said, there were a few posts that lead to some good discussions for me…so let’s go there. Microformats and RDF….

So far we have a few elements that might make these more interesting in the near future…

• Geo targeting; as the value of granular geo/local/international increases, microformats are sure to start playing some role (even if limited)

• Rich Snippets – is another area to be looking at especially for those longer tail queries where these tend to be utilized. The snippet is a factor of a healthy SERP CTR… another important consideration

• Images – can also be considered as far as geo-tagging etc … While not a major factor, it is another area I can see these becoming more and more important

• Social – is the last link in the chain as Google (and other engines?) start looking more and more at our social network connections. This is another area that microformats will come in handy.

We can safely assume that the semantic web is (finally) becoming a value worth considering (and good webmastering too!). If you don’t use it… you should at very least learn more about it? M’kay?

Let’s roll….

/end SOSG session

‘7 Days of Search and Social’ is a joint effort from Search Engine Journal and the SEO Training Dojo to bring you the latest in SEO and Social Search news. Each week (on Tuesdays) we’ll be posting the highlights of the most recent (SEO Geeks) newsletter here on Search Engine Journal.

Be sure to grab the SEJ feed for the latest or sign up to the SEO Dojo newsletter to get it straight to your inbox.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

7 Days of Search and Social; the ultimate update

It’s been another week in the trenches and while it may have been a little slow out there, we did have some big news with Google Social Search. Question remains, will it really be a game changer or just another vertical? And what the SEO community lacked in activity, we did come across more IR geekiness, which makes this old horse a happy camper. We’ve also got a few interesting patents and more…

I hope this edition finds you well… Enjoy!

Lead Story

When the news broke last week of Google’s Social Search going live, I thought, ‘this has got to be the big story of the week’. At the end of the day I’d say, maybe/maybe not. What we do know is that Google is once more looking to ‘get social’ and there is certainly interest. The part that isn’t as clear, much like Search/Side Wiki before it, is the level of adoption.

As a fella that has been following Google’s personalization/social trail the last few years, it was an interesting development. The burning question is always, “what effect will it have on SEO?”. There were those that said personalization would mean a massive change in what we do, that too, was a bit of an ambitious assertion.

Unless there are wholesale changes to its current implementation, I can’t see this being a game changer. Yes, it will likely present a new vertical with new opportunities, but beyond that it would seem this development will be limited in its effect on us.

Here’s a ton of coverage for you;

My own review!

Google;

• Introducing Google Social Search
• Support Info

Usual Suspects;

• Read Write Web
• Search Engine Land
• The Noisy Channel
• BlogStorm
• Bruce Clay

Now let’s get on with the rest of this week’s search goodiness shall we?

Buzz Bin

Search Geek Central

Search Patents

/end SOSG session

‘7 Days of Search and Social’ is a joint effort from Search Engine Journal and the SEO Training Dojo to bring you the latest in SEO and Social Search news. Each week (on Tuesdays) we’ll be posting the highlights of the most recent (SEO Geeks) newsletter here on Search Engine Journal.

Be sure to grab the SEJ feed for the latest or sign up to the SEO Dojo newsletter to get it straight to your inbox.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Search Geek Weekly News Update; Google Social Search & More