Search practitioners have to deal with everything from social media and mobile to local search and video optimisation, notes Econsultancy senior research analyst Jake Hird.

The boundaries of SEO as a digital discipline are “blurring”, say the guide’s authors, who claim that the technical distinctions between different digital disciplines are becoming less relevant.

In addition, the report notes that SEO strategies have to be tailored to the linguistic and cultural “nuances” of foreign countries. “Simple translation is not sufficient in SEO when entering new markets,” it states.

The guide also highlights the dominance of Google, which accounts for 90 per cent of search queries. This means any changes made by the firm to the way its search engine works will have a “significant impact” on SEO strategies.

Why search engines go social?
There is many reasons for search engines to become more social. You know why?

• The major reasons is to be able to show users what they like and want to see. If users tell search engines manually what they like, it’s possible for Google to be more accurate with what they show.
• People like to interact with content. They already do it with Facebook likes, so why not with Google +1?

What do you think about Google’s latest move to go social? Should they continue to become more open and let people click what they like, or should search results be algorithmically driven?

• Analysing SEO: What to do when starting out with website optimisation.
• On-Page SEO: How you optimise your sites, creating proper headlines, titles and content.
• Link building: A complete overview of all steps and types of links.
• Tracking SEO: Read about how to measure and track your latest SEO efforts.

I find this new London SEO company doing a good job with their education of potential clients and recommend you have a look at their website, www.seospecialist.co.uk. Few, if any other SEO firms, can offer such an advanced British guide to search engine optimisation.

Advice on improving link popularity is usually lumped in with general search engine optimisation, and is sketchy to say the least. The importance of links to the Internet, and how to improve link popularity scores is a highly specialized subject that deserves debate in its own right. Below I have provided a broad introduction to the subject, which I have condensed into nine essential points. This list of link popularity do’s and don’ts cover everything a Webmaster should know in order to achieve greater search engine rankings.

1. Set aside an hour a week to search for out sites related to your own (non-competitive of course) and request a link. You’d be surprised how many Webmasters will be more than happy to do this — even big sites. Try to get the link included within some text about your site. Be cheeky and suggest the text in a reply e-mail, making sure to include your most important keywords. Many Webmasters will use this text instead of taking the time to write their own summary. Find possible sites by using the same keywords you that describe your site. The search engines already consider these sites to be important, and a link from them will gain more credit than from other sites.

2. If applicable, join a Web ring of associated sites. Services such as Webring (http://www.webring.org) allow you to join groups of related sites. If you have any other domains, link them together with a descriptive link.

3. Dedicate areas of your site for outbound links, which are also an important factor in calculating link popularity. Link to high-quality, related sites. Pick some that are highly ranked for your particular keywords. You might wonder why you should add to their popularity, but believe me when I say you will benefit more from the relationship.

4. If possible get a listing on the big directories, namely Yahoo!, LookSmart and the Open Directory. These listings will significantly boost link popularity.

5. Submit your site to crawler-based search engines after you have secured links on other sites and directories. This will help to boost your popularity score.

6. Avoid link popularity software programs. AltaVista and Google are publicly trying to blacklist any site using such programs. If you do decide to use them, check them out first. Ask them what the major search engines think and doublecheck their answers with the search engines themselves.

7. Be skeptical if an SEO company offers to improve your link popularity. Ask them how they will achieve this, bearing in mind all of the points outlined here. Will they carefully research your market and request the addition of links on related sites? Will they use link farms (either third party or their own)? Or will they use a standardized link page?

8. Be wary of search engine submission services that offer to submit your site to thousands of search sites. There are only a hundred or so search engines worth being listed on at the most. Most of the others will be link farms that could act negatively on your link popularity score.

9. Use crawler-based search engines and specific sites such as www.linkpopularity.com to carefully monitor who is linking to your site, and the quality of those links. If you think the text surrounding a link could be improved, try suggesting it in a tactful e-mail. If a link is negative, politely ask for its removal.

You need to be as interested in how your site connects to others as you are in what’s actually on the site itself. The Internet was founded on the linking of related information, and this remains the lifeblood of the modern World Wide Web. Cultivate your links, and in doing so you will carve a place for your site on the Internet. Imagine there are no search engines, and that visitors will only find your site through referrals from other sites. If you learn to see Web site marketing in this light, then you have truly unearthed the secret of link popularity and your search engine positioning will be massively improved.

Paul Fisher is thefounder of Traffikka.com and is head of search engine research. Traffikka.com advises many major U.K. companies on search engine marketing. The company provides complete search engine optimisation, submission and reporting packages for all sized businesses and Web sites.

So, let’s look at this interview with Jim, and learn more about Ask Jeeves and their relatively new search engine on the block, Teoma.

As Vice President of Product Management, Jim overseas the strategy, Web design, and product development for all of Ask Jeeves’ properties, including Ask.com, Teoma, and Ask Jeeves for Kids at AJKids.com. Ask Jeeves is a top twenty Web property and is among the most recognized Internet brands worldwide.

Jim began by giving some background information about Ask Jeeves and Teoma.
“Ask Jeeves is one of the leading search engines on the Web, with more than 16 million unique users per month. We also recently launched a new search engine called Teoma (Gaelic for “expert,” in case you were wondering).

“Both Ask.com and Teoma.com are powered by Teoma’s search technology.The difference between the two sites lies in the design and the features.
“Here’s an easy way to think about it: Ask is for `Passengers’ (people who want help searching) and Teoma.com is for `Drivers’ (people who don’t).

“Our company makes money by serving advertisements that are triggered by the searches people conduct on our sites. There are three main types of advertisements: Graphical (e.g., banner ads), Paid Placement (Sponsored Links), and a new program called “Paid Inclusion” (pay to be entered into our search index).”

Is free submission still an option?

Question: Can you still submit to Ask Jeeves if you have a site that answers questions, like we have been able to do in the past for free, or do you have to go through pay inclusion to get into either index?

Jim: “Well, yes, if you want to submit, you need to pay. It takes special attention, and therefore resources, for us to take a site rather than simply crawl the Web as usual. But there are special benefits to paying!

“Our editorial staff is much smaller than the old days, and the `questions’ for Jeeves (what we call the `Knowledge Base’ internally) are not emphasized as much as they used to be, so the exposure will be more limited…and it may take our editors quite a while to get to your site.”

So, you can still submit your site to Ask Jeeves for free, but it will probably take a while for your site to make it into the index.

Jim: “For the search index, there is no free submit (for Teoma).”

Question: Compared to, for example, the free add URL in Google, the one for Ask Jeeves makes you jump through hoops.

Jim: “That’s because it’s quite an old program that was developed for our editors to review.”
Remember that Ask Jeeves was established to answer questions, so you have to “prove” that your site does, in fact, very effectively answer the question you’re going after – which is a lot more detailed than a simple submission at Google.

What about pay inclusion?

If you submit to Ask Jeeves’ and Teoma’s pay inclusion program, your site will get visibility at both sites. The pay inclusion program is now out of beta, so the subscription period is 12 months.

Benefits of their pay inclusion program include:

* Your page will be indexed within 7 days.
* Your page will be refreshed every 7 days.
* Your page remains in the index for 12 months.

Cost?

$30 for the first URL, and $18 each for 2 through 1000 URL’s. For larger numbers of pages, you can use their batch processing facility. Visit http://ask.ineedhits.com/ for more information.

Question: The Direct Hit site has been taken down, and traffic is being redirected to Teoma. What about the Direct Hit results that were being shown in engines like HotBot? Are those now Teoma results?

Jim: “Yes, we still have Direct Hit on HotBot, as well as BellSouth and InfoSpace.
DirectHit.com is redirected to Teoma. But some partners still have the old DH “pop” (popularity) results. MSN still has the Direct Hit results.

“We will be merging pop into the Teoma technology sometime in the near future, but some partners still want it as a “one-off,” and we are open to providing it.”

Question: Teoma does crawl sites on its own? Is that correct?

Jim: “Yes, that’s correct. Its index is currently featured on both Ask.com and Teoma.com.”

Question: A Web site with good link popularity then would not need the Ask Jeeves/Teoma paid inclusion program?

Jim: “For a major site, that is probably true. However, for smaller sites, or sites that refresh their content frequently (or have many dynamic pages that are difficult for search engines to crawl), paid inclusion is still a great option if you really want the traffic. Paid inclusion sites are spidered weekly. Other sites are spidered monthly, currently.”

Question: When paying for inclusion for Ask Jeeves and Teoma, are the results shared with other partners? If so who?

Jim: “Currently, no. However, we’re aggressively pursuing partnerships that will extend our reach considerably. Not able to say who just yet, but the usual suspects.”

Robin Nobles, Director of Training, Academy of Web Specialists,

(http://www.academywebspecialists.com) has trained several thousand people in her online search engine marketing courses (http://www.onlinewebtraining.com) and is the content provider for (GRSeo) Search Engine Optimizer software (http://www.se-optimizer.com).

She also teaches 3-day hands on search engine marketing workshops in locations across the globe with Search Engine Workshops
(http://www.searchengineworkshops.com).

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Search Engine Optimisation or SEO as it is generally named, helps web masters to increase the number of visitors to their web site. They optimize a web site in order to have it positioned in the top 10 of a search engine result page.

“The logic is simple,” says Peter Faber of www.seo-works.com: “A web site that ranks in the top 10 for its important keyword phrases, receives many visitors per day, a web site that doesn’t rank high, struggles to make money.”

According to Mike Pass of www.increaseranking.com SEO is an essential part of any home business: “With the search engines being one of primary sources of targeted traffic on the internet, search engine optimization should be an essential part of any home based internet marketing strategy. A knowledgeable search engine optimizer can be your best source of a positive ROI.” (Return On Investment)

Good SEO firms and consultants know that just high rankings isn’t enough to be successful on the internet and will often advise web masters to improve their web sites as a total, and to go for more than just for the good positions in the search engines.

Leann Pass of www.leannsdesigns.com explains: “Targeted traffic that doesn’t convert to sales is worthless. Website design can literally make or break a sale. Visual appeal and ease of navigation are necessities. Present a poorly designed site and your targeted traffic will become your competitor’s customer.”

There are many SEO firms and consultants that practice unethical SEO. Methods that are against the Terms Of Service (TOS) of most of the major search engines like Google are not appreciated because they reduce the quality of the results of a search engine. Something that is very important for every search engine.

Google’s TOS for instance, shows that unethical SEO practices are not allowed. Their systems try to identify web sites that do make use of unethical practices and punishment in the form of lower positions or even being banned are a risk that every web master takes with these practices.

Ethical SEO takes a bit more time but can give great ROI.

Article by:
Peter Faber
Internet Marketing Consultant
Search Engine Optimization
www.seo-works.com

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What is a Trusted Feed?
Everyone is used to the idea of search engines crawling web pages. However, certain situations can arise when there is simply no web page to crawl – or the dynamic URLs that certain scripts employ mean that URLs are blocking or inhibiting spiders from crawling them fully.

A typical example of this may be on a travel site. The site may consist simply of a search form with drop down menus on the front page. Into this search form the surfer may select a departure point (say – London), a destination (Florida) and a time period (December). When the enter button is hit, a dynamic page is produced from items currently in the agent’s database which includes a list of vacations or flights applicable to the surfer’s needs. It is impossible for this individual page to have been crawled as it has been created from data applicable only on the day of the search. This means that if the surfer had looked for “flights london florida december” on a search engine, it would have been impossible for this particular website to appear in the results, unless they had specifically produced a static page including the information required.

Trusted Feeds overcome this problem. A Feed provider may give an XML file, spreadsheet or text file to the search engine that will accept the feed with the following information:

Title to appear in the search results – “Cheap Flights from London to Florida in December”.

Description to appear in the search results – “MakeMeTop Travel has cheap flights from London to Florida in December. Check the latest deals online.”

5 Key phrases to be taken into consideration.

The URL to be displayed in the search results.

A tracking URL (if required) through which the surfer will be redirected.

The actual destination URL or page created by completing the search parameters (in this example). If static, this page may be spidered by the inclusion spiders to verify the feed data.

200 words of text to cover the content of the destination page. Lay out should be informative and descriptive of the actual content seen by the surfer when they arrive on the destination page.

This, then, is the information that is given to the search engine and it is this content that is taken into consideration for ranking purposes. In the above example, you may have hundreds (if not thousands) of permutations of pages. Traditional methods of optimizing these pages are possible, but could be a very lengthy process, with pages having to be added and removed depending on the requirements of the website. Even if the work were carried out, it may take many months for these thousands of pages to be indexed – and by that time, they may be out of date!

If, in order to get fast indexing, PFI (paid inclusion) is considered, this could be very expensive – with a fixed annual cost per page. With Feeds, you pay only when someone clicks on a search result. No click-throughs, no fee (though you may have to pay for feed construction and optimization).

With Trusted Feeds, URLs can be added and deleted almost instantly – with no changes having to be made to the structure of the client site – just to the feed data. Oh, and you can target specific geographical areas (in some instances) too.

All-in-all then, Trusted Feeds were designed as a method of allowing large database driven sites with deep, non-spiderable content to obtain listings that were specific to the data included within these sites.

Separate the Facts from Fiction!

Like all technology, there is the possibility of abuse. Search engines do trust providers to give them accurate information and route surfers to the deep content page on which that information exists. However, when feeds first started, some providers bent these rules and routed multiple listings to the same (often the home) page of the target site. Within a relatively short time (about a year) the rules were tightened – but many people still believe that Feeds are just legal “doorway” pages. In fact, if a search engine finds a feed doing same page redirects, it will drop the feed! Spam rules are (if anything) tighter on feed data than on standard results. All feeds are checked pretty strictly (and randomly) for relevance!

Many people believe that feeds are just used when a site has a large number of pages and don’t want to change site content. Although this can be a legitimate use of a feed – it is easy to convince a client that they are probably better off in the long term optimizing these pages. Most clients who want feeds need them due to the fact that their pages are created dynamically from input data. As such there are often no pages to optimize – feed mechanisms are a highly effective way of providing an alternative to having to create thousands of static pages.

In the case of where a site doesn’t want to change content, it is true that Feeds can be viewed as approved “cloaking”. The surfer doesn’t see the content provided to the search engine spider. However, in the case of my second example, there is no content that can be presented to a spider and the descriptive text in the feed is for the provider to accurately reflect the data that the surfer is going to see when they visit that page. Failure to do this would be grounds for the search engine to pull the entire feed! Is it cloaking? Well – maybe according to your definition of the term. Is it deceptive – absolutely not!

Conclusion
Trusted Feeds are accepted by all leading search engines with the exception of Google (currently). As more and more companies become aware of the power of search engine marketing, so the demand to get all their content indexed will increase. Trusted Feeds are another indication of the commercialization of search by which search engines are seeking a trade-off of mutual benefit to both feed users, through having their content indexed properly, and engines whom earn revenue from the indexing. Clients have the option to spend large sums on site redesign or can see what the results of successful optimization can do on their site through the use of a well set-up feed. However, prolonged use of feeds can be expensive – and in many instances we see clients realising that they could save money if they created/optimized pages for specific queries that are getting a lot of hits and put these pages into “standard” inclusion – where they pay nothing per click.

So Trusted Feeds, like use of PPC engines, AdWords from Google, LookSmart CPC listings, standard Paid Inclusion and natural spidering, should be considered as part of the repertoire of facilities available to search engine marketers. In some situations, it can be the fastest and most cost-effective way for a website to get significant results across a broad spectrum of search portals. But, for the smaller site, it probably is not worth considering.

Do they drive relevant traffic? Yes, by the bucket load! Otherwise, why would anyone use them?
Trusted Feeds are available for AltaVista, AllTheWeb, Ask Jeeves/Teoma and Inktomi plus several other smaller engines. Feeds can be arranged directly with search engines or via their partners. Optimization of feeds and submission is often done by optimization specialists in conjunction with the search engines or their submission partners.

So, is yesterday’s spam today’s Trusted Feed? I don’t believe so. But it is a very different way to get content listed from “traditional” free SEO methods. Ignoring the technology is not, in my opinion, an option. Understanding it properly and then being able to decide on its’ usefulness in individual situations adds benefit to every professional search engine marketer’s repertoire! Hopefully, this introduction will spark some rational debat

Article by Barry Lloyd, CEO of MakeMeTop
Barry Lloyd founded the MakeMeTop brand of SEO services in 1999 although he began search engine optimisation in 1997. Barry posts on several forums as a Senior or Veteran Member under the name MakeMeTop, is a Moderator on the IHelpYouServices Forums, has spoken at leading conferences on various aspects of search engine marketing and has written articles on specific aspects of the industry for webmasters world-wide. MakeMeTop now has offices in Northern Ireland, mainland UK and Singapore and does search engine marketing for over 200 clients throughout the World www.makemetop.co.uk

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1. Presold Customers
When someone searches on the Internet they search because they are already interested in something. All a search engine listing has to do is rank in the top 20 and then explain what your site/page contains. SEM is about making yourself easy to find for the products and services you sell – the audience is already looking for you, not the other way round. But as direct marketers would argue, copy sells – so your descriptions need to be good enough to bring on the clicks.

2. Size Doesn’t Matter
You may be a small corner shop with a web site that sells blue widgets and your competition could be the huge ‘Widgets R Us’. You don’t stand a chance competing on TV, billboards, print, etc because of the cost. But you CAN compete and win on search engines. SEM is cost effective, with many companies offering SEM services for a wide selection of budgets. Search engines rank pages on their relevance, not on the size of last year’s net profit or number of employees.

3. Measurable From your web site statistics you can find out which search engine has provided the most visitors, the fewest visitors, what search terms were used, what country they visited from and a whole lot more. This provides valuable feedback on the performance of the SEM campaign and allows you to change approaches as necessary. For example, MSN.com may not be worth spending as much time on as FAST, 'uk blue widgets' may be your most successful phrase so you should set up a separate landing page on 'uk blue widgets' - there's no offline marketing medium that gives you this kind of precise data.