It looks like Google is changing its priorities. This is evidenced by the placement of “Products” on its menu bar at the time of the search page and the movement of “Videos” to the drop down menu where the other, less important links are. I think there are two primary reasons why Google would make this change.

First, since purchasing YouTube, Google Video is not really necessarily. Many of us in the Internet marketing realm have wondered why the search engine doesn’t just roll Google Video into the more popular YouTube product and merge the two into one. No need to promote video services when the majority of video uploaders head to YouTube anyway.

The second reason I think Google made this change is even more significant. It’s a realization that eCommerce is here to stay and the fact that Google now allows users to search for Products, and in fact encourages them do so with this link in a more prominent location, is to give everyone who sells any product online a bit more legitimacy. Of course, recent changes in the paid links policy at Google has met with some backtalk from many SEOs who have criticized the policy and accused Google of not caring for people who are online to make money. This move seems to indicate otherwise.

Google is clearly not anti-commerce. I think their main concern is creating a fair playing field for all businesses and websites at various levels and stages of development. Google Products makes it easier for online retailers to market their products to the right markets. Now if we can just get them to include this vertical search in its Universal Search platform then consumers who look for the same or similar products often can have a personalized marketplace of trust websites that will make shopping easier for them.

Almost anyone that sets up a website knows that the domain name is important. But when naming a website some people cannot come up with a one word domain name. The first thought was how to separate the keywords<, or should it just be run together. Well the answer is it should not be all run together. Running words together just confuses the search engines, yes a silly as they seem at times they do know that cutekittens.com is not a real word. So then what do you do?

Well in recent months the search engines helped everyone out. The search engines in the past only saw a dash as a word separator. So in order for cutekittens.com to make any sense to them it had to be registered as cute-kittens.com; register cutekittens.com or cute_kittens.com and the engines saw it as one word and would not compute what that word was. Ok so only the dashes worded for the search engines, but it was not pleasing to the human reader. People have a tendency to over look the dash and still see only one word that did not make sense to them. Now we have the option of including the underscore; now when looking at the domain name underlined it makes perfect sense to all.

The same thing holds true for file or page names can utilize the same tricks. Put that underscore in and make the urls make sense to both the search engines and the human reader.

Aaron Wall, like a lot of SEOs, is upset about Google’s new paid links policy. So he posted a very well-thought out post on the state of SEO at Blogoscoped that also included some harsh statements for Google. Matt Cutts responded on his blog with a poll, asking readers if he should respond or not That was November 14.

On November 19, after several other people weighed in, Cutts enlightened the universe with his take on the real issue:

My takeaway advice for anyone in a similar situation is “Don’t mix your blackhat networks with your whitehat sites.”

I for one appreciate this response. While I don’t always agree with Google’s policies, I do want my websites to indexed by the search engine. Therefore, I try to follow its policies or risk being de-indexed. This just makes sense. If you do have blackhat websites, or websites that you promote using blackhat techniques, then keep them separate from your other websites. That way, if you get penalized on your blackhat websites then your whitehat sites won’t get penalized. I can’t argue with good old-fashioned common sense.

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• Search Engine Optimization
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Search Marketing Standard doesn’t just deliver the latest information on these topics, but the best information. That’s why I’ve decided to partner with them and do not mind recommending them to my readers. This is not a paid review. I really believe the Search Marketing Standard is a great magazine for any professional performing search engine marketing, for themselves or for someone else, and that’s why I subscribe.

Google PageRank is back in the news again. This time it’s from Titus Hoskins on SiteProNews. Unfortunately, he believes the same myth so many other people believe, and it’s all about Google. Thing is, as an Internet marketer, he should know better. Here’s the myth:

Free organic traffic from Google is vital to any online site or business. I would take traffic from Google over any other source of traffic on the web, except for traffic coming from my articles on other sites, and even that traffic probably originated from a search in Google.

You see? It’s all about Google. Not.

The myth that you need Google traffic to survive is perhaps the biggest myth about Internet marketing. It just isn’t true. You can build a website and never get traffic from Google and still survive. As long as you have a steady flow of targeted traffic from two out of three of the other top four search engines then you’ll do fine. Just look at the numbers:

From Hitwise, reflective of numbers in March 2007 …

• Google = 64.13%
• Yahoo = 21.26%
• MSN Live = 9.15%
• Ask = 3.48%

How many billions of searches do you think take place every day? This survey is take from a sample of 10 million searchers in March 2007. 21.26% of 10 million equals 2,126,000 - more than 2 million. This is just a small sampling of the number of people making searches every month and it’s just from one month. Multiply that number by 12 and you get 24 million searches in one year. Again, that’s just a fraction of actual searches taking place on Yahoo. If you appeared in .25% of those searches - a small fraction of the total searches at Yahoo in one year - you’d still appear in 60,000 SERPs. Let’s say only 10% of the people who view those SERPs clicked through to your website - 6,000 new visitors every year. Add that to the people who have you bookmarked and visit your website regularly. Convert 1% of those to sales at an average of $10 per customer and you’ve made $600 extra dollars. Again, that’s just a small fraction of Yahoo traffic.

Every year, traffic online increases. Most people new to the Internet have their home page defaults set at Yahoo, MSN, or AOL, and they don’t change them. That extra $600 you made from organic search at Yahoo, consider a PPC campaign and add another $2,000 to that. Then add a sponsored search drive and another $2,000 in revenue. Now you’re up to $4,600 new revenue this year just from one search engine. This is over and above what you are making with repeat business. Now add half that revenue from MSN Live and half it again from Ask.com. That’s a total of $8,050 new business, over and above the business your repeat customers bring you - in one year. Now increase that a measly 5% each year representing a growth of new business added to the amount of repeat business you get each year. Seeing the picture?

Are these figures realistic? I don’t know. I don’t know how you run your business. But I do know there are lots of people making money - more money than this - from search engines other than Google. All you need is a solid business plan and the ability to work it until it works. You don’t need Google, but it’s nice to have them on your side.

Jordan McCollum made a brilliant post earlier today at Marketing Pilgrim regarding the topic of relevance. Just a few things stand out about her blog post that I’d like to respond to.

I think that relevance cannot be a selling point for a search engine, and not just because Live’s update was just catching them up to the level of many other popular search engines. In fact, I think that it’s hard for any of us to truly evaluate “relevance” in results.

Before getting into the meet of relevance, I’d like to just say that Jordan is right. It is difficult to evaluate relevance for several reasons, which she so aptly points out. In a nutshell:

• It’s a subjective term; what’s relevant for one searcher may not be for another
• Certain terms can be interpreted in several ways, many of which could be unrelevant relative to each other
• Sometimes a certain search term may not be sensible to the search engine
• Sometimes a certain search term may be nonsensical in any sense
• Due to some improvements like Google Universal and Ask 3D, some search results may be entirely irrelevant
• Personalization hasn’t really helped, and may never help, because we all have varied enough interests that narrowing down search interests could be an impossible task

First and probably foremost, search engines try (as much any computer can “try”) to understand user intent, but they aren’t all that great at it.

This truth is a source of discomfort for some people, but it’s always been the case. Google rose to prominence primarily because the search engine was better at returning relevant results than all the others. But in 1999 there were much fewer web pages to search out for the best results and quite a bit fewer searchers entering search queries. The algorithms had a lot less work to do. The possibilities have expanded far beyond anyone’s imagination and have proliferated way out of control.

But even personalized systems aren’t perfect. Yesterday, perhaps I was looking for flatware; today, I might be researching New York Indian tribes. Tomorrow, religious collective movements. This is part of the reason why there is a limit to how personalized Google has made its personalized results.

And I’d add this caveat: The more searches any one searcher performs, the more difficult it will be for Google to discern search patterns. A journalist, for instance, who queries on a lot of different topics may never get truly personalized results. A search today for turkey with regard to information on recipes that involve the bird and one tomorrow on the demographics of the country Turkey will undoubtedly send mixed signals to Google regarding personal intent.

A site could be totally on-point for my query, but if it requires me to register, forces music upon me, features a horrific amount of ads or is simply completely illegible, I won’t be able to consider it “relevant.” (And I will run far, far away.)

And some of us will run farther than others.

But there is a place for nonsense in the real world—and a place for Braeburns on a SERP, even if that wasn’t what you were looking for. It might be exactly what someone else wanted.

Quite frankly, this is where most searchers need to be educated. We can blame the search engines all day long for not returning relevant results, but sometimes it is the searcher’s fault. If you want information on Braeburns then you need to query Braeburns, not apples. If you want more generic information on apples and don’t care about specific types or brands of apple then “apples” as a search query is fine. Just because the search engine didn’t return the type of results you weren’t looking for doesn’t mean the results are irrelevant. It may mean your query was irrelevant.

If you are just getting started on your SEO efforts to promote your Christmas, you are likely too late. It takes at least 30 days, and many times up to 60 days, before new web pages appear in search engine SERPs. If you have a brand new website then you could end up in Google’s supplemental pages for up to six months. That means your Christmas promotions should have begun in the summer.

I don’t necessarily mean your Christmas-only promotions, but I am talking about promoting your website in the general sense. If you are gearing up for the holiday season, you should start your SEO promotions at least 60 days in advance and preferably 90 days. If your website is brand new and you are starting off with Christmas promotions then I’d suggest you add another 90 days onto that. That first 90 days should be spent building your SEO brand. Then once you are out of the supplementals you can focus on the Christmas holidays.

If you are late, don’t worry. Start now building your brand (for new websites). If you have a blog then you can promote your Christmas specials there. Blogs have a way of getting indexed faster than web pages so it makes sense to focus your efforts, this late in the game, on your company blog and use it to drive traffic to your Christmas specials pages of your website. Otherwise, start thinking about Valentine’s Day.

Does your 404 Not Found page help your visitors or irritate them? You will undoubtedly come across unhappy visitors to your website from time to time. It’s a part of business. And 404 Not Found pages are supposed to help visitors who couldn’t find the web page that they were hoping to find. You don’t want your 404 Not Found page just being a blank page or some useless error message that will send your visitors elsewhere cussing and spittering and sputtering like a rusty wheel.

If your website sits on an Apache web server then you can simply update your .htaccess file and customize your 404 Not Found page. Open you .htaccess file and add this phrase to the file:

ErrorDocument 404 /notfound.html

This creates your 404 Not Found page. If you don’t already have a notfound.html file then you’ll need to create one of them as well and put it in the root directory of your web site. If you don’t have an .htaccess file then you’ll need to create one of them and all you need to do is open a blank Notepad file to do so.

If all you have is a blank page that says 404 Not Found then your visitors will hit the back button and never return. To prevent that from happening, you need to help them find the web page they were looking for. Here are some things you can put into your notfound.html file to help your visitors.

1. Make your 404 Not Found page look like any other web page on your website by enclosing in your website template and having your menu bar in its usual location
2. A sitemap link so that visitors can see all the web pages on your website
3. If you’ve created a customized search engine or you have a search function for your website then put a search box on your 404 Not Found page
4. A list of frequently mistyped URLs and their correct locations

Anything that will help your visitors find what they are looking for should go onto your 404 Not Found page. Otherwise, your visitors will leave and not come back.

Scott Buresh at Medium Blue wrote a piece on Google’s pay per click services and whether or not they influence search results. It’s very interesting and enlightening article. Just a few tidbits are reprinted below:

It has long been rumored that Google will offer technical assistance in achieving better organic search engine placement to those who spend more for paid search results. I know for certain that these rumors are true in at least two instances. In fact, I actually have the minutes from one of these technical assistance meetings after the company met with Google engineers.

If this is true then it is certainly proof that Google does allow big spenders in its pay per click program to have access to the best information on search engine rankings. Is that fair? Google has long maintained that this doesn’t happen. Is it just a matter of time before rumors become an open secret that everyone talks about - the elephant in the room?

Unfortunately, this reality leaves an advertiser with a small budget for paid search at a disadvantage. If Google is willing to offer this secret perk to larger advertisers now, what might they do in the future? Offer price breaks to larger paid search spenders? Increase the minimum monthly spend to squeeze out smaller companies and please the larger ones? It certainly has the potential to become a slippery slope, and I am interested to see where it goes next.

So am I. Google should keep in mind that the same people who made it rise to the top of the search engine pile can also bring it down. In those days, Google’s popularity was powered by great search tools. If it ever becomes known that it is powered more by money than by search improvement then users without money but with tons of knowledge will go elsewhere. Other search engines are already getting a reputation for beating Google in some search areas (Ask.com, for instance). If Google thinks its current corner on the market is secure, they’d better think again.

I simply believe that they have played the underdog, anti-corporate card for too long, and that even if it has not outlived its usefulness, it has outlived its truthfulness. Google is now a huge multinational corporation that answers to its shareholders. To pretend anything otherwise is silly, but it seems that, for now at least, the charade will continue.

There’s no sense in pretending to be something they’re not. Google is a public company and they must answer to their shareholders. That is true. Oftentimes, as we have seen in the corporate world, shareholder interests are counter to the interests of customers or the public at large. Can Google balance those interests successfully? If not, don’t they think the rest of ought to know?

I was reading a post on the blog of a popular SEO website from 2004. A reader sent a question to the blogger asking about the future of SEO. I found it interesting that the question centered primarily on organic SEO vs. PPC. In 2004, pay per click advertising was still relatively new and organic SEO was quite a bit different than it is today. But the question asked by the reader was, “My concern is that with everyone seemingly wanting to fatten their wallets with paid inclusion and PPC, that the search engines will drop the regular spidering and go with advertising. Will the Internet community “allow” for this to happen and just go along with it?”

I like the answer that was given by the blogger then. It’s not much different than the way I would answer the same question today. In a word, the gist of the answer was that search engine optimization is more challenging now than it used to be. In the old days, if you didn’t rank well in one search engine then you had several other search engines that you were likely to rank well in and you’d still get the traffic that you wanted. Today, almost everyone is focused on the Big Four. This limits SEOs a bit because the bigger search engines, with a few differences, primarily rank websites pretty closely to the same criteria. Again, there are slight variations, but the similarities are noticeable.

On top of that, pay per click advertising is getting more expensive. There are some keywords in Google, for instance, that will cost you $5.00 to get a respectable placement for. If you are new and just starting out then you probably have a small budget and can’t afford to pay that much for advertising. So there are now barriers to entry that were not present in SEO and PPC just a few years ago. And even if you do real well at organic SEO and/or PPC, if your website is really bad and doesn’t make the conversion then you won’t make any money. So there is a lot to think about.

To answer the question, what of the future of SEO? Will it become obsolete? Will PPC replace organic SEO? No. I think if that were to happen then we’d have already seen it. I think today the main thing to worry about is how semantic search will change SEO. No one has yet come out with a popular version of true semantic search such that keywords would no longer be the focus. If search were truly semantic then keyword-optimized web pages and PPC ads would no longer be necessary. There may be a day when that is the case, but as of now you still need to optimize your web pages and your ad campaigns according to traditional SEO strategies. In some sense, though, search engines will always be a necessary component of SEO, no matter how it is done in the future.

TechCrunch has lost its PageRank. Duncan Riley explains why.

What it all boils down to is Google doesn’t like sponsored posts at all. Even if you don’t take money for your sponsored posts, Google could penalize you by taking away your PageRank just for saying that a post is sponsored. There are two ways to prevent this from happening.

The first way is to make your statement of adoration toward your sponsors a .jpg file. At this time, none of the search engines can crawl images so it will be safe for awhile. But there is no guarantee that this won’t change in the future.

A better way to protect your PageRank is to include the “nofollow” tag in all of your sponsored links. If you must mention that your blog posts are sponsored, even if you don’t take money for them directly, then be smart about it and put the “nofollow” tag in place. Otherwise, just don’t mention that your blog posts are sponsored. Just don’t mention it.

Aaron Wall recently wrote a great post on linkbait and suggests that it’s not as valuable as it once was. He recommends, instead, that modern marketers build a brand. It’s slower, but more reliable, he says.

I’m all for website branding. You know that. But I’d like to take a minute to really analyze what Aaron is saying here. First, an excerpt:

Outside of those risks, most people coming to your site from linkbait have a fly-like memory. One visit, one pageview, and they are gone forever. If you are selling branded CPM ads good news for you, but otherwise there is no value.

The potential upside of a linkbait driven marketing campaign is growing smaller by the day. In the third video here, DaveN hinted that he believed that Google is looking at how natural a site’s link growth profile looks like, and discounting many of the rapid growth spikes if they are not followed up by an increased baseline link growth rate. Which ultimately means linkbait only creates significant value if you can keep launching one right after another.

I’m not sure I agree with this. I think the larger issue is whether you get any of the right kind of traffic from your links. Roderick Ioerger said it better on Marketing Pilgrim:

I don’t believe that just because Google or another search engine might devalue a set of links is any reason to be afraid of generating linkbait. Links that generate traffic, whether or not a search engine values them, in my mind are still good links…

I don’t think the important thing is whether you do linkbaiting or not. I think it’s whether the linkbaiting that you do is effective in driving targeted traffic to your website. With that in mind, there are three different kinds of linkbait campaigns:

1. The One-Shot Charlie - This is where you build a list or a poll or build some web page that is designed to get people excited over the short term and that is effective in building quick inbound links, but after the initial enthusiasm the inbound links begin to decline. The inbound links built at the beginning are still there, but as time progresses fewer and fewer websites and blogs link to your bait, eventually being forgotten. Remember, the links are still there so you still may get traffic to that web page months or years after the bait has been set. Is that targeted traffic? If you do it right, it can be.
2. The Long-Term Necessity - This type of linkbait involves offering a resource that people will need and use any time in the future. For instance, link popularity checkers and other webmaster tools. These type of link bait are popular and could build as many inbound links two years from now, or fifteen years from now, as they do the first day they are implemented. Since the bait being linked to is beneficial at any time to a good cross-section of people then it is a very powerful form of linkbait. The drawback is that not all of your traffic is necessarily targeted and you could feasibly get a lot of traffic from people who will never do business with you.
3. Targeted Linkbait - Another kind of linkbait campaign is the targeted linkbait. You purposely put up linkbait that is going to be attractive to specific audience within your niche. You are effectively cutting some people out, but you are doing it because you know those people won’t be interested in what you have to say. There links won’t matter to you anyway. You really want the links from the sites that fit into your niche, or a subset of your niche. Therefore, you target your linkbait to fit that segment.

Which type of linkbait you use depends on what you want to accomplish. Before the last PageRank update, many people sought to increase their PR ratings by implementing generic linkbait that any website owner anywhere might link to hoping to get a lot of high PR sites to link to them. That strategy won’t work any more. A better strategy is to use the Targeted Linkbait strategy so that you attract relevant links from relevant sites in the same niche that you are in. If you see an increase in PR from that effort, fine, but the real benefit is the traffic you get from those websites. By the way, this type of linkbaiting is also good for helping you build your brand. So it’s not really a matter of either/or, you can have both/and.

MSN Live Search is making improvements again. I’d like to say that this latest improvement is way overdue and I’m quite glad to see it happening:

(Source) This week we’re excited to announce that the Live Search Webmaster Center has moved out of its closed beta and we are now open for a public beta. In conjunction with this release we want to announce the creation of the Live Search Webmaster Center blog.

It’s always good whenever a product that has been in beta moves out of beta and into the public realm. That means that enough early users have been happy with it to give it praise and that the developers are comfortable enough with the product to introduce it on mass scale. It doesn’t mean it’s perfect. It just means that it’s good enough - or that enough people thought it was good enough to share with the rest of us.

The fact that MSN Live Search is implementing a Webmaster Center means that MSN is serious about competing against Google and Yahoo! for search traffic. They may be in third place, but at least they’re trying. Maybe MSN is just tired of getting beat up, or maybe they’ve realized that if they don’t do something soon to improve their search technology that they will become irrelevant. Ask has gained on them and both Google and Yahoo! have stretched their leads. It’s time for MSN to make a comeback. The Webmaster Center might help them do that. Here are some of the features I’ve seen after an initial excursion:

• Live Search Books
• Business Listings
• URL Submission
• Product Information
• Videos
• Custom Search Engine
• Virtual Earth Map
• Webmaster Forum
• Webmaster Blog
• And Technical Assistance for Webmasters

Now all they need to do is convince people to use them.

(Source) Finally, Google has integrated Picasa Web Albums into Google Image Search. Public albums can be enabled for a public search option, meaning your images will be more likely to come up in Google image results. And that’s a huge improvement, because previously images on Picasa (and Blogger, and Google Docs) were not searchable at all. The other Google applications are still missing out on all the fun, but Picasa images are now searchable. This is limited, however, to a Google image search.

Proof that Google Universal is becoming more universal. While the majority of searchers won’t be able to see Picasa images, this is just the first step to moving in that direction. Google has already rolled several verticals into its Universal Search feature. Now it’s just a matter of time before the search engine incorporates them all. Google images is currently available to some searchers. The next step is to get Picasa images to appear for those users then, when Google Universal rolls out of beta, everyone can benefit.

About once a week somebody will publish an article somewhere about the SEO myths. Strangely, they’re all different and sometimes contradict each other. Trying to get two SEOs to agree with each other on something is like trying to get two young children to play with the same toy without fighting. If it happens, it’ll be a miracle.

The following article was published in SEO-News yesterday. It isn’t the first time. Kalena likes that article.

Myth 1 - You need to buy a domain with keywords in it

I’m sure you’ve seen them, domains like: www.paris-hilton-pink-diamond-dog-collars.com. For some weird reason, webmasters seem to think that they need to have a keyword-stuffed domain to do well in the search engines, the more hyphens the better. Well it just isn’t true. In fact, Google spam evangelist Matt Cutts is known for warning against using over-stuffed keyword domains. If you have a look at one of the last sentences of this post of his he talks about possibly attracting Google’s attention with keyword-filled domains and gives an (excessive) example. Could he be hinting that using ultra-keyworded domains may trip a filter of some kind? I think so.

It’s possible, but Matt’s article is about dashes vs. underscores and I think it’s dangerous to read things into it. As far as keywords in the URL, Kalena Jordan’s article seems to imply that they aren’t necessary. While it might be true that you can rank a website without having keywords in the URL, it’s still just as true that keywords in the URL are considered by the search engines just like they consider them in your meta tags. Not the most important ranking factor, but not to be ignored either.

Kalena Jordan’s example is more of a reason to shun long domain names. Most SEOs agree that shorter domain names are better. Think about it. If you optimize around one keyword and you have two words in your domain name then you have a 50% density in your domain name. If you have 10 words in your domain name then that’s just a 10% density in your domain name. Now, I don’t think the search engines measure keyword density in your domain name, but I am simply pointing out that optimizing your URL with your keyword in a short domain name is better than either of the other two options:

1. Using your keyword in a long domain name
2. Having no keyword at all in your domain name

Bear in mind, though, that putting to much emphasis on any one ranking factor is dangerous.

Myth 3 - You need to stuff keywords into as many areas of your site as possible

I like to think this rumor was started by the same idiot who started 1). It’s correct that search engines actively seek to match your site content with search queries, but stuffing the same keywords over and over into your site code via visible or invisible text DOES NOT automatically make your site relevant for searches containing those keywords. It’s more likely to trip spam filters and earn your site a ranking suppression. In fact, you might as well hold up a big red flag to Googlebot that says “COME AND GET ME”.

Keyword stuffing doesn’t work. Anyone who has tried it knows that. You have to be smart about your keywords. Using too many can be just as bad as not using enough. Even worse because if you get on the search engines’ bad side then you have no advocates. They want you to rank well. The best strategy for you is to work within their guidelines.

OK, that’s just one debunk. In actuality, Kalena Jordan hit the nail on the head with most of them. I think she’s made a good point with the overstuffed keywords in the domain name discussion, but she leaves the impression that keywords in the domain name aren’t necessary at all. I don’t think they’re necessary, but I do think they are desirable.