Dave Davies wrote a 10-step search engine optimization process in 2004 that consisted of the following steps:

1. Keyword Selection
2. Content Creation
3. Site Structure
4. Optimization
5. Internal Linking
6. Human Testing
7. Submissions
8. Link Building
9. Monitoring
10. The Extras (all those things that didn’t fit in the first 9 steps)

He recently updated his list and now it looks like this:

1. Keyword Research & Selection
2. Competition Analysis
3. Site Structure
4. Content Optimization
5. Link Building
6. Social Media
7. PPC
8. Statistics Analysis
9. Conversion Optimization
10. Keeping It Up

I like the update for several reasons. First, competitive analysis needs to be right up there at the top, near the beginning of the process. In his first list, Davies didn’t even include that, possibly because in 2004 most industries didn’t have a lot of competition. From this point forward, though, most businesses going online will have a lot of competition, and most of it will be stiff. Competitive analysis is very important.

I also like the addition of PPC, statistics analysis, and conversion “optimization” (though “tracking” may be a better word) to the list. But I’m not sure I like social media being where it is and I’m definitely sure I don’t like content optimization following site structure.

To me, content optimization (aka creation) is a part of site structure. In some ways, I understand why you need to structure your site before you create the content, but it’s also a repetitive process that you will come back to. You have to make sure that any new content you develop down the road conforms to your site structure so be sure you’re planning for the long term.

Link building and social media go a little bit hand in hand. But I think you need to specify what you mean exactly by social media. Does it include bookmarking and blogging? If not, it should. Or maybe blogging should be in its own category. I would definitely include blogging as a part of my overall strategy, but you can fit it into link building as well as social media. In fact, a lot of these categories flow into each other and are difficult to define.

If I were to create a list, it would look like this:

1. Keyword Analysis
2. Competitive Research
3. Keyword Selection
4. Website Template Design
5. Content Creation/Site Structure Tweaks
6. Article Marketing and Blogging
7. Social Media Marketing
8. Other Link Building Activities
9. PPC/Other Online Advertising
10. Analytics
11. Conversion Tracking & Optimization
12. Maintenance

I’d be anxious to see what the process looks like in five years.

Google Maps now has a new search feature. When you land on the Google Maps page you’ll see the usual set up, but if you look to the right of the search button there’s a link. It says “Show search options” and a drop down box appears. Click on it and it says “Hide search options.”

In the drop down box you’ll see four options:

• Everything
• Location
• Businesses
• User-Generated Content

These are interesting choices. A search for York County, Pa. (history buffs will know this is where the U.S. Constitution was signed) under “Everything” will bring up several choices as wide and varied as you can imagine:

• harley davidson
• giant
• memorial hospital
• york hospital
• yorktowne hotel
• bae
• sheetz
• marcello’s
• wellspan
• manor care

These choices appear as links. Click a link and you’re taken to a page that shows all the locations for that entry in Google Maps and pinpoints on the map showing those locations. That’s a useful tool.

Add one of those business names to the “york county pa” distinction and search under Locations. You’ll get exactly what you asked for: A list of locations for that business within York County, Pa. It’s just as if you were searching for the same item under “Find Businesses.”

The interesting way to search is under “User-Generated Content.” When you create a search under that criteria you’ll get a list of choices under Community Maps, and new Google Maps feature that allows content creators to collaborate.

Google Maps’ new features should enhance the user experience. Try it out and see how you can use it for your business.

For the past year-and-a-half about all you’ve heard is social media, social media, social media. Either it’s StumbleUpon, or it’s Facebook, or it’s Digg. Now it’s MySpace.

The once wacky hangout for high school kids with nothing better to do is now developing its own development center. The strange this is that back in November of last year MySpace and Google announced that they were partnering in a join social application called OpenSocial. With MySpace stretching out to improve its social networking capabilities and partnering with Google – in fact, all the search engines now seem to be interested in social media of some kind – it only makes sense that the search engines and the popular social media sites will start figuring out ways to work together to increase member benefits and improve user experience. The big question is what will that look like?

Google now owns YouTube. Yahoo! owns del.icio.us. MSN adCenter is partnering with the Wall Street Journal. Ask has 3D. Google has universal search. The race is on to get social media and search engine optimization mixed together in some fashion.

If natural language search ever catches on, and I think it’s just a matter of time, then I say watch out. Web 3.0 will be at our doorsteps before we can say Google. I’m already all google-eyed over it.

If you redesign a web page and change its URL, you’ll need to perform a 301 redirect so that you don’t lose any search engine rankings. To do that you need to access or .htaccess file or create one. If you use a CMS, this may pose a challenge for you. If possible, contact the company that manufactured your CMS and ask them if they can help you with a 301 redirect. If you can make an .htaccess file then you can make sure traffic to your old page URL is transferred to the new page URL with no issues.

To create a new .htaccess file, you’ll need to open Notepad and save it as a blank page with the name .htaccess. Make sure nothing follows the final s. There is no extension to the file name. It has to be .htaccess. Otherwise, browsers and search bots won’t be able to read it.

If there is already an existing .htaccess file on your server then download it to your desktop so you can work on it. Add the following code to the file:

redirect 301 /old/old.htm http://www.you.com/new.htm

Change old/old to the name of the page that are you moving. In other words, if your domain is www.mydomain.com and the specific page you are moving to a new URL is /thispage/thispage.html then /thispage/thispage.html is what you need to put right after redirect 301. The same thing goes for you and new. You is your domain name and new is the name of the new page.

Put that code at the very end of any other code in the .htaccess file. Be sure to skip a line before you add it. Then save the new .htaccess file to your desktop and upload it to your server. Be sure to run a test by typing in the old page URL into your browser and watch to see if you are taken to the new page.

If you haven’t heard yet, Sam’s Club, owned by Wal-Mart, is now offering search engine optimization and SEM services to its small business customers. This is no joke. Besides website hosting and design services, Sam’s Club is also offering pay per click management and search engine optimization. The pay per click services start at $50 per month “for any budget.” That’s funny because most pay per click services run 15%-25% of your budget, which means on a $200 per month budget you’ll be paying $30-$50. But that’s the low end of Sam’s Club’s PPC management service, and remember, Sam’s Club is a wholesale club for small businesses. Some wholesale.

Another interesting tidbit: Their SEO service actually claims to provide you the benefit of hand submissions to all the major search engines. It’s like Sam’s Club took a Wayback Machine to 1995 and decided to go online. No one does hand submissions any more. Search engines have robots that crawl your website and all you have to do is build one. Either Sam’s Club executives don’t know that or they are planning to bilk their customers of their hard earned money.

A word to the wise: Don’t shop at Wal-Mart or Sam’s Club for your Internet services. Not SEO. Not PPC. Not hosting. Not web design. Seek a specialist. You’ll likely get the services cheaper and get higher quality. Go figure.

Google has announced new experimental views:

• Map View
• Timeline View
• Info View

I must confess. The timeline view isn’t exactly what I expected. From the Official Google Blog:

Timeline view does the same thing as map view, but for dates found on the web. This includes dates of upcoming or historic events, or even biographical information — all generated automatically from your search results.

In other words, you can search a timeline of your particular query. If you are doing research on corporate tort law, for instance, then you can search a timeline of relevant events related to that topic. That’s a useful search tool, I admit. But what I would consider just as useful, or even more useful, is the ability to filter search results by time of publication. If when making the same search on corporate tort law, I find that a post regarding an important historical development was made in August 2003 and it appears too high in the search for my tastes, I can search for results that were made more recently. So if I only want blog and website content searches related to corporate tort law dated from January 2006 to present then I can make that specific query and the search engines would return a SERP with results that meet that criteria. Then I’d like to have the ability to organize those search results by time or relevance.

I can see a time when such searches are possible. But for now, I guess we’ll have to settle for the timeline view.

(Kelsey Group) So what are these search engine optimization tactics? One example some clever SMBs (and search engine marketers) have started to use is to have the video on their Web sites linked to the same video that has been uploaded to YouTube. When Google sees that the copy and tags surrounding the video are the same as the corresponding video on YouTube, it will rank the video highly as part of its general favorability of YouTube content. Clever.

Brilliant post on The Kelsey Group blog. I was just thinking myself earlier today about new ways to optimize video for the coming search explosion.

If you’re not up on it yet, the search engines are gearing up for the expansion and growth of video search. Ask calls their package Ask 3D, Google calls it Universal. What it’s called, the idea is to return results for searchers that do more than just list links. You’ll also get a list of relevant photos, videos, and other types of content. This should make video marketing a much more powerful medium than it is now.

Savvy search engine optimization experts will have to devise a strategy for marketing their businesses through video. They’ll have to think outside the proverbial box and beyond the shores of YouTube and Google Video. Chances are, Google (if none of the other search engines) has already thought ahead on this one. What will video marketing look like?

I think the above solution presented by the The Kelsey Group is on the right track. I also think that niche video sites will begin to spring up within the next year or so. YouTube and Google Video will get saturated with videos on every imaginable topic. And you’ll see many more videos on other websites as well, including traditional company websites, blog directories, and article directories. But how will they be search engine optimized?

This is really a problem for the search engines and the question should be styled, “How will they be indexed?” Will YouTube continue to enjoy top rankings while everyone else plays second fiddle, only to see prominent rankings when YouTube can’t muster the search juice? Will YouTube enjoy top rankings for the same video that exists on another website even if that other video was there first? Webmasters will want to rank higher for the videos if they exist on their own websites. But that will depend partly on their ability to search engine optimize the videos properly. Linking to YouTube may be a temporary solution, but it won’t last long term. The question is, what will replace that practice?