Carol Bartz, the new CEO of Yahoo!, has announced a new reorganization plan for the company. Will it help?

On the surface the new reorganization appears like a good idea. By dividing the world into the U.S and the International Community, Yahoo! can focus its core business on non-U.S. searchers, which is probably a good idea. Google seems to be having a hard time getting the same recognition in Europe and Asia that it has in the U.S. This is partly due to Google’s privacy policy, whereas Yahoo! has a much more favorable privacy policy, which is important to European citizens and could mean that Yahoo! has a chance to make significant gains in Europe.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that Yahoo! is giving up on the U.S., but it can mean that Yahoo! can earn back some of its losses by focusing on its core strengths and capitalizing on the competition’s core weaknesses in those markets where there are opportunities. By leveraging the competitive landscape in search that way, Yahoo! might stand a chance at being a major player again and giving Google a serious run for its money. The big question is, Will it work? And will business owners every focus more on Yahoo! instead of Google for their long term search engine optimization strategies?

Not long ago Google announced that Google Analytics can track Flash applications. That was a great development for Google Analytics, but how many people have actually used the code or the API for tracking their Rich Internet Applications (RIAs)?

If your knowledge of web development is limited to HTML and CSS then you may not know what an RIA is. But that doesn’t mean you couldn’t benefit from developing one.

Matthew McNeely wrote a great piece on using Google Analytics for Flash open source code. At first, I thought the abbreviation for their website folder was gatorflash (as in Gator Flash), but then I realized it stood for Google Analytics For Flash, hence gaforflash, a fine distinction. But that’s a weird digression.

Anyway, McNeely talks about how you can use Google Analytics to track page views and events such as downloads and interaction with your RIAs.

The first thought that comes to mind for use of the tracking for Flash is the obvious: Video viewing. But the applications for this tracking code go much further than mere videos. If you have useful widgets that can be downloaded or embedded on other websites then you can track how many people are using your widgets. If you have a game site that uses Flash and other high-impact Web code then you can track how many people start your games, how many finish the game, which games they play, how long they play for, etc. And you can view all of these statistics within Google Analytics. How useful is that?

For years search engine optimization practitioners have been proclaiming the virtues of organic SEO. It’s free. It’s easy. It’s not PPC. Etc. By the same token, pay per click experts have been signing the praises of PPC – it’s fast, it’s dynamic, it’s targeted traffic, and it’s not organic SEO. Does it really matter?

Personally, I think that your Internet marketing efforts should all work together. It’s not a matter of SEO vs. PPC. It’s more a matter of whether or not you are targeting your traffic through the tools that are available to you, and organic optimization is one tool at your disposal. And it’s a valuable tool.

Organic search engine rankings is about targeting the keywords that are important to your business and achieving business results for your targeting efforts. There’s more to it than simply picking keywords out of a vacuum and throwing them against the wall. The idea is to target the keywords that searchers looking for a service or product like yours would use to find it. If you can identify the keywords that the market thrives on then you can drive traffic to your website. You can do this through organic SEO and PPC as well as through other avenues.

Doing business online boils down to two things reall – traffic and links. Traffic is important because without it you can’t close any sales. It takes traffic to make conversions. Where you get your traffic from isn’t as important as getting targeted traffic. If you drive traffic to your website that is qualified and ready to buy then you have good traffic. It’s the most important thing for any website.

Links are a means of driving traffic. With links you can build a solid base of targeted traffic that shows up at your doorstep over and over again, day in day out. Where you place your links is very important in the overall scheme of things because if you put them in the wrong places you run the risk of not getting any traffic at all or getting the wrong kinds of traffic. But links do one other thing as well.

The second benefit to building links back to your website is that those links have the potential to push you up in the search engine rankings. Do it right and you can target specific keywords to rank for, push your pages up in the rankings, and increase your traffic through organic search listings.

One of the best ways to increase your traffic through links to write articles and submit them to other websites and directories that act as repositories for your ideas. If you take a list of keywords and write ten articles for each keyword and distribute those articles to strategic websites where your qualified traffic is known to frequent then you can drive targeted traffic to your website over and over again. This will be qualified traffic that you can sell to over and over again.

Rand Fishkin is at it again. He wrote a great blog post on the value of linking out versus linking in. One of the reasons that many search engine marketers refuse to link out on their web properties is because they are afraid that they’ll pass valuable link juice to their competitors that could go to their internal pages instead. Here’s what Rand has to say about that:

As for costing PageRank – yes, it’s true. Technically, the original PR formula (described in great detail here by my grandfather, Si) dictates that any link equity spent on external pages is lost opportunity that could have been spent on internal pages. HOWEVER, I (and many other notable SEO experts) have seen very compelling evidence to suggest that not only does linking out NOT harm a site’s rankings, it appears to carry some positive correlations with ranking, trust, etc. on both a page and domain-wide level.

And here’s my response:

Total bunk!

Search Engine Optimization has been linking out to our competition since Day 1. We’re at a PR5 while some of my competitors who have been at this for longer than I have are still hovering around a PR3 (I purposefully am not linking to those competitors to save them some embarrassment). How is it that a newer site with fewer pages can have a higher PageRank by linking out than older sites with more pages that don’t link out? I think there are several reasons why:

1. PageRank Distribution – Most reputable SEOs agree that PageRank is evenly distributed across between all pages that share a link from the one linking out. That holds true whether the links are internal or external. If you have a site with 1,000 pages and your PR7 page links to everyone one them, you are effectively diminishing the juice that all of your pages receive because of the wide distribution of your PR. On the other hand, a PR5 page that links to only 100 pages, all of them external, actually passes more link juice to each of those pages.
2. The Law of Diminishing Returns – It really doesn’t matter what your page’s PageRank is when it comes to linking. The more linking you do and the more pages that you build on your site to be linked to the more you are demeaning the value of each link. When you have a five-year-old blog that’s been posted to every day for those five years, you have a website with 1,226 pages on it. If each page distributes a sidebar link to each of the other pages on the site then there really is not that much difference between a PR8 site that passes link juice and a PR7 site that passes link juice. We’re talking about minuscule amounts of link juice here.
3. The Law of Reciprocity – Here’s Rand Fishkin again:
   

   #2 – Linking Out Incentivizes Links In
   With a few notable exceptions (Wikipedia & YouTube, I’m looking in your direction), websites that earn links tend to do a good job of linking out themselves. When you link out, it creates a signal to other websites and content creators that you’re a willing participant in the web’s natural linking environment and not a closed-off community or purely self-referential, pompous know-it-all.

   The more you link out to others, the more you encourage them to link back to you. If you produce quality content then you will be linked to. Keep producing quality content and you’ll keep getting linked to. Keeping linking out and you’ll keep getting linked to. It is likely that by linking out to 100 websites over a period of time that you’ll win back more links than you create. That’s because the Law of Reciprocity kicks in. The Law of Reciprocity says that people will return a favor that is given unselfishly just because they are able and willing. Do unto others and they’ll do unto you.

4. Why Waste Time Measuring Link Juice? – There are only 10 levels of PageRank. Are you really going to waste your time measuring link juice and numbers of pages and how your PR will be distributed across those pages? It’s a waste of time since the amount of link juice that gets distributed from page to page and link to link is so small that deciding not to link out because you are afraid of losing juice seems so absurd. The traffic and authority benefits of linking to quality pages far outweighs any loss of PankRank transference you may experience by linking to Uncle Joe’s website versus your own page on Monkey training.

The bottom line on outbound linking is it’s up to you. But before you make that decision do it on whether or not you’ll gain any benefit by linking to competitors and others within your field.

What does it take to get listed in Google’s local search onebox?

FYI for those who haven’t heard, the Google onebox is the box and map that show up on local search results for specific searches. Let’s say you search for microbreweries in Harrisburg Pennsylvania. In this case, we’re shown three links in the onebox. I’ve seen as many as ten. Regardless of the number of businesses listed for a particular search, however, is there a trick to know in order to be one of those businesses that appears in the Google onebox?

No, there’s no trick. All you really need to do is list your business with Google Maps. Whenever a searchers goes online to use Google to make a local search, Google brings up the one box for search queries and shows businesses based on their proximity to the search location. In other words, if you search for a broad area like Harrisburg Pa. then the search will bring up businesses that are located closest to the center of that broad area. But if you narrow your search to a specific area, or zip code, then the onebox will show businesses that are closest to that specific area first and branch out from there.

Change the above search to microbreweries in Camp Hill Pennsylvania, for instance, and the same three business appear in the onebox but in a different order. Notice that the one in Camp Hill is first, but in the first search (Harrisburg) it was listed third. The microbrewery located in Lancaster moved from second to third and the the one in Harrisburg that was first is now second. That’s because of Google’s emphasis on proximity to the specific locale being searched for.

One thing is clear: If you don’t list your business in Google Maps then you likely will not be eligible to appear in the onebox for a local search related to your business. If you’re a local business then you need to be listed in Google Maps, this will help with your local search engine marketing efforts.

Blogs have come into their own. It’s not unusual for a business to throw up a blog and have that blog act as its primary website. But do these blogs rank differently than static websites? Are they treated differently by the search engines? Does authority count?

With static websites, authority is very important. How about for blogs? According to an article by Matt McGee, yes, authority for blogs is important:

Blog results “authority”: Coincidentally, those three old posts mentioned above all came from Huffington Post, which suggests authority may trump timeliness when blog posts show up in universal search. In fact, Chris did say that authority/prominence matters a little more in universal search results than in Google Blog Search results.

Kudos to Matt McGee for his study on this matter. There is still a lot to learn about how blog search works and how Google Universal works. But one thing that I think is important is to build a blog that is recognized as an authority in its niche. Whether you are building a blog or a static website, you need to focus your search engine optimization efforts on being the authority that everyone wants to quote.