In recent months, there has been a whole lot of talk about where search is going, and what search is lacking. This is commonplace for months encompassing the changing of years. A big part of the discussion is personalized search. Many SEOs aren't entirely thrilled with the idea. It changes the way they have to do things. Do searchers want it though? According  to Yahoo, one of the three major things searchers want is a personalized search experience. This is one of the topics discussed in this interview with Larry Cornett, VP, Consumer Products, Yahoo: More WebProNews Videos However, it is Google's SearchWiki that has gotten the most attention when it comes to personalized search. Whether or not everybody uses SearchWiki's features, Google feels like SearchWiki stands to make Google itself better. At the recent SMX West show, SearchWiki manager Corey Anderson said that SearchWiki allows the company to conduct user studies in the field and crunch user feedback. For example, Google has discovered that a large fraction of users are attempting to re-find sites they previously visited. It is still early in the year, and you can pretty much guarantee that there will be more advances made no the personalized search front. Do you as a search engine user want your experience to be more tailored to your own patterns and habits?

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SearchRank Founder and CEO David Wallace is a very busy guy. He has to have a schedule. At the SMX West session on Productivity Tips for the Busy Search Marketer, he says that when you're busy you have to have a routine. (Coverage of SMX West continues at WebProNews Videos.  Keep an eye on WebProNews for more notes and videos from the event this week.) Looking for more productivity with your writing?  Remember that creative or research can be published any time, but news has to be first. Overloaded with email? Utilize extensive category structure and only keep pending emails. When it comes to social bookmarking, be selective where you are involved, and avoid time-wasters. When submitting content, submit where you will receive the most benefit. Twitter is viewed as useful to many and as a time-waster to many more. That's why Wallace says to use apps to help you manage and don't play. On top of all of that, Wallace suggests making sure all regularly scheduled work is completed by certain day of every month to allow for internal development and projects. And don't forget to leave room for yourself! After Wallace (who has plenty more productivity tips here)  finished up, Jennifer Slegg, the owner of JenSense discussed making use of non-desk time. She pointed out that there's "nothing wrong with the old-fashioned pen and paper." It's portable and relationship-friendly. If you have a laptop, you'll most likely get distracted by other things. It can also be useful to use a personal voice recorder, which is small and portable. It's a great way to record ideas when they come. She then suggests using speech recognition software like Dragon Naturally Speaking, which converts spoken words into text and imports into Word, Dreamweaver, and WordPress. She also suggests using netbooks and mini laptops because they start up great and can run most business software. Blackberries and iPhones are also good for sending quick emails, Twittering, etc. Productivity is crucial in a down economy, and it is the little things that can make a huge difference in how much your business can produce. Abby Johnson contributed to this report from SMX West.

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In-House SEO has been a big topic at SMX West. This is because many businesses are moving their SEO in-house to save money because of the economy. With in-house SEO comes training the staff. (Coverage of SMX West continues at WebProNews Videos.  Keep an eye on WebProNews for more notes and videos from the event this week.) Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz discussed "igniting the SEO training fire." He says companies have to create a "culture of SEO." They need to test campaigns. He notes that 88% of all clicks take place on organic (not paid) results. He cites the following as important metrics to keep track of: - visits from search engines - # of pages drawing at least 1 visit - time and human resources spent on SEO - total lifetime value of customers acquired from SEO - trend lines of search traffic and conversions Melanie Mitchell of Folio Investing spoke after Fishkin. She says, "Everyone in the company plays a role in SEO." But not very many companies are set up to do SEO in a good way. You have to make sure everyone knows their role. She says to do the following: - Set up training - Define your goals up front - Tailor training sessions based upon people - Define intended audience - Define documentation objectives - Ask: What's relevant to each department? (Ex. design team, advertisers, etc.) - Develop a course, outline and track it She says it requires ongoing training. You have to set internal standards, provide tools, and have a measurement track -- pages indexed, search referrals, user behavior, etc. Stephan Spencer of Netconcepts spoke after that. He says to consider visual learners, auditory learners, and kinesthetic learners. Custom training is needed because everyone learns differently. Spencer's own company starts with the 3 pillars of natural search optimization: - site indexation - content optimization - link building Educate your staff on technical areas. Spencer says that even if you work with an agency, you should know what they're doing and how they're doing it. Dave Lloyd from Cisco adds that the aim of your training should be behavior change. Possible topics of training include keyword research and landing pages. He says you should invite and engage with bloggers. If you're struggling with budget cuts, this is all advice that could save you a good amount of money in some hard times. Abby Johnson contributed to this report from SMX West. See what other experts had to say on the topic here.

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Next up on the search engine trade show circuit is SMX East. It will be in New York City, and will run from October 6th to October 8th. The agenda looks strong, and the attendance and networking opportunities should be great. Two keynotes will be given. One is by Bill Tancer, who many of us know as the General Manager, Global Research for Hitwise. More recently, Bill has released a book called “Click” which has been featured on ABCNews.com. Bill has always been an excellent source of insight into searcher behavior. On the 7th, we will have Tim Armstrong, a corporate VP at Google, who also heads up Google’s North American advertising sales and operations teams. This looks like a great chance to get insight into the PPC side of the business. Last, but not least (well I like to think so at least!), I will be there. I have a presentation on Internal Linking Tactics on Day 2 of the event. Want to get my take on how to manage your own link juice? Yeah - I think I have a few opinions on that.Comments

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Spend a day at a retail store, and you'll see all sorts of people forgetting parts of mental three- or four-item shopping lists.  Since SEO is a little more complicated than picking up milk, an SMX session looked at things that can slip by.(Coverage of the SMX Advanced conference continues at WebProNews Videos.  Keep an eye on WebProNews for more notes and videos from the event this week.) Chris ShermanChristine Churchill, the president of KeyRelevance, kicked off the session with a famous quote attributed to John Wanamaker: "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half."  She suggested tracking offline conversions to get a better idea.A study conducted by Google and comScore showed that 63 percent of consumers who conduct product searches online buy the same items offline, according to Churchill.  In-store surveys are a simple way of finding out when this happens.  You can also offer coupons and special offer codes, or even try tagging customers with phone numbers or credit card data.Ryan Gibson, the Rimm-Kaufman Group's director of marketing, then suggested introducing "actions of value" on a site - allowing people to order a catalog or sign up for emails.  As for specific measurements, A/S (ad spend), ROAS (return on ad spend), ROI (return on investment), and CPO/CPA (cost per order/acquisition) are all things you should track.Rich Devine, ZAAZ's director of search, stepped in to recommend assigning dollar values to things other than the main conversion.  Some of these things will often lead to conversions, and so in a monetization model, can be considered microconversions.Finally, to wrap up the main presentations, Akin Arikan, the Unica Corporation's senior manager of Internet marketing, pointed out that "search is not alone."  Banner ads and other strategies have been proven to help out a campaign, so their effects need to be measured.Arikan also stated it's "time to take off the blinders - talk to the guys on online, offline sites, brand marketing sites.  We have a lot to learn from each other."

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In the session "You and A with Matt Cutts," Danny Sullivan and Matt started off by talking about the Lyndon Antcliff story involving a 13 year-old boy who stole his dad's credit card to buy hookers. The story was widely reported and later revealed to be a hoax that was used as link bait.(Coverage of the SMX Advanced Conference continues at WebProNews Videos. Keep an eye on WebProNews for more notes and videos from the event this week.)Matt said it would have been irresponsible not to do anything about it and that you should not lie to get links. Matt said it's best to do what's right for your company long term and that you don't want to be the Milli Vanilli of SEO. Credibility and trust are important.The first question was about widget bait. People need to ask what they are getting from these links. They need to ask if its off topic and what the target is. Cloaking is bad, and Google has removed big sites that were doing it. Matt said, "Fix things so your site architecture works well."When it comes to penalties most of the time the penalty is not going to keep you out of Google forever. Matt said, "We try not to be overly harsh, people make mistakes." Google tries to get sites back in if they are legitimate sites.On the issue of attempting to hurt other sites by pointing dirty links at them, Matt says Google works hard to make sure that does not happen. He says people should be working on their own site instead of trashing the competition's sites.Matt says when it comes to SEO, most people know the answers, they know what's right, and they don't always need him to tell them.  

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Last week I attended the SMX Social Media Conference in Long Beach California, here are some of my thoughts about the event. The one thing that really stood out about this conference was the “focus” or “intensity” most of the attendees had about coming to learn and take in as much information as they could about the subject. At most conferences there’s a significant group of people who are there because there boss sent them, or they are looking for an excuse just to get out of the office, I didn’t see many of those people, most of them really came to learn about SMM. IMHO one big change from this show over the last one was the lack of focus on Digg. The first show was digg, digg, digg, something else, digg, digg, digg. This show featured a much more balanced distribution of topics and subjects. Sure Digg is still the 800lb gorilla, but it’s good to recognize they aren’t the only game in town. One of the new things we tried about this conference is twittering on the SMX twitter account. Full disclosure Danny handed the keys over to me on the account, but I’d really like some feedback there. I’m a big boy and if I sucked you can tell me, but at least tell me why it sucked, what you want to see more of or what in your opinion would make it better. I also was monitoring for SMX mentions using tweetscan. If you are speaker at a conference something you should be aware of if you suck or don’t connect with the audience chances are they will tweet about you. Lisa Barone of Bruce Clay covered the conference and you can cruise over to the blog get a SMX conference session wrap up. Hey any chance we can get some info on how much traffic twitter sent you that week … c’mon pleeeeze …. Jason Calacanis was one of the speakers and he created quite a stir. Sure he talked a bit of trash but I’m with Shoemoney you guys are way to easy to bait. Hey don’t take my word for it listen to the presentation and judge for yourself … My two favorite presentations of the show were Brent’s on link building and Randy Woods on Linkedin. Later in the week Susan of Bruce Clay asked what’s the value of niche shows like this, while my initial response was sarcastic and flippant (hey c’mon it’s me) I think the real value is you get exposed to the bleeding edge of development in an industry. At some of the bigger shows it gets a quick glossing over but it’s hard to really dig your teeth in. At this level of show you really can get exposed to people who are doing some interesting, unique, and bleeding edge stuff, you can also network with some of the rising stars in the field, and IMHO that has a lot of value. Want some other opinions check out 20 Take-Aways from SMX Social Media and SMX Social Media ‘08 - Long Beach Recap Missed this show … be sure to register now for SMX Advanced I have it on good authority there’s going to be some good stuff and some real tips on the ‘give it up’ panel Comments 

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For Internet marketers trying to reach the unique audiences at social media sites such as Facebook, Digg, Reddit, and Stumbleupon, the place to be on April 22 and 23 is Long Beach, California, for the SMX Social Media conference.SMX Social Media was established by Search Engine Land editor-in-chief Danny Sullivan, who has been the go-to guy for Internet and search engine marketing for over a decade. He has a reputation for producing quality shows that deliver useful, timely information to attendees, some of whom even begin implementing his ideas during breaks in the conference. SMX Social Media was presented to standing-room-only crowds in New York City last fall, and the West Coast version in April is an encore presentation of that event. The show is designed to offer tips about how to harness the power of social media sites to engage audiences in an appropriate and respectful manner in order to deliver them information based on community interests, voting, and sharing. The two-day event will offer attendees both fundamental and advanced presentations on topics including social media marketing essentials, the most popular social news sites, social bookmarking and tagging, the marketer’s role in social media marketing, and how to use linkbaiting and leverage social networking effectively. Speakers at the event were chosen based on their knowledge and experience with social media marketing. SMX Social Media is open to the public, but anyone who is responsible for promoting and enhancing brand acceptance should attend—new media specialists, SEM managers, PR professionals, CMOs, brand marketers, and full-service agency media planners and buyers. Register before March 15 and save $200 off the full conference rate. Satisfaction is guaranteed—so you have nothing to lose by attending, and chances are good that you’ll walk out as a master of social media marketing!For more information or to register click here.Comments

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Michael and I had the opportunity to attend the SMX (Search Marketing Expo) last week in sunny Santa Clara, CA. It was a shame to spend those 60-degree days inside, especially since I come from the cold, white Rocky Mountains, and we spend as little time as possible outside this time of year. But for the good ofour readership, my poorly educated mind, and to get our money’s worth we suffered through some questionable meals (sorry guys, most of it was inedible), and overly well air-conditioned conferences rooms (where’s my parka?) to gather all the information we could. From the get go, it was obvious the conference was going to spend much of the time discussing what Danny Sullivan and others are calling “Blended Search.” I am not a big fan of the term “blended search,” it isn’t an accurate descriptive term. In my mind when something is blended, a bunch of ingredients are taken and acted upon to create a new product, with the ingredients of that product not being individually identifiable from that point forward. What we are talking about here is not a blended new search results page, but more like a new look, and a re-organization of information from sources, which were not previously utilized, but where the data remains very much identifiable. Google is calling this mega- results page Universal Search, which is a better term as far as definitions go, since Google is essentially universally searching all their database silos for all the results possible. Essentially, the search engines are now able to draw from more databases at one time and return results from all those queries to us on our results pages. The database sources used by search engines can now include blogs, books, catalogs, programming code, online directories, stock quotes, images, maps, news, video and standard web searches. So on a so-called blended or universal results page, the searcher could see data from anyone of the above listed sources, organized by relevance, instead of just the page of links and snippets we are used to seeing now. In the past if we wanted to search specific data silo, we had to select Images, Maps, News, Shopping, etc, from the top of the search page, now all those silos can be automatically included. I personally wonder how much this sort of mega results page will benefit us. My biggest complaint with search now is the shear volume of superfluous garbage we still seem to receive in our SERPs today, so I worry that unless the search algorithm gets drastically better, all these new search results possibilities could potentially just turn out to add to the useless noise and clutter plaguing us now. We shall see. The most important question to us small business owners becomes, what does this mean to our sites, and how does it change the way we SEO? In short, for now it doesn’t change one thing. In two different sessions representatives of Google made it clear that good, proven SEO strategies are still as important as ever whether is be in web search or universal search pages, so we do not need to change what we are doing (assuming we are doing our SEO right). I think that is the best way to play it, just keep adding the rich content, building natural links, adding popular keywords, and our sites will continue to grow and do well. However, I am concerned with the prospect that we are now going to now need to compete with large companies and other media types for position on the SERPs. For example, if I am an online advertiser for my plumbing services, I don’t want the listing I worked hard to achieve to be replaced by some absurd YouTube plumbing mishap video, or by an image of Miss Plumber America, scantily clad holding a pipe wrench. I want my listing to rightfully stay put… I hope good SEO practices and a more defined and appropriate algorithm protect small business owners, our site’s position, and they continue to provide us with the opportunities to still do well online as Integrated Search becomes more mainstream. We will need to keep a close eye on it, and if we must, we will figure out how to make the new changes work best for us. I am sure Michael could make us some sort of another helpful tool. ?Comments

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Shari Thurow, Founder and SEO Director, Omni Marketing Interactive spoke about SEO and usability.(Coverage of the SMX West Conference continues at WebProNews Videos. Keep an eye on WebProNews for more notes and videos from the event this week.)Shari Thurow - SEO Director Omni MarketingSearch usability is a key part of both the user-centered design and usage-centered design. Thurow said one myth is that "search behavior" means "querying behavior". The types of query behavior include, navigational, informational and transactional. Your Web pages should accommodate all those types of querying behavior.Bolded words in search results are not used for rankings, they are for usability. Using keywords in the heading is important. Use a font that is easy to see and to read.Things to remember include that the keyword research process should happen before developing a sites information architecture. Important keyword phrases should be part of sites information architecture and corresponding interface, which means effective SEO, begins before a site is built not after.Search usability addresses all search behaviors, not only querying behavior and Web site usability is extremely important for receiving high quality link development.  

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Yank out "The Art of War" or just use common sense; either way, it's plain to see that knowing about your competitors can help your business.  At a session titled "Analyzing the Competition," speakers suggested areas to research and acceptable ways in which you can do so.(Coverage of the SMX West Conference continues at WebProNews Videos. Keep an eye on WebProNews for more notes and videos from the event this week.)Christine Churchill - President Of KeyRelevanceChristine Churchill, the president of KeyRelevance.com, started with the basics.  She recommended looking at how well competitors' sites are optimized, and checking into their background through the use of various domain tools.  Archive.org is a site that got mentioned by name.Churchill then advised looking into several aspects of competitors' backlinks - how many there are, what sort of linking relationships are in place, and what anchor text is used.  This should give you an idea of how strong they are in SEO.Next, some of the tools for providing insight on traffic came into play.  Use Compete, Hitwise, Alexa, and/or comScore - there's no such thing as too complete a picture.A PPC competitive review might also be in order, and PPC intelligence tools like KeywordSpy, KeyCompete, AdGooroo, and SpyFu may come in handy.Use things like Google Alerts, Google News, and Yahoo News to keep an eye on everybody's reputations.  Churchill suggested visiting forum boards, online discussion groups, Epinions, and the Better Business Bureau for the same purpose.At this point, you'll hopefully have gained some insight into your strengths and weaknesses, and identified some opportunities for improvement.  You'll definitely have gotten your data from public sources, and not done anything that even hints of corporate espionage.

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I was interested to hear the presentations in the Reputation Monitoring & Management Through Search session at the SMX West Conference yesterday in Santa Clara, and the five presenters didn’t disappoint. (click to enlarge) First up was Andy Beal, who I was particularly interested in hearing since this presentation came just after he announced his new online reputation management monitoring service, Trackur, and he also announced he’d have a number of free copies of his book at a booth in the exhibit hall later. Additional speakers included Chris Bennett, Veronica “Niki” Fielding, David Wallace, and Jonathan Ashton. Chris Bennett David Wallace Veronica “Niki” Fielding Jonathan Ashton I guess that the most interesting takeaway for me was in terms of how beneficial proactive online reputation management can be at insulating a company or person from negative press if/when something does arise in the blogosphere or in general internet space. Setting up a presence under your name in multiple different services like LinkedIn, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Myspace, etcetera can help you control the message about you that users will find on the first page of keyword results for your name. Comments

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Day 3 of SMX West kicked off with a group keynote titled Generation Next: Search In The Coming Decade moderated by Search Engine Land's Executive Editor Chris Sherman and Gord Hotchkiss, President and CEO of Enquiro.The panel of speakers included representatives from the major search engines - Brad Goldberg of Microsoft, Larry Heck with Yahoo! and Peter Norvig of Google - discussing where they see search going in the next decade. Will search as we know it will survive? Larry noted that consumers are having more expectations for search. Search will absolutely survive and verticalization will increase. Peter said that search will disappear as it will become invisible and more interactive, more second nature and part of core life. We've all become cyborgs in a way. Brad said we're not going to throw search away, but build upon it, evolving gradually. What's going to change more is the user experience - where they ask it and on what device. Search will become pervasive. How can we interact with the huge amount of information out there? People are likely to pose queries differently on other devices, as opposed to on a PC, said Brad. Peter says average queries will probably become longer, but harder to get results back on tiny screens. Implications for search marketers? Larry sees advertisers more able to take advantage of mobile opportunities for promotions for pushing discounts, directions, etc. As that grows and advertisers come online, we'll see more there. We need to maintain the distinction between actual results and advertising, though, he said. Peter sees the user having more control over ads in the future, whether it's TV or search. Will contextual suggestions be more prominent? Larry sees search playing more in the foreground and in the background, targeting people to specific queries, for instance what comes up on their personal search or at the office. Do you see search coming as a personal assistant as mentioned by Louis Monier? Larry thinks it's a good idea, but an incredibly hard challenge, very surprised if it took form. Peter thinks we're pretty good at short term searches, but supporting a personal assistant would be a long term search strategy, much more difficult. Brad says the search engine is a tool to make like more efficient, but the idea of letting the search engine go off on its own might be OK for small tasks, but the human needs to be a part of the process, making a personal assistant impractical for now. How smart can search get in the next five years? Peter says we're getting better, bringing in books, videos and we're just starting to take off. Larry says a lot of it will be from the users becoming more sophisticated as well as technical advances. Brad thinks a better question is how much better will the partnership between the human and the machine will be. The search engines are becoming much better partners to humans. What's it going to take to get local search as good as it can be? Peter says part of it is getting the local content. Brad agrees. The mom/pop shop needs to know it's available and use it. Do ads need to be more engaging (louder) on the search page? Larry said search has grown to be an ad product that can be quantified, probably easier than any other type of advertising. Marketers can measure results easily. We'll see a diversity of ad types in the future, including some that we can't even imagine today. The readings are there for advertisers to test freely using different formats (video, audio, etc.) and add or drop what does and doesn't work. How good does personalization have to be? Peter says he sees search as not being all personal, but fragmented. There are times when results don't need to be personalized, but more generic. Brad says that if you can identify what someone is trying to accomplish, you can make the result feel like it's personalized, but not necessarily so. Will blended search kill traditional SEO? The group sees more opportunities, rather than fewer. Creative thinking will make the difference with so many new vehicles to explore. As the serps become richer, there's more to leverage. The SEO will have to change their way of thinking about search results. What's cool in interfaces? What's happening in the mobile space, not only from phones and pocket devices, but also things like searching from you automobile, to be able to search from away from your PC. We've got a way to go in terms of opening up platforms, but it's all happening. What do you want five years from today? Larry: More vertical searching will make the search experience better. Peter: Go beyond matching keywords. Brad: Access to search everywhere. Comments

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Managing your organization's online reputation is no easy feat. It takes a lot of organization and keen eye for strategy. There are lots of people, in-house and out, that are talking. Marketing Pilgrim's Andy Beal has some tips for knowing who's saying what about you. (Coverage of the SMX West Conference continues at WebProNews Videos. Keep an eye on WebProNews for more notes and videos from the event this week.)Beal was up first at the Reputation Monitoring & Management Through Search track at the SMX West Conference. First order of business: tell them about trackur.com, Beal's online reputation management tool released this week. “The online reputation management space is still in it's infancy," he said. Beal then got down to stats and pointers. He said 52% of individuals put their trust in what others say about your brand, and 83% of companies will face a reputation crisis that can impact their share value by 20-30%. Besides protecting your company from negative developments, reputation management has other benefits. Monitoring can keep you abreast of industry trends, and can help with new product development. Andy says there are two very important sources to watch out there on the Web: competitor's blogs and employee blogs. This can be done via trackur, of course, but also with Moreover, Yahoo News and Google News. He says  mainstream news like Google News will give you a good overview of 70-75% of discussions about your business.Utilize RSS feeds to monitor news buzz and company-related mentions on sites like Digg.com, Technorati, and boardtracker.com for online forums. Keep track of bookmark sites like del.icio.us, search on Flickr, and Google Video. Monitor tags with keotags.com, and track other social sites like Wikipedia, Amazon reviews. Sign up for Google News alerts with the keywords you want to keep tabs on. Terraminds.com help keep track of Twitters.

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When someone searches for the term "dog," they're very likely interested in our furry friends.  But a few folks might be curious about digital on-screen graphics, and won't want to dig through stuff about rottweilers and retrievers.  So personalized search remains as important as ever.(Coverage of the SMX West Conference continues at WebProNews Videos.  Keep an eye on WebProNews for more notes and videos from the event this week.)Steven Marder, Eurekster In a session titled "The Personalized Search Revolution," representatives from several different companies got together to discuss the subject.  Phil McDonnell, a software engineer at Google, laid the groundwork by giving a sort of overview.According to McDonnell, personalized search is based primarily on web history data.  It finds the most relevant results for each user, and provides subtle ranking changes.Steven Marder, the CEO and cofounder of Eurekster, later stepped in to talk about where search is heading.  "Social search has reached a turning point with search giants tapping into new methods of user engagement," he said.  "We continue to see value in explicit and implicit contributions and believe it's instrumental to overall search experience that users are able to browse and discover, as well as more deeply engage with content and drive the conversation among their community."Phil McDonnell, Google Inc. Marder also added, "Content discovery is the next step in social search, especially leveraging more distributed vertical communities.  Adding a layer of community-contributed content to enhance the user experience creates more opportunity for the monetization and verticalization of search, as well as driving highly targeted advertising inventory for advertisers."So if they're not already, it seems that marketers (and search engines' accountants), along with average users, should be cheering personalized search right along.

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Whether you're looking up a pizza parlor's address, a picture of J.F.K, or a video of Maria Sharapova's dog, the big names in search want their main engines to help you out.  A session titled "The Blended Search Revolution" looked at how they'll do this. David Bailey, Google(Photo Credit: Picasa) (Coverage of the SMX West Conference continues at WebProNews Videos.  Keep an eye on WebProNews for more notes and videos from the event this week.)David Bailey, Google's senior staff engineer, confirmed that the search giant is on the same broad path as always, giving the traditional "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" line.  One of his other statements was also a bit predictable: Google.com is supposed to remain the search box of first resort.We found it comforting, however, that Google intends to keep things fast, simple, and relevant.  After recent murmurings about video ads, confirmation of those first two aspects may be especially important.Looking forward, it appears that users will see more local business review snippets, more videos, more images (with explicit triggering on the long tail), grouped blogs, grouped books, more internationalization, and increasing diversity on the pages.If not now, then in the future, Google's universal search looks ready to live up to its name.

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Amit Kumar of Yahoo spoke about the company's plans to create an open search platform to allow site owners to provide their most relevant content to searchers.  Amit Kumar(Coverage of the SMX West Conference continues at WebProNews Videos. Keep an eye on WebProNews for more notes and videos from the event this week.)He said users want to get things done and go from "to-do" to "done." He said site owners want more control and that the open platform gives you access to structured data to map, create a rich user experience and make it available.Yahoo's open search platform will give users blended search results, which will be almost, like a mini site.The most positive feature of the open search platform is that it will give users control of personalization. Users will be able to enhance results from sites they trust and be able to turn off enhancements from sites they don't trust. The new open Yahoo Search platform is scheduled to launch in the next couple of months. You can receive updates on the progress by visiting the site here. 

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Day 2 of SMX West 2008 was kicked off with a keynote by Louis Monier, formerly with Google, eBay and Alta Vista and currently Vice President of Products for Cuill, an up and coming search property.Monier made it clear that his address would be on search history and future aspects and not on Cuill. He started out with a history of search. As is often the case with something new, he said that the first phase of the Internet was rejection. The web was only as good as its index, which was limited at the time to human edited directories. Full text search was needed but the early engines were slow with limited indexing. Alta VIsta came along with a huge 16 million page index and something new, a way to check backlinks to a site (link:www.mysite.com), possibly the beginning of search marketing. Alta Vista dominated for a while, but around 1998 index spam became a problem with top results filled largely with garbage. Around this time Google started out with link analysis, giving much better results, as well as the beginning of discrete, targeted ads. Today, we have a huge front runner, Google, with a couple of out of breath competitors and a number of also-rans, he said. Currently queries can appease most searchers most of the time and these can even be cached. Really long queries (black leather jacket with green stripe and fur collar) are another matter. The search engines don't handle those really precise queries, so results are few. What is the right query? "Search is about one-shot queries," he said. "From a certain point, we're still in 1995." Search engines could take a clue from ecommerce sites, which slice and dice info to narrow down consumer choices, he said. And, do search engines cover enough? Clearly size does matter. Search engines have a responsibility to find out of the way gems as well as popular sites, so they need insight. Currently, human powered directories, personalized, social and vertical search can only take us so far. Ten years from now, he doesn't see us typing two words into a box and hitting the search key. Among the possibilities are a sort of search assistant that will compile results for us based on our specifications. At any rate, search is still in its infancy, he said, with great things to come.Comments

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Local search figures prominently in predictions for the future success of online ads. Businesses should start now at gaining good placement for local searches.Gab Goldenberg(Coverage of the SMX West Conference continues at WebProNews Videos. Keep an eye on WebProNews for more notes and videos from the event this week.)Time spent on local search advertising today puts a business in better position to benefit tomorrow. Look no farther than Gab Goldenberg and his four steps to getting MontrealSEO.ca to appear twice in universal search: once alongside a Google Map, and once in a high organic listing placement. Here's how that happened:  1. Bought MontrealSEO.ca and "Sticky"-Forwarded It 2. Submitted MontrealSEO.ca to Google’s Local Business Center 3. Built Links Internally and Externally for MontrealSEO.ca 4. Passed On Reviews Into Google Maps Eric Lander recommended cross-linking pages with maps and trusted sources to help with blended search. If multiple data sources push duplicate listings into blended search results, the site publisher will want to consolidate.    Eric LanderLander recommended using a free tool at Localeze to help manage their online listings. The Merchant Profile Manager allows a business to add, edit, or remove a single business listing at no charge. People performing a local search tend to include their city name, Chris Silver Smith noted. Seeing a certain result in a given blended search depends on the search engine and ranking factors. He observed how ratings on Yahoo Local, and links at the Yahoo-owned Delicious bookmarking site to a business, play a role in where the listing will rank in blended search. Microsoft's Live Search blended results seem to be impacted by the address of a business. A sample of a query for [Boston seafood restaurants] ordered results mostly by the numeric address in Live Search. At Google, the One Box section for universal results contains a lot more listings. This gives businesses more of an opportunity to appear alongside a Google Map and the attention it draws in a search.

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Just a quick post here on some simple tips that David Bailey of Google advised in this morning’s session on “The Blended Search Revolution” at the SMX West conference in Santa Clara:Publish high-quality, well-captioned images;Have pages which already have good PageRank (use traditional SEO to achieve);Create a Google Video Sitemap;Update business listings in Local Business Center;Submit your feed to Google Product Search;Create a high-quality company blog; Comments

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Universal search presents retailers an opportunity to reach searchers with more information than a few words of plain text.(Coverage of the SMX West Conference continues at WebProNews Videos. Keep an eye on WebProNews for more notes and videos from the event this week.) SMX Conference (Photo Credit: iEntry Inc.)As search engines shift to presenting additional types of content, like images and videos, in search results, retailers need to make their content ready for engines to present it to potential customers. Liana Evans said these opportunities present new chances at engagement. Along with images and video in universal search, people see other content like maps, social media site profiles and reviews, and results from shopping comparison engines. Being in universal search goes beyond just search now. The important relationship-building that can take place still need good SEO fundamentals; we mentioned some of these in our previous SMX West post on universal search. Chris Silver Smith noted the ongoing changes at search engines, and how they impact retailers. He recommended using titles for products to match what searchers seek. As one makes more content available for search, retailers will want to experiment with searches and see what types of products come up in the results. Clothes and books are not as easy as electronics, for example. To help with this, Smith suggested placing product names and brand names in titles, something that should work better in universal search results. With universal search being a work in progress, retailers have the chance to experiment. They will need to keep experimenting as Google and other search engines adapt what they do with universal search results. One change could undo what people get with a query now, and there is always room for improvement.

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The big thing in search brings more than text to searchers. Images and video figure in the universal search plans of the major engines.(Coverage of the SMX West Conference continues at WebProNews Videos. Keep an eye on WebProNews for more notes and videos from the event this week.) During the Search 3.0 track session on Videos, Images & Blended Results, Todd Friesen clarified some history behind blended search. "I'd like to point out that Google did not invent universal search... Ask.com did," he said. Universal search sweeps different media types into the results pages. No more list of ten plain text links. This iteration of search reflects the changing nature of the searcher, who expects rich media results mirroring his or her interests. The ten blue links still exist in Google's results, for example. But now these are complemented with results from news, images, videos, blogs, even books when appropriate.    SMX WestThis represents an opportunity for site publishers to reach an audience beyond text. High quality content of relevance to searchers will bring them to a publisher's site, whether it is text or something else. Eric Enge noted comScore's estimate of image search activity: seven percent of all searches take place in image search. More optimistic figures from other quarters peg that figure as high as 15 percent. Images become important in search due to the scanning habits of people looking at a web page. In plain text search, Enge said studies found people scan over a page in an 'F' pattern. Add images to the mix, and they scan the top of the page before going directly to the pictures. If you want universal search to find those images, attention must be paid to URL attributes. One HTML document with a bunch of variable images doesn't work well; worse, Enge noted the potential for this being treated as duplicate content, with the usual penalties a search engine could assess. ALT attributes are the publisher's friend. Words like 'pictures' or 'images' or 'photographs' help here, as Enge cited a case study his firm performed. They found a universal search inclusion rate of about 30 percent without descriptive words in the ALT attribute. Once those attributes were in place, inclusion rates jumped to the 70 percent range for a nice increase. Benu Aggarwal discussed videos and universal search, saying three out of five people consume video online today. She provided a nice six-step list to creating and promoting videos:   1. Keyword research/story board. 2. Video production 3. Optimize the video for web delivery 4. Surround the video with HTML 5. Create Media RSS; create video sitemap 6. Do video submissions and track your video views  Keyword phrases for video pages are just as important as they are for other content. She also tapped Flickr as a friend to video creators, since screencaps of interesting content can be uploaded and tagged at the service. User expectations have moved beyond text. Modern Internet users see images and videos as a given part of the experience. Since so many millions of people use search engines to get what they want, site publishers should work at capturing their interest through universal search.

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In the age of information overload and excessive social media use (which are often joined at the hip), there are still plenty of questions as to whether or not social media is truly beneficial to businesses. This is a topic that has been covered time and time again (including by myself), and generally what it comes down to is...it depends. Clearly there are businesses that can benefit more than others, there are different ways to utilize social tools to benefit different aspects of business from networking to marketing, yada, yada, yada. There are lots of variables that come into play. Assuming that you are one who does use social media while trying to successfully run a business, you've got to have some way of getting the most productivity out of your day as you can. This is certainly easy to lose track of within the social media world. Having a time management strategy is incredibly helpful in maintaining productivity. That goes without saying. This is a subject that David Wallace of SearchRanks elaborated on in a session at SMX West as well as in the following interview with Abby Johnson. More WebProNews Videos I'll tell you another tremendous time-saving tool for those who don't fool with them - feed readers. Within our little industry we like to think that everybody uses them or at least knows about them, yet you can probably stop any number of random strangers on the street and ask them if they know what RSS is, and you'll probably get a high percentage of blanks stares. I'm going to assume that as a WPN reader you are fully aware of the concept, and just say that feeds have saved me an infinite amount of time in researching articles, keeping up with news, and staying organized in general since I have been using them. The point is, we all feel a bit overwhelmed sometimes, and it can be easy to lose focus. Thankfully, there are ways to stay level-headed that can be utilized if we only stop and evaluate our strategies for how we manage our time. I'm sure you're familiar with the "time is money" statement.

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The SMX Confernece was in Sydney Australia last week, and one topic discussed by representatives of both Google and Yahoo was that of duplicate content filtering across international domains. Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz notes that while the subject has been discussed in the past, many people including experts in the field have been in the dark. He highlights what Yahoo and Google (respectively) search engineers Priyank Garg and Greg Grothaus had to say about the matter: Priyank, when asked about best practices for "localizing" English language content across domains, noted that Yahoo! does not filter duplicate content out of their results when the works are found on multiple ccTLD domains. Greg confirmed that this is also how Google's engine behaves and, with the exception of potentially spammy or manipulative sites, reproducing the same content on, for example, yoursite.com, yoursite.co.uk and yoursite.com.au was perfectly acceptable and shouldn't trigger removal for duplicate content (assuming those sites are properly targeting their individual geographic regions). Fishkin also notes that for usability and conversion reasons, it's best to localize languages anyway, just to create a better user experience. Vanessa Fox (formerly of Google) has a very in-depth article on "Making Geotargeted Content Findable For the Right Searchers," which also discusses the issue. She recommends the following: - Putting content for each country on a subdomain or subfolder. (Either is fine; but  if you’re starting from scratch and have a choice, I’d generally suggest going with a subdomain.) -  Ensuring all content (including title tag and meta description) is localized. -  Focusing on regional link-building efforts. For instance, make sure that your PR team is targeting newspapers in local regions, not just near the corporate office. - Including location-specific terms in internal anchor text. For instance, you might want to create an HTML site map that links to each country’s “home page” on the domain. Fox's article contains a ton of additional useful information on international SEO, an important topic for any business looking to expand their customer-base around the globe. Country-specific TLDs can contribute to relevancy factors that potentially make your site rank higher according to Fox. While there are exceptions, the subject is something definitely worth giving some thought to.

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The SMX Advanced conference is coming up next week in Seattle, Washington. It will take place on June 2nd and 3rd, and WebProNews will be there to cover it both days. More WebProNews Videos WebProNews readers can expect interviews with Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft on a variety of topics including what's in store for the future of search for Microsoft. The latest trends and seo and social media will of course be discussed as well. Stay tuned to WebProNews for tips and interviews in the form of articles and videos next week, and beyond. Any particular topic you're interested in hearing about from the event? Let us know.

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As you may have read about by now, Google's Matt Cutts participated in a fairly lengthy Q&A session at SMX Advanced in Seattle. One interesting question that Matt got was about how webmasters should deal with display:none and AJAX without being penalized by Google. Cutts recommends making sure that whenever you write your own mouseover code that you don't roll your own custom solution, which he says might do some really weird things that nobody else has done before. "We write our algorithm so that we try to detect all the common idioms, so if you're using a mouseover sort of thing where you mouseover this menu and there's five more links here, or some text or stuff like that, we try to handle that in all the common cases," explains Cutts. "So whenever we're parsing through css or looking through javascript, we're trying to detect hidden text we try to specifically make sure we don't accidentally trigger on somebody who's got mouseover code, so if you're using common mouseover code, go and find sites that are very well known, and you use code the same or similar to that, in terms of how the mouseover works, you should probably be fine," he adds. "We want the algorithm to trigger on when you use display:none and you're sending it 9,999 pixels that way, and you've got four pages of text, and it's really, really irritating and our users complain about that," Cutts continues. "So we do our best, and when we spot that there are problems, we try to iterate and improve the algorithm, but I dont' think we have very big issues with false positives in terms of that." The summary of Matt's advice here is that to be safe, just make sure you don't write your own completely weird code from scratch. He says to look and see what other sites are doing. The guy who asked the question asked him if his advice is basically to just copy other people's code. The audience found this amusing, and Cutts was quick to defuse the notion that this is what he is really saying.  "I think you're oversimplifying it a little bit," Cutts said. "I don't want you to commit theft on someone else's code. But there are for example, libraries that are released...script.aculo.us and things like this that are well known that you can use that aren't just copying other people's code." What do you think of Matt's advice when it comes to display:none and AJAX? Does this limit creativity with regard to code creation? Tell us what you think. Stay tuned to WebPronews for more coverage of the SMX Advanced conference from Seattle (that goes for articles and for video). You will also be seeing more info from Matt's Q&A session, specifically.

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WebProNews is of course attending the SMX Advanced conference in Seattle, and Abby Johnson spoke with Christine Churchill, President of KeyRelevance, about the effect the economy has had on keyword usage. Have you noticed differences in keyword trends? Share your experiences here. More WebProNews Videos There have been interesting trends appearing in keyword usage, and what has consistently worked in the past may not be so effective these days. When it comes to keyword research, there are plenty of tools available for you to use. Christine points out a few that she uses personally: - Google Trends - Google Insights - Google external tool - Keyword discovery - Wordtracker

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In a Q&A session at SMX Advanced in Seattle, Google's Matt Cutts talked at length about paid links. He was asked several questions about this. Google recently announced it is now reading javascript and acting upon it. In the past, the advice given out has been if you have paid links, you should either nofollow those paid links or use javascript because Google didn't read it. When asked about this, Matt says Googlebot has gotten smarter. He notes that Google began changing its messaging on this around 2007-2008 to stop mentioning javascript but to nofollow or do a redirect through a URL which is blocked through robots.txt. Cutts says this a very secure way to do it. Cutts says the interesting thing is that even on the onclick in javascript, the crawl and indexing team has submitted code so that it will respect a rel="nofollow" so you can put a rel="nofollow" attribute on a link that's running in javascript and in the majority of cases Google will make sure it doesn't float pagerank even if they're executing the javascript. He says that if you want to be completely safe, nofollow or link through things that are blocked. Someone then asked Matt how long they have to fix their sites if they didn't know about this. Cutts reponded by saying that javascript has not been a problem in the vast majority of cases. "If you look at the major ad networks, they tend to be doing redirects through or iframes on things that are blocked out on robots.txt anyway." He does say that Google should probably put up a blog post about it though. A Vanessa Fox article about how javascript is executed and crawled these days was also referenced. Cutts thinks the other search engines are moving in the direction of having more sophisticated bots as well. You may have heard that Google gave away Android phones at its recent developer conferences. This was brought up in comparison to paid links. Cutts basically says that it was not Google's intent to acquire links, and that the move was more aimed at putting Android phones in the hands of developers to inspire the development of apps. Google doesn't need paid links itself. He says they don't even think about getting links as far as their own stuff. Cutts also talked about the Federal Trade Commission's stance, which basically just looks to see if there is material connection to linking. Are you getting something of monetary value for a link? Contests were also brought up in this light. If you're making people link to you to get into a contest where they can win a prize, that's close to money for links. "If you're doing a contest, don't make it explicitly your role to try to get links," he says. From this part of the Q&A there seemed to be two main points that Cutts wanted to make clear: 1. There's a spectrum of how money is involved and there's a spectrum of how people are trying to manipulate or spam the search engines. The majority of the stuff Google sees is where there is money being paid directly for links. 2. As a webmaster, you can do whatever you want on your site. "It's your site and it's your choice," he says. Google also has the right to choose what they want to display in their index. If you are interested in learning about other things Cutts discussed in the Q&A, check out the following articles: - Duplicate Content not an Everyday Problem - How to Avoid Google Penalties with AJAX and display:none - Google 'Evaporating' Excess PageRank - Matt Cutts Opens Up About Google Penalties - How Google Handles Google Bowling

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In a Q&A session at SMX Advanced in Seattle, Google's Matt Cutts was asked the following question: How does Google look at the issue that I can buy suspect links and point them to my competitor? How does your algorithm track that? This practice is known as "Google Bowling". To get a better understanding of what Google Bowling (different from Google Bombing) is about, check out this article from Michael Pedone from 2005 about how competitors can sabotage you. Matt discussed how Google deals with this. In the session he said: The short answer is we try really hard to make sure that one person can't Google bowl another person. You try to include it in your algorithm so much that you don't want those links to count, but you don't necessarily want anyone to be in a position where somebody else could try to hurt you.... We try to make it so that it doesn't cause a drop in your rankings (if a competitor tries to hurt you). We try to do stuff algorithmically, we use manual means...we've been pretty clear that we do not like paid links and we take action on it, but at the same time, we try very hard to make it so that just because somebody else doesn't like you, they can't submarine your rankings and things like that. It's good to know that Google is keeping the best interest of those being "bowled" in mind. It would be interesting to know people's opinions about how well they're actually handling this. Has this ever happened to you? Do you think Google does a good job handling it? Share your thoughts with other WebProNews readers. Also, stay tuned to WebPronews for more coverage of the SMX Advanced conference from Seattle (that goes for articles and for video). You will also be seeing more info from Matt's Q&A session, specifically.

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Abby Johnson of WebProNews had a nice chat with FindMeFaster's Matt Van Wagner about PPC campaign strategies and ad copy at the SMX Advanced conference in Seattle this week. For one, they discussed how to get a good quality score right from the beginning. Talk about your strategies for achieving a good quality score. More WebProNews Videos A couple tactics discussed by Van Wagner include: - Determining what your competitors are paying for their ads, and approximately what their quality score is by doing a little "competitive analysis." - Pulling reports from the search engines periodically and using excel to generate a an optimized bid list. He says this does 80% of what a lot of the good tools out there do - for FREE.  

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