By Mary,

Recently, Google explained to digital marketers that links coming from social media like macroblogging, digg, youtube, facebook, etc., count as an important factor for website ranking.

Google describes how links that come naturally from viral word of mouth, on the basis of the merit (people linking to a website because they genuinely like it), are more valuable, opposed to inbound links coming from “link building marketing” efforts which build links in a none organic way.

Google explains they’ve been monitoring this closely and is taking in consideration those links that have been attracted on their on…on the basics of the interestingness of a website. Of course, this comes as surprised to many SEO professionals, specially link builders, but this is part of the new algorithms changes Google implemented recently.

Links that are editorially base and come naturally are better than those typical link-building tactics because you won’t have to work for them nearly as hard. Plus, Google will consider these vital links as high valuable traffic, leaving the none organic ones below value rate.

Does this mean link building is going to disappear?

It looks to me more like link building is evolving towards a more natural way, where the online user has the upper hand, and not the link builder guy. Google recently explained they consider inbound links coming from pages to be only one out of their 200 factors, so they have asked people to relax with the link building frenzy and concentrate more on generating interesting and unique content for their users. Of course, they do not discard adding those on-page keyword elements to make sense of what a website is about.

Some example of vital linking:

• Links from video sites, and microbiologist sites
• Links from different social networks and profiles like Facebook, Mysepsace, hi5, friendster, twitter, etc.
  

• VERY IMPORTANT FOR RANKING:
• Social channels like youtube or facebook need to generate comments and attract views and generate quiality of followers and quantity of      followers ratio.
• Need to reply to people on youtube for example, as well facebook (constant activity)
• Generate User Authority
• High youtube presence and user activity makes videos more visible. Google does not preffer youtube, and you sholud post videos on other places like. photobucket.com
• Among many other factors… which requires lots of time and work (even more than SEO). SMO is another type of digital ad marketing campaign all together.
  
  
  
• MICRO BLOGGING Tips for ranking factors:
• The ration of followers to the number of people following  counts.
• Fleashness of and the number of time people people take to retweet what you tweet.

Yes! times are changing. Many of those Google changes happened at the end of last year, including Personalized Search, and most recently last May. Google is moving towards semantic web technology and real-time SEO, and common SEO practices are becoming obsolete. One of them is Link building practices who a lot of companies still use as their main SEO strategy. SEO professionals need to keep in mind that it is not about jumping into social media as the only new best way to link/rank a site– it is more about gearing the focus towards Semantic Web as a whole. Read more about Semantic web.

                          

Having a video showing up on Google organic is not the result of  the usual application of SEO strategies. This is because a video on Google organic comes from a well coordinated plan of  SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING (vital marketing) strategies.

This is call SMM (Social Media Marketing), Not SEO. Video Marketing is a whole different ball game. Very often, Search optimization can’t  rank a video on Google organic as well as it  does with other regular content pages. This is because Google’s video ranking factors come mostly from social activities.

Some example of factors:

• Linking video from other socia/video sites.
• Link video from different social networks and profiles like Facebook, Mysepsace, hi5, friendster, twitter, etc.

VERY IMPORTANT FOR RANKING:

• First and most important, you need to create a video site map. Creating a video site map is easy. Here are the five things you need to include in the site map:
  x
  1) Title
  2) Description
  3) Play page URL
  4) Thumbnail image URL

  Once you’ve collected this information, sign into Google webmaster tool and submit your video site map.x
  

• If the video is hosted in your site, make sure you include keyword information about it, in your page title, name of the video, or text around the video.
  One tip: I would recommend introducing a place for people to leave comments. This will generate more natural keywords from users commenting about the video.
  x
• Those videos need to generate comments and attract views and generate quiality of followers and quantity of followers.
  x
• Need to reply to people on youtube for example, as well facebook (constant activity).
  x
  Generate User Authority
• High youtube presence and user activity makes videos more visible. Google does not preffer youtube, and you sholud post videos on other places.

• Free places to distribute online videos:
  • YouTube.com
  • twitvid.com (for twitter)
  • bubbletweet.com (cool vid for twitter like and websites)
  • Vimeo.com
  • 12seconds.tv
  • Zipvo.com
  • Homeumentary.com
  • Tweetube.com
  • Twitvid.com
  • TwitCam
  • Twiddeo.com
  • RealeFlix.com
  • Realestateshot.com
  • TweetReel (for iPhone)
  • Blip.tv
  • Facebook.com
  • Myspace.com

• MICROBLOGGING Tips for ranking factors:
• Again, introducing functionalities where viewers can leave comments about your videos will generate natural keywords and relevant content from users, which Google semantic search is now giving an importance factor for ranking.
• The ration of followers to the number of people following  counts.
• Freshness and the number of time people people take to retweet what you tweet–with video links.

KEYWORD FACTORS

These are the key parts where you should focus:

• Include keywords in your video name, titles & description.
• Build a video library to make your channel more relevant
• Activate comments, rates, favorites through your channel
• Add a link to your website within the description

Among many other factors… which requires lots of time and effort (even more than SEO). SMO is another type of digital marketing campaign all together, but should be part of your overall online marketing plan.

Create a channel with multiple videos

NOTE TO KEEP IN MIND: Even though youtube or Google doesn’t look at video quality to rank videos, a good produced  and interesting video is required to generate the social media traffic that subsequently will help your video rank high.  I have studied video production in the past, and I will soon write a post about how to produce a good quality video for the web. In the mid-time, you can check out Media Trust Blog post  Crash Course in Creating Compelling Product Videos as an starting point.

Related news and articles:

• Small Business Social Media Marketing eBook (slideshare.net)
• Using Facebook for SEO and Driving Traffic (shawndrewry.com)
• Social Media Optimization: SMO is the New SEO – Part 2 (briansolis.com)
• Can You Keep Ignoring Social Media? 10 Reasons Why You Just Can’t (blonde2dot0.com)
• What is Social Media Optimization (SMO)? (antonrsa.co.za)

                          

By Mary,
Twitter is a great microbloging platform, but what they’ve neglected in focusing on is that by producing things in real time there are stuff that gets left behind with volumes of information you cannot make heads of tails out of it.

Each tweets has relevance in a the longer term fashion, and it has even more relevance if it could be assembled into an organized by topic durable content. Fortunately, there is new plataform that allow us to do just that. It’s called Twylah.

Twylah organizes your Twitter stream (lists and all) into neatly organized topical folders, and crates your very own blog out of your tweets, creating a durable contextual SEO-optimized pages. You can even tweet from within your blog.

A blog more sustainable with more durable stratigic valuable goods, turning flow into stock, boosting productivity, and organizing your tweets as long-term ranking influencers.

HOW TO GET IT

All you  need to do is go to Twylah.com. It will ask you to join by using your tweeter account login. Give a minute, and voila! you have a blog organized with tabs pert topic.

Check out my new Twylah page

Have fun creating your own!

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Phrase of the day: HIGH QUALITY INFLUENCERS.

                          

I had the pleasure of meeting Tim Ash a couple of years ago at one of the Ad-tech events in New York city, and ever since we’ve bumped into each other from time to time. Always a pleasure to talk  to him, share ideas and experiences, and get free books from him (joke)–very nice guy.

Well, I want to share with you yet another of Tim’s work. Today’s Tim webminar on Landing Page was commented by tweeters as “a great webminar!” He was very kind to share it with us, so here it is. Enjoy it!

                          

By Mary,

What semantic means? is the study of meaning in communication.

So then what is Semantic Search?

Semantic Web, part of the new 3.0 technology is being used by the engines. Latent semantic indexing allows a search engine to determine what a page is about outside of specifically matching search query text.

This was not a big factor on Google, but all that has changed. Semantic Search is now at the core of its search engine technology.

Semantic technology is a human-software architecture that identify associations and concepts related to a query. It allows the robots to read keywords but also the similarity between them and the links within a site to make sense of what a page is about.

Another way to picture this is to use a cube where all these factors need to be moved around and compose a perfect 6 side match. It’s the same way with semantic search. The bot engine comes to a site and does not longer just look at one side of your page, it reads throughout your entire site meaning, by observing closely at the composition of your contextual elements to determine where the site stands as a whole. For instance, if you search for “web design” a semantic search engine might retrieve documents containing the words “HTML”, “Dreamweaver” and “video traning”, even if the word “web design” is not found in the source document.

A semantic search engine automatically identifies the concepts structuring the text content.

“For example, if you search for ‘principles of physics’, our algorithms understand that ‘angular momentum,’ ’special relativity,’ ‘big bang’ and ‘quantum mechanic’ are related terms that could help you find what you need,” wrote Ori Allon, technical lead of Google’s Search Quality team, and Ken Wilder, team engineer at the company’s Snippets project on their blog.

In January of this year, during Google’s fourth-quarter earnings conference call, CEO Eric Schmidt touched briefly on this topic, hinting that the company is getting more serious about semantic search technology. “Wouldn’t it be nice if Google understood the meaning of your phrase, rather than just the words that are in the phrase? We have [done] a lot of discoveries in that area that are going to roll out [soon],” Schmidt said.

And Microsoft last year acquired Powerset, one of the companies developing and perfecting semantic search engines, in order to improve its Web search engine with semantic search technology.

And since july 19th, 2010 Metaweb is now part of Google, so very soon Google will have tools for webmaster to plug their sites into Entities.

What are Entities?

Is a singular person place or thing. For example, One thing could be named diffrent ways or vise-versa, one word could be many things.  So by using the process of identifying millions of identities and what other sites use to relate to them, Metaweb (now Google) builds a map of single words into entities to show how they are related.

Entities are smarter than words. “It’s a colaborated process that involves the online community.” Metaweb explains on their blog. Wait, “community?” Does this sounds like Google is tryign to put SEO out of business? You will be the judge of that. Watch this video explaining the entire process.

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Where does this leaves current SEOs tactics?

For now, lets think of search engines as a 5 year old child, and try to talk to it in terms it will understand. So keywords are still a key on-page element. For example, it’s good to do your keyword research and use those keywords into your pages, but additionally try to use variations of SYNONYMS of the same keyword.

Other Recomendations

-Use independent “topics” instead of terms!

- Use close variants. This would include, singular/plural forms, misspellings, abbreviations and acronyms, and stemmings (like “floor” and “flooring”). Synonyms (like “quick” and “fast”) and related searches (like “flowers” and “tulips”) are not considered close variants.

The illustration below outlines the relative reach of different keyword match type strategies. As it shows, modified broad match keywords match more searches than the equivalent phrase match keyword, but fewer searches than the equivalent broad match keyword. Match behavior also depends on the specific words you modify. For example, the keyword formal +shoes will match the search “evening shoes,” but the keyword +formal +shoes will not.

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……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
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IMPORTANT: Keywords that have become more important than title tag (believe it or not).

-Use Keywords that trigger action or interaction with the user and/or provides the user with something valuable. Like using the following keywords: “for example,” an example of this,” “an study conducted by,” ” here is a demo,” “comment on this” (this would be for blogs), “read white paper,” “Join,”  ”poll(s),”  ”news,’ “related articles,” “follow us,” “case study.” and so on.

If you’ve noticed, some of these keywords are the description of tools that creates on-the-fly elements, otherwise called, real-time SEO [Read more about real-time SEO.] Google is reading into these real-time content generators as important factors, even more than title tags.

For web development

Buildings sites based on entities, which is a matter of plugin in your site to an entity data base. (tool will soon be available on Google webmaster tools).

It’s suggested to begin using blogs  instead of regular sites. For example, Wordpress can run a site just as good as any other regular website technology, and the upside is that Google is ranking sites with social factors and freshness in them. Blogs are a perfect fit for that. A blog can be designed and developed to look like a  full-blown website, with the advantage of all the widgets you can add to it.

A case study on this is a recent multiple local listing I did for a client, we set up a blog specifically to rank for one of his offices in Florida. I themed about 20% with related (not relevant–how about that) local mentions and close variant keywords. In less than two days, we were ranking in third position on Google organic. In the other hand, It took about about two weeks to show up on Google maps. What this means is that the blog was faster on ranking than the submission we did to Google maps.

Lean LSA modeling method

“Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) is a theory and method for extracting and representing the contextual-usage meaning of words by statistical computations applied to a large corpus of text.” Explains U.C.

It is essential that you understand the LSA modeling methods before using semantic applications on a website. A good way to start learning LSA is by checking the study conducted by the University of Colorado on LSA.

Apply the SVD to a term–document matrix
-  The intermediate dimensions correspond to “topics”
– Terms that usually occur together get bundled (synonyms)
– Terms having several meanings get assigned to several topics (polysemes)

What do we need?
– How to relate single terms to topics
– How to relate documents to topics
– How to relate query terms to topics

Again, providing valuable and relevant content but mixed with new semantic tactics. This is the new SEO.

See this article on how Google Explains Social Links Are Better Than Link Building. One of the many factors semantic has changed the web for good.

Related news and articles:

• How Twitter Annotations Could Bring the Real-Time and Semantic Web Together (readwriteweb.com)
• Google’s Semantic Web Push: Rich Snippets Usage Growing

More about the term Semantic Search

______________________________________________________________________________
Semantic search
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Semantic search seeks to improve search accuracy by understanding searcher intent and the contextual meaning of terms as they appear in the searchable dataspace, whether on the Web or within a closed system, to generate more relevant results. Author Seth Grimes lists “11 approaches that join semantics to search”[1], and Hildebrand et al. [2] provide an overview that lists semantic search systems and identifies other uses of semantics in the search process.

Guha et al.[3] distinguish two major forms of search: Navigational and Research. In navigational search, the user is using the search engine as a navigation tool to navigate to a particular intended document. Semantic Search is not applicable to navigational searches. In Research Search, the user provides the search engine with a phrase which is intended to denote an object about which the user is trying to gather/research information. There is no particular document which the user knows about that s/he is trying to get to. Rather, the user is trying to locate a number of documents which together will give him/her the information s/he is trying to find. Semantic Search lends itself well here.

Rather than using ranking algorithms such as Google’s PageRank to predict relevancy, Semantic Search uses semantics, or the science of meaning in language, to produce highly relevant search results. In most cases, the goal is to deliver the information queried by a user rather than have a user sort through a list of loosely related keyword results.

Other authors primarily regard semantic search as a set of techniques for retrieving knowledge from richly structured data sources like ontologies as found on the Semantic Web [4]. Such technologies enable the formal articulation of domain knowledge at a high level of expressiveness and could enable the user to specify his intent in more detail at query time.

                          

Google released their “permanent” personalization of results just at the end of last year, and Bing released their own the following week. Check SearchEngineLand’s coverage, though one big question remains in my mind:

What metrics impact personalization?

Is it merely clickthroughs from the organic results? Does visit history play a role? Or clicks from other vertical search services Google offers? What about clicks from paid search ads – either in the SERPs or from AdSense/DoubleClick?

I’d love to see experimentation done on this front so marketers have a better idea what they’re dealing with. If it’s proven that you can get organic benefits by attracting PPC clickthrough, this may be the new “paid inclusion” for 2010, and could drive bid prices up massively as companies compete not only for paid listing clicks, but for the chance to earn “organic” positioning as well.

Personalization means a few things for SEOs, but it doesn’t fundamentally change the game, IMO:

• The Rich Get Richer - It’s now truer than ever. If you rank well, and earn solid traffic, you’re going to be even harder to unseat. Startups and upstarts are going to have an even greater uphill battle to climb than before.
• Branding is More Important - you want your loyal visitors and fans scouring the SERPs for your listings, and clicking them more so than anything else. I expect some clever spammers are going to be manipulating this with everything from Mechanical Turk to virus infections that make their browser search for their brand and click those results. We’ll see if Google has good protections in place to defend against this.
• There is No Normal Ranking - Or, at least, there’s no “normal” ranking that’s “average” in a personalized SERPs world. Rank tracking may still carry some value to understand how non-personalized searchers see your pages, but that data is going to be less useful in comparison to what your analytics report about search traffic and the trends. Win the “personalization” battle, and you may start to care less about the classic “rankings” battle.

SIDE NOTE: Here is instructions about turning off personalization

http://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=54048hl=en&answer=54048

I tested out, and quite honestly, the search results still seem affected and not as good as before. It gathers random results– all related to a theme of words–but not much related to my query in particular.

                          

Google has announced that it is now offering privacy-friendly SSL encryption on its search engine, becoming the first major company to offer the protection.

For now you can log into the more secure Google SSL Beta service at https://www.google.com.  The “S” is critical, indicating you are connecting to Google’s server through the HTTPS protocol, rather than the usual HTTP. The “S” stands for secure.  It means the data flowing on the network between your computer and Google’s servers is scrambled and can’t easily be intercepted and read.  HTTPS is the usual protocol used automatically when connecting to such things as bank Websites  and other Web pages were sensitive financial information is entered.

It’s also important do understand that the new service does not change the information you share with Google.  The Internet giant continues to gather that and do everything it has always done so it can serve you up to advertisers.  However, HTTPS makes it extremely difficult for anyone between you and Google to snoop on what you are doing.

                          

If you’re looking to generate income on the internet, by building your own business or becoming an affiliate marketer, then follow Steps For Success that looks at how to get both aspects working in tandem.

Steps For Success

Identify Market Opportunity

This step is the most crucial.

No matter how good a PPC campaign is, or how well it has been executed, if someone is trying to sell ice to Inuits, they won’t make any money. The ideal opportunity, from a business point of view, has low competition and high profit margins. A poor opportunity has high competition, no market, or low margins, and often a combination of all three. The closer you get to identifying a market with low competition and high margins, the more lucrative your PPC campaign will be.

How do we identify such a market opportunity?

Search marketers have a golden tool in the form of the keyword database. Danny Sullivan likened search to a reverse broadcast network, where people broadcast what they want, by way of the keyword query.

“Search is magical. For years, I’ve described search as a reverse broadcast system. In a broadcast system, advertisers spend lots of money to reach a mass audience, hoping to build desire for a product or service. But most of the audience is not interested in their pitches. Search is the reverse. Each search is an expressed desire, something that someone at a particular time actually wants. Advertisers can tune in to the “desire-cast” that’s going on.”

John Battelle labeled Google search the “Database Of Intentions”. Intent is contained in every keyword query, telling you if a potential visitor wants to buy mortgages online, or find a map of California, or download torrents.

“The Database of Intentions is simply this: The aggregate results of every search ever entered, every result list ever tendered, and every path taken as a result. It lives in many places, but three or four places in particular hold a massive amount of this data (ie, MSN, Google, and Yahoo). This information represents, in aggregate form, a place holder for the intentions of humankind – a massive database of desires, needs, wants, and likes that can be discovered, subpoenaed, archived, tracked, and exploited to all sorts of ends.”

Keyword databases contain a goldmine of intent. We can mine those keyword databases.

The trick lies in detecting commercial intent of visitors, then looking for areas that make good business sense.

Examples of keywords with clear commercial intent include “purchase”, “buy”, “coupons”, descriptions of commercial products and services, and consumer brand names. Not all terms relating to your product or service are equal. Keyword volume only tells you a lot of people search on a term, not whether that term is lucrative. For example, you can’t tell much about visitor intent if the keyword is Paris Hilton, however Paris Hilton watches hints at an intent to purchase, as it directly relates to a product.

Using a keyword research tool, a PPC marketer may find a keyword that signals commercial intent ie, buy LCD monitor online. The visitor’s intent is clear. Next, the marketer looks at the level of competition. This is likely high, as this niche is well known, mature and competitive. A keyword is competitive if the number of bidders, as shown in Google Adwords for example, is high.

Can we compete for high competition keywords?

Yes – however the challenge in such a scenario lies in operating on thin margins. A marketer would need to have slightly better margins than her competitors. Deep pockets win these types of competitions, and ultimately, PPC systems are geared towards advertisers with the deepest pockets. If your pockets aren’t too deep, look for niches with less competition. It takes some digging, but that’s half the fun!

Keyword terms that don’t signal a commercial intent can lead to conversion too, of course. Google has recently implemented search funnel tracking to help identify these terms. However, generally speaking, these terms account for low levels of conversion compared to keywords with clear commercial intent.

Execution

After a visitor clicks through to your landing page, what do they see? If they get beyond your landing page, what is their experience? Will they go elsewhere at that point? Why? Will they return? Is there anything that will encourage them to do so? What is their experience of the entire transaction?

No doubt you can spot the many problems that can occur beyond the PPC campaign.

Let’s say you’ve identified a golden niche. Visitors have a clear, commercial intent, and the bid competition is low. You now need to look at your competition.

What prices are they offering? What service levels are they offering? The most important question to ask is:can you do better? People will comparison shop. If your offer isn’t compelling, isn’t cheaper, or doesn’t offer more value, people will shop elsewhere.

Make sure your offer is as good as, or preferably superior, to your competition. What can you offer that your prospects want and will pay for, that your competitors cannot? If you’re in a market with little to differentiate one supplier from the next, accept that your opportunity is likely to be short term, unless you can compete on volume. If you can find a point of uniqueness that is difficult, or impossible for your competitors to copy, you’ll likely have a good long term proposition. It doesn’t matter if you can’t find this, as you can always work multiple short term niches over the long term, and/or leverage your position – such as a customer database – into other markets.

PPC In A Nutshell

The final piece of the puzzle is PPC, the means by which you acquire visitors once all else is in place.

Boiled down to the essentials, successful PPC strategies consist of these steps:

• Clearly identify your target market
• Identify the keyword terms your target market uses
• Organize keywords into small, tightly focused groups
• Write PPC adverts that have a clear call to action, demonstrate value and differentiate your offer from those of your competition
• Use keyword terms in the adverts
• Use capital letters in your ad title, where permitted
• Build clear, user-friendly landing pages that convey to the visitor they have found the right place
• Use a clear call to action
• Model your first landing pages design and text after those of your most successful competitors, then test landing pages using split/run testing methodologies and run with the winners
• Provide a means for the user to return if they don’t buy immediately – encourage bookmarking, get an email address, give something away of value free in return for personal details
• Measure and track everything

Summary

Identify your target market. Analyze your market and, ideally, look for areas with high margins and low competition. Use keyword databases to research and discover markets. Define the points of difference between you and your competitors. Ensure your end-to-end execution is comparable, or preferably better than your top competitors’. Run tight, focused PPC campaigns, and test performance regularly.

Look for keyword terms that reveal an intent to purchase.

How to kick-start your search for buying keywords

Here’s a simple technique from Academy editor Mark Nunney, to kick-start your search for buying keywords.

Here are the top 10 keywords containing lcd monitor as found on Wordtracker:

,

,

,

,

,

,

,

The seed keyword for the search was:

lcd monitor.

Now:

1) Build a list of ‘buying modifying’ words:

buy
purchase
bargain
bonus
value
benefits

2) Add those modifiers to lcd monitor like so:

buy lcd monitor
purchase lcd monitor
bargain lcd monitor
bonus lcd monitor
value lcd monitor
benefits lcd monitor

Use this Google spreadsheet to help build similar lists.

3) Repeat the Wordtracker search with the above list as your new seed words (configure Wordtracker to be ‘Broad keywords in any order’) to find a list of possible buying keywords like this:

                          

There are several ways to add Google maps to a wordpress post, but most of them requires going into the code or acquiring an API key from Google first, and then insert that into wordpress.  There’s not need to do it this way. You can add Google maps very easily with Google Chrome’s extension Zemanta. It shows right next to any post you are edinting.  All you do is type the address inside any article post, and automatically a map shows up on the right column (zemanta). You click on it and done!!

I only do coding for things that are worth spending time with.

To test this out right now, I’m going to type an address in this post.

Example:

A friend i have is located in Tampa, Florida.

Right after i type this location, a little map box shows to the right of this post. I clicked and there it is on top of this post.

Go try it and have fun!!!

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Related news and articles,

• 20+ Top Google Chrome Extensions/Plugins for Bloggers and Web Developers (tipsblogger.com)
• Zemanta for Thunderbird & Outlook 2007 (zemanta.com)
• Inserting Google Maps into wordpress (wptricks.net)
• The story behind Zemanta Chrome extension (zemanta.com)
• Tutorial: Zemanta bookmarklet for Google Chrome (zemanta.com)