Importance of Keywords in Links to Your Website

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a very complex process. It is a long-term process that will usually never produce results that you can see in days or weeks. By now you probably heard about the importance of getting other websites to link to yours so that you can get a higher ranking in search engines. You listed your websites in some directories and also received a few other links to your website.

But stop right here. How is being linked to your homepage? Are people just using a plain http://www.yourdomain.com for the link? Or is the link embedded in your business name? If so you are eventually loosing valuable points in your search engine ranking. To receive full 'points' from a search engine for a link to your website, the link should be embedded in specific keywords.

Keywords? What keywords? How are people searching for things related to your website? Almost nobody searches for your business by business name when doing a search in search engines. People are search for something specific and the search engine will eventually show a link to your page if it relates the search term to your website. If it does not associate a keyword with your website it will not display the link to your site and you are missing out on visitors.

You need to create a keyword strategy to optimize your website AND the associates links for search engines. Keywords need to be found on your website. Make sure there is enough text with the important keywords. Talk to friends, family, and customers to find out what search terms they would use and how that relates to your business and the website. This can be helpful information in your research.

Now when you go to exchange links with other websites use those keywords. Let the other sites link you with these keywords and the link embedded into those keywords. This will be an important piece to your search engine success. A good example of how this is done can be seen in the Author Resource information of this article.

Keywords, Ranking & Search Engine Optimization Fun

I am a Search Engine Optimization newbie. I have read a little on various forums, browsed a few articles, and read through The Affiliate Masters Course (Ken Evoy) a couple of times.

Eleven days ago I invested a little of my affiliate earnings in a new product that was being launched.

The Dowser Professional is a keyword research tool on steroids, and has allowed me to improve the returns from the few existing niche websites I already have, and find a number of new niches very quickly.

I was so impressed with The Dowser Professional that I decided it was a key product I wanted to promote as an affiliate, even to the extent of developing a product specific niche website.

I am very much a believer in Ken Evoy's technique of "pre-selling". If you provide a customer with proof that a product works, and what they could do with the product, you can maximise your sales potential.

So I set out to prove that The Dowser Professional was an insanely powerful tool, and that anyone could easily use it to improve their website(s) and find rich new niches.

I set myself what I believe is the ultimate challenge, to target SEO experts on their own turf.

I picked an initial keyword to research, "keyword".

Within a few minutes I had a good list of related keywords, and within 20 minutes had completed my keyword research. Yes the whole process was that fast.

I then setup a Blogger.com blog based around the keywords I selected.

http://keyword-report.blogspot.com

The primary keywords for the site are "keyword position report" (KEI approx 6K) and "keyword ranking report" (KEI approx 3K). It is amazing that such large holes can be found in a very competitive niche with only a few minutes work, but that is the power of The Dowser.

I set myself a very strict rule. No seeking links until the site was indexed and had achieved ranking based purely on keywords.

Today (July 28th 2005) the site was picked up by Yahoo. It ranks 1st and 5th for it's primary keywords, and has already received traffic from both Yahoo and Technorati.

The site is not yet listed in MSN and Google. I expect it to rank well on MSN and poorly on Google until it has some incoming links.

The site contains maybe 30% original content, and any articles used were carefully "wrapped" with specific keyword heavy text both before and after.

Andy Beard has worked in Sales, Marketing and Localization for the last 15 years, primarily in the computer games industry. His blog Exploring Niche Websites gives insights into creating profitable websites on the internet.

Additional related information including screenshots of example Yahoo ranking are available on his Niche Website Blog

Reporting on the success or failure of Keyword Position Report will appear in future articles.

Driving Your Website through Google Sandbox

What is Google Sandbox?

Google Sandbox is applied on new websites, it determines the timing of site inclusion as well as ranking in Google search engine results (SERPS). This process could take up to 6-8 months, which could be against your plans causing frustration to webmasters.

The question is what is to be done during the time in which websites are in Google Sandbox?

Do not waste time on checking your website listings in results page instead emphasize on SEO methods to accelerate your listings & improve status of ranking results.

Also make efforts to appear on other major search engines such as MSN & Yahoo since they do not have sandbox like Google, this will help drive traffic to your website while waiting for Googlebot to index your pages.

Link building strategy is another important issue not only will it improve ranking but also it will help Googlebot spider to find your pages easier while it's in the sandbox instead of repeatedly submitting your website every time.

Content is king

Main part for ongoing development of your website is to add new content on continuous basis since the most thing search engines are after is good quality websites with relevant content.

Conclusion at the end is that waiting for Google Sandbox is nothing but a waste of your precious time; instead do some useful efforts on developing your website with relevant content & adding inbound links as a part of your linking strategy to make Google happy with what it sees as well as your target visitor.

Google WebSearch? & Google Adsense - Yahoo

The makers of the world renowned search engine, Google, have taken things a step further to increase their user loyalty, grow their user base and at the same time reward websites for helping them promote their search engine. What a beautiful deal.

Google now offers WebSearch? allowing AdSense members to take the earning potential of their sites to an even higher level. Is it all about the money? For most I bet the answer will be "YES", however, those who would say no can say so with confidence.

Google delivers the best search results on the web today. Don't be surprised if the majority of your website users use it to search the web. They pride themselves on highly relevant search results with a clean and effective interface. They offer various filters to fine tune their results to allowing you to eliminate any unwanted sites from being displayed.

They have started a highly successful symbiotic relationship between Google and websites that many webmasters will be taking advantage of as soon as they hear the news. It is said time and time again how Google AdSense has transformed websites not geared towards earning income, into solid income producing businesses. Now with WebSearch? it gets even better.

So what exactly is WebSearch??

It's using Google's SiteSearch or Google's Web Search and displaying AdSense ads in the results and you earn income every time someone clicks on the ads. Lots of sites already use these features together or independently and them being able to monetize this is a sure plus. You are also able to customize your results page to some extent which includes full color customization as well as the ability to include your logo.

So how do I get it?

Well if you haven't already done so you will need to create and AdSense account at Google AdSense and follow the steps.

If you already have an AdSense account then log in and click on Search Settings and you should be able to figure it out from there. They also offer reporting information which can also be filtered by channel and includes clicks, the number of queries and clickthrough rate.

The verdict

If you answer yes to any of the following questions then there's a good chance that Google's WebSearch is for you:

1. Do you want to give your users a reason to stay on your site longer?

2. Have you ever wanted to offer web search from your site?

3. Do you want to be able to offer a site search feature to your users?

And last but not least

4. Do you want to increase the earning potential of your website? More popularly stated as? Do you want to make more money?

I'm not a betting man but id put my money on you answering yes to at least one of these.

Happy Google WebSearch?ing :-)

Google Introduces Pandas to Latin America

Brazilian Webmasters are bracing for impact as the rumor spreads that Google may be targeting their search results with the Panda Technologytm next. I may be partly responsible for that bracing because I reported a rumored Tweet that has been passed around. Let me say in no uncertain terms that I do not know where Panda will be rolled out next. My belief is that since all English search results have now been affected that it follows a non-English rollout will signal the release of Panda 3.0.

There is no official Google Blog for the Portuguese Web [CORRECTION: There IS a Google Brasil Blog] (Brazil, Portugal, and a few other countries use Portuguese as their primary languages). The source of the Portuguese language rumor appears to be a Tweet from Pedro Dias, a Search Quality Analyst at Google.

All he said in that Tweet (according to Google Translate) is that Panda is not yet active in Portuguese or any other non-English language. So have Portuguese Webmasters who circulated this Tweet reacted too quickly?

One does not normally think of Brazil or Portugal when talking about “content farms” (which Panda does not seem to have been concerned with — but try explaining that to the news media). Still, it might make logistical sense to focus on a widespread but not most widely used language. There are several major international languages that are used on the Web: English, Russian, Chinese, Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Arabic. Other languages are used on a smaller scale between multiple countries. In terms of numbers of Websites, however, I think these may be the most widely used languages.

There could be a number of factors that Google uses to determine which languages to target. They may roll Panda out to multiple languages at one time. But maybe they are looking at things like market share, number of Google users in the language, number of Websites, and how many employees they have who would be able to work on the Panda rollout.

Regardless of how good the algorithm is, according to former Google Search Quality Team member Edmond Lau, Amit Singhal doesn’t believe in just turning algorithms loose on the Web. Amit, according to Mr. Lau, prefers a strong measure of human oversight. Perhaps Amit is a true Terminator fan who will never trust the Machines to operate without supervision. Maybe he just has the good sense not to let a SkyNet evolve on his watch.

So despite everything we have been told so far, we can say with a high degree of certainty that Panda has not simply run amok on the English Web. People at Google are working on Panda in some capacity. Googler Wysz even told Webmasters that Google engineers are very interested in hearing feedback on the algorithm, apparently so they can figure out if it needs any Tweaking.

To date, we know of two tweaks: Panda 2.0 adjusted a further 2% of US searches and Panda 2.1 adjusted another (undisclosed) percentage of US (and possibly international English) searches.

I think there is sufficient evidence to argue that Googlers have to assemble the troops and conduct a large-scale audit of preliminary Panda-derived classifications before Amit Singhal and his advisors are ready to roll out the next update. But where will it land?

I don’t know, but a curious thing happened on the Spanish Web this week. Google started talking about the Panda update en Espanol. So maybe the next rollout will be targeted at Spanish language sites — most of which (I believe) are created in Latin America.

The article to which I link appears to be a translation of Amit Singhal’s May 6 Webmaster Central Blog article. I checked the Google France and China blogs and there are no such translations on those blogs [UPDATE: Nor is there such a translation on the Brasil blog]. Of course, maybe Google just doesn’t have time to translate every Panda-related blog post into every language Google blogs in — there have, after all, been so many Panda-related blog posts from Google. (That was sarcasm for those who are not sure.)

So, at the risk of starting more unverified rumors and causing panic among my numerous distant relatives in the south, I point to this rather interesting and curious communication from Google’s Search Quality Team.

Maybe the Panda will land in South America next. Maybe not. My money is on a Latin Language rollout but only because that seems to be where the discussion is aimed. It could be that Google is employing a classic Fencing technique called “Tactics of Mistake”, where they lead their opponents to guess wrongly about what Google is trying to do.

Conspiracy Theorists should have a field day with that suggestion.

In any event, talking about Panda in Spanish or Portuguese seemed more interesting to me than talking about it in English. So to my brother (and cousin) Webmasters in Latin America I say: Clean up your page clutter! Get rid of your duplicate content!

Hot SEO Topics in 2009

The following list of topics are taken from the search referral data for this blog, so they only represent the topics that are hot for content included on SEO Theory. It would be a good exercise for those of you who write SEO blogs to compare these queries to your own blogs’ query data.

Keep in mind that with the exception of “SEO Theory” none of these keywords really means anything to me. If you want to optimize for them, do so, but you’ll miss out on the object lesson in this article.

In fact, there are several object lessons. The first is that your recent “hot” referral data should match your rankings pretty well. Unless you are totally into the long tail of search (even I optimize for brand value, so that takes me out of the long tail on occasion) you will have pages that are optimized for targeted expressions.

If you find a “hot” query for which your rankings suck, ask yourself how you managed to pull in that much search traffic (this is what I call the Golden Page Effect). But before you start optimizing with dollar signs in your eyes, do some keyword research to see if you benefitted from a spike or if you’re sniffing the leftovers from a productive query. That’s lesson two.

Lesson number 3: Do not optimize for spikes that you cannot predict well in advance. Clients often ask us how to optimize for upcoming news events — events that will happen next week, tomorrow, or (my favorite) “this afternoon”. I always want to say, “You got a blog?”

The immediacy of the need for search optimization limits your available resources, but if you control a blog network (and if its hub is a pretty popular blog) you could probably link-bomb your way to some sort of mediocre overnight success. Do that too often, however, and you’ll pay the piper one way or another.

So let’s look at these referral strings:

SEO Theory – “SEO theory” is consistently the expression with the most search referrals month-by-month, usually day-by-day. That tells me that there is brand value in the name “SEO Theory” (although it did not exist when I started this blog over 2 years ago on Blogspot). Brand referral data can help you gauge how popular and relevant your brand is to the market. If you see a growth in brand referrals or a decline, you know your brand value is changing.

Google meta tags – There are months when this query brings in a lot of traffic to SEO Theory and there are months when it’s way down the list. It probably spikes more often after Google reconfigures itself than at any other time. Google has been very erratic since early January (in my opinion) and we’ve seen a consistent amount of traffic for this query.

SEO Theory does not presently rank in the top five results on Google for “Google meta tags”. I suppose I could optimize for that expression (for example, I could link to a relevant Google meta tags article) but anyone out there who thinks he can count coup by taking a ranking away from me will probably drop 10-20 links to his own Google meta tags blog post. It’s not worth fighting over, so you’re welcome to outrank me still.

Link-poor site – This is one of those “huh?” referrals. I’ve discussed link wealth and link poverty in over 100 articles. The query itself tells me nothing about what people are looking for. So what is the point in optimizing for it? I don’t even rank for it right now, so I’m not sure the search engine can figure out what people want.

Maybe this is a query someone can build brand value in. Think about the irony you can play on, writing a link bait article about how you are running a “link-poor site”.

Seo tips – Everyone and their pet dog wants to rank for “SEO tips”, although I honestly don’t know why. Many years ago I searched for “SEO tips” and found the same crappy advice dominating the search results. The advice may have been upgraded a bit but it’s not like someone ranking for “SEO tips” is going to be able to help me improve my search traffic (the tips you find still pretty much suck).

The really curious thing here is that this blog — which is NOT an “seo tips” blog — gets a lot of traffic for “SEO tips”. It probably has more to do with the annual “20 Hard-core SEO Tips” articles than anything else.

I’ve always been curious about how much money is to be made in giving out free SEO tips that can be found on every other SEO blog and forum….

Nofollow SEO – Search Engine Roundtable did a live poll during one of the sessions of SMX West last week and 50% of the respondents said they were “sculpting PageRank”. To date, no one has published any credible evidence which shows that “nofollow SEO” works as advertised. I’m sure it does something, but I’m equally sure it does nothing useful.

I’m still waiting for someone to deliver a believable case study on “nofollow SEO”. All the SEO bloggers who just say it works appear to unbelievably convinced of their own rightness, because they sure ain’t offered any data to back up their claims. None of the case studies I have read have made their cases.

Good luck with your “nofollow SEO” queries. There’s still nothing but bad advice out there on the topic.

Traffic estimator – Okay, this is closely related to an expression I targeted, but it’s not exactly what I went after. Real Time Web Traffic Estimator Tools is still a good article if you haven’t read it. Real-time traffic estimation is a powerful SEO technique, albeit one that is entirely dependent upon the tools available (for competitive analysis).

SEO multiple domains – I have written about this topic a few times so it makes sense we get some traffic for it. I suspect that Google’s PageRank push has driven people to think more about microsite networks and how to optimize search for multiple domains. Frankly, if you’re that desperate for links, you should just check out Fantomaster’s 10 Links A Day program. There is no better link building methodology available for today’s search engine optimization needs.

Caveat: I reserve the right to be more impressed with some future link building methodology.

Link analysis – A lot of people check out the SEO Theory link analysis article I wrote a year ago. It’s not very scannable so people who insist on reading only scannable articles should ignore it and go back to reading articles that tell you to analyze links through Yahoo! Site Explorer and SEO toolbars.

The rest of you, take note: If you have not developed new methods for analyzing links in the past 12 months, WHY NOT?

Blog farms – What is it with people’s fascination with blog farms? I have only mentioned them casually. It’s not like I endorse the concept. Nor have I ever tried out any of the blog farming software. If you want to know what a blog farm is, think of a link farm where you own all the sites (blogs) and where you populate those sites with scraped content.

If that’s the way you want to get your links, please make sure you leave my content OFF your scrape lists.

SEO steps – This query reminds me of the famous thriller, The 39 Steps. In Alfred Hitchcock’s film adaptation an answer man astounds audiences with his amazing encyclopedic knowledge. He even knows the answer to the question, “What are the 39 steps?”

There are two SEO Theory articles that are relevant to this kind of query. Neither of them actually ranks very well for it. SEO Checklist: Fundamental Steps For Every SEO Campaign is one of the few SEO Theory articles that would easily fall into the “Beginner SEO” category.

Advanced SEO: The 4-step Campaign Process is, obviously, a more advanced article. There are no mysteries in these articles.

Subdomains and SEO – I did write about subdomains and SEO only a few months ago. I wrote the article after seeing consistent traffic for the expression “subdomains and seo” (as well as a related expression, “seo for subdomains”). I figure I might as well write something specifically about that topic, since it was pretty coherent.

SEO analysis – This is what I call an incidental brand keyword. SEO Theory is actually called “SEO Theory and Analysis Blog”. This is an example of what has been referred to as “power keyword optimization” — a method of combining simple keyword expressions into longer, more complex expressions. Instead of repeating words unnecessarily several times, you just use them in a tight, efficient expression.

You’re not going to rank equally well for all variations on an expression but your optimization — if applied consistently — should provide plenty of good rankings when you work with power keyword expressions. Ann Smarty recently provided a concise example of how to do this.

SEO metrics – I wrote about SEO metrics a year ago, using Google’s Supplemental Index to illustrate how we can development measurements for data that is hard to capture.

Over the past year the SEO metrics discussion in the industry has drifted away from Google’s Supplemental Results and toward measuring conversions. Old metrics that are being given less and less credence include Toolbar PageRank, ranking reports, and backlink reports. New metrics that are being given more scrutiny include MozRank (SEOmoz’s response to PageRank), relevant search referrals, and conversions.

There are needs for other SEO metrics. For example, when you measure 2008 Search Market Share through more reliable data than estimated queries, you see that Microsoft is the second most popular search engine.

People continue to question the value of that metric, however, because they don’t see significant Microsoft referrals in their own data. There are two primary reasons for that. First, most people are now relying on Google Analytics data, which underreports Microsoft search referrals (I have confirmed this happens for multiple domains in different verticals by comparing the Google Analytics data to server log data).

Secondly, many people in the SEO focus their optimization efforts on Google, ignoring Microsoft and Yahoo!. Hence, you tend to have fewer optimized queries in Microsoft and Yahoo!, and therefore the people benefitting from those search services are more likely to be outside the field of SEO. The SEO industry defeats itself by subscribing to nonsense metrics like those published by comScore, Compete, Hitwise, and Nielsen for measuring search market share.

I have no doubt that other well-trafficked blogs have different “hot topics”. That is one of the points I have tried to make about the major search engines. They don’t all see equal traffic for the same queries. There is no reliable method for identifying the truly hottest trends in search engine optimization. People search for things the SEO bloggers don’t optimize for, and SEO bloggers optimize their title tags for social media more often than for search.

The best you can hope to accomplish is to track the hottest topic trends in your own sites and respond to shifts in reader interests where appropriate.

Concatenation Schemas for Large Site SEO

You've just been handed the job of performing SEO on a large retail website. You look at the pages and pages of items being sold and want to tear out your hair. How do you organize the various brands, categories, and everything else so that you can create title tags, headings, and so forth for every page – without taking forever? This is where concatenation schemas come in.

Let me give credit where it's due. I came across the definition and explanation of how concatenation schemas work when I read Stony deGeyter's article on the subject. He describes it as “default content that changes dynamically based on category, sub-category, and product related information.” I think of it as a template for certain kinds of content, or even a form where all of the empty spaces have multiple choice options. Envisioning a concatenation schema as a Mad Libs page can also work, if youd don't mind that the result after you fill in the blanks probably won't be funny.

The clearest way to explain how concatenation schemas work is to start building one. First, think about all of the areas on your website that programmers will populate with text. Focus specifically on the areas that will matter for SEO purposes. According to deGeyter, these areas can include, but are not limited to, the Title tag, Meta description, headings, ALT text, and body content. If your site runs to many pages, you will want to speed up the process of populating at least some of these areas.

Take a look at what your website sells, and see how it breaks things down. Look at your site's navigation to see how customers find their way around the site. Maybe it's category ? subcategory ? product; if so, those are your three variables. Perhaps it's brand ? category ? style ? product; in that case, you have four variables with which you'll need to work. Try to keep things simple.

So how does this translate into a concatenation schema? Well, for argument's sake, let's say you run a website that sells yarns and thread for knitting, crochet, and related crafts. Your variables might include the weight of the yarn, its fiber content, and the company that makes it. So your title tag concatenation schema might look like this:

[Weight][Fiber] | Assorted colors of [Fiber] [Weight] yarns from [Company].

To put this in practice, you just fill in the blanks.

Worsted weight acrylic | Assorted colors of acrylic worsted weight yarns from Red Heart.

If your site goes into more detail, you can plan your schema to include more details.

[Company] [Brand] | Try out [brand] [weight] [fiber] from [Company] in a rainbow of colors!

Bernat Cottentot | Try out Cottentot medium weight 100% cotton yarn from Bernat in a rainbow of colors!

You can even go with something shorter and load the variables a little further from the front, if there's another term to which you wish to give a little more prominence:

Knitting yarns in [weight] [fiber] from [company] in [number] colors.

Knitting yarns in rug weight wool from Lion Brand in 30 colors.

Please note that I'm not saying anything about the SEO value of any of the particular concatenation schemas above. I'm not even saying that any of these are the best formats for your title tags. I'm just showing them to you as examples of how you might build your concatenation schemas for your title tags. How you actually build them will depend on the product you sell and what you're trying to accomplish, among other factors.

Google Unveils Beta Music Service in the Cloud

At its I/O conference yesterday morning, Google unveiled its Google Music Beta service. The long-anticipated invitation-only service will allow users to store up to 20,000 songs in the cloud. But there are some important details and catches.

If you weren't at the I/O conference, you can only press your nose against the glass and request an invitation. Even if you can use it at this point, the service only works through a browser or an Android-based device. Users of iPhones are out of luck. So are music aficionados who live outside the United States. Furthermore, at least at this point, it looks like you can't buy songs through the service to add to your music library (although you can add certain free songs as part of music genre packs).

Given those limitations, however, Google Music Beta is pretty cool. Simply upload your songs to the service, and you can access them from any computer connected to the Internet. Any playlist you create can be edited from any device you're using – so you can create a playlist on your computer and add songs to it on your Android phone, for instance.

If you don't want to spend a lot of time creating a playlist, Google Music Beta can create one for you. Simply give it one song to start with, and the service will use “Instant Mix” to choose other songs that go well with it. This is Google's version of Apple's Genius playlists.

Interestingly, despite the limitations mentioned earlier, Google Music Beta appears to be compatible with iTunes; it will ask you if you want to update your music library automatically with new songs you add to iTunes, and when it asks you where you keep your music, it offers “iTunes player” as one of the options you can click. Check out some TechCrunch screen shots (http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/10/google-music-beta/) and you'll see what I mean.

Strictly speaking, even if you aren't able to connect to the cloud, you won't be completely tuneless. Recently played songs will still be available, even if you're offline. If you want a little more certainty in your life, you can pick specific albums, artists and playlists to always be available for your listening pleasure while you're offline.

This caching feature seems designed to wean users away from carrying around a separate music player. Why carry an iPod and your Android phone when the latter can already play all the tunes you need? If you're traveling by plane, especially, one less electronic device means one less thing to worry about getting through security.

Users who own Android smartphones will probably get the most out of Google Music Beta. There's something to be said for being able to access your entire music collection from any desktop or laptop without having it take up space on the machine, but that particular benefit becomes even more compelling when you're dealing with the kind of limited memory endemic to portable electronic devices. Whether Google Music Beta catches on, therefore, depends in part on the market penetration that Android-based smartphones achieve. That's enough of a reason to keep an eye on it and see how it does.

Go For Quality in Your Social Profile

You already know that you can harness social media to promote your website and your business. You probably even maintain accounts and profiles on multiple sites, such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. How many sites should you be on to promote your business? The right answer, if there is one, is not a number.

To explain what I mean by that, I need to mention an excellent item I read on Search Engine Land by Ciaran Norris. He spoke at the SMX Sydney conference a couple of weeks ago, and attended a presentation given by Rand Fishkin from SEOmoz. After I stopped wishing I'd been there myself, I skimmed Fishkin's presentation deck. He'd spoken on the topic of social media marketing for SEO links, and a slide a little past midway through the presentation pulled both me and Norris up short.

That slide baldly stated that “You Should Have a Profile on Every One of these Social Sites (and probably at least a dozen more).” The slide lists 15 sites, so if we add at least a dozen more, that's a total of 27. Who, exactly, has time to do all that AND run a business?

Every person gets 24 hours in a day to do what they need to do. How they manage that resource makes all the difference. If you don't own your own business, you might think they have more resources, so they can accomplish more. That's only partly true, and in many cases it's hardly true at all; tasks can be delegated, but you're still playing the delicate game of resource management.

To manage your time and resources successfully, you need to spend it where it will give you the biggest return on investment. On a small scale, this is why a seamstress will buy fabric rather than weaving her own; it takes up less of her time and resources. The time and resources she saves by buying rather than weaving, in turn, can be spent on something that will actually bring in a return (creating samples or clothes for a client).

Before you get involved in a social media site, you need to ask yourself a few questions. What resources will you deploy? What kind of a return can you expect on your investment? Can those resources be spent better elsewhere? What do you hope to accomplish by participating in this site? Will you be able to stay involved on an ongoing basis?

In considering these points, Norris noted that “if you decide to jump into Facebook, or YouTube, or wherever, but haven't planned for how you will manage and continue the conversations that this is likely to create (if your strategy works), then you may as well not even start, as all you'll be doing is wasting time and money.” So if you're going to use social media to promote your website, you must go into it with your eyes wide open. Do your research! That goes double for large companies trying to get a running start with lots of different social media sites. Norris observed that “jumping headlong into multiple platforms is basically a recipe for disaster.”

Does this mean you shouldn't even try to promote your website on social media sites? Not at all. But don't be afraid to take things slowly and do your research. Different social media sites were designed with different purposes in mind. Many of them facilitate some forms of interaction but minimize others. Some social platforms don't require you to do much to maintain a presence; if you already give regular presentations or write a lot, SlideShare and Scribd might work well, for instance. But other sites will require more love and attention to deliver a good return – quite possibly more than you can afford to invest.

Ultimately, you need to consider your purpose in getting involved in social media. If you're simply trying to generate links and interest to promote your site, you might want to get active on lots of social media sites (though even then, I'd recommend moving slowly and really learning the platform). Promoting your website, however, should be just a part of your overall business objectives – which brings us right back to time and resource management. Overextending yourself can be both costly and difficult to recover from. So limit your involvement to the sites on which you've done your research, and decided that it makes sense to continue to invest your resources. Good luck!

Bing Gains Market Share, at Great Cost

There's been a fair bit of positive press concerning Microsoft's Bing search engine lately. A number of observers noted Bing's market share gains – small, to be sure, but consistent over the last few months. Is this sustainable? Not at the price Microsoft is paying for it.

Microsoft's search engine gained only a small increase in market share. Bing's percent of the search market in the United States went from 13.9 to 14.1 between March and April of this year, according to comScore. Yahoo's percentage of the market went from 15.7 to 15.9 over the same period. That's worth noting because of the deal between Bing and Yahoo.

That four-tenths of a percent apparently came from Google and Ask. Over the same  period of time, Google's share of the same market went from 65.7 percent to 65.4 percent, while Ask's share dropped from 3.1 percent to an even 3 percent. It would appear that Microsoft is finally beginning to chisel away at the search leader. Indeed, Christina Warren, writing for Mashable, predicted that if current trends continue, Bing will hold a greater share of the US search market that Google within a year.

I found that a little hard to believe, so in researching this story I tried to track down items that would explain this success. Granted, the increase so far is only small, but if it could lead to that kind of change, Microsoft must have started doing something right. I found an item reporting Microsoft's deal earlier this month with Research in Motion to make Bing the default search engine and map application on BlackBerry smartphones. It's too recent to affect the other figures, of course, but I thought that perhaps a number of similar deals to become the default search engine on other platforms might have boosted Bing's numbers.

At the end of the brief news item, however, I saw some figures that drew me up short. “The company's online services division, which offers Bing and MSN, had an operating loss of $726 million on $648 million of revenue in three months ended March 31, 2011.” Excuse me? Did I just read that the division in charge of Bing just LOST $78 million over three months? If that trend holds for a year, the division will lose $312 million. I may not be a math whiz, but even I know that is not a sustainable business practice.

Fortunately, we don't have to depend on my math skills. Henry Blodget at Business Insider spotted the insanity, and  he's not afraid to say that the emperor is throwing gold after rags – and threadbare ones at that. In fact, he goes directly to the numbers. “In the March quarter, Microsoft's online revenue grew $84 million year over year. In the same March quarter,” Blodget continues, “Microsoft's online cost-of-revenue grew $292 million.” Microsoft attributed the cost increase to the Yahoo search agreement and increasingly expensive traffic acquisition – which Blodget noted was only two different ways of saying the same thing. It all falls at the door of the Yahoo deal.

Want some more math? Blodget notes that Microsoft is paying Yahoo about 90 cents for every dollar it generates from Yahoo's search queries. That is not a great return on investment. But it's actually worse than that. “Based on an analysis of Microsoft's financial statements,” Blodget revealed, “Bing is paying about 3X as much for every incremental search query as it generates in revenue from that query.” That definitely does not sound like a sustainable business model.

Blodget also blew Microsoft's argument concerning search scale out of the water. If you haven't heard it, the software giant claims that it's sending what appears to be good money after bad to buy search share because once they've gained a large enough number of queries, their keyword prices for their advertising will rise to profitable levels and they'll stop losing money. Fine. Let's recall that the deal between Bing and Yahoo means that Yahoo's search results are powered by Bing, and it's getting money from that. When you put Yahoo's and Bing's shares of the US search market together, you get 30 percent. How is this not enough of the market to start showing some benefits from the economics of scale?

I don't have an answer for that one, and neither does Blodget. Indeed, after taking another look at Bing's loss rate, and doing the math for a year, he observed that “Bing is spending $5.5 billion a year to generate $3 billion of revenue.” I've been wrong before, but I don't think even Microsoft can get away with that forever.

Build Jargon into Your B2B SEO

If you're new to doing SEO for business-to-business websites, you face an interesting challenge. That's doubly true if you've done SEO for consumer-facing websites first. Some of the same rules apply, but others operate in exactly the reverse way. The biggest example of this involves your use of content, keywords, and jargon.

To illustrate my point, I'll describe two parallel purchasing situations. Your eleven-year-old niece enjoys looking at things under a magnifying glass; she's even been drawing pictures and taking notes. She asked you for a microscope for her twelfth birthday. You're a careful shopper, so you look up maybe three or four models online, compare features and prices, and ultimately buy one that's easy for her to use, but you think will grow with her. You've spent maybe two hours of your time and somewhere between $25 and $100.

Now, let's look at someone purchasing lab equipment at the college level for undergraduates, graduate students, or researchers. Or if you really insist on a business example, let's consider a purchaser for a pharmaceutical company. They will want much more capable microscopes; they will probably have a list of features the equipment must include, for example. They will spend a lot more money – and correspondingly, a lot more time looking for the right device. Bryne Hobard, writing for Search Engine Land, notes that your average B2B buyer “might read 10,000 words of copy before they start the purchasing process – half on the site they eventually buy from, and the rest on several other sites they consider.”

These purchasers are sophisticated; they are experts in their fields. If you talk down to them or simplify, they will leave your site in frustration because you're not really telling them what they need to know. If you're building a B2B website and want to reach these professionals, you need to choose your keywords from their language. This means you need to learn their jargon, and use it correctly.

This process requires that you immerse yourself in their literature. If you're selling products and services to lawyers, read the law blogs they read; ditto for corporate accountants. You might not understand it at first, but you can learn enough to tell your prospective customers what they need to know – and in as much detail as they need to know it. Even better, if you use the right jargon in the right way (and that's going to vary depending on the field), you'll be telling it to them in their “native language,” so to speak.

How Navigation Labels Improve SEO

If you think of your website as a map, navigation labels name the streets, features, shopping districts, and even major buildings like libraries and community centers. Does that description sound too expansive for something so humble? Maybe you need to rethink your definition of navigation labels.

As Shari Thurow explains on Search Engine Land, most people think of the text placed on a navigation button as a navigation label. Keep in mind, however, that most site visitors and searchers use multiple cues to orient themselves, and to make sure they ended up where they intended to go. Thurow's list of navigation labels includes the common definition I described, plus titles; headings and subheadings; breadcrumbs; embedded text links (in context); and URLs.

What is the point of expanding this definition? It gets you thinking about all of these different page elements at the same time. If you can see what they have in common, and think of them as belonging to the same group, you'll give them a more consistent structure.

Consistency helps anyone trying to navigate anywhere; it creates and fulfills expectations, and enables visitors to predict what they'll find when they click through or read something just by looking at the navigation label. Or as Thurow puts it, “When navigation labels contain keywords and are used consistently throughout a website, they effectively communicate aboutness of both page and site content, as well as provide a clear information scent to content that is not available on the web page.”

So now you understand how treating these very important page elements as aids to navigation can make your human visitors happy. They can also make the search engines happy. When spiders crawl your web pages, if they see a consistent structure to your navigation labels, with a predictable usage of keywords, you've made it easier for them to figure out your site's relevant topics. To put it bluntly, using navigation labels correctly can help your site's SEO.

The key point, however, is to use navigation labels correctly. This goes beyond simply putting keywords in your URLs. Fortunately, there are a number of prevailing conventions on the Internet for structuring your navigation labels.

Google News Lets Users Drop Blogs

If your blog depends on traffic from Google News, you need to know about some changes the search engine made to its popular service. With the new options it gives to Google News readers, you might experience a serious decrease in visitors.

Danny Sullivan noted the change over at Search Engine Land, complete with pictures. Google News users can go to their settings page and control the quantity of results they get from certain sources. These sources are Blogs and Press Releases.

By default, Google set everyone using the service to see a “Normal” quantity of results from blogs and press releases. But users can choose to see “none,” “fewer,” or “more” results from each of those sources. What does this mean for publishers?

That's a good question, but it's difficult to answer without asking others. The first one that comes to mind is, “what is a blog?” Sullivan pointed out that Google started classifying some news sources as blogs more than a year and half ago. But what rules do they follow to determine that a particular source is a blog?

If the rules for Google News and Google Blog Search are consistent with each other, then anything with an RSS feed would count as a blog. That can't be right, though, because lots of newspapers have taken to using RSS feeds to get the word out about new articles – and not just opinion pieces, either. The New York Times boasts an RSS feed, and permits comments on many of its items. That doesn't make the site a blog, though some of its pieces do fall under that classification (and Google designates them as such).

There's a larger concern that goes with the potential for misclassification – one that Sullivan implies but never explicitly states. It's the assumption that Google News readers, given a choice, will opt to see fewer news sources that are blogs and press releases. They may even opt to see no blogs or press releases. While that may not turn out to be true, it's a valid concern. When I want the basic facts, I read news; when I want analysis and entertainment, I read blogs. If I'm trying to catch up with what's happening in the world, seeing lots of blogs can get in the way.

On the other hand, this doesn't mean that I would actively opt to see fewer blogs when I'm browsing Google News. Google actually labels blogs as such in Google News results, with the word “blog” in parentheses next to the name of the story's source. Both of these appear discreetly under the headline. That lets me decide on the spot which way I want to experience a story: as if it came from Dan Rather, or Jon Stewart.

Despite the stories we've all seen about some blogs getting to the heart of a news item or scandal that the regular press declined to report on (or got wrong), and the praised sometimes heaped on “citizen journalists,” many bloggers still fight for respect. Really, that's as it should be; not all bloggers hold themselves to the high standards of journalists (not all journalists do, either, but I digress). If Google calls you a blog on its Google News service, then, does that make you a second-class news source in the eyes of your potential audience? Worse, with this new option, will they not even see your content at all when they read Google News?

That's certainly possible. Fortunately, there may be something you can do about it, if you think your site has been erroneously labeled a blog in error. Sullivan pointed to a form that publishers can use to report an issue with how the search engine has classified their content. If you're not happy with how Google views your content, it's certainly worth a try. Sullivan noted that Google has long classified his site as a blog, but this latest move makes him not want to be painted with that brush any longer, “especially when we are arguably also a news source.”

Whatever you decide to do, if you're a publisher, you may want to pay closer attention to your traffic over the next few months. Watch both the level of traffic and from where it's coming. If Google labels you a blog, and you see a decline in traffic from Google News, the new option could be playing a role.

Link Building is Relationship Building

If you're not using social media to promote your firm, you're missing out on a fair bit of business. Even if you aren't personally using social media, you could be building links online without knowing it. If you want those links to reveal positive things about your business, you're going to have to put in some work.

Julie Joyce, writing for Search Engine Journal, offered a couple of scenarios to illustrate this point. Say you're going on vacation and looking for a bed-and-breakfast in which to stay. If you're as sophisticated as most searchers today, you've learned that the first listing you hit didn't necessarily get there because it's the best of the lot. So you click around for some reviews, perhaps at sites such as Yelp. You find a place with mostly positive reviews and relatively few negative reviews, so you book your stay.

In our example, you thoroughly enjoy yourself. The food is yummy, your room is comfortable and home-like, the service is friendly and efficient, and the owner points you to some sightseeing gems you might have missed otherwise. You're so delighted that you write a glowing review in your blog, and link to the bed-and-breakfast's web page from your post.

What just happened? The business certainly didn't ask you for a link, but you gave it one anyway. As Joyce puts it, “They’ve done nothing but provide good service in order to get positive mentions, which led me to them, which led them to a link.”

There's a deeper message here. You will probably get links of one kind or another whether you want them or not, based on the kinds of relationships you have with your customers. You want those links to reflect positive relationships. After all, when was the last time you decided to patronize a business because you saw that it had more NEGATIVE reviews than positive ones?

But what can you do if you get negative reviews? Well, if you hear about them, you can actually become proactive and fix whatever problems the customer raised. You'll be surprised at how effective this can be. I'll talk about that more in a bit, but first, let's look at how you can get more active online.

What PPC and SEO Have in Common

If you've been doing website promotion for a while, you know that organic search and pay-per-click search ads are two different things. The techniques you use to get to the top of organic search (SEO) are not the same ones you use to get your PPC ad displayed at the top of the results. Or are they?

Mike Moran, writing for Search Engine Guide, noted that the differences used to be much greater than they are today. I don't have his depth of experience; he's been working on search engine technology since the 1980s, while I've only been covering Internet-related technology since 1997. Still, that's long enough to have seen – and reported on – a number of major changes, to say nothing of the gradual evolution of pay-per-click ads.

Like Moran, I was around when the first pay-per-click search ads came out. Not the first ones from Google, but the first ones, period. They were created by a now-defunct search engine whose marketing model was based entirely around paid search; in other words, it offered no organic results. At the time, most observers thought it was crazy. Clearly, results that had been bought and paid for by advertisers would be inferior to those that had to be earned, and no searcher would want that when better alternatives sat a click or two away!

But then a funny thing happened. Yahoo bought the paid search engine, and built a marketing department around it. Google saw what was happening, and built their own version of pay-per-click marketing, called AdWords (and AdSense, too, but we're focusing on advertisers here, not publishers). They visually separated the paid listings from the organic ones, so all searchers would know which ones were which. And at first, the paid search results fulfilled expectations – that is, they appeared to be less relevant to searches than the organic listings. Over time, though, that changed.

How did that happen? Well, companies seeking to promote their websites learned what search engines were looking for to put them at the top of the results. Early SEO practices gamed the system, almost to the point that paid results might be more relevant. Think about it: if an advertiser is paying for every visitor who clicks on their ad, they won't want that ad to show unless the traffic clicking on it is likely to convert. That means whatever the site is offering had better be relevant to the search term and the ad.

That's only one element at work, however. Google changes the rules regularly by tweaking its algorithm, so the same old SEO tricks don't keep working. But it also changed the rules for pay-per-click ads. Oh, you still need to bid on what you're willing to pay for each click. But now Google looks at how often your ad is clicked, and if it isn't clicked often enough, it might not place your ad in the number one slot – even if you bid high enough. Google also looks at the landing page for your ad, to judge its relevance. As Moran observes, what was on this page once made no difference; now it matters.

What does this mean? It means that promoting your site with PPC has gotten very similar to doing it with SEO. Consider this: if you want your site to appear well in the organic search results, and you're using white hat practices, then you're trying to create the right content to appear for the right keywords. You want searchers to believe, when they click through to your site, that they've landed in the right place to solve whatever problem inspired them to do the search.

Thanks to the series of changes Google has made to pay-per-click search ads in recent years, you need to do the same thing with your PPC campaign. You need to make sure that your ad and your landing page match the keywords you're aiming for, regardless of the bid you place. In fact, matching very closely could actually save you some money. As Moran notes, “If you've figured out how to put the searcher first in organic search, you can apply that same lesson for paid search. That's far more likely to pay off than increasing your bids.”

Excel Tips for PPC Ad Campaigns

If you use the AdWords interface to set up your pay-per-click marketing campaigns, you know that it accomplishes certain tasks quite well, but is somewhat less than helpful with others. Fortunately, Microsoft Excel lets you use certain tricks to get your PPC campaigns on track and properly optimized.

Let me give credit where it's due: John Lynch, writing for Search Engine Watch described these and other Excel-based techniques for streamlining an AdWords campaign. You may want to read his article as well, especially if you run a lot of PPC campaigns to promote your website. I admit that I don't exactly have a great deal of experience in this area, but even I can see how much time a marketer can save using these methods.

Okay, let's look at building those PPC ads first. Excel works well for that, except for one issue. Search ads must meet character limits for headlines, descriptions, and display URLs. You can't tell just by looking at an Excel cell whether you're under or over the character limit. Fortunately, you can make Excel tell you how many characters you're dealing with before you try to load your ads.

When you build your Excel spreadsheet for ads, you'll include a column for the various different headlines you hope to utilize. Insert a column directly adjacent to your headline column (in Lynch's image, this column is right next to the one that contains the headlines). Now take advantage of the length function in Excel to give you a count of the number of characters in each headline. As Lynch explains, “If your headline is in cell c2, simply enter the function =len(C2) in the adjacent row.”

That give you your character count, but you still need to make it eye-catching. Looking at numbers helps, but it's too easy to miss a number that's too big or too small. Wouldn't it be great to get some bright color in there to tell you when you're on target or over the limit?

Fortunately, that trick isn't difficult either. To accomplish it, you'll need to use Excel's conditional formatting. For the first condition, tell Excel to highlight the cell in red if the character count is greater than 25. Use a second condition to highlight the cell in green if it's less than or equal to 25. What you'll see are red and green cells next to each headline, and each one will contain a white number. This way, you'll not only know that you're over or under 25 characters in each headline you're thinking of using, but you'll know by exactly how much. And you'll be able to take it in with a single glance.

Ads aren't made up of just headlines, of course; typically, you get two lines of description. That's okay. Build columns for description lines one and two, and add that extra column for counting next to each one. This time, of course, the search engines generously give you more characters to play with, so increase your count to 35. Like magic, you'll never have to worry about problems submitting and loading your ads into the AdWords or adCenter platforms because you've exceeded character limits.

Are you having a problem coming up with headlines? Excel functions come to the rescue once again. This time, we're going to use concatenate. As Lynch explains, the function simply lets you combine two or more cells of data. So start with the column for your ad group label. Create a new column and fill its cells with positive adjectives: time-saving, powerful, versatile, best, etc. Now, in a headline cell, use the concatenate formula to combine an ad group field with an adjective field to create your headline. You can even use this technique with the character limit field.

The concatenate function itself is actually not difficult to form: =CONCATENATE(first cell,” “,second cell). So if you wanted to join the name of an ad group in cell C5 with the name of an adjective in cell E5, the function you'd put into the headline cell is =CONCATENATE(C5,” “,E5) and then await the result. If you just wanted to put the cells together as if they were one word, you could simply type =CONCATENATE(C5, E5) but you want them to be separate words and phrases. That's why this form of the function includes the quotation marks and a space.

There are more tricks you can employ with Excel to speed up ad creation, but these should get you off to a good start marketing your website. Good luck!

Explaining Keywords to Your Clients

Everybody knows what keywords are, right? Likewise, everyone knows what it means to target particular keywords and why one would choose to target certain keywords over others, of course. If you're laughing or shaking your head right now, then you know where I'm going with this...and you'll want to keep reading to get a little help when you need to explain these concepts.

If you're an SEO or search marketer who has to explain your field to those who are far less versed in digital marketing, you know it can seem like you're teaching them a foreign language. Learning a foreign language can be made easier by cognates (words in different languages that are derived from the same root). Likewise, if you're explaining SEO concepts to your client and can relate them to other concepts with which he's already familiar, you can spend less time  explaining and more time bringing experience – both yours and his – to bear to create the best possible marketing campaign.

Mike Moran, writing for Search Engine Guide, focused on the concept of keywords to teach this point to his readers. Typically, it's not too difficult to explain keywords on a basic level. Nearly everyone who's ever used the Internet has used a search engine, so typing keywords into a search box is a familiar experience. It's simple enough, as Moran noted, to explain keywords in this way. You would then continue by noting that “Google shows pages and ads in response to the [keywords] that were typed,” he wrote, and if you want your marketing message to be seen, “you need to know which keywords...your customers are using.”

That easy enough to understand, surely. But what if you could explain keywords in a way that lets your client, or the person to which you're explaining them, apply their own experience and understanding? Consider an old-school marketer with no real background in digital media. Is it possible to explain the concept of keywords in a way that fits into their already-considerable background in the general field of marketing?

As it turns out, Moran discovered that there is a parallel concept: market segments. He observed that “when I explain to them that search keywords are their primary means of market segmentation for search marketing, they bring a enormous amount of knowledge to the party. Because marketers know what market segments are. And they know what to do with them.”

I know, this probably sounds a little crazy, but it actually makes sense. Normally, a marketer would think of demographics as a marketing segment. Tell someone marketing video games that you're trying to reach 14-year-old boys who live in cities, and they'll know exactly what kinds of games appeal to them. Keywords make sense as market segments once you realize that they also carry clues to their users' interests – clues around which you can structure your content.

Moran notes that you might have to provide a few examples before a non-digital marketer gets it. He then describes how “the owner of a bed and breakfast might target 'lodging' as their keyword rather than 'hotel' because his customers are expressly looking for alternatives to hotels, which is why that segment of searchers uses the more unusual word.”

And what happens after it clicks in their head? Then “they understand why some segments (keywords) might be better targets than others. They know why they would want to analyze conversion rates and click rates and other metrics by segment, because they are always doing the same thing when they use market segmentation for any other reason.” Suddenly, you no longer need to explain the trickier stuff, because you explained the basic concept in a way to which they could relate – and which, in their world, pretty much implied all the rest.

Cherish these parallels when you find them. They're the Rosetta stones that lead to greater understanding between your world and your clients' world. Good luck!

Do SEO Yourself or Hire a Pro?

If you've just recently discovered SEO, you may be feeling overwhelmed by how much there is to learn. It's a little like college. You know you can master the material, but it's going to take time – and if you're also trying to run a business and maintain some kind of personal life, where will you get the time? Perhaps it's time to consider an alternative to doing it all yourself.

If you're an SEO yourself, of course, you'll want to do your own SEO for your business. My father was a CPA, and he always did his own taxes (though he had my mom do the bookkeeping for the business). But the small business owners who used his services often handed that aspect of their workload over to him with a sigh of relief. It let them concentrate on providing their own, very different services to THEIR customers. After all, what does filling out a tax form and dry cleaning a formal gown have in common?

And what does your day-to-day work have in common with SEO? This isn't a moot question; in fact, it's very relevant to whether it makes more sense to do your website's SEO yourself or hire a pro. By the way, the kinds of questions I'm going to bring up should sound very familiar to you if you've ever had to decide between doing something in-house or hiring someone outside your company to do it.

If deciding whether or not to outsource your company's SEO could be expressed as a math problem, the variables would include time, money, and capabilities. You can't get around the fact that SEO done right takes up a considerable amount of time. Learning the skill set takes time, as does keeping abreast of new developments. You might be better off spending this time elsewhere. But hiring someone to do it takes money – and hiring someone to do it right can take a lot of money. How do you decide?

You might start by actually approaching it as a math problem. Since we're looking at an investment of time, you need to find out what your time is worth. Yes, I know, if you've run the numbers, you're probably making minimum wage; that's true for all business owners. Instead, look at what you charge for your products or services. “If you can put a dollar amount for what your time is worth,” notes Stoney deGeyter, “that can help you determine if you can make time for SEO.”

Now that you've figured out what your time is worth monetarily, you need to look at your skill set. What do you do better than anyone else? That's what you should be spending your time doing. If customer relations is your true forte, that's where you should invest your energy. If you're best at coming up with new products and services, that's what you should do. Let go of the idea that you need to do everything; nobody can do everything equally well. Stoney deGeyter suggests that you should “Think about what you can do that provides the greatest benefit for the company before you decide that you should allocate your valuable time to the SEO.”

Google Takes Social Search Worldwide

Google announced that it has expanded the availability of its Social Search. Launched officially in October 2009 in just the United States, now searchers worldwide will be able to use it. The search giant noted that it will start making Social Search available in 19 languages, with more to come.

So what exactly is Social Search? It's one of Google's answers to Facebook – or at least a way to introduce social factors into search. It only works when you're actually signed in to your Google account. Basically, it's a way to make online content from your friends more visible to you in the search results.

The example Google likes to use to show how it works involves a searcher planning his next vacation with Google searches. He decides he wants to take a camping trip, and when he searches on camping trips, he finds a tweet partway down the page from a friend of his who just came back from Yosemite. He knows it's from his friend, because he can see a thumbnail image next to a sentence under the search listing that identifies who sent it.

So our vacation planner's next search is Yosemite. This time he's looking for campsites, and he finds a link that takes him to a friend's Flickr account, where she's posted images from the place she camped when she went to Yosemite last year. He decides that it looks like a great place to camp...and coincidentally remembers that he needs to get a new camera for the trip.

So he searches for a good camera for outdoor photography, and finds a Blogger blog result. He doesn't recognize the name at first, but hovering over the person's name reveals that he's been following her Twitter feed; she's a professional photographer. So he visits her blog to find out which camera she recommends.

Google notes that if you're not seeing very many Social Search results, you can expand and improve them in a number of ways. You can create a Google profile and connect your other public profiles from social websites, such as Twitter and Flickr, to your Google account and profile. You can also add links to your own public content, such as your Blogger blog. Subscribing to interesting content and following interesting people in Google Reader will also enrich your Social Search experience.

Social Search results are unique to the searcher, because every searcher has a slightly different constellation of contacts. These results may rank anywhere on the page; Google places them according to their relevance to your search. As Google explains in a blog entry, “Social search results are only visible to you and only appear when you choose to log in to your Google Account. If you’re signed in, Google makes a best guess about whose public content you may want to see in your results, including people from your Google chat buddy list, your Google Contacts, the people you're following in Google Reader and Buzz, and the networks you’ve linked from your Google profile or Google Account. For public networks like Twitter, Google finds your friends and sees who they’re publicly connected to as well.”

For more on this topic, visit http://googlesocialweb.blogspot.com/2011/05/social-search-goes-global.html.