Craig Silverstein, Director of Technology at Google, was the first person founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page hired to help develop what has now become the world’s premier information resource. After 11 years, Silverstein is still with the company and exudes much excitement about its past and future…not to mention the possibilities in mobile and social search.

One interesting side note about Craig…he was visiting my hometown of Gainesville, Florida for his 20-year high school reunion, which coincidentally, is the same high school I graduated from 9 years later.

But while he was in town, he thought he would take a couple hours and speak to the community he called home during his childhood. While the audience was mainly interested people in the community who were not necessarily interested in Google’s algorithm and ranking high in the search results, he did touch on a few of those things and other issues that will be a big part of any online marketers life.

Specifically, the development of mobile and social search technology are increasingly becoming ways people are finding information online.

With regards to mobile search, more and more people are using “smart phones” like BlackBerry, IPhone and even Google’s smart phone, the Anroid. In the future, and closer than we think according to Silverstein, people’s primary device for finding information will be their mobile devices.

Think about it – you’re visiting a town and need to find a place to eat. Or, you need to find a place to get a haircut. Flip out your phone, do a search and voila, you got a list of different businesses in the area you’re in.

We’ve mentioned before the importance of local search, especially if you’re a local business like a restaurant or store. If you fall into this category, you will certainly need to have mobile search on your radar screen going forward.

Social search, which Google pursues through its Google Buzz, Google Wave and its new Google Me is another area that’s seeing tremendous growth. Of course, Facebook is the king of social networks right now and as you know is pursuing social search with a vengeance.

Why is social search important? Not only do people enjoy finding information on their own, they also like to ask their friends about products, ideas or whatever. Since trusting an online source is harder to do (you never see the person on the other side), Internet users want to be able to interact with people they know and find information that way as well.

And perhaps one of the most fascinating technologies for the future of search – voice search. That’s right, instead of typing in your search terms, you can simply say what you’re looking for. Google is working on voice translation technology to take your spoken words and translate them into written words.

Much of Craig’s talk though centered on Google’s history and the history of search in general. Google wasn’t the first search engine – even in the online world.

In fact, the first search engine was the Bible concordance, a reference manual for terms found within the Bible. But instead of it being like an encyclopedia or dictionary where you look up a word and find its meaning, the concordances took a word and told you where you could find them in the Bible.

Fundamentally speaking, this is how search engines work. You take a keyword phrase, type it in and see where on the Internet that word appears. And when search engines were new, that’s about all it involved…keywords and the number of times they appeared on a page.

Of course, search engines have evolved way beyond this.

Concordances were simply correct. Then with the advent of Google and PageRank, searches are not only correct but authoritative as well. Pages with higher PageRank were seen as being more trustworthy. Now, a good result is considered correct, authoritative (trustworthy) AND timely as well.

We’re seeing this play out in Google’s development (think Caffeine/algorithmic updates).

At the conclusion of Silverstein’s remarks at his childhood synagogue, Craig took questions from the audience. Most of them were about different technologies and efforts the company is working on like Google TV. The last question was about Google Fiber and Gainesville’s application to be the first site of this venture.

Unfortunately for the Gator Nation though, Craig doesn’t have anything to do with Google Fiber’s application process.

When I got the opportunity, I asked Craig about Caffeine and how the company expects the update to provide better search results for people. I knew he wouldn’t be able to answer a direct SEO question since in the end, they’re not going to share how their algorithm works too much because surprise, they make a lot of their money by selling PPC ads to companies.

But friends, I’m sorry to say that he didn’t answer much besides saying they do a lot of experimentation with a small set of searchers to see how things work before they go with it entirely. Beyond that, he told me point blank that he couldn’t go into that.

No worries, I understand. But the talk was still fascinating from the perspective of what we do at SEO Advantage and the past, present and future of search…which by the way, is nowhere near being fully developed.

Craig says that could be another 150 years from now! Wow, we got a long way to go!

While all three of these are important and impact search engine rankings in some way, the last type has the largest by far…which coincidentally, is the hardest links to control.

Basically speaking, the search engines’ concept is as follows: if high-quality sites are linking to yours, then your site must be pretty important and therefore, will be more inclined to show it higher in their results…you in effect receive “link juice” from other sites that link to you.

But it’s not enough to just get a couple of links and then sit still. Search engines like Google look at link patterns to your site as they build over time, not just a one-time snapshot.

So, building the right links in a consistent fashion can payoff tremendously – that much is clear. But how do I go about building strong inbound links without getting myself in trouble? Getting on Google’s blacklist isn’t much fun and hard to recover from.

Continue reading for one of the ways you can build high-quality links to your site naturally and check back again in a week for part II of our quick little link building how-to.

Variety is the spice of life – and links too!

There are all sorts of link farming schemes out there you can buy into – which is probably the first reason you should run away. This practice is known as reciprocal linking – you exchange links with other sites who will turn around and link to you on a mass scale…Google and others are on to this!

The key to successful link building is to cultivate a good mix of links over time.

Having 100 links with the same anchor-text doesn’t look natural to anyone, including search engines. When links come naturally, some may use your business name while others may use some kind of descriptive phrase for the anchor-text…they vary.

If anchor-text is the same for all links pointing to your site, it will be signal to the search engines that your links are being generated artificially, not naturally.

And consider the pages people are linking to and try to mix that up too…don’t have them all going to your homepage. Try to drive links to specific product pages, your blog, your press room, your articles and more. This will help get them ranking as well.

Also, you will want to try and influence the title tag for incoming links if any have one. If you can, you will want variety in the link text and title for links pointing to your site…again, it’s about growing your links in a natural way, not simply slapping a bunch of homogenous links up there and walking away.

Variety in your links is perhaps the most critical component of successful link building. Don’t have them all coming from the same place to the same place and so on.

Check back with us next Monday for part II of our quick little link building guide and even learn how you can easily find out which sites are linking to you.

In the mean time, take the above steps to ensure what links you do acquire don’t get you in any trouble and give you the most bang for your buck.

In the early days of SEO and the Internet, meta tags were a lot more important to accomplishing ranking goals…get as many keywords into the document as possible was the mantra. But with search engine’s evolving alongside other technologies, they’re not just looking at meta tags and keywords but whether you have original content that’s creative and compelling too.

But that doesn’t diminish the contribution meta tags can make to help you achieve high rankings.

Nevertheless, just what are the right ways to go about making meta tags? Before getting into that too far though, you need to know the different types of meta tags: title, description and keyword.

Each are pretty self-explanatory – the title tag is the title visitors will see in the top left of their browsers, description appears underneath the search results and describes what your page is about and keyword tags list all of the applicable keywords for the particular page.

Technically speaking, there is no limit to how many characters you can use for each of these meta tags…however, there is a limit to what Google will display so you will want to keep a few limits in mind…a good rule of thumb for the different tags is:

Title: 9-12 words max

Description: 3-4 sentences

Keyword: up to 10 keyword phrases

Besides these limits, simply try and integrate keywords into your meta tags without sacrificing the flow of anything too much (title and description tags). These are things people will read and the search engines will perhaps think you’re keyword stuffing penalize your site.

Take a look at a sample set of meta tags from one of SEO Advantage’s web pages below. Modeling your meta tags like these will help you get the most benefit from having them in the first place. This is how they will appear in your page’s HTML coding.

<head>

<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1″ />

<title>Search Engine Optimization & Search Engine Marketing Services Company: SEO Advantage, Inc.</title>

<meta content=”Search engine optimization and search engine marketing services company: SEO Advantage, Inc.,offers online web site marketing and optimization services including search engine marketing and optimization, SEO Buzz Marketing, optimized press releases, and web site development.”>

<meta content=”search engine marketing company,search engine optimization services,SEO specialists,consultants,web site marketing,web site promotion,search engine promotion,search engine reporting,press release optimization,search engine marketing firm,florida search engine optimization.”>

Remember, meta tags aren’t as important as they once were but you can still harness them to improve your position in the search engines.

In fact, many organizations are directing their users to their Facebook page instead of their actual sites because of its built-in social interactivity.

Many of our online experiences though still start through search – whether on Google, Bing or Facebook. If we’re looking for information or searching for a solution to a problem, we generally go and ask very broad questions and use broad terms to try and narrow down what we’re looking for.

Continue reading for some tips from Manoj Jasra at Search Engine Guide on how you can boost your Facebook page to the top of the search engines results page.

Number of Followers – The more followers your Facebook page has, the more back links…the more links you have, the more authoritative your page seems.

Fresh Content – Like regular web pages, the fresher your content is (wall posts, pictures, comments, etc.), the more frequently the spiders will crawl your site.

Include relevant content – Only post content on your Facebook page that helps improve its overall theme.

Keyword-rich URL – Be sure your Facebook URL contains keywords searchers use to find your products and services online.

Number of “Shares” or “Likes” – Having more “shares” and “Likes” will also boost your Facebook page to the top of the results. This shows your page is so compelling that people couldn’t simply look at it and move on, they had to share it.

Social media applications like Facebook and Twitter are increasingly important in effectively marketing your small business online. Going forward, any SEO or online marketer must factor these social networks into their marketing strategy.

Saying the same thing over and over again may work in politics but when you’re marketing your small business online, it appears fake to prospective customers. Most who come across content like this immediately leave a website as they are seeing right through the angle the site is trying to play…if not consciously realizing it, site visitors will feel something just doesn’t seem right about the site so they leave.

Besides helping build links and SEO rankings, good content builds trust with site visitors. Continue reading for four ways you can build trust with prospective customer with your site’s content.

1.  Do not hype anything

Hype is still a favorite tactic of low-level marketers. We’ve all seen hype time and again – in commercials, on billboards and in magazines. We’ve become accustomed to it. But the Internet is still relatively new and useful for many things – research, business, shopping and more. People have a much lower tolerance for hype in the online world.

Substantiate all claims. Don’t say you’re “#1” or “the best” unless you can back that up through a third-party. Simply claiming you’re the best because you want it to be true isn’t enough…people find unsubstantiated claims very suspicious.

2. Be genuine, like a friend

Great copy that sells generally reads like a conversation between friends. Writing in a conversational tone that helps the reader solve their problem goes a long way toward building trust. Since online shoppers cannot meet the seller in the flesh, they get extremely suspicious and leave if your content is bland and boring.

Also, don’t spend much time telling outlandish stories or make claims that appear too good to be true…be able to backup claims with third-party verification.

3. Don’t use hidden text that’s hard to find

In the infancy of SEO, webmasters used to write content and make it the same color as their background to hide it from readers. The keyword-rich content got the attention of the search engines at first but no real person would spend much time on the site. You can still “hide” content like that but there’s a right way and a wrong way to do it.

It’s okay to employ hidden content to make your page more usable as long as the reader can easily find it with a simple click of a mouse. But hiding content to make it more difficult for readers to find is wrong.

Before using hidden text though, ask yourself is it valuable? If it is, then your visitors need to be able to read it. If not, then it probably shouldn’t go on the site anyway.

4. Include negative reviews

Another powerful way to gain trust in your site’s content is to include negative reviews of your products. Only including positive reviews will only serve to turn people off…you can lose credibility pretty quickly. Negative reviews help because they give the reader a better-rounded picture of what they’re purchasing. They also help readers determine how the positive attributes of your products outweigh the bad.

Courtesy of SearchEngineGuide.com

Your site’s content is where you make your impression on potential customers. Therefore, it needs to build trust if you want site visitors to purchase your products or use your services. Make sure you’re giving your site visitors a good first impression and not simply creating a jumbled mess of keyword optimized content.

You don’t want to give away too much but you do want to draw their interest enough so they will click on that link to learn more or buy.

Creating copy that simultaneously achieves both of those objectives is the needle you need to thread to effectively harness the Internet to grow your small business.

So when you’re writing landing pages for your website, consider the following 5 tips to maximize their value on both ends…that is serve as good search engine fodder on one end and an effective marketing message on the other.

Write attention grabbing, eye-catching headlines

Headlines are the best opportunity you have to really grab your reader’s attention…if it doesn’t, they will most likely leave the page. You will want to include a primary keyword that will grab both your both your reader’s and the search engine’s attention.

Include call-to-action often

Next, you need to include a call-to-action that instructs visitors on what to do next. Generic forms of this are “Click here to learn more” and other quick anecdotes but those have shown to not work as well as more unique calls-to-action like “…start increasing your online presence and find more customers by contacting search engine marketers at SEO Advantage today to learn more.

Read 3 Elements of a Good Call-to-Action to learn more.

Like our example, you should also include a keyword phrase for your link in this call-to-action statement for additional search engine benefits. Include at least 2 calls-to-action for a short landing page and 3-5 for longer ones.

Directly address the customer

In your main copy, address the customer as “you” and “your” rather than saying “we,” “us” and “our.” Let the customer know what your company and its products/services and do for them. This relaxes the customer too…making them feel like they’re talking to a friend.

Directly deliver the message

When you’re writing landing pages and other content for marketing your small business online try to think about your copy as a business tool and not an art form. You’re trying to persuade readers to take action, not feel good about your ability to express yourself.

Keep content closely written

Whether your landing page is short (500 words or less) or longer, keep the context of the page tightly knit. Meaning, don’t get sidetracked by including extraneous facts and benefits of your products or services. There’s much debate amongst copywriters on an effective length for a landing page but no matter which one you choose, keep the subject matter within certain parameters.

Accomplishing both SEO and marketing goals through your landing pages and other content will maximize the value of your site for both you and your customers. Not only will search engines reward you for compelling, keyword-rich content, those who find you will be reassured that your products/services can address their needs.

This time last year, Microsoft’s Bing enjoyed the title of fastest growing search engine, experiencing 22% growth in its first year of existence.

But now, Bing can no longer claim that mantle as Twitter CEO Biz Stone proclaimed at the Aspen Ideas Festival this week, a gathering of the nation’s leading intelligentsia. Stone says Twitter is exceeding 800 million searches per day, which translates to 24 billion per month – almost twice as much as Bing and Yahoo combined!

(Last month, Bing had 4.1 billion searches and Yahoo had 9.4 billion)

Of course, this is nowhere near Google with over 88 billion searches a month but it’s quite respectable.

Lately, it’s been said you can jumpstart indexing of new content by posting it on Twitter in addition to your site since Google is constantly refreshing feeds from Twitter. With this newest data, you can safely assume many people are turning to Twitter to search for answers to their questions, news on current events and information on products and services.

Stone says Twitter has intentionally been trying to play this kind of angle – serving as not only a social network but a search engine as well. He argues there are many misconceptions regarding Twitter, saying that it’s “not a social network” but “…more like an information network or a source of news.”

Either way, Twitter is quickly becoming a relevant way to search for information online…we’ll see what some of the reports from comScore and others say when they come out. But if there’s any validity to Stone’s claims, you best consider how, when and if it’s wise for your business to jump in.

Evaluate the demand and presence of your industry on Twitter to get a better idea of when and how much effort you should put into it.

Before you start the redesign and all throughout the process, it’s important you make your SEO strategy a top priority. First, you don’t want to lose the rankings and traffic you’ve built up to now but you also will not want to miss the more targeted visitors you will get when your new and improved site is up and running.

Ignoring the following 6 steps when redesigning your site will put your online position in peril. So if you’re looking for quality web design services, be sure they understand the following before hiring them.

1.  Keep content/keyword rich pages near the top of your site’s hierarchy

Search engines are quite meticulous when seeing how pages within your site are linked together. They use this form of internal link popularity to determine a particular page’s place within your site’s hierarchy. Pages linked from every other page are given more weight than one’s linked from only a few.

In light of this fact, you should be sure your content and keyword-rich pages are placed high within this hierarchy. If a particular page was bringing in a lot of traffic before, don’t bury it too deep within the site.

2. Categorize content by niche markets and avoid duplicate content

Online searchers generally ask questions when initially looking for solutions to their problems or answers to their questions. Therefore, the more ways you can categorize your information for these different issues – or target markets – the better.

Categorize all of your top-level pages to reflect this fact and make it clear your products and services can address their problem. And be sure – regardless of how someone finds a certain bit of information on your site, be sure they end up at the same URL to avoid any duplicate content issues. For example, if a specific product can be listed as both a product and a service, place the same URL in both categories so regardless of how someone views it, they will end up at the same place.

Courtesy of cool-photos.com

3. Stay on top of URLs if transitioning to a new content management system (CMS)

If you’re going to use a new content management system for your site to help better administer it, be sure you place 301 redirects for any URL you have to change. Since search engines will take some time to index new URLs, you want to be sure you maintain your position in the search engines and current traffic levels.

If you must, you should re-direct your top-level pages at minimum. Doing so will quickly pass the link popularity of the old URLs to the new ones – and prevent prior visitors from seeing a 404 error/not found message when they come back.

4. Code links with a navigation menu in a search friendly manner

It’s important you code all links within your navigation menus in a search friendly manner so they can be crawled and pass on those benefits to your rankings position. Many graphic designers don’t realize this – some Flash graphics and DHTML menus are invisible to the search engines, causing them to not receive the internal link popularity they should receive.

Therefore, make sure all navigation menu elements are coded with CSS that is visible to search engines. Avoid drop-down box links as the main form of navigation and ensure all content can be reached through their own dedicated links.

5. Be sure your new CMS system allows you to customize HTML elements

While automation may seem nice for HTML elements like titles, meta tags, headers, URLs and alt attributes for headers, it’s imperative your new CMS system allows you to customize these. There should ideally be no limit to the number of characters for each of these elements but do remember, the search engines have limits you should stay within.

6. Avoid session IDs and other tracking links

Tracking visitors on our websites gives us insight into what works and what doesn’t. For ranking purposes though, this can be a double-edges sword. It’s best to avoid these types of internal elements but if you must, be sure the clean URL is the only one given to the search engines. If not, the search engines will duplicate the same page over many URLs, splitting your link popularity.

If your new CMS system has tracking elements inherit within it, be sure you use a canonical link element to maintain one URL for every page of content.

Sharing these “secrets” with your potential developer may make them feel you’re usurping their knowledge and authority but heck, it’s your money, so be sure whoever your hire has all of the know-how to make your site work. Many professional graphic designers are not SEO experts per se.

They may create some very nice looking websites and marketing materials but it won’t matter too much if it can’t be found.

Nevertheless, we do like to drop in from time to time and see what’s going on with Microsoft’s newest venture into the search world – Bing. It’s been almost a year since Bing hit the information superhighway and while it’s enjoyed some growth, it’s nowhere near taking over Google’s top position.

But one thing that will help SEOs understand how Bing works that was just released is an advanced query guide.  This guide basically consists of advanced search operators webmasters can use in their site’s coding to help their rankings in the fledgling search engine.

One of the biggest advanced search operators Bing made public was the norelax operator, which automatically implements relaxcount for queries that are five words or longer. Basically what that means is any words past the fifth word in a query will not necessarily appear in the search results.

Other advanced search queries include: AND:, contains:, feed:, filetype:, language:, noalter:, URL: and more.

Check out this quick post on Microsoft’s technical site which includes a list and description for each search operator along with a quick forum on the topic from WebMasterWorld.

A call-to-action is just as necessary an element of web copywriting as your keywords and message…simply writing your message without instructing the reader on what to do next will hinder your potential for getting new customers.

Call-to-actions have to be strategically placed throughout your copy (landing pages, solicitation emails, etc.) in order for you to move visitors from one phase of the buying process to the next. If they have to look for how to contact you, how to download that white paper or how to purchase your product, they will most likely get very frustrated and leave.

Continue reading to learn some good call-to-action strategies you can employ in your marketing emails and landing pages to ensure you move prospects through your site effectively. (Notice the call to action there.)

Position call-to-action above the scroll

You don’t want people to have to scroll down to the bottom to see the call-to-action…we’re an impatient lot so place a call-to-action (i.e. contact, order or download) in a prominent location at the top of your page. Different Internet ready devices layout things differently so factor that into your decisions.

Include several call-to-actions throughout your copy to give visitors multiple opportunities to take the next step…keep your words consistent though so you don’t confuse anyone. And in considering the layout, position your call-to-actions directly in your reader’s visual path.

Choose your words carefully

The tone and words you choose for your call-to-action are vital since you’re essentially asking someone to take another step. Incorporate powerful words in your call-to-action to prompt the reader to act and make them feel good about what they’re doing.

Be sure the words you choose create the effect you’re looking for…consider them from your reader’s point of view. And while words are important, the format of your call-to-action is important as well. Evo, an online outdoor outfitter, tested a couple of different calls-to-action with a recent marketing campaign. Would “15% off” or “$50 off” be a more powerful message…they found $50 off worked better even though it was roughly the same amount off the original price.

Make your words appear prominently

Once you have those powerful words down, you have to figure out how to draw attention to them. You may have a great call-to-action in words but if no one can find it, then you’re not going to get very far.

Think about how your call-to-action appears to your readers…should it be an image, a button or an anchor-text link? Take a look at this button vs. text link experiment from Aweber for ideas.

Remember, your call-to-action needs to be unique since your brand, industry, purpose and audience are all different. Considering that, these tips may not even work for you but they are a good place to start.

Need experienced help in developing your site’s infrastructure, content and even calls-to-action? Contact web copywriters at SEO Advantage today for a premier evaluation of your website, business and goals.