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.

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.

We spend a lot of time here at the search engine optimization e-blog exploring the best and most legit ways of doing this.

One strategy of building links budding web entrepreneurs can consider is buying an abandoned website that has an existing cache of inbound links already. This can be a quick way to jumpstart your link-building efforts.

It’s been estimated that nearly half of businesses started in the U.S. fail within four years. In the old days, this exclusively meant a brick-and-mortar storefront was abandoned, leaving the real estate for someone else to pick up and use for productive purposes. In the online world, the site owner may keep his “online real estate” around in hopes of making it work one day.

These kinds of businesses or their website more specifically, are ripe for the picking at rock bottom prices. As far as cash outlay, this option may be more expensive than other link building strategies but the time you will save will make up for it. As the old saying goes – “time is money.”

One of the easiest ways to find these link jewels is to do a search on Google for outdated copyrights. For example: “copyright 2003” + your keywords

One of the easiest ways to spot an abandoned website is to find one whose copyright date is several years old. Sites that are consistently maintained will change that date each year but if it’s abandoned, the copyright year may be from 5+ years ago. Nothing says a site has given up like an old copyright date.

Another way to find abandoned or underperforming websites you can pick up for cheap is to type in “temporarily down for maintenance” or “under construction” plus your keywords. This is another indication that a site could be abandoned.

Once you locate a potential site, make sure its domain hasn’t expired. If a domain expires, Google wipes their entire history and infrastructure clean. Meaning, the value of any links and PageRank is reduced to zero so it would be a waste of time to purchase it for link building purchases.

We’ll have more on how to effectively build links through purchasing abandoned domains. Check back with the search engine optimization e-blog for more on this and other tips on building search engine rankings and effectively marketing your small business online.

For any of us who spend our time trying to obtain high search engine rankings, this surely threw a wrench in the gears. How would we know if our efforts are working if everyone was getting personalized results based on prior searches, their location, etc. In one respect, personalized search is nothing new. Google has returned results based on geographic specific elements for a long time now.

Now that you have to opt-out of personalized search (which most people have no idea about), search results may be slightly skewed. Meaning, if you visited a website, your browser was likely stamped with a 180 day cookie that will highlight any related keywords pertaining to that site. So the next time you do a search using those keywords, the site you visited will appear first rather than one that’s more deserving.

While this may not be a problem for most people, SEOs and webmasters like you and me want to see search engine results how they are and not skewed results pages based on some personalization.

So how can I see raw search engine results without personalization?

Keep reading for two ways you can shut off Google personalization in your web browser so you can see the raw results for particular keywords you’re targeting.

Option 1 – Add the search operator “&pws=0” to the end of the URL of your search query. Type in the keywords into the search bar like normal then click search. When that results page appears, simply add the above code into the URL bar on your browser. This will return raw results with no personalization.

Option 2 – Scroll down to the bottom of a search engine results page and click the “view customizations” link. Next, click the option to view your keyword search “without these improvements” to remove personalization and any cookies from your browser.

After doing one of two of these, you should be able to see non-personalized results for the keyword in question. Repeat for other searches to obtain raw search results. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be any permanent shut-off switch for this feature but if we stumble into one, we’ll let you know.

These strategies can help you get the raw deal on how well your search engine optimization efforts are working. Personalized search isn’t affecting search results too much, the best we can tell, but shutting it off entirely will certainly give you the best picture on how well your efforts are working.

Normal crawling is reliable – just not quick enough sometimes…very inconsistent in other words.

Being reliable is great but if you’re 5 minutes late for the train, all the reliability in the world won’t matter if you’re inconsistent – show up early some days and late on others.

So, what can you do to get new content indexed faster in the search engines?

Continue reading for four tips on getting your site content indexed faster and check out the video below for more.

Update your XML sitemap and “ping” Google, etc.

Your XML sitemap is basically a file containing links to all of the pages on your site. Unlike an HTML sitemap, it is only visible to the search engines. Updating this file with links to new pages provides the search engine spider a one-stop place for finding everything on your site. So to get indexed faster, update your XML sitemap when you post new content. But instead of waiting for the spider to come, ping them through Google’s Webmaster Tools and let them know you have updated your file. If you ping, they will come.

Use Pubsubhubbub protocol

Pubsubhubbub protocol is a server-to-server web hook-based pubsub (publish/subscribe) protocol that you can place in your site’s coding. You can create your own public or private hub that news aggregators like Google Reader, Friend Feed and Feedburner can use to find your new content. You can plug-in your Wordpress blog utility and Superfeeder to automate this process. Whenever you post new content to a PSH-compatible site, these aggregators will immediately be notified of your site’s new content.

Create a “tweet” on Twitter

We recently discussed this on SEOe – Can Twitter Get a Site Indexed in the Search Engines All by Itself? While it’s not a long term solution, “tweets” on Twitter can provide your site that initial boost to get the spiders to come and index your new content. Considering Google is now indexing “tweets,” simply posting an announcement of your new content will immediately be picked up by the search engine.

Ping-o-matic

Ping-o-matic is a service that allows you to “ping” a bunch of different web services and notify them of new content on your site, much like ringing an alarm bell to alert the world to your new stuff. Ping-o-matic is linked up with different blog directories and news aggregators like PostRank, News Gator, Bloglines, Google Blog Search and more.

It’s to your advantage to find different ways to get your site’s content crawled and indexed as quickly as possible. Your competition is likely working hard to do the same thing so you don’t want to be passive and think that great content alone will bring home the bacon. If a competitor is working hard to get their content indexed quickly, they will leave you in the dust quicker than you can blink.

Check out this video SEOMoz produced on the heels of the SMX Advanced conference for more.

Topping the list – Facebook with 540 million unique visitors in the month of April, which translates to 35.2% of people on the Internet!

The top ten most visited sites include:

1. Facebook
2. Yahoo!
3. Live.com
4. Wikipedia
5. Msn.com
6. Microsoft
7. Blogspot.com
8. Baidu.com
9. Qq.com
10. Mozilla.com

Websites on the list come from a diverse range of industries and specialties – social networks, other search portals, news and information, ecommerce and more.

Google made the list as part of its Ad Planner, a tool to help businesses effectively use their pay-per-click advertising services. While we don’t spend too much time talking about PPC here, it does have one main advantage when you’re first getting online – it gets your fledgling site in front of millions of users!

Aside from PPC though, this list is good information for any search engine optimization pro or group. Getting links from sites like these can give your site a powerful boost in the search engines. Ones farther down the list might be a little easier to obtain links from.

Having more links to your site boosts your site rankings and in turn, brings in more site visitors and revenues. Now with millions perhaps billions of websites out there, you may spend a lifetime trying to get on a list like this but don’t worry, you can certainly use lists like this to maximize your online stature, site visits and ultimately sales.

Check out the list for more detailed information on visitors, unique page views, the other top 1000 sites and more.

Caffeine is a change in the index, or infrastructure of Google. Unlike the “Mayday” update, it’s not changing the algorithm in any way…it’s simply changing how sites are indexed on their servers. Since content on the web is blossoming and getting more complex, Google felt it needed its index to evolve with it so it could return the most relevant, up-to-date results to its searchers.

In a nutshell, the following are the main things you need to know about Caffeine:

• It’s NOT a ranking change. You shouldn’t see any major ranking changes from this
• It DOES change how Google indexes pages – speed, scalability and how deep they can get into a site
• It should now deliver fresher results
• Search results should go deeper over time

Before, the old index consisted of several layers, each of which was updated at different times and frequencies. When refreshing a layer, Google would have to analyze the entire web which caused a delay between when new content was discovered and when it was made available to a searcher.

With Caffeine, Google will now analyze the Internet in small portions and continuously update the search index on a global basis. As the spider finds new pages or information, it can automatically be added to the index, making it available immediately.

Caffeine can index pages on an enormous scale – its server takes up over 100 million gigabytes of storage in one database. It adds new information at a rate of hundreds of thousands of gigabytes a day. To compare, you would need 625,000 of the largest I-pods to store that much information.

As with anything, there is some controversy as to the effects of this. Some comments on different forums discussing the new infrastructure claim Google is making a smart move, staying ahead of the bell curve when it comes to the advancement of websites.

However, others worry about spam and how this could be a great boon to spammers. Since Google is striving to post the most current results, spammers could take advantage of this by copying other sites’ content. Some have even said this could lead to Google’s demise and only gave them 6 months!!

Either way, we will stay on top of how Caffeine is working and its effect on websites and web searchers. If it is a bad move on Google’s part, we will certainly witness a decline in their search volume.

In the mean time, see Google’s spam chief at the recent SMX Advanced conference explaining Caffeine in this video below.

Now Google has confirmed the “Mayday” update with Matt Cutts saying at Google I/O that “this is an algorithmic change in Google, looking for higher quality sites to surface for long tail queries. It went through vigorous testing and isn’t going to be rolled back.”

Each year, Google changes its algorithm anywhere from 350 to 500 times (2009) which is why many veteran SEOs recommend you not get too focused on specific ranking factors, which puts you at the mercy of these types of tweaks.

Every so often though, Google makes a big enough change in their algorithm that it gets noticed by people who usually don’t spend much time thinking about it.

In regard to the Mayday change, Vanessa Fox at Search Engine Land prodded Cutts for more on the specifics of their change. He stated that it was a rankings change, not a crawling or indexing one. This seems to imply that sites seeing less traffic are still getting their pages indexed but are not ranking as high as they were before. Google’s changes seem to only be affecting “long-tail” traffic which generally comes from longer searches that few people do. But when you add them all up, it could be a lot.

The algorithm change also seems to be affecting very large sites with “item” pages, like an ecommerce site. These pages generally don’t have many links to them and buried deep within a site. They also may not have substantial amounts of unique content on them.

These observations and admissions regarding the Mayday update confirm one thing for sure – it’s certainly beneficial to create unique product descriptions for items you sell on your site (B2C companies). Simply using a manufacturer’s generic description could be causing you to lose rankings for your product pages.

What can I do if I have pages affected by the Mayday update?

Creating compelling content and attracting links to these pages can be difficult. The best we can suggest is to isolate the pages/keyword phrases you’re experiencing a drop in. Do a search using those phrases and see what sites are ranking on page 1 and see what they do. Don’t copy them verbatim but get an idea of what they may be doing that you’re not, or vice versa.