Internet Marketing

A get a lot of people asking where they go to setup their Facebook Permalink or as FB calls it: username. Here is the link that you can hit once you are logged in:

http://www.facebook.com/username/

Be careful in choosing the name as you can only release and change it once. This is a great way to promote your business or personal profile to friends and fans. As Google and the other engines continue to crawl and index the entire Facebook community this makes it easier to connect your social profiles with your name and business.

If you ever want to change your username, you have to go to your account settings page at:
Facebook Edit Account Settings

It is available in the account drop down menu on the top right navigation bar. Remember it can only be changed one time and it is the ‘username’ that you will want to edit.

Here is another Facebook SEO tweak that you can apply to your profile to cross link your sites to show the engines that they are related to one another. Go to your profile page, click the info tab, scroll down to contact section and click edit and you can fill in your website URL(s) there.

Another great tool that Facebook allows you to do is create a profile badge or widget to embed on your website to increase your fans. The Facebook widget page can be found at:
http://www.facebook.com/facebook-widgets/profilebadges.php

-Brian R.

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Google just rolled out their new Search Beta project, codenamed “Caffeine,” that could change how your business will rank in natural search on Google if this project makes it to public launch. For those businesses that live-and-die on free Google organic traffic, this can be a huge deal for them.

In a blog post announcing the project, Google suggested that Caffeine could change search results, which raises the concern of companies’ needing to change their optimization tactics to protect their Google listings and ranks.

It’s probably too early to make changes, but web developers and others with SEO interests are doubtless already running searches using their existing keywords to see what changes appear in their rankings.

Here’s what Google is saying:

“For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google’s web search,” two engineers wrote in the company’s official blog.

“It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. The new infrastructure sits ‘under the hood’ of Google’s search engine, which means that most users won’t notice a difference in search results. But web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences, so we’re opening up a web developer preview to collect feedback.”

If you’d like to see Google’s “Caffeine” in action, visit: http://www2.sandbox.google.com. Only the URL tells you that you are on the test site.

“Right now, we only want feedback on the differences between Google’s current search results and our new system. We’re also interested in higher-level feedback (’These types of sites seem to rank better or worse in the new system’) in addition to ‘This specific site should or shouldn’t rank for this query.’ Engineers will be reading the feedback, but we won’t have the cycles to send replies.”

In order to give Google feedback, do a search using the Caffeine beta site. Look on the search results page for a link at the bottom of the page that says “Dissatisfied? Help us improve.” Click on that link, type your feedback in the text box and then include the word “caffeine” somewhere in the text box.

It’ll be interesting to see how the new score card is setup with this algorithm on whether it continues giving rank preference to the big boys or shares some of that love with the mom and pop shops. I did a couple of searches in dating and hip hop and saw a nice blend but still too much emphasis on news, wikipedia and youtube. If I wanted hip hop videos then I would have searched that exact phrase and the same goes for news.

-Brian R.

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Bada-Bing-a-hoo. As crazy as this sounds it is true. MSN or as we now should refer to it as Bing.com has signed a 10-year deal with Yahoo to power its searches for an initial 88% share of search revenue. What does this mean to you? Well if you have ever ranked high with MSN search in the past then get ready to get about 4 times more natural search traffic from this partnership. I have always optimized SEO around Google and have never really gotten much love from Yahoo and have stumbled on great placements on MSN over the years with no real math behind the results.

In a lengthy interview on Friday before departing for a vacation, Carol Bartz, CEO of Yahoo, said she sold the search business because Yahoo could no longer continue to match the level of investment Google and Microsoft were making in searching, one of the Web’s most lucrative and technologically complex businesses.

“My first reaction when I got here was that I wouldn’t even do a search deal,” she said, “until I looked at our expense structure and our actual options and looked at what our prime job was, which is to grow audience.” Yahoo will lose some of its most talented engineers to Microsoft and as many as 400 employees through layoffs. The deal also undercuts years of investment around search technology.

Microsoft will now power Yahoo! search while Yahoo! will become the exclusive worldwide relationship sales force for both companies premium search advertisers. Read the below bullet points from the press release. It is a bit lengthy but good information:

• Microsoft will acquire an exclusive 10 year license to Yahoo!’s core search technologies, and Microsoft will have the ability to integrate Yahoo! search technologies into its existing Web search platforms;
• Microsoft’s Bing will be the exclusive algorithmic search and paid search platform for Yahoo! sites. Yahoo! will continue to use its technology and data in other areas of its business such as enhancing display advertising technology;
• Yahoo! will become the exclusive worldwide relationship sales force for both companies’ premium search advertisers. Self-serve advertising for both companies will be fulfilled by Microsoft’s AdCenter platform, and prices for all search ads will continue to be set by AdCenter’s automated auction process;
• Each company will maintain its own separate display advertising business and sales force;
• Yahoo! will innovate and “own” the user experience on Yahoo! properties, including the user experience for search, even though it will be powered by Microsoft technology;
• Microsoft will compensate Yahoo! through a revenue sharing agreement on traffic generated on Yahoo!’s network of both owned and operated (O&O) and affiliate sites;
• Microsoft will pay traffic acquisition costs (TAC) to Yahoo! at an initial rate of 88 percent of search revenue generated on Yahoo!’s O&O sites during the first five years of the agreement; and Yahoo! will continue to syndicate its existing search affiliate partnerships
• Microsoft will guarantee Yahoo!’s O&O revenue per search (RPS) in each country for the first 18 months following initial implementation in that country;
• At full implementation (expected to occur within 24 months following regulatory approval), Yahoo! estimates, based on current levels of revenue and current operating expenses, that this agreement will provide a benefit to annual GAAP operating income of approximately $500 million and capital expenditure savings of approximately $200 million. Yahoo! also estimates that this agreement will provide a benefit to annual operating cash flow of approximately $275 million; and
• The agreement protects consumer privacy by limiting the data shared between the companies to the minimum necessary to operate and improve the combined search platform, and restricts the use of search data shared between the companies. The agreement maintains the industry-leading privacy practices that each company follows today.

This announcement could be one of the biggest game changers in the brief history of Internet as we like to call it.

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Google recently published a Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide in the Google Webmaster Central Blog due to the high demand of requests from people asking “What are some simple ways that I can improve my website’s performance in Google?”. This compact guide is very comprehensive and covers all of the best practices that people can follow to improve their overall crawlability and indexing by the engines. The guide is also available in Spanish and German.

Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide

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This is my week to rant about Google so just let me be for a second. I have been doing random searches everyday in areas and verticals that I don’t typically search on just to find some funny search results that don’t make sense or where the SEO pro’s have worked the “Google Algorithm” also referred to my me as “Google Love’s How Popular I Am” tool. We already know Google doesn’t care about your inbound links or your PR link backs or your PageRank score. They get their data from Analytics, Feedburner, links from trusted sources which are usually news publications (Authority links), Registrar info on the age of your site, how active the content is and the list goes on. So what happens when all of your competitors are employing the same tactics to Google? Check the “Nordstrom Coupons” search example below:

Isn’t this reminiscent of how Altavista.com search results used to look back in 1999 before they went under?

Now let’s look at how the search results used to look back in January, 2001 now that Google has published their own ‘way back index machine’ for us to view the Google 2001 results for Nordstrom Coupons:

What has changed in 10 years? Looks like the consumer is getting a pretty shitty experience and where are the ads? Oh, Google doesn’t think that advertisers should be able to buy this keyword I guess because it isn’t relevant even though tons of those same advertisers are now SEOing the hell out of it. This results are starting to look a little homogeneous.

I wish our friends at Mahalo.com would hurry up and get all of their index filled up and start spending some money to get some mind share in search.

-Brian R.

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Have you been wondering how you can get your site included in Cuil.com but can’t find anything anywhere on their site? I am always looking for alternative SEO and natural search traffic options and did a little digging around and found the Cuil.com webmaster info page at:

http://www.cuil.com/info/webmaster_info/

From that page, there is a link that says “Please let us know” - nice SEO anchor link huh? Well, that link takes you to this page:

http://www.cuil.com/info/contact_us/feedback.php?to=crawl%20me

To: Crawl Me
From: put your email address here
Site URL: http://www.mysite.com <-- be sure to include the http://

or you can send them an email directly to: crawlme@cuil.com

Something tells me that the form will work more efficiently. Now cross your fingers that they start gaining some momentum before Google takes over the Earth.

-Brian R.

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And finally the moment that we have all been so anxiously awaiting, a new search engine to battle the Google giant. I have always been an advocate for the small guys. Cuil.com was created by Ex-Google workers, Anna Patterson, her husband, Tom Costello, and two other former Google engineers - Russell Power and Louis Monier. They have kept a low profile, raised $33 million in venture capital and in the end launched Cuil, pronounced “cool” today.

The first thing I did was look for a Submit URL page. I found a webmaster info page that had an email address for now on site submissions. If you would like Cuil to crawl your site and have it included in our index, just let them know:
crawler@cuil.com

Twiceler is the name of their robot Web crawler. The user-agent is “twiceler.” They understand that many small sites are bandwidth-limited, so support the robots.txt Crawl-delay directive.

More info can be found at:
http://www.cuil.com/info/webmaster_info/

Costello’s Irish heritage inspired Cuil’s odd name. It was derived from a character named Finn McCuill in Celtic folklore. Let’s see if these guys can pull it out and make some noise in the search space. If I was Microsoft I would be trying to get some investment going on this project as it seems like a small dream team at work.

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I recently did a SEO presentation at BizJam and got a few questions about SEO and flash websites and came across this posting in Google’s Blog by Software Engineers at Google, Ron Adler and Janis Stipins.

Google has been developing a new algorithm for indexing textual content in Flash files of all kinds, from Flash menus, buttons and banners, to self-contained Flash websites. Recently, we’ve improved the performance of this Flash indexing algorithm by integrating Adobe’s Flash Player technology.

In the past, web designers faced challenges if they chose to develop a site in Flash because the content they included was not indexable by search engines. They needed to make extra effort to ensure that their content was also presented in another way that search engines could find.

Now that we’ve launched our Flash indexing algorithm, web designers can expect improved visibility of their published Flash content, and you can expect to see better search results and snippets. There’s more info on the Webmaster Central blog about the Searchable SWF integration.

Now even though Google is one of the only engines that can now effectively crawl flash files there are a few other techniques that you might want to explore that include inserting primary content into the Javascript function called SWFObject 2.0. The primary content can contain links, headers, styled text, and images— basically anything you can add to an regular HTML page. With SEO copy writing applied to the primary content, Flash then becomes a non-issue for SEO.

-Brian

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There was a great deal of buzz around getting your site listed on relevant news sites via press releases. Is there any merit to this? Hells yeah. Once you send your press release out o the wire there is a good chance that Yahoo news, Google news, Reuters and other aggregators will pick it up if it is press worthy material. If this happens then the blogosphere usually repurposes the release and takes out excerpts or references. Hopefully some of those references will be your website URL. The most common mistake that I see is companies forgetting to use an anchored link to their own website in their releases. Duh?? Many writers, especially bloggers are too lazy to strip this out of the releases and if they copy and paste the news then you get another inbound link hopefully from a blogger that has relevant content to your business or vertical. If you happen to have something press worthy enough to get to the home page of Digg or other social news media sites then it becomes a home run for your link strategy. Here are a few good press release distribution services and some of these guys even have SEO upgrades for releases. Money!

PRWeb
PR News Wire
PR Log

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MSN has recently launched its own Webmaster Tools (Beta) center which is similar to the Google Webmaster and Yahoo Site Explorer webmaster areas. You can register you website and sitemaps with them now at:

MSN Webmaster Tools

Use the Webmaster Tools to troubleshoot the crawling and indexing of your website, submit sitemaps and view statistics about your websites. Once you have your site authenticated with a HTML tag then you can view a site summary, your rank on MSN, top keywords, top outbound links and top backlinks.

You can submit your XML sitemap for better results. Sitemaps help the Live Search robot find all of the files to be indexed. You’ll get the best indexing results by using robots.txt autodiscovery.

On the website status page you’ll see the date from the last crawl or your site along with the total number of pages that were indexed.

If you haven’t submitted your site and it doesn’t already appear in the MSN Live index then you can submit to MSN below:

MSN Search Submit

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