Google’s new SearchWiki allows searchers to promote or eliminate pages from their own personal search results. You have to be logged into Google to personalize your results.

This new feature is an example of how search is becoming increasingly dynamic, giving people tools that make search even more useful to them in their daily lives.

While there is some debate about the usefulness of the tool and a small (so far) uproar over privacy concerns, Google continues to move forward in providing searches with better search results.

Search engine optimization will become more difficult as you will be optimizing across behavioral patterns instead of towards a single search engine. The top SEOs are already aware of how personalized search will affect optimizers and are prepared for the future.

You have to forget about rankings and focus in on return on investment (ROI).

The web site design is done in photoshop and the writing for all the chosen keywords is 90% complete.
We are now into coding the site taking advantage of all the on-page factors search engines like to see.

Having perfected our code over the years, we write it as simple and light as possible. <Table>s got thrown out a couple of years ago, although it’s surprising how many people still use them and weight down their code, plus restrict their creativity to lay out a page. We can predict what is going to happen when the css renders the file each browser, however just to be safe every website is checked in all the major browsers on Mac and Windows to make sure the end user has the same experience regardless of the platform. Each browser has it’s own little quirks that we have to be thoughtful of. Images are only used for pictures or logos, always with alt tags, and never for text or navigation bars. We have also started to replace pixels with ems, so that the site has maximum flexibility. If an end user has his fonts set to a larger size than normal the whole site enlarges, not just the text!

The site is now bullet proof, works in all bowsers, all font sizes and has maximum searchability, what more can a client ask for!?

The title and meta tags also need to be researched and written, nothing is guessed we do our research and write most optimized title tag and meta tags with the most compelling words to entice the user to ‘click’. After all the end user will scan the title tags in the search engines and will often click on the one that is the most enticing, which is not necessarily the first one!

I need to get more photo’s this week for each landing page and start to shoot testimonial videos, so that can be edited very soon and sent out to all the video sites with tubemogul.

We always tell clients that everything you need to know about search engine optimization (SEO) is already out there on the Internet. Some very good SEO’s make a nice living by providing all the information and resources you need to successfully run an Internet marketing program.

That being said, however, the best research you can bring to the table comes from practicing what they preach. Lisa Barone has a great take on the difference between reading about and practicing SEO.

In fact, most of the information put out there is general, as opposed to industry specific.  Once you start to do your competitive research, that will become apparent to you very quickly.  So, don’t get stuck trying to find out which SEO tactic lead to your competitor’s top 5 ranking, start practicing and let the results guide you to page 1.

Rand Fishkin outed an SEO company last week for suspect search engine optimization techniques.  Since then, there has been innumeral posts regarding the techniques in question and the fact that someone like Rand publicly outs another SEO firm for using tactics that he may be advising his own online community membership.

SEO Book‘s Aaron Wall has a lenghtly blog post regarding Rand’s behavior. The post also includes a a video from Shoemoney, who also questions Rands outing of a company for tactics that Rand has used at one time himself and includes his vue on paid advertising.

I follow Rand Fishkin’s at Seomoz blog and I pick up valuable information from Rand’s indepth analysis of search engine optimization and social media marketing. I admire Rand for what he has accomplished but still, I don’t get it. Why would someone of Rand’s stature take to outing an SEO company.  It just doesn’t make sense to me.

Google will eventually catch up with the company and justice will be served. The real point here is that by the time Google catches up to them, they will have made a samll or large fortune by then and they will take their profits and just start over with a backup they probably already have in the system.

We see this a lot in SEO, clients will show us a competitive website and want us to out their competitors who may or may not be using black hat tactics to rank well in Google.

Its not in our nature to out companies. That is just our way of doing things but that doesn’t mean we are right. That is just who we are.

I would like to hear your opinion on the matter. If your competitor was manipulating the system to take advantage of Google, would you report them?

Okay, we have picked victim #1, a cabinet maker/woodworker who has built a successful company that is celebrating 20 years in business.
Garren Dakessian (Owner) has built his business by giving great service, craftmanship and happy customers giving great referrals. When the chief editor of Style at Home magazine chose Malibu Woodwork to build new cabinets for the basement and lounge of her own home, it shows he is the best in his business.

Over the years he has expanded his skills and offerings from clients requests that he, finish their basement or renovate their lounge. But now he wants to go back to his true skill, cabinet making, and to get the word out that Malibu Woodwork will make custom cabinets for your Kitchen, home office, bathroom, or basement.

Malibugroup.ca has a simple site today, made up mainly of pictures showing the Style at Home spreads, home and contact page.

After doing keyword research we found traffic, and a lot of it, searching for his services as a cabinet maker. Add in his local town and the competing sites in natural search come down to either single digits or none!

After looking at competing websites in this space, we noticed of lot of them have a local amateur feel. We only found three that stood out with any style, content and ease of navigation.
What do we do with these you ask? Knowing that the average web surfer doesn’t just visit one site, we need to stand out and be remembered over the others, even if we aren’t in position #1. So we take the best of each and combine them into the ultimate site. Not only will the site rank well, it will also convert well.

Next steps: refine the final keywords and have content written. Build the new layout. Get video and pictures of happy customers.

Look for a resurgence in organic search engine optimization and a move away from SEO “trickery” as search engines move to place more value on what a Web page is about rather than how it is linked to other pages and sites on the Internet. The ideas and information on a page – a Web page’s “content” – are going to matter more and more, rather than the page’s architecture and the links that connect it to the wider Internet, as search engines vie to better “understand” what a Web page is about and rank its relevancy to the end user.

The big push is on to understand the “semantics” of a page, trying to digitally comprehend the keywords and concepts of a Web page’s content and ranking them in their relevance to the end user – the person behind his or her keyboard or phone pad keying in search queries.

The debut of Cuil.com, the newest search engine and would-be challenger to industry leader Google, underscores the shift in how search engines now, and will, search and understand a page’s content. Specifically, the team of world leading search engineers that banded together to build the new Cuil search engine claim not only that Cuil (pronounced “cool”) will index a much bigger portion of the individual pages on the Internet, but that they will emphasize the content on the pages rather than the links on the Internet that point to a specific page. (The link structure pointing to a specific Web page indicates its popularity, and hence the reasoning goes, its relevance to the end user. The number of inbound links is a critical part of industry leader Google’s PageRank methodology.)

“Rather than rely on superficial popularity metrics,” according to the new-kid-on-the-search-engine-block, “Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance. When we find a page with your keywords, we stay on that page and analyze the rest of its content, its concepts, their inter-relationships and the page’s coherency.”

“In addition to looking at the popularity of a Web page,” reports the Wall Street Journal, “Cuil also analyzes the concepts on the page and their relationships – grouping similar results under different menus.” Grouping different results under different concept-specific search result menus implies a much deeper understanding of the concepts and interrelationships on the individual Web page, rather than a mere ranking in terms of a “relevancy” that is determined in large part by a page’s popularity based on its links to other pages.

For businesses engaged in online marketing, the move toward a more “semantic” understanding of their Web page content will mean that their search engine optimization strategies will have to focus more and more on finding an SEO company that will help them produce the quality content that will make their organic search engine optimization strategy a success. Using so-called “ethical” search engine optimization techniques and building relevant pages with quality content and information for the end user will increasingly distinguish companies whose SEO and online marketing campaigns are a long-term success from those who look for the quick-fix and short-term boost in rankings brought about by using SEO techniques that are less organic to artificially boost the relevancy of their pages to their target audience.

You may be able to “game” the search engines for a while, but ultimately you cannot game the end users who always know whether the results a search engine displays are relevant to what it is they are looking for. The ability to “game” the search engines will, of course, decrease as they are better able to, and rely more upon, a semantic understandings of the Web’s content. To the extent that new search engine Cuil is better able to conceptually understand and sort the content of the hundreds of billions of web pages that are on the Internet – a number that grows by several billion each day – they may have a shot at making a dent in goliath Google’s market share.

There is no quick-fix key to online marketing success. Yet, with time and effort utilizing ethical search engine optimization techniques will improve your web site’s ranking and drive more web traffic to your company’s web site. But, the concept to stress here is ethical SEO techniques.

Search engines are all premised on providing their users with the information and web pages that are most relevant to the search query that users type into the search interface. Google’s famed “Don’t Be Evil” corporate ethos restated for SEO-types is: “Don’t rig the system to rank less relevant pages.”

There are a number of “quick-fixes” for web pages and web sites that do not rank well for keyword terms on Google and the other search engines. The downside of such “quick-fixes” – keyword stuffing, cloaking, hidden text, paid and dubious links etc. – is that sooner or later (most often, sooner) the search engines will clue into such well-known “Black Hat” SEO tactics, resulting in a permanent banning of the offensive website, or at least a temporary de-listing until the offensive and misleading tweaks are removed from the site. And Google, Yahoo! and the other search engines reserve a contractual right to de-list a site in their Terms of Service.

The Internet is the much-touted “Information Super Highway”. The price for claiming your roadside frontage is creating relevant content that users are looking for online. There are a raft of “White Hat” techniques that will attract web traffic and users to your website, but each of these requires a sustained effort to create relevant content and link structures. While such “White Hat” or ethical SEO techniques – blogging, article writing, participation in relevant forums and directories – take more effort and time to build a site’s relevancy, their effect is much longer lasting and you do not run the risk of having your site shut down peremptorily as a result of trying to game the system. In a “Don’t be Evil” world, “Content is King”, and the creation of quality content and relevant inbound links to your site is the hallmark of ethical and effective SEO and online marketing.

My new boss is now officially as jaded as the lawyer I used to be. . . . On my way out yesterday, I poked my head in his office and asked him to look over an article I’d posted on eZine.com for a client, to see if I’d gotten the right mix of keywords – not too many, not too few – in the article’s content. He opened the article and looked up at me with “You’ve got to be kidding me!” written all over him. “To be honest,” he said, “I look at this and all I see is blah, blah, blah . . . link!” “Wow,” jaded, I thought. The article, its content and length was more than he was used to seeing in SEO land, apparently.

And that seems to be the critical balance in SEO copywriting. Yes, we all want to get content up there on the web that has the all-important incoming link to our site, but how to best achieve this while getting the double-boost of attracting readers to the site, blog or social media space you are writing for? After all, in the short-term link building gets the page ranking boost you and/or your clients are looking for – but it’s short-lived. I think my bosses and I agree, and we wouldn’t be the only ones in the industry, that social media marketing – MySpace, Facebook, del.icio.us, dig etc. – is the next wave to ride. But how best to ride it and turn it into a strategy that pays for itself and for our clients? After all, almost by definition users on social media sites – perhaps with the exception of the SEO-types I now rub shoulders with, but I know( or at least hope), that they too tap into what is out there on the internet for fun and frolic) – do not want to be bothered with in your face, blatant marketing content. What’s a poor hack to do?

I think the answer must lie with almost the very first thing I heard about SEO when I first interviewed for this gig. “Content is King!” With Google still trying to figure out how to monetize its social marketing phenomenon – YouTube, all of us seem to be focusing on how we can utilize social marketing media to boost the page ranking on the search engines. What we seem to forget, as I see it as an admitted SEO newbie, is that the blogs like this that we publish are already social media. Readers come to them not only for the information that they want, but to be informed by it. That’s communication, an inherent social medium.

As I write articles for the directories, content for web pages and blog blurbs like this one, I try to keep in mind that their is an end user out there who will, I hope (Are you out there?) read what it is I am writing and feel motivated to take some action as a result . . . post a comment, link to the site, return to see what is new in a week or two’s time, link to my client’s site. That is how the internet grew, and I feel that all of us in SEO should bear that in mind while we’re trying to make a buck or two for ourselves and our clients.

Google faces a great challenge in figuring out how to turn a buck, or bigger buck, on YouTube. Google CEO, Eric Schmidt was candid about that during his recent interview on CNBC. Ultimately, however, if you want to put readers eyes in front of the advertising, products or services you are marketing on line, whether for clients or through affiliate marketing, you’d best be assuring that the product that is going to capture their eye is also going to capture their imagination. Down in the caverns of Google Labs and Google Research, I’m sure they have this uppermost in mind. Good thing they have the cash to back up the imaginative ways they will undoubtedly come up with for marketing their products, ads and services through YouTube, which is becoming greater asset for them every day, if they can only figure out how to capitalize on its social marketing potential. I for one will be keeping an eye on how that plays out how to do the same on a smaller scale in the social marketing milieu the rest of us small fry swim in.

Chris Silver Smith at Search Engine Land put out a great piece on May 5th regarding what seems to be a disconnect between Google’s current page ranking method for local search terms outside of the major markets and what is, essentially, Google’s basic business model. If the internet is, as I understand it to be, a user-driven, ‘digital democracy’ – that is, the end-users (you, us) will migrate to using the hardware platforms and software programs that best enable them to get the information that they want, be it product information, entertainment, news, how-to tips, or whatever with the least effort and hassle – then Google and the other search engine players have a vested interest in ensuring that the person entering their search query, using the words they think will in fact get them the information they are seeking, the information that is most relevant to them.

Curious then, isn’t it, that the typical page rankings that come out of Google when you type in a specific place name for a locale that is not one of the major urban centres still come out in a most arbitrary fashion? As Mr. Silversmith observes in his Search Engine Land article, punch in the name of a town, smaller city or suburban area where most of us live after all, and Google will typically spit out what it sees as being most relevant to that locale in the following order: Local/CityGovernment websites, Chamber of Commerce/Local tourist bureau/visitors’ bureau, local Wikipedia articles, local newspaper websites, etc. This order of page rankings or search results really doesn’t seem to have much to do with what information most users are likely to be searching for. It’s arbitrary, as Mr. Silver Smith says.

Optimizing a website for the search engines – SEO at its best and most effective – is really all about ensuring that Google’s web crawling “spider” program finds your website and indexes the website and its content as being relevant to end-users who type in certain specific search queries. At its best, your website and its content will help your targeted audience self-select your web pages with the help of the search engines. The job of Google, Yahoo! MSN and the others is to figure out how to monetize this process, so that they can make money while helping your potential customers find you.

Mr. Silver Smith suggests overriding Google’s current arbitrary system for ranking locale-specific search terms by doing an end-around and posting material that will get Google to override the priority of local search terms in favour of universal search terms. Probably “grey hat”, but it seems to be effective. He suggests that an interim strategy which will help you get around the current glitch or arbitrariness in Google’s local search page ranking methodology, and get your local business site optimum ranking for a locale-specific query, is to put up a YouTube piece that for whatever Google-logic it deems to be more relevant than its current default ranking according to dry Gov’t websites, Chamber of Commerce websites etc. (Could it be that one of Google’s current top priorities according to Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, in his recent sit-down interview with CNBC’s Maria Bartiroma, is figuring out how to best monetize the surging popularity of its YouTube subsidiary ?)

While this is a good short-term fix – it will work for now – you can bet that in the not-too short term Google will be rolling out local search and mobile search products that will fill in this gap and it will be back to SEO 101 – making sure that your website has the content and links to the information, products and service that your local customer is searching for with his laptop or, increasingly, her mobile phone.

After all, Dr. Schmidt noted how great it was when he was on the road in a major centre and he wanted a cup of coffee to be able to pull out his phone, key in “Starbucks” and have Google Maps show him the nearest outlet where he could get his Grande Sumatran bold, double non-fat latte or Chai tea. You can be sure that Google’s CEO would quickly recognize a lost opportunity and be miffed if he googled in “Starbucks” in Ottomwa, Iowa instead of Ottawa, Orlando or Osaka (should he ever find himself in Radar O’Reilly’s hometown on business) and all he got was a bunch of local Government web sites and Chamber of Commerce balderdash instead of convenient Google Map directions to a hot cup of joe!

Stephane Malhomme’s recent article in the Financial Post‘s “Small Business” section (April 21, 2008) regarding search engine optimization and how to get your small business website to the top of Google’s search results page was interesting and topical, yet did not fully cover the whole SEO story. The techniques that were discussed by SEO’ster Justin Cook in the article are known in the search engine optimization (SEO) field as “keyword stuffing”. This is the practice of placing key words that describe the product or service you are offering as many times, and in as many places as possible, in your web page’s hidden html code as possible.

While Mr. Cook, of Convurgency.com, is technically correct in that keyword stuffing can have the effect of quickly bumping your website from page twenty to page one of Google’s search result rankings, it will not keep it there. Moreover, Google and the other search engines are more than overly familiar with this outdated SEO technique. The practice can, in fact, have the opposite of the intended effect. Once Google, Yahoo! or MSN analyzes your website’s html code and sees that it is keyword stuffed – and they will – the page will in effect be punished for the practice and will drop off the search engine’s radar screen – perhaps altogether, depending upon how blatantly the practice is abused.

Search engines are designed, and continually updated, to ensure that the results that are most relevant to the end user searching for information are displayed first. Google’s entire business model is premised on this, and they jealously guard against entrepeneurial types that seek to ‘game the system’ utilizing technical shortcuts that are irrelevant to the end consumer, such as keyword stuffing. If they didn’t, users would obtain better, more relevant search results using a different search engine! Consumers would vote with their feet – or in this case their fingertips – and Google’s market share would tank.

In both SEO and search engine marketing (SEM), the maxim is “Content is King.” While it is important to ensure that the relevant key words are in the right places on your website – and in the right amount, and no more – it is more important to provide quality information – content that is both relevant and interesting for the end user (i.e., the person typing in his or her search query). It is important to include the relevant key words when adding content in the form of articles, pages and blog entries to your web page, but not to overdo it. Every person who links to your site as a “favourite” is worth more than all your efforts optimizing your website

When a small businessperson is seeking advice on SEO or SEM – whether hiring a professional to undertake that function, or in looking for courses to learn how to perform those functions oneself – caveat emptor still applies: Buyer Beware! If the person selling you SEO services or advice is talking about a quick, one-time fix brought about by a tweak to your webpage and is not telling you that the best results are achieved by continually adding new and relevant information for visitors to your site, shop around.