I’ve been thinking about the limits of media when I was a child and in my teens. We had television (and not 500 cable channels), movies, and then print. It still left a fair number of options, but nothing compared to the world we live in today. Would it date me to say that the general populace didn’t even begin to talk about the internet until I was in university?

As SEO professionals, it doesn’t hurt us to remember that some of the lessons from the pre-internet era are still valuable today. Studying the media itself and how it works is still worthy of our attention today, just as it was in 1964 when Mashall McLuhen coined the phrase “The media is the message”. It even applies to link building methods, including content writing, asking webmasters to link to your site, and linkbait.

Content writing is all about attracting readers and links to your site through simple, clear content. In order to take full advantage of this kind of marketing, “make sure that your content is easily readable and absorbable (and linkable)”. If you manage to do this, you’ll attract inbound links.

While acquiring links through good content writing is a passive activity (you are passively seeking links with your content), there are more active ways to pursue links, like asking webmasters to link to your content. This asking can take many forms, including “You ask, you beg, you might whine or offer a form of compensation.” This is a trickier method, because each webmaster has different preferences of communication and each niche market will require different language both for the content you want linked and for dealing with the webmaster you want to have do the linking. “You also have to choose and use, proven methods for approaching webmasters and alerting them to your content.”

Linkbait is a combination of active and passive methods of link building, and it has the advantage of being creative. You can use anything from videos to content pieces to whatever you dream up as linkbait, allowing your company to rely on its biggest strengths. As Julie Joyce says, “Linkbaiting is both passive and active. In producing linkbait in your desired form, you could just let it sit there and wait for the links to roll in, which is passive, but in order to really succeed, you have to take an active approach and do the asking/begging/pleading bits.” Social media can help to make your linkbait more visible too, but will be much more successful in a social media arena where you or your company are active members.

So the next time you are thinking about link building, consider the media you are using, the effort you intend to invest, and the outcome that can follow from each possibility before putting together your own link building toolkit.

I came across some interesting tips on multilingual SEO from Maria Nikishyna of Search Engine Journal this morning.

Language Recognition
Stick to only one language per page
Avoid side-by-side translations
Use the same language for all elements of the page: headers, sidebars, menus, etc.

URL Structure
Language-specific extensions are often used on multilingual websites to help users (and crawlers) identify the sections of the website they are on and the language the page is in.

Crawling and Indexing
Avoid redirects based on user’s perceived language: they could, in fact, prevent both users and SEs from looking at more pages on your site. Keep the content for each language on separate URLs
Don’t use cookies to show translated page versions
Cross-link page by page

Like anything else in internet marketing, whether its SEO, social media or pay per click advertising, its important to start with the end result in mind and be consistent as you build your site out. Get the basics right and move forward from there.

As you are growing and developing your business, often you’ll only be thinking about one or two steps down the road, even if your five or ten year plan is much more complex than that. When planning your content management system, you can save yourself, your company, and your employees a lot of hassles and headaches if you approach your plans with best practices in mind for international expansion.

Andy Atkins-Krüger covers this topic in his article “My Dream International Content Management System”. I’m going to talk a little bit about these three topics in his article:

- World character sets,
- Managing content across local domains, and
- Translation and SEO workflow.

When it comes to world character sets, remember that there are a wide variety of characters and accents not used in the English language. Instead of getting a translation that gives a question mark or a box in the middle of a word – which is at the very least distracting and also has the potential to cause huge problems with your clients’ ability to understand your content – you want your content to be seamless, no matter what language you are using. Atkins-Krüger recommends using unicode or UTF8 for your online character coding. If you start with this standard, there will be no need to backfit or work out other solutions in the future.

With international expansion comes the issue of managing your content across local domains. Sometimes your company will be able to do this from one main location, but in that case, your resources will need to be shared from site to site. The key to success according to Atkins-Krüger is that “You also want to be able to manage the internal linking of the sites from that single interface and to manage the geo-selection tool which links one domain to all others on one single URL linked to from all pages.”

Of the three topics related to international CMS that we are talking about today, translation and SEO workflow can be the most difficult to navigate. In some cases, your company may need to rethink your online organizational strategy when going into different markets. “The best way to do this is to link it to a keyword map of all pages, so you know what needs to be targeted where and to link those keywords to glossaries to be used by the translators that support your SEO initiatives.” according to Atkins-Krüger’s article. It’s most important to note though that making web pages accessible for clients in other languages does not start and end with translation. Content may need to be different for a new market and your keywords may need to be refined, which can result in a slightly different SEO strategy.

International expansion can be a big project for your company, but if you incorporate some of these ideas into your original content management system, your company can come out ahead of the game when the time comes.

It’s true that when most of us search for something online, be it through Google, Yahoo or Bing, we’ll investigate the top few search results, start our search over again with new keywords, and abandon it from there. Since becoming involved in SEO, I admit I have become the rare person who will look onto page two or three if it is something I am interested in and the search results of the first page don’t satisfy me. And I am persistent, so I will try different keywords repeatedly. However, I am the minority.
The race for top internet rankings is a fierce one, and one that garners a lot of attention in SEO circles. Many different theories have been tested. Some of them get short term results, which may last or not. Some get long term results. Still others get no discernable results. With that in mind, might I suggest going back to the tried and true with organic search. If it works (and it does), then perhaps it is wise to use the simplest and most reliable methods to ensure your company is on the top of your client’s search results.

An article by the title of “Organic Search Still Reigns” confirms the importance of organic search. The article compares the results of Google, Yahoo and Bing and discovers that organic search results still get the top rankings “across the big three search engines, with at least 95% of traffic from each originating from the first page of results after a nonbranded search”. With numbers like these, it is no wonder that organic search and search optimization efforts remain on the top of the lists of recommendations from online marketing experts.

Instead of spending time, money, and effort on complex marketing strategies or paid advertisements, it is much more cost effective to go back to simple search engine optimization tactics. And this common sense tactic is being used by professional marketers who “recognize the importance of investment in search optimization so they will appear in those results and benefit from the huge portion of clicks that go to the top hits. The Society of Digital Agencies (SoDA) found that search optimization was the third priority of senior marketers worldwide, after social networking and improving digital infrastructure.”

In spite of my own extensive browsing of search engine results, the numbers clearly show that your clients are most likely to not go beyond that first page, so this is a case where instead of marching to your own drummer your seo company should follow current online marketing trends. It’s hard to argue with the solid results achieved by organic search.

Every so often while I am reading SEO news, I find something that tickles my funny bone. This morning, it was an article about Bill Gates’ blog and the SEO tactics that are either missing or need improvement on his site. I love this kind of tongue-in-cheek commentary, but better still, Danny Sullivan, author of “Some SEO Advice for Bill Gates” brings some good tips to light by using Gates’ site as an example. Although Sullivan digs much deeper, today I’d like to highlight two aspects of web page design that can increase your search ratings if they are improved: titles and meta-description tags.

Like many blogs and web pages, Bill Gates’s blog does not come out on the top of the heap when searched through Google. Shockingly, Bing doesn’t even rank this site in the top 10. Sullivan points out that although it is in the top 10 on Google, there are parody blogs ahead of him in the rankings.

Here are some of the main points I’d like to bring to your attention about titles:

1. Include the most obvious title for your page in the title text. In Gates’ case the sites that outranked him in Sullivan’s search did so because they had titles that said “Bill Gates Blog”. You might think that this phrase is too obvious to put in the title text, but it will drive up the site’s rankings. Sometimes it is about the obvious.

2. Each page on your website should have its own title, as this will provide another opportunity to be found by search engines. A little research on keywords can go a long way to increasing your site’s ranking if you include the top keywords used to get to your site in your title text.

3. Think of your website’s title as another opportunity to brand yourself and your business, but remember to combine branding with the top known keywords for maximum results.

4. Adding the word “official” to a website or blog can help rankings in certain situations. In the case of the Bill Gates site, it could make his blog stand out in the crowd of search results if he includes “official” in his title.

Sullivan’s information on meta description tags is also valuable. He points out that if you do not fill in your own information for your website, then “what shows is likely to change depending on the exact search someone does that brings up your home page. Usually, Google and Bing will try to automatically form a description based on what someone enters.” Meta description tags – which are done by – are another way for you to brand your own site and speak for your site, business, or person.

These are small things that can increase your site’s visibility, but small things do add up in SEO. If Bill Gates doesn’t have a handle on them, then there is a chance that your own website could do with a little tweaking too.

Late last week women on Facebook began posting their bra colours. The aim of the game was supposedly to raise awareness for breast cancer. And, indeed, the creator of the Facebook group called What’s Your Bra Color??? promised to donate $500 to Susan G. Komen’s foundation for the Cure if that group had more than 1,000 members by this past Monday. The casual campaign to post bra colours has garnered media attention and netted the What’s Your Bra Color??? Facebook group 4,500 members.

Some critics claim that the meme is only a pointless flirtation device, aimed at teasing men. Others claim that we are all already aware of breast cancer. While still others, including Susan G. Komen, praise the action, saying anything that gets people talking about and thinking about breast cancer is a boon. And it did get attention! The fact that the colours have vanished from Facebook statuses, but there is still talk about whether it worked or not is proof that it got people talking.

Regardless of your stance on this particular rash of Facebook posts, the deeper awareness for SEO and internet marketing gurus is a reminder of the deep reach that social media now employs in our society. If a post about bra colour has received this kind of attention, both on Facebook and from the media at large, it is worth talking about social media as a tool for attention for your business.

We’ve talked about the importance of social media within your marketing campaign before, but it bears repeating with this kind of example of its potential impact at our feet.

One big aspect of social media is that it is a new spin on the old adage about word-of-mouth being the best sales tool out there. Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter are the electronic versions of word-of-mouth. Although there is some time and energy taken in setting up and maintaining accounts, when your business takes off in these electronic spaces the word-of-mouth rule begins to apply. The bra colour campaign is a perfect example of how well a focused, fun idea can capture the attention of a social media group, sell that idea, then result in action. It’s a perfect business marketing model. The next time a business tells me that they are hesitant to employ social media in their marketing plans, I am definitely going to use this example to show them that social media can get people talking about your business and products.

Now, I have to go and find an old picture to post, pick up the closest book and pick a sentence to post in my status, and make sure my settings are set properly. Social media really is all what you make of it!

As someone with a vested interest in SEO tactics, I’m always interested in what the official word is from the biggest players on the scene. Namely, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo. Every so often their officials put information out there that especially catches my attention.

I like the way linking works. It fascinates me that linking can help to build your ranking on Google. As much as I try to wrap my brain around it, there is always another caveat and always something new to learn about this technique. It’s a little like editing the English language: just when you think you have all of the exceptions and rules figured out, something else crops up to dig into and to consider. Basically, I like it because I learn something new all the time and there is always a curve ball somewhere. Not everyone finds these sorts of things entertaining, but suffice it to say that those of us who do are incredibly entertained by Google and linking.

Here is Matt Cutts from Google, answering the question: “Links from relevant and important sites have always been a great way to get traffic & acceptance for a website. How do you rate links from new platforms like Twitter, FB to a website?”

Chris Crum covers this video in his article “How Google Rates Links from Facebook and Twitter”, and he and Matt both basically tell us that Facebook and Twitter links are ranked the same way as every other link out there. Matt Cutts goes so far as to pointedly say that Google’s search criteria does not discriminate based on platform. A link is a link is a link in the world of Google searches.

This claim does have a bit of a caveat to it (it’s those exceptions that tickle me so much) in that Facebook pages can have private settings. When a Facebook page is not public, Google cannot crawl it or rank it. And most links on Twitter are nofollowed anyway, which changes their interaction with Google.

So, if you thought that a .ed or a .gov website would carry more weight in the rankings, you’ve now been reassured straight our of the mouths of Goggle that their search techniques just don’t work that way.

Now that the presents are opened and the left-over turkey is being made into sandwiches, we’re all slowly moving on to preparations for the New Year. Although resolutions are sometimes done alone, they can be done on a bigger level. In our family, we often take time to talk about what we would like to do and see in the coming year as a family.

It makes sense to think about making resolutions – a pretty fancy word for plans – for your business too. If your business is a small one, a breakfast meeting with some brainstorming and then making a few concrete plans may do the job. Bigger businesses will require input from different groups across the company and several meetings, but the end result of these resolution meetings is the same: brainstorming and planning. Regardless of the size of your company and scope of your SEO resolution project, the beginning of a new year provides an opportunity to figure out what worked in the past, what needs improvement, and what new projects ought to be tackled now.

Duane Forrester focused on resolutions in his article “6 New Years Resolutions for In-House SEMs”. He suggests starting with these steps:

- Hold an internal SEO summit: from a small breakfast meeting to a catered day or two with several speakers, this is the opportunity to talk about different aspects of your online strategy, uncovering the positive and negative attempts of the past year, and proposing projects for the new year. You never know where the best suggestions will come from, so keep an open mind when issuing invitations to this meeting.
- Get Robots.txt and Sitemap.xml docs in place: your business wants to let engine crawlers know how to interact with your site and how to access your freshest content, which is what robots.txt and sitemap.xml docs do. If your company has these documents on your website, be sure to update them. If they are not on your website, now is the time to get them up.
- Open and use Webmaster accounts: Bing, Yahoo, and Google offer contact with their search engines through dedicated Webmaster accounts. As Forrester explains, ”These accounts provide a wide range of services from alerting the engines to updates on your site to feedback directly from the engines themselves around how they are interacting with your website.”
- Establish the ROI on SEO investment: determining your ROI (return on investment) for your SEO strategy is not a straight calculation. Figure out what has been done, what increases your business has see through your web presence, and go from there.
- Integrate SEO and Social Media efforts: link building is a complex effort, which is propelled forward with your social media endeavors, so don’t leave social media out of your resolutions.
- Schedule and hold a senior executive-level SEO review: be sure to get your company executives on board, as they will help you move your SEO strategy across different levels of the company effectively.