The social space does pose a problem for Google if they are going to try and bake it into their algorithm. People use ‘Tiny Urls’ for the most part, so they will need to start crawling these links. This issue could explode as SEO’s will manipulate this to their own benefit by spamming the social sites,  which already have a huge issue on their hands. Also, many people wont link to sites with the proper “Anchor Text”. Google would need to read the conversation and decide how to decipher relevancy from it.

Any thoughts on how they can accomplish this? Email me. Any good ones will be posted on this blog with a nice little inbound link to your site.

There are going to be changes in the industry, here is what I think will happen over the course of the next 2 years as Search Engines start adopting Web 3.0.

Things that won’t happen:

1. Social Media sites like Facebook and Twitter have a very long way to go when it comes to taking over Google, Yahoo and Bing. They serve different purposes and it will remain this way for some time. And even if something nuts were to happen and I am wrong in this statement, just like Search Engines in the past, these sites will also have exploits that a good “optimization company” can take advantage of. It is possible that these sites take some market share, however, it will probably be at a similar rate of traffic that Search Engines are still gaining by way of new users and a more savvy audience goes online and uses search engines. For the most part, this change will be unnoticed to everyday businesses looking to market in search engines.

2. Search engines going to paid only - I have been hearing this one for 13 years now and it simply cannot happen. Many search engines have tried it, all have failed. Search engines are mainly used as research points, not a place to buy stuff. Research can lead into buying, but 70% of search engines traffic is not worth the cost per click that a search engines would charge to a company. So they would not have enough paid results to satisfy their audience. A research-visitor is often not far enough down a buying funnel to make it worth a business’ money to pay for that visitor. Search engines need up-to-date free content from websites to keep their users happy.

3. Nothing left on the home page to be optimized - Sure, the landscape is changing, especially the primary search results page. Real Time, Shopping results, maps and news are starting to suck up valuable real estate. Bt guess what, those pieces too are optimizable, it is all about keeping up with those trends to be successful.

Things that will change:

1. How SEO is done will change - I believe that over the next 2 years, SEO will change more than the last 10. Links and Content have ruled over the last 6 years. The next natural progression in my eyes is that links will take a back seat to content, and content, depending on a “syndication score” will rule. Meaning, the more places that content or concept shows up in the news, social sites and blogs, the more value it has.

2. On page optimization factors will slowly go away - Search engines wont care about terms like meta tags, code bloat and SEO friendly URLs. Their indexing and spidering capabilities on the content itself will be strong enough to bypass these factors.

3. How many things one will have to optimize - A good Search Engine Optimization program will be forced focus on many different factors, including News, Real Time, Shopping, Local and image/video search. These sources will equally occupy the home page and force a diversity in focus.

4. SEO companies will stop selling rankings - Results are no longer static. What is ranked today wont be ranked tomorrow (or an hour from now). Campaigns will need be sold as an ROI-driven model or traffic strategy. Ranking reports will be near useless. I can see this pose the biggest issue for SEO companies to learn how to set ROI-driven expectation and not rankings.

5. Mobile and Local marketing will be something that companies will be forced to adopt as geo-location software is getting better and better. Instead of someone doing a search from a computer for a coffee shop, they are going to use their phone or GPS system. Small, geo-specific businesses will undergo a radical change equal or greater to the recent changes with yellow page books. I actually feel sorry for the local small business owner. They are in the most dynamic of spaces online that they will learn. Problem is that most have been unable to adopt the changes from yellow pages to online, not sure they are prepared for the next phase.

Search Engine Marketing as a business will change, but it is not going away anytime soon. Naysayers beware when we sit down in 5 years and compare blog posts.

Google and Bing are doing an exceptional job of finding fresh or “real-time” results. This means that you need to keep your site as up-to-date as possible by adding fresh content. Here are some tips that I use to make sure my websites are staying nice and fresh:

1. Wake up and read one piece of information on your industry each morning. Then, go to Twitter and comment on this article. Make sure Twitter and your Blog are in sync, and then take it once step further, sync Twitter and Facebook. You can do this in Facebook. Just type in “Twitter” in the application section.

2. Each week, come up with your own article. This does not need to be a life-changing, industry-changing piece of information. Give your insight on something within your industry. Write 150-200 words and post in on your blog. Don’t have a blog? Get one. It costs about $200 to get a professional to install one on your website. I can refer you to a bunch of people that can do this, just ask!

3. For all of my ecommerce websites, I have someone “review” one product a week and put it on the bottom of the product page. This will not only help your search engine rankings, but it is certain to help your conversion when someone lands on that page. Just make sure your review is favorable!

4. Incentvize clients, subscribers, etc. to come to your website and leave a comment or testimonial. Offer them a link (just make sure the site you are linking to is authoritative) Offer discounts, free stuff, whatever you need. Content is king and is the only thing that matters!

5. Digg, Post to Facebook and Bookmark every time you write content. If you have Wordpress, you can automate this. If not, do it manually. If you have questions on how to do this, email me.

Twitter and Facebook rarely show ROI in your analytics software, but it does not mean that it is not happening. We see the typical Social Media Campaign going down like this:

1. Internet Users sees your ad, sponsored post or finds you in the world of social media through a friends influence for a new set of running shoes. You see the suggestion and bypass it as you were probably not in the state of mind or situation to need the product or service that you saw.
2. Days later, you are at the gym and realize there is a hole in your shoes, and think to yourself that you need to get a new pair of shoes.
3. That night, you log back into your Facebook account and try and find the obscure reference that your friend was speaking about. Turns out it was the new Nike WRX cross trainers that he was ranting about.
4. You go to Google and search for Nike WRX Cross Trainer. You find several references for it.
5. You decide which website you are going to buy from and make the purchase.
6. Web Analytics Software shows the sale comes from Google, the SEO team jumps for joy, leaving the Social Media heroes with poor ROI and fighting to keep their job.

There are other ways that Social Media will play in a sale. In the above instance, someone may have seen a TV spot for the new Nike WRX Cross Trainer endorsed by Tiger Woods and decide to go online and look for it. 9 out of 10 times a person will start this in a Search Engine. They go to Google, type in “New Nike Cross Trainer” and results appear. They go through different User Generated review sites, Facebook conversations, Twitter, you name it, and finally they realize that this is the shoe for them. In this case, once again, the SEO department is going to take credit for this sale, which obviously should be going to the TV spot and online conversations about the product. The search engine had little to do in influencing the buyers decision and had it not been because of the TV and Social Media spots, the sale would have not happened.

In the current environment, unless you are a huge brand with huge budgets, it would be hard to narrow in on where your sale truly originates from.  You need to penetrate the social sector at some level, make sure you don’t make a knee-jerk reaction and base 100% of your decision on your Analytics Software. Social Media is a slow and steady campaign. One that is necessary for any well-rounded online marketing campaign.

Here is more: http://searchengineland.com/google-releases-page-speed-report-in-webmaster-tools-31036

Getting first page rankings is not a guarantee that you will be successful. However, not having rankings is a pretty good sign that you won’t be sticking around for very long. I see this over and over again and the data is damning.

You would be surprised how many clients we run into with million dollar year marketing budgets but that won’t spend $3,000 a month on a solid SEO campaign. It is an absolute tragedy. How can you spend $25,000+ a month on paid search, when you have no control over how much you are going to be paying next year per click and spend nothing on SEO? In most cases, if you look at an SEO campaign and PPC campaign side by side after 1 year, the SEO campaign is producing as much if not more traffic than the PPC campaign at 1/10th or 1/100th the cost. This is not an exaggeration!

A lot of people are immediate gratification “ranking” oriented and lose sight of what SEO is all about. Here are the benefits of SEO, some of them you may not have known.

1. Free Traffic - that’s right, it’s free. This is one of the big questions I get from people all of the time. “Why would Google give you free traffic? They will need to dump that model eventually.” I have been hearing that statement for 13 years now and it is still free traffic. What you forget to realize is that a search engine is USELESS without the content that your site gives them for free. Search engines need your free content to satisfy visitors to use their search engines so they can monetize them in other ways…..So that content will always be there, and the traffic to your site will always be free!

2. Reputation Control - if someone types in your company name, product name or personal name, Google will find 10 results to put on the first page whether you like those results or not. An effective SEO campaign involves social media, articles, press releases, etc. and in most cases these will take up real estate on the first few pages, thus giving you control of how people see you online.

3. Offline support - whether you have a large outbound sales team that are educating clients on your product or service or you are one of the few companies spending 4 million this year for a Super Bowl ad, when these people are done listening to your message, they will most likely start searching online. You better be in the search engines for phrases they might type in to learn more about you. If you are not, and your competition is, they will get the sale you spent so much money trying to get.

4. Because your competition will - Starting an online business is easy, quick and cheap and most likely your product is not that unique. Sure, your purple widget may have platinum hinges, but guess what, your audience doesn’t know and they don’t care. They just want a purple widget for God sakes. So that is what they are going to type in when they start their search. Who is going to be there, you or your competitor?

5. Because people want to find you – that’s right, people want to find you. Google has billions of pages to crawl and unless you stand out, you won’t be found. If you have a good product or service, people want to find you. So why don’t you help them along the way?

You must do SEO or your company is not reaching its full potential. SEO is not the only thing that will make you successful, but it is a foundation, a piece that you cannot ignore. Spend at least 10% of your marketing budget on SEO and your chances of success will increase significantly.

In many ways, what they have done is good, as it puts the competition on its toes. But I am starting to lose sleep (and I am sure many other are) in the fact that they could turn a switch and be the only business, in business, for many industries. How, you ask?

80% of people find business, ideas, movies, restaurants, plumbers, through the search engines. Google owns almost 70% of the search space. So in essence, they control which sites people go to 55% of the time. They decide where people will go, what companies they will do business with. That is some really crazy power.

What if Google decided that CitySearch was too close of a competitor to Google Local? If they removed them from their index, Citysearch would be impacted to the point that the probably wouldn’t be around in 2 years. Citysearch is not, and never will be a destination website, they are only used when someone needs to find something in a particular city. I would venture to guess that a lions share of their traffic comes from the organic and sponsored results from Google. If Google removed them, Citysearch dies.

Google could do this same thing to many huge online companies. Wikipedia, gone without Google. Local.com, gone without Google. Lending Tree, gone (or at least severely impacted) without Google. I could create a list of thousands of companies, big ones, that would die if Google decided so.

What about retail? I don’t know how you can quantify it in terms of actual dollars, but Google decides where billions of dollars are spent online. With the exception of Amazon and some big offline brands, Google, for the most part, dictates where someone is going to make a purchase. If they decided to form a true competitor to Amazon, they could and within a year in business would probably have the same revenues as Amazon.

This is a monopoly. Quite possibly the biggest monopoly the world has ever seen. A monopoly way beyond a search engine. It is a monopoly on business in general. The government must see it, investors must see it. Google could very easily be a threat to business more than it is an asset.

What would your business do if Google simply did not let you or your competitors compete? I get sick just thinking about that.

I am going to break this post up into two sections, hiring the SEO company or the SEO employee:

Hiring an SEO company:
There is nothing consistent about SEO companies. You can put up 5 good SEO companies against one another and they will deliver you 5 distinctly different contracts, 5 different prices, 5 different payment terms and a host of different guarantee’s and promises. How on earth do you judge one company vs. the others when you are dealing with apples-to-oranges-bananas-grapefruit comparisons?

Issue 1: Don’t compare on price. This is one of the biggest problems I have consistently seen. Sure, if the contract is outside what you can afford, get rid of it. I will tell you that just because one contract is $5000 and the other is $1000, ‘ mean that the $5000 is better. On the flip side, don’t go with a company because they appear to offer the same service as a more expensive competitor. You don’t want to go on the cheap when it comes to SEO. You are not buying a car here. You are buying a service, one that comes with a very unknown expertise that you hope works. A good SEO firm will break down, with absolute transparency what they will be doing for your company. If they are unwilling to do this, stay clear of working with them.

Issue 2: Verify Results: Many companies claim to have gotten crazy results for a client, but often times they are not verified. There are many ways for a company to verify their results. Speaking to the owner of their said placements is a great start!

Issue 3: Don’t just go off glowing references: Anybody can make this up. One time, a client wanted to hear from 3 companies that we lost because we did a bad job for them. Shocked me but I thought it was genius. Especially in the SEO world, none of us nail it 100% of the time. The best of us (I am willing to admit it) only have success with clients 70-80% of the time, so if they come back to you stating they have no companies they have done a bad job on, stay clear of them to.

Hiring an SEO employee
This can be dicey. Easy for me as I own an SEO company, but hiring one in house to do your sites SEO is a different aspect all together. I typically dont recommend this, but if you are hell-bent on doing this, here are a few tips:

Issue 1: How do you manage this person: If you do hire an SEO employee, figure out how you are going to manage him. Most likely, he will be the only guy in the room that knows SEO, so come up with benchmarks (aside from rankings) to make sure he is doing his job. Tell him to show you links, content, long tail keyword placements, etc. along the way. If you look just at placements, it will take you 6 months to know whether or not he is doing something right.

Issue 2: How to find this person: So, when you get a stack of resumes in, how do you seperate them out? How can you verify what they are saying to be true? Unless you know SEO, it is hard to tell. I would look for a person that has verifiable references, can show 10 websites across a spectrum of verticals that are ranked well. If you are an ecommerce company, I would not hire an SEO that only has experience in the hotel industry as those are two entirely different campaigns. Also, have them write down 10 things he would do to your site out of the gate, see what he comes up with.

Issue 3: Watch out for the entrepreneur-SEO: I am an entrepreneurial SEO and no matter what you paid me, I would be a horrible employee. If an SEO consultant comes to you looking for full time work, and his entire experience is him working on his own, don’t hire him. He will be gone the second one of his sites are doing well enough to pay his bills.

issue 4: Seo Copywriting - I see over and over again companies hiring offshore companies to go on the cheap for SEO copywriting. This is a HUGE mistake for a couple of reasons. 1. the copy does not read well, so you will lose the very visitor you spent time and money getting in. 2. If you develop poor-quality content, Google will eventually find it and either remove it from their index or penalize you. IF you are going to outsource, pay the extra few bucks and do it locally.

This was posted on Danny DeMIchele’s Newsweek profile