Recently renamed the Search and Social Marketing department, our SEO team had more to celebrate this past weekend than just the Superbowl.  Everyone at Fresh Tilled Soil was delighted upon learning Friday that our long time process engineering and design build firm client, SPEC, closed a new deal worth $15,000,000. High spirits around our Waltham office increased further when SPEC informed us that the initial lead landed on their doorstep as a result of our organic search engine optimization services. The term which lead their new client to SPEC’s website was “boston process engineering” and after looking at the following screenshot you’ll see why the introduction was no accident.

In addition to the top organic listing seen just below the Google Maps image, Fresh Tilled Soil’s Search and Social Marketing department also spent time getting Spec’s website to the top of the local search listings. The ensuing dual-coverage on Google’s SERP (search engine results page) made Spec’s corporate website impossible to miss, and a very profitable new business relationship has been the exciting eventuality.

Selling goods and services online is a multi-step process, with each facet dependant on the others all the way down the line. To dust off a tired marketing analogy, there’s no point in leading a horse to water if it isn’t going to take a big gulp once it gets there. It’s as true today as the moment a hundred years ago when it was likely coined – and is frequently repeated within our Waltham walls in one form or another. Everyone at our company is thrilled about Spec’s recent accomplishment, and it’s a perfect example of the way in which we strive to “partner” with our clients. To never abandon, but rather work with them from start to finish. Beginning with the earliest discovery phases and carrying right on through to a website’s final conversion analysis. We did this with Spec – and now it’s your company’s turn.

How is Twitter becoming more and more relevant to SEO and internet marketing strategies today?

Let’s talk business strategy for a minute…

First off, and most obviously, there has been an overwhelming public interest and participation in online social media networks in the past few years (Twitter, in particular;) microblogging is arguably the newest phenomenon in high tech communication.   Commercial industries must and will cater their marketing strategies accordingly.  Every notable business today has a Twitter account you can follow, right?

Proof’s in the Pudding

Google has altered its indexing algorithms based on real time conversations as a result of Twitter’s growing influence on consumer opinion and product branding.   Since the public has a voice through these social media venues, marketing is becoming more and more tailored according to consumer wants, likes, and dislikes.  Google, too, has noted this gradual shift, and developed its real time and personalized search features as a means of specifying search results.  Services like Yelp, that allow users to give their personal input on a product or service, centrally locate businesses in online search results; public preference plays a key role in how Google optimizes site rank.

Google’s recently released caffeine update will further increase the value of link sharing and traffic building through social media venues like Twitter and Facebook.  Google Caffeine speeds up the search engine indexing process, allowing pages to be indexed more quickly; the caffeine update has essentially made “real time” search results possible.

Real time search results index live Twitter feeds at the top of Google search engine results pages.  Twitter makes “real time” link building possible—this is a quick and easy way to get a site ranked on the first page of Google.

Finally, expert predictions regarding what will be the most effective SEO strategies in the upcoming year all point to the incorporation of social media as a key.  Getting genuine incoming links from quality, relevant sites will get you the most “bang for your buck” in terms of link juice and effective search engine optimization; link building on blogs is becoming less and less worthwhile and effective because so many comment forums now have “nofollow” tags on guest post hyperlinks.

Love it or hate it, it looks like you might want to start embracing Twitter– if only for the sake of your business.

The useful-ness of Twitter has been a much debated, controversial subject.

Twitter is most common criticized for being a waste of time.  I won’t deny it–there’s definitely some legitimacy to this statement.  Without a set agenda, Twitter probably won’t be a very good use of your time. However, the secret to using Twitter as a very useful business tool is to develop and stick to an agenda.  Decide what you want to achieve, and develop a game plan of how to do it.  Stick to your purpose, and Twitter will prove to be a crucial resource for the success of your business.

There are a lot of very that are tweeting about relevant, useful content every day.  This microblogging site allows users with similar interests to connect with one another.

I discovered an flock of interesting, knowledgeable, and yes, even influential, people in the internet marketing industry via Twitter; this microblogging site connects individuals with similar interests and puts them in direct contact with one another. What better news source is there than the real time conversations of industry professionals, especially in a society where business fundamentals increasingly cater to public opinion? Twitter is an amazing resource for staying tuned-in to the most current public dialogue around the world, even pertaining to niche industries.

For me, Twitter became a tool that helped me build links and traffic to our website—key aspects of search engine optimization.  I opened lines of communication, became a guest blogger on other’s sites, and contributed my own interesting and informative tweets.  Making business contacts, earning viral attention, building your brand, receiving consumer feedback, and accessing cutting edge industry information are all inherent values of Twitter, if used correctly.

If you haven’t heard, it’s official—Bing and Yahoo, two major players in the search engine world, recently merged to form one company. The marriage between these two internet bigwigs has lead inquisitive minds to wonder, from internet users, to business owners, to SEO’s: What kind of changes will result from this corporate integration?

Here are the cold, hard facts—

Press releases have issued an official statement that confirms Yahoo will control Bing’s MSN Ad center for paid links, while Bing will reign over Yahoo’s organic search results listings.

But our burning questions persist:

Will Bing and Yahoo’s collaboration create one super-powered search engine that can compete with King Google? Will it change how we (the users) search?  How much will it shake up existing organic business rankings?  How will the Bing/Yahoo partnership affect SEO practices?

Unfortunately there aren’t any definite answers to these questions; but there are certain elements to keep an eye on in 2010 that will likely reveal crucial clues about the changes taking place in the realm of search engine marketing:

Look out for:

Search engine algorithm changes—

These are the contributing factors that affect search engine results.  For example, it’s been hypothesized that the birth of Google Caffeine will alter the criteria for organic rankings.

Blended searches—

We’ve recently seen that Google search results have become much more blended, incorporating different types of categories into results pages; multimedia, real time news, and social networking content is now being indexed with written content.  It’s likely that Bing/Yahoo will follow suit due to the publics’ increasingly influential role on marketing and product branding (thanks to the popularity of interactive online media.)

Content Format—

The old rules still apply for SEO-related content in 2010– relevant, high quality writing is always of utmost importance.  Content structure will likely be of special import in 2010, however, since there is a much higher volume of content being indexed on the whole (thanks to blended search results.)  Make content index-friendly by maintaining an organized and hierarchical structure with pointed keywords. This will let search engine spiders more quickly and easily index your site content.

Where visitors come from–

It’s more important than ever to gather information about where your site visitors are coming from since there are so many available SEO leveraging resources. Collecting and analyzing information about where visitors come from will allow you to pinpoint your target audience and effectively concentrate your SEO efforts, identifying the most valuable strategies for your particular business.

Stay tuned for more updates and exciting revelations in 2010…

Ever wondered out loud why it’s so fanatically difficult to facilitate a link from Wikipedia to one of your websites? Were you simultaneously embarrassed because someone caught you talking to yourself at a red light? We feel for you deeply and there are indeed simple ways to make this task easier. Read on for some suggestions which have given our team a serious leg up when it comes to traversing this frustrating hurdle of search marketing.

Even with the variety of <NoFollow> tags now in place, a link from a prominent Wiki article can be the Holy Grail of both relevant referral traffic and algorithmic relevancy bequeathment for your most valuable keywords. Not to mention, there’s a lot of debate within the SEO community as to whether the tags truly negate link juice benefits as was previously thought. You’ll want to rethink spending the first month of a new client engagement obsessing over PR sculpting from now on. Will you choose… wisely?

Wrapping up my incredibly amusing preface, I’d like to start off with a quiz meant to hammer home a crucial point. Please bear with me…

Question: If you haven’t put in your time and developed a reputable profile on Wikipedia, adding links to your site from one of their articles is about as useful as:

a) Teats on a bull.
b) A screen door on a submarine.
c) A cheese sandwich to a drowning ferret
d) A chocolate kettle
e) Shut up and get on with the article, Dave

If you answered “e” – then I already don’t like you. Regardless, I’ve still made my case. It’s darn near impossible to get a new Wiki link to stick if your profile makes you look like an SEO, social media marketer, blogger or anyone with something to promote. Sure, you may get lucky. An established Wiki denizen may see your resource in passing and add it to an article “naturally”. Likewise, you may catch the first individual to review your change on the same day his wife gives birth to healthy twins. Realistically though, in both cases you’ve got a better chance of seeing a three-legged cat bury a turd on a frozen pond.

Wiki is Picky – Build Trust
Why so cynical? Simple – there are oceans of Wikipedia power users who like nothing better, not even World of Warcraft LARPing, than to delete the “contributions” of self-serving online marketers (regardless of what you might want to call yourself). That’s what you are to them and they hate you with every fibre of their being. It’s easy to increase your odds of successful link dropping resource inclusion on Wikipedia by making contributions over an extended period of time which improve the quality of their articles. Your level of trust then increases exponentially with every objective edit that you make within their kingdom. This isn’t hard to do once you’ve figured out the basics, nor does it take a lot of time. Consistency is the crucial ingredient, and here are a few tips to help maintain your momentum.

1. Every time you edit something in your own interest, work on at least one other article for no reason other than improving the resource.
2. After you make your calculated edit, hit the Random Article link in the navigation sidebar if you’re feeling low on inspiration.
3. Contribute to subjects you enjoy and are knowledgeable about. Books, authors, movies, directors, cars, countries, pets, houseplants – there’s an article for absolutely everything!
4. Link to well established sources of information you see sticking on other articles – news sites, reputable blogs, guides, manuals, etc. Keep a list of these for future reference.

One more time for the cheap seats: Any individual or agency devoting eons of time to creating free, objective, Wiki-friendly resources must also devote time contributing to the general Wikipedia community. Set a reminder, form a habit, pick subject matter which genuinely interests you – but stick with it. In a few months the suspicion with which new or rarely-used Wikipedia profiles are regarded will have turned to trust – vastly increasing the likelihood your business-related additions will remain intact. You could say that the aforementioned elusive, disabled and incontinent feline might just become one of the most powerful tools in your marketing arsenal. However… I’m pretty sure you won’t.

If you’ve seen the movie Terminator, than the slight mention of “Skynet” might leave you shaking in your pants. Well the day has come and Google has become self-aware!… Well I’m only kidding, partially.

If you are like the majority of us you have probably come in contact with Google at some point in your life. I use Google on a daily basis, not only to search for anything and everything I may be interested in, but to perform market and keyword research for our SEO clients. You might have noticed that Google is now incorporating a new element within the search bar that “pre-determines” topics you might be searching for.

This isn’t necessarily a “new” element/feature in Google, because I have seen this for some time, but it’s definitely funny to review some of the crazy results I have found. Take a gander…

Often times I perform manual ranking analysis for our SEO clients. This typically involves me sitting at my computer and manually typing in a variety of keywords; searching for a websites current position based on these keywords. As I’m sure you are aware this can take some time. I do this because the keyword reports we receive can sometimes be misleading or not necessarily accurate.

Today however, I found a new tool that I’m sure is going to make my life a lot simpler. It allows you to see and compare current position rankings among Google, Yahoo, Bing, Twitter and Ebay. If you go to search3 [dot] com. You will be able to use this great tool. I really do enjoy it and it’s going to save me a lot of time when it comes to manual keyword search/position rankings research.

I’ve attached a screen-shot below, just to give you all a little sneak peak at this new tool. Hopefully some of you will find it useful as well.

We often get a lot of questions from clients referring to title, description and keyword tags and what the “best” practice is when creating such tags. The rules are fairly simple, but the process is not.

I always recommend a title tag that incorporates relevant keywords, phrases and a description of the company or page you are creating the title tag for. Title tags have a limit of about 60 characters. When it comes to the description tag, again you want to outline and give a “description” of the page you are outlining, using keyword rich content, with a limit of about 160 characters.

The rules are straight forward and simple, but actually developing title and description tags that are effective in terms of SEO can be another story. Often times I have to do a lot of homework involving keyword research to determine keyword search volume, the type of keywords the client wants to rank for and tags that are clearly positioned which outline the content found on the specific page they are being optimized for.

Time and time again after creating title and description tags clients do ask, “why didn’t you optimize or create keyword tags?” and I continue to answer, “because keyword tags are no longer relevant and don’t help with your ranking potential.” Still don’t believe me… take it from Matt Cutts: a Google Software Engineer.

I’ve been reading a lot of juicy articles over the past couple of weeks pertaining to Google’s futuristic ability to display “real-time” search results AND today I’ve finally seen this mighty-magical process in action.

Let’s start from the beginning… every now and again in an enchanted little place called, “my desk” I like to check to see that my Twitter profile is ranking correctly. Today I typed my Twitter username into the Google search bar and was pleasantly surprised to see “real-time” search results stemming from my Twitter username (review my lovely screen shot below). I was filled with joy… yes, joy over real-time search results!

Then I began to think of all the ways we can harness this power to help increase our clients organic search results. I’m sure over time, more and more Google searches will incorporate this feature into the functional elements of Google’s search. But one questioned really stood out to me. Why do some search results display real-time search and others don’t? It’s really all about social presence or the amount of “social content” related to the keyword iteration you type into Google and how frequently you update that content. If there are a lot of Tweets and other social elements that relate to a particular keyword then the ability to view “real-time” search is probably more likely.

Again, this is completely new to me but I cannot wait to see what direction this takes us in search. It’s a great time to build-up your online social marketing skills, because there definitely seems to be a new direction of search on the horizon.

Some individuals may think of SEO as spam and I’m not talking about the Spam you find in a can. Although in this situation I would rather eat spam in a can than be called an online spammer. However this is simply not the case… unless of course you hire a black-hat SEO. By definition online spam encompasses individuals who find shortcuts that “trick” the search engines into ranking webpages higher than the competition, without necessarily following best practices. In the short run this may be a successful strategy, but over time will not sustain the test of time. Make sure if you are hiring an SEO firm, they are not taking shortcuts when it comes to your SEO or practicing black-hat SEO tactics that will have negative implications on your website. If SEO is considered spam than any message offered by any organization to their customers or the general population should be considered spam.

Onsite SEO:
If you are starting an SEO effort always look for changes you can make onsite. Setting up your website internally is the first and most beneficial thing you can do. Think of it like this: If you were building a home would you start building your new home on a cracked or unsteady foundation? probably not. Any successful SEO strategy starts at the foundation or on-site and builds upon the successful block that have been created. This means creating an optimized URL structure, title/description tags, internal links, setting up 301 redirects, RSS feeds and blogs.

Offsite SEO:
Once your onsite SEO efforts are fixed and complete it’s time to work on offsite SEO. This means building external links and content to your site. Today offsite SEO strategies are not about spamming the end users, but providing offsite content that offers dynamic and relevant content to these individuals. This can be done through article submissions, social bookmarking, comment link building and a variety of other online mediums.

Making certain that you are following the best practices of SEO will ensure that you are not spamming your audience with irrelevant or useless content. Although to some extent SEO is a numbers game, it’s also about a content game. Creating relevant and quality content links to your site will maintain their sustainability and popularity over time.