Link building has become an often used tactic by search engine marketers and site owners to get their site placing in the prime real estate of the search results.  As you know this does not always mean that the most relevant result is being returned.  With linking, it’s not just about search engine optimization.   A well written piece, whether it be an article blog post, press release, or web page should be able to generate the link authority needs.  The ability to buy links and inflate a site’s link popularity totally depreciates the whole idea of link authority.

So what then happens when link popularity becomes… well less popular?  I am speaking from a search engine algorithm perspective.  What if the engines were to drastically change their algorithm so that link popularity was not as important of a factor as it is today?  Here are some things that I think would happen:

1. Purchasing of links becomes less of an issue - Google is having difficulty in dealing with this widespread issue.  There are still numerous sites out there that have acquired links by buying them to artificially inflate their link inventory and improve their link popularity.  Again this presents an issue for the search engines and for the users of search as this can have a direct impact on the results that are being presented.   Does Google use “human raters” to assess the quality of individual sites in order to counter this effect (of purchasing links)?  Google has recently admitted that “employees” do have the ability to change index rankings.  This is a touchy issue and as Scott Cleland, on his “The Precursor” blog has stated:  “If links are a factor in determining the rank of content, and Google’s advertising revenue is derived from sites’ search rankings, how does Google ensure the human raters of the SDB are not influenced to reward Google-owned content or Google partners’ content that Google revenue shares with?”
2. The search engines would need to place greater weighting on other elements – perhaps freshness of content, on-page elements, engagement with a given page, time spent etc all get a higher weighting and the true value or relevancy of a page comes out.  Google already factor these things in but if they shifted weighting of some of their algorithm components, you can bet that we would see a shift in the pages or elements that make up a search results page.
3. Drastic changes in the SERPs – placing less weight on link popularity would mean that we would most likely experience drastic changes in the search results.  We might even see sites that had been ranking for a given key phrase no longer place as well as they once did.  Again it should all come back to relevancy.
4. Backlash from link-optimized website owners – sites that have enjoyed successful rankings and presence in the search results might all of a sudden lose some of their visibility.  You can image what this could mean in terms of traffic and potentially revenue that is generated by these sites.  There would most likely be a number of lawsuits to try and put pressure on the search engines to return the results to where they once were.
5. Truly authoritative sites would better populate search results – as mentioned, less focus on link buying might allow people to create content that is more engaging and speaks to their audience thereby providing more authority in the results that are returned.  Depending on the nature of the search query, more relevant results could populate the results that did not have their link inventories artificially inflated.
6. Link Brokers go out of business – the folks that sell links for all of the wrong reasons would be left scratching their heads, but you know what, they tend to be pretty smart people and would look for other opportunities.
7. The Web gets cleaned up – think about all of those spammy links that are out there.  Link farms etc etc, there are currently massive amounts of useless linking going on and it has diluted the Web.  Think about how much better it would be to browse the ‘Net without clicking through to sites that simply don’t serve your needs.  Less focus on links would eventually see a lot of these environments phase out.  Thee would simply be less garbage and fewer blogs and sites that are leveraged for the purposes of link building on the Internet.

Will the search engines ever place less value on link popularity?  Well with some of the past algorithm updates in Google, they have already made slight changes which have at times caused a ripple in the search results.   At the end of the day, Google and the other engines want to deliver the most relevant result possible.  I truly believe that.  However it is not an easy thing to do.  Is placing less value on link popularity the answer?  I’m not sure, but I know that it would be an interesting test if anything else.  Again we’re talking about link popularity not link authority.  Although with regards to link authority, this is another reason why some sites have gone the route of purchasing links.

I think that link popularity is a little overrated and that the engines will need to continually tweak their algorithms so that they are delivering the most relevant results to us the user.  With highly frequented environments such as social networks (read:  Facebook, Twitter) we might see a shift from search engine usage to other tools and sites that people will visit to find the information that they are looking for.  The popularity of the Facebooks, Twitters and YouTubes of the world proves that people just might visit their online destination of choice regardless of link popularity or even search engine of preference.

Yesterday, the Google Webmaster Central blog announced that GWT (Google Webmaster Tools) is now reporting on soft 404s or soft 404 errors.  As a reminder, a “soft 404″ occurs when a webserver responds with a 200 OK HTTP response code for a page that doesn’t exist, rather than the appropriate 404 Not Found.  According to Google,

Soft 404s can limit a site’s crawl coverage by search engines because these duplicate URLs may be crawled instead of pages with unique content.

The web is infinite, but the time search engines spend crawling your site is limited. Properly reporting non-existent pages with a 404 or 410 response code can improve the crawl coverage of your site’s best content.

Soft 404 errors are not only a bad idea for the search engines, but they can confuse your site visitors as well.  Returning a 404 response code for a non-existent URL is ideal as opposed to websites that serve “soft 404s”, returning a 200 response code.  It’s much better to return a 404 response code and clearly explain to users that the file wasn’t found.  Google illustrates this very clearly with this post.

How to Fix Soft 404 Errors

1. Check whether you have soft 404s listed in Webmaster Tools
2. For the soft 404s, determine whether the URL:
   1. Contains the correct content and properly returns a 200 response (not actually a soft 404)
   2. Should 301 redirect to a more accurate URL
   3. Doesn’t exist and should return a 404 or 410 response
3. Confirm that you’ve configured the proper HTTP Response by using Fetch as Googlebot in Webmaster Tools
4. If you now return 404s, you may want to customize your 404 page to aid your users. Our custom 404 widget can help.

Some of the questions that we will be exploring include:

1. What technologies exist that will facilitate more collaboration between marketing and sales?
2. Should social media be part of your demand generation strategies?
3.  What role does search marketing play in improving both the quality and quantity of your leads?
4.  How will demand generation look different in 2015?

Join us for a conversation with Mac McIntosh (from The Business-to-Business Sales Lead ExpertsTM) and Gord Hotchkiss (author of The BuyerSphere Project) to discuss these and other existing realities that face B2B Marketers.

This webinar is recommended for VP’s, Directors and Managers in Sales and/or Marketing roles.

Register here: http://pages.enquiro.com/webinar24-managing-b2b-sales-leads.html

Just a reminder that Enquiro is pleased to be presenting the latest webinar in our B2B Expert Series: Managing B2B Leads for Sales Success.  This time out, we’ve invited one of America’s leading experts on B2B lead generation, Mac McIntosh to speak to our audience.  Mac is considered to be one of America’s leading experts on B2B lead generation. President and principal consultant of B2B lead generation consulting firm Mac McIntosh Incorporated, and founding partner of B2B marketing automation services firm AquireB2B, McIntosh specializes in helping companies generate more leads and close more sales using the latest marketing strategies, tactics, technology and media.

Mac, Gord Hotchkiss and Bill Barnes will be leading us through a series of Questions and Answers which are top of mind for marketers.

The webinar takes place:
Thursday June 10

11:00am – 12:00pm (PST)
Length: 30 minutes
Register here: http://pages.enquiro.com/webinar24-managing-b2b-sales-leads.html

Managing B2B Leads for Sales Success
Can B2B Marketers increase revenues with tighter integration between your sales and marketing team functions?
In this special live webinar, two leading industry experts will address this question and those below that are top of mind for many B2B Marketing Executives today.

1. What technologies exist that will facilitate more collaboration between marketing and sales?
2. Should social media be part of your demand generation strategies?

3. What role does search marketing play in improving both the quality and quantity of your leads?

4. How will demand generation look different in 2015?

Join us for a conversation with Mac McIntosh (from The Business-to-Business Sales Lead ExpertsTM) and Gord Hotchkiss (author of The BuyerSphere Project) to discuss these and other existing realities that face B2B Marketers.
This webinar is recommended for VP’s, Directors and Managers in Sales and/or Marketing roles.

Register here: http://pages.enquiro.com/webinar24-managing-b2b-sales-leads.html

We, like many, have been monitoring a number of sites to see if they have been hit by the latest Google algorithm update, which was dubbed “Google MayDay” by Webmaster World. The good news? We have not seen this impact any of the sites that we work on, including large e-commerce sites.   This is a vote of confidence in the recommendations that we have been sending to our clients as their sites are doing the right things to become authorities in their given industries.  This includes:

• optimizing for the proper mix of keywords between head/torso/long-tail phrases as part of your keyword strategy
• creating unique, informative and useful content through content development strategies
  • creating unique product descriptions, anyone?
• obtaining quality links by producing useful content as mentioned above

Many in the industry have chimed in including Google’s Matt Cutts in a video that you can find within the links mentioned below.

Matt Cutts:  “This is purely our algorithm thinking that some sites are a better match for some queries than other sites…” (read: long-tail).  This will change how Google assesses which sites are the best match for long-tail queries.  Matt goes on to state that if your site is being affected to:

• go back and ask yourself do you have a high quality site?
• are you showing up for the most qualified searches?
• what can I do to add great content?
• do people consider you an authority?  (read: quality inbound links)

There has been some great discussion about “MayDay”, from Search Engine Roundtable to Vanessa Fox and Matt Cutts.  One month after initially reported, we have come up with the definitive resource list for the Google MayDay algorithm update.

Google MayDay Update:  Definitive List of Resources

1. Google MAYDAY Update Hitting Long Tail Ranking? – Search Engine Roundtable
   http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/022128.html
2. Google MAYDAY Update – SERP Changes May 2010 – Webmaster World
   http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4125460.htm
3. Whiteboard Friday – Google’s May Day Update & What It Means for You – SEOmoz
   http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-googles-may-day-update-what-it-means-for-you
4. Google Confirms “Mayday” Update Impacts Long Tail Traffic – Vanessa Fox – SE Land
   http://searchengineland.com/google-confirms-mayday-update-impacts-long-tail-traffic-43054
5. Google May Day Update Confirmed, Our Fourth Post – Search Engine Roundtable
   http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/022289.html
6. Video: Google’s Matt Cutts On May Day Update
   http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/022293.html
7. Is This Google Algorithm Update Costing You? – Web Pro News
   http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2010/05/27/webmasters-say-google-algorithm-update-costing-them
8. Mayday! Mayday! Google Changes Impact Long Tail Search – Marketing Pilgrim
   http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2010/05/mayday-mayday-google-changes-impact-long-tail-search.html
9. Google “Mayday” Update – New Long-Tail Indexing from Google? – Marketing Jive
   http://www.marketing-jive.com/2010/05/google-mayday-update-new-long-tail.html
10. Google’s Mayday Update and What to Do About It – Step Forth
    http://www.stepforth.com/blog/2010/googles-mayday-update/

Expect more stories on “MayDay” to emerge.  The fact is “MayDay” is an algorithm update, confirmed by Google itself.  You probably do not need to panic because by now you should be doing things to make your site a great resource for your audience.  Your site should feature unique and informative content that will help you become the authority your need to be in your given discipline.

• showing an “Average position” column right on the main Search Queries page
• showing a “Displaying” number for Impressions and Clicks
• showing a CTR for a given query

These items can provide some great insight into your site’s activity.  Of course you should cross reference with your own analytics to see if the data resembles what you are actually seeing.  Especially in terms of organic click-through rates.  We should remind you that the traditional definition of click-through rate is the average number of click-throughs per hundred ad impressions, expressed as a percentage.   The organic click-through rate that Google is reporting in Google Webmaster Tools is the number of clicks divided by the number of impressions, expressed as a percentage.

According to Wikipedia:

CTR is most commonly defined as “number of clicks” divided by “number of impressions” and generally not in terms of the “number of persons” who clicked divided by the “number of impressions”

Organic Click -Through Rates: What’s the Standard? 

What is interesting about this is that in the past, people have tried to establish a standard for organic click-through rates, yet this has not been an easy thing to do.  I would suggest that there really is no true standard for organic click-through rates due to a couple of key factors:

• Nature of the search – different types of searches will provide different type of CTRs
• Changing Landscape of the SERPs – as personalization and blended search make the Search Engine Results Pages more dynamic, calculating the organic click-through rate becomes more difficult.
• Real-Time Search – timely search results contribute to the changing landscape of search results page

So as you can see having a standard for organic click-through rates is truly difficult to produce.  Having said that we are getting closer.  Here’s a comparison of some recent research and information on organic click-through rates that you might want to consider.

Chitka Research @Chitka – May 2010

There were some interesting findings with this research.  While stating the obvious, that the prime organic real estate in Google is the #1 spot, the CTR of 34.35% that they reported was higher than we have typically seen.   Here is a breakdown of the organic click-through rates (in Google) for positions 1-15 based on Chitka’s research.

Another interesting finding from their research was the importance of being on the first page of Google.  The research suggests that moving from the top of page o in Google (position 11) to the bottom of page one (position 10) sees a 143% jump in traffic.  This is significant although the 143% increase means going from a CTR of 1.11% to 2.71%.  The point is clear however, you want to be on page one of Google results to generate sufficient click throughs and organic traffic.  In particular within the top three organic results ideally in the top spot.  Does this task daunting?  Well it obviously depends on the keyword your are trying to place for, but optimizing your content, and not just your traditional web pages (read: video, press releases, shopping feeds, local results, blogs etc.)can help you gain visiblity in the organic search results.  http://chitika.com/research/2010/the-value-of-google-result-positioning/

Enquiro’s Marketing to a B2B Technical Buyer – 2007

In our very own research we established our own organic click-through rates based on how B2B technical buyers search knowing that technical buyers are using online to search and select and screen out vendors; to create short lists; and to get competitive pricing for closing negotiations.  What we found is that the top organic listing generated a CTR of nearly 25%.  What we found that was interesting and holds true based on some of our own client’s data is that being in position ten at the bottom of the page was more valuable than say being in positions five thru nine.  Here is a breakdown of our organic click-through rates:

If you like, you can download our free B2B whitepaper on Marketing to a B2B Technical Buyer from Enquiro Whitepapers page.  We have been analyzing organic click-through rates for years dating back to some of our earlier research in 2005 as mentioned here.  It’s interesting that even in 2010, that organic listings/results still generate the majority of clicks compared to paid or sponsored listings.  While the gap is narrowing ever so slightly (a few years ago the split was 80/20 paid vs, organic), today 70-75% of the clicks are for organic listings when compared to sponsored.  Where are you putting your resources? 

We have conducted additional research which suggests that the CTR is most likely around 26% for top organic, 12.68% for position two and 8.89% for third organic spot.  Results vary but this seems to be close to what we are seeing in Google.  With all of the recent changes that Google has been implementing it appears that the organic CTRs are changing as well.  Take this post which suggest that the average organic click-through rate s 46.37% and spot number two is 29.3%.  Still other reports such as this one, suggest that the CTR for the top organic spot in Google is 42.3% and the second spot is 11.92%.

So while there is no standard for organic click-through rates, the data is there and organic click-through rates are not as elusive as they once were.  Of course you have to monitor your own data to see if the CTRs mentioned above hold true for what you are seeing with your own traffic and such.  Your organic search efforts should focus on gaining visibility in the search results.  It is obvious that there is no greater visibility than being in the prime real estate of the top organic listing in the search results, whether it’s Google, Yahoo, or Bing.

As always there is a lot going on at Google.  Late Spring/early Summer seems to be a busy time for Googlers.  Here are a couple of great articles that are Google related that you might want to consider sharing with your online marketing or SEO teams.

1. Google SEO experts explain what REALLY affects search results – http://www.labnol.org/internet/google-answers-seo-questions/13731/ five Google experts shared their thoughts on SEO from things such as duplicate content to XML sitemaps.  It is a good reminder for many in the industry with some nice nuggets thrown in.�
   

   For example, with regards to HTML sitemaps, Matt Cutts suggests: If you have time or a script that can generate a pretty HTML Sitemap (e.g; for a blog, you could have one page for each year or month of your blog, depending on how much you write), that can work nicely.

   As mentioned there are some pretty great reminders here.

2. Google’s encrypted search casts shadow on web analytics – http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/05/25/google_ssl_search_and_web_analytics/.  An interesting articles on the impact of how “SSL snuffs browser referrals”.  Here’s a brief snippet from the article: “Web browsers typically turn off referrers when going from HTTPS to HTTP mode to provide extra privacy,” Google says. “By clicking on a search result that takes you to an HTTP site, you could disable any customizations that the website provides based on the referrer information.”
3.  The Value of Google Result Positioning – there have been a number of articles out recently based on click-thru percentages from the organic results of Google search results.  Chitka Research shares their information.  Some interesting stuff here.  What does top spot in the organic rankings mean?  According to Chitka, 34.35% which is considerably higher than what others including our own research have stated.  (Our research suggests that the top spot typically returns a CTR of around 26%. In addition, one of the stats mentioned based on the Chitka research was that going from the 11th spot to 10th (from the second page top the first page) sees a 143% jump in traffic.   The numbers are based on a sample of 8,253,240 impressions across the Chitika advertising network in May, 2010.
   http://chitika.com/research/2010/the-value-of-google-result-positioning/
   
   
4. Something Is Up (Or Down) With Google’s Search Algorithm - SE Roundtable has shared their thoughts on the Google “MayDay” Update which we had previously touched on a few weeks back.  Is it this possible algorithm update that is taking place at Google or are people experiencing traffic fluctuations due to Google’s redesign?  http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/022264.html
   
5. Google’s Push To Speed Up Your Web Site – As Eric Enge points out on his SE Land piece, Google continues to make a big push for improving your website download performance.  Arte you one that thinks that page speed is not an issue?  Well Eric provides an example of a site that did in fact experience a drop in rankings and traffic as a result of slower page load times:

We recently became involved with one website that had seen a drop in rankings and traffic right around the time that Google announced that speed was a ranking factor back on April 9th. Our investigation found that they had been having significant server outages as well as a fairly long average page load time (greater than 5 seconds). While it is not possible to be definitively sure that page speed is the reason for the drop, our investigation has led us to believe that this is in fact the case. We have, of course, addressed the issues and hope to see traffic pop up again soon.

There you have it a couple of great articles about Google.  Google is up to a lot of things these days, from potential algorithm updates to SERP redesigns to encrypted search.  It can be a full time job keeping on top of all of these initiatives, but the main thing is to be patient and see how this will impact you site.  Do not be too quick to make changes for the sake of making changes, but be aware the Google is continuing to evolve its search offering.

Thanks to Tina Kells for pointing us in the direction of a couple of the articles mentioned above.

We consult with clients on their linking efforts through items such as link audits and such.  We are well versed in link analysis and use tools to help identify issues with client’s link inventories.  We used advanced link operators such as these to evaluate link inventories for client’s competitors.  We used Google Webmaster Tools to gain insight in both internal and external link inventories for a given site.  We get the importance of link building, but there’s more to SEO than just link building.

The fact is that the search engine algorithms are fundamentally based on link popularity.  Yahoo for example, was started by David Filo and Jerry Yang got together  in February 1994 to organize their favorite sites on the Web.  They began compiling their lists of favorite links eventually turning Yahoo into the most popular destination on the Web.  Since then, most (all?) search engines that have followed have used link popularity as a key part of their search engine algorithm.  I take issue with this a little because based on my experience as a searcher the results that appear at the top of a given keyword query are not always relevant, and knowing that a reason a lot of these site appear is due to link popularity, I would love to see a shift in the algorithm.  For me relevant search results are exactly what I am looking for.  We tend to put a lot of trust into Google in terms of the search results that they present us, but you know as well as I that there are always potentially better results that are not on the first page of Google’s search results.  Why do you think Google is pushing things like personalization and blended results?  Why have they shifted focus to provide real-time search results? Websites that have artificially inflated their link inventories does not always equate to relevant results.  Again this is another reason as to why there is more to SEO than just link building.

Now don’t get me wrong, I understand the importance of link building.  How you go about link building and the types of links you acquire  is your business.  For me, I am more in favor of the approach that the search engines communicate that they would like to see and that is building your link inventory in a natural manner.  A few years back this was referred to as “link-baiting”.  Over the years link building has changed and more recently how link popularity as part of the search algorithms continues to change.  Think about some of the reasons for this:

• Un-trustworthy link practices are tripping the filters and resulting in more penalties than ever before.
• There are a ton, most likely billions of non-linked “references” that are on the web through avenues such as social media messages, instant messages, emails, and tweets. There is a lot of relevant content here.  You cannot tell me that someone, at Google or the other search engines, is not evaluating this data to see how they can extract value and relevancy from this content.
• The ease of setting up a blog or website for the purposes of link building.  The content is being watered down and artificially linked web properties are polluting the search results
• More weight is being place on brands and
• The ability to acquire and purchase links has established an accelerated rate of link acquisition causing the engines to take more proactive action to address the volume and new unknown value of these links  

Rand Fishkin had a great piece on how link building is changing over at SEOmoz where he shared some similar reasons as to what he feels has caused this change or shift.  http://www.seomoz.org/blog/link-building-has-changed

So if there is more to SEO than link building, what does this “more” consist of?  Well there are two areas where you should be focusing your marketing efforts on:

The most important piece of SEO?  Where many will say link building and link popularity, we say content.  Content is the key to all that you do with any of your marketing efforts.  It does not matter if you are a B2B site or a B2C site.  Without useful, informative and somewhat unique and timely content, your online efforts may prove fruitless.  When we refer to content, we are not just talking about a traditional web page of content.  In 2010, content is dynamic and can be in the form of various guises including:

1. Keyword Research
2. Content

In terms of keywords, all search queries or questions begin with a keyword or a key phrase.  Recent trends show that longer key phrase queries are up with phrases that contain 8 or more words on the increase.  (This data has been supported by findings from Hitwise).  The fact of the matter is, without a sound keyword research process and keyword strategy, link building becomes somewhat irrelevant.  Keywords will always be a part of the search process.  At the heart of any search is a keyword.  Why do you think that the search engines spend so much time compiling user data and learning about semantic mapping?

The most important piece of SEO?  Where many will say link building and link popularity, we say content.  Content is the key to all that you do with any of your marketing efforts.  It does not matter if you are a B2B site or a B2C site.  Without useful, informative and somewhat unique and timely content, your online efforts may prove fruitless.  When we refer to content, we are not just talking about a traditional web page of content.  In 2010, content is dynamic and can be in the form of various guises including:

• Video
• Tweets
• Facebook status updates
• Blog posts
• Press releases
• Images
• Smart phone applications
• Podcast

The fact is people search looking to find timely information and in case you haven’t noticed, this habit has become social.  Of course Facebook and Twitter are the obvious examples, but think about all of the other environments where people go to find and share information.  From forums to YouTube to popular blogs, information has never been so accessible.  From an SEO perspective ensuring that your site features timely and useful information that can be shared will assist in improving the visibility of your site and web properties links or not.  To state the obvious, you need content to link to and from.  You can build your link inventory with great content. Should your SEO strategy be centered around link building?  We suggest no.  Should it be centered around content?  Our answer is yes.

A third area of SEO that always plays second fiddle to link building is on-page optimization.  Yet almost every site that we look at has missed some of the fundamentals in terms of on-page optimization.   On-Page optimization is a key piece to your SEO strategy that can be easy to address whereas link building can take a lot of resources.  Link building a key part of SEO?  Yes for sure but not the only part and not the most  important part from the way we see it. 

What would happen if Google made a fundamental shift with their algorithm and decided to place less value on link popularity?  All of the link building in the world would not help you.  In fact they have done this with past algorithm updates (think of algoruthm updates such as Florida).

The future of SEO will be less about links and more about content, the timely presentation of that content and the social dialogue about your brand.  You decide where you want to spend your time; link building or participating in a conversation with your audience?  The choice seems like an obvious one.

So what goes on at Google?  What’s in the secret sauce?  What are they going to come up with next?  How will they change Search from what we know it to be today?  Well the fact is, your guess is as good as mine, but we do know that Google continues to refine and tweak their business as they follow their mantra to “do no evil”.

Earlier this week, Google’s Matt Cutts, released a brief video discussing the fact that Google likely makes a change per day to the search algorithm. They don’t necessarily release those changes each day, but they will release them in batches.  Every day, can you image?  This is probably why they continue to be North America’s most popular search engine well popular based on market share.  The point is Google is always up to something.  They do not settle for complancency, in fact Google promotes change, creativity and innovation.  If you think about it, this is how they have become one of the world’s most recognized and popular brands.

So let’s take a look at some of the cool things about Google that have come out in the past week or so.

20 Things That Google is Up To

1. Google hired goats to cut the lawn - according to Google, more than 200 goats from California Grazing have once again arrived at Google’s Mountain View headquarters where they’ll stay for over a week chomping away on grassy goodness. 
2. Google Webmaster Tools Now Showing Clickthrough Data - big news for search marketers as this data provides some great insight into what people actually click on from a natural search perspective.  Google previously just reported the average position at which your site’s pages appeared in the search results for a particular query. Now you can click on a given search query in the Top search queries report to see a breakdown of the number of impressions and the amount of clickthrough for each position that your site’s pages appeared at in the search results associated with that query. Impressions are the number of times that your site’s pages appeared in the search results for the query. Clickthrough is the number of times searchers clicked on that query’s search results to visit a page from your site.
3. Google Holds an Atmosphere Conference to talk cloud computing - Atmosphere 2010 featured a range of luminaries and thought leaders – including senior Google executives, technology innovators, and industry analysts – providing input on the cloud and the issues shaping IT today. http://www.google.com/events/atmosphere2010/
4. Google announced the Google Product Reviews Program – at the Bazaarvoice Social Commerce Summit, Google Product Director Sameer Samat announced the Google Product Reviews Program. Through the program, we will begin featuring full-length product reviews and user ratings from participating retailers and manufacturers wherever it will help users with their shopping, including in our search results and advertising programs.  Sound interesting?  Read more here: http://www.google.com/intl/en_us/products/reviews.html
5. Forbes communicated that the Google Guys are amongst the greenest billionaires on the planet.  In fact, through Google’s charitable foundation, Google.org, the billionaire duo of Larry Page and Sergey Brin has committed $100 million in grants to nonprofits and investments in companies ranging from solar energy to development of plug-in electric vehicle technologies.
6. Google to Impose on Salesforce? – according to reports from businessinsider.com, Google may be looking to impose on Salesforce territory.  “Within roughly 3 1/2 years, Google Apps has amassed 25 million users and more than 2 million businesses. In contrast, it took Salesforce.com 10 years to reach 2 million users and 72,000 businesses.”  Google’s Marketplace announcement a few weeks back
7. Matt Cutts from Google recently posted his presentation from SMX West where he discussed, Google’s SEO audit that it did on itself.
8. Google launched a new feature in real-time search that gives you the ability to search and replay the public archive of tweets on Twitter. While real-time search usually focuses on what’s happening now, our new feature is helpful for viewing the history of what happened in the past and how people reacted to a particular topic on Twitter.
9. Google Adds Buzz, Localized Suggest To Maps - Google Buzz has been available on Maps for mobile devices, but now Google has made it possible to access Buzz on Maps for the PC. In addition Google is rolling out localized Search Suggest for Maps in more places around the world.
10. Bloomberg News is reporting that Google is in discussions on what could be a $1 billion buyout of ITA Software, a company that provides reservation/information systems used by many well-known travel industry companies.  “Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information, and ITA does that for travel,” said Henry Harteveldt, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc. in San Francisco.
11. Google has decided to change the name of what was called the “Google Local Business Center” to “Google Places.” The rationale, according to the press release, is to better connect Google Place Pages with the place where local business information is claimed, entered and enhanced because millions of people use Google to find local businesses each and every day. http://sites.google.com/a/pressatgoogle.com/googleplaces/press-release
12. Google responded to reports suggesting that a consumer advocacy group thinks the government should break up Google.
13. Google Buys Stealth Hardware Startup Agnilux - in yet another acquistion.
14. Google shared information on the crawling of XML sitemaps in that “Google’s Sitemaps crawler usually reacts to the update frequency of your Sitemap files.” Note that if you find that Google is crawling your sites too frequently, you can also set the crawl rate in Webmaster Tools for those sites.
15. Google’s Virtual Keyboard Now In Search Bar- this is something cool as Google is deploying their virtual keyboards on the search results pages for their non-English based search portals.
16. Google has begun leveraging recently acquired social search startup Aardvark, using it for Help Support. The service allows you to ask questions and get responses almost immediately from other users who are knowledgeable about the topic at hand.
17. Google announced updates that will help you read and write foreign scripts with Google Transliteration and Script Converter.  – http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/04/helping-you-read-and-write-foreign.html
18. Google launched a new Government Requests tool to give people information about the requests for user data or content removal we receive from government agencies around the world. They are using data from July-December, 2009, and plan to update the data in 6-month increments.
19. Google unveiled Rich Snippets for recipes – Rich Snippets are the brief annotations you see beneath search results that summarize what’s on a webpage. In addition to Rich Snippets for reviews, people, video and events, this week Google unveiled a new Rich Snippets format for recipes.
20. Google sheds some light on using a trailing slash or not….

We could go on an on, but you get the point.  Google is busy and continues to make improvements in all facets of their service and product offering.  So what did your organization accomplish in the past week?

One of the pains that continues to be identified in most organizations that we work with revolves around education.  The need for education on SEO and SEM is continuing to evolve and as a result B2B companies and B2C companies alike are looking for ways to educate their teams on the latest techniques to ensure online success.  The Search industry is evolving quickly and there is a need to continually educate yourself on best practices and emerging trends that you can incorporate into your online marketing strategy.  So how do we do this?

Information overload is a problem that is a direct result of the digital age.  The Internet gives anyone and everyone access to the world’s data with the ease of a few clicks.  Internet users continue to hone their search skills as people are becoming more judicious and skillful with search than ever before.  The number of touch points that we have with information is at an all-time high.  Another result of the digital age is the shift in marketing.  Born was a new breed of marketer, the online marketer.  From here new disciplines have emerged such as SEO, SEM and SMM.

Within these options there is a tremendous amount of information that one must learn in order to participate successfully with their online marketing efforts.  Take SEO for example.  SEO, also known as nature search optimization or organic search optimization is really only 10-15 years old, but it has transformed greatly during this time.  Technology and innovation has ensured this.

SEO Knowledge Transfer:  Educating Your Organization

So how does one acquire and share SEO knowledge?  In this digital age, there are numerous ways to transfer knowledge.  Of course for this process to take place, we need a minimum of two parties:

1. Someone who shares the knowledge
2. Someone who acquires the knowledge

Think about all of the potential mechanisms that we can use to transfer SEO knowledge, or any knowledge for that matter.  By blogging, I am currently leveraging one of these mechanisms right now.   Yet there are various ways to share things like SEO tips and best practices for educating your organization.  The following list is just a few of the avenues that you can use for SEO knowledge transfer.

Of course with any type of knowledge sharing, there are really two ways of communicating:

• Verbally
• Written

On-demand/recorded could be a third manner of sharing knowledge.

21 Ways to Share SEO Knowledge in Your Company

Items 1-7 deal with ways you can verbally share SEO information.  Items 8-15 are more from a written perspective.  The remainder involve sharing information that is made available on-demand.

1. In-Person
   • In-Person visits
   • Mentoring/Peer Learning
   • Job Shadowing
   • Team Events
2. Meetings
3. Team Huddles
4. Conference Calls / Teleconferencing
   • Internally with your team
   • Externally with clients
   • Externally with others
   • Using technology such as GoTo Meeting or other teleconferencing technology
5. Interviews
   • In-person
   • Phone
6. Formal Lectures
7. Conferences
   • In-person (networking)
   • Virtual
   • Speaking engagements
8. Email
9. Blogging
10. White Papers
    • Internal white papers produced by your organization
    • External white papers from other resources
11. Reports – monthly, quarterly or annual reports
12. Dashboards – reporting success metrics via a dashboard that can be viewed in real-time or scheduled as a weekly or monthly event.
13. Internal Newsletters
    • Email newsletters
14. Instant Messaging – via technologies such as Skype or Messenger
15. Wikis – sharepoint sites, or wiki environments where people within your organization can share information is another great way to transfer knowledge within your organization.  This could be as simple as setting up a Google site or internal blog.
16. Pre-recorded Webinars – Internal – webinars that your organization has recorded
17. Pre-recorded Webinars – Other – these are webinars that your team can access via industry sources that are typically made available on-demand.
18. Podcasts
19. Slidecasts – sharing information through slide decks via technology such as slideshare can be a great way to educate your team about SEO items.
20. Video – video is huge and can be highly effective at educating your team about any subject.
    • Creation of Video (sharing of information)
    • Watching of Video (acquiring information)
21.  iPhone App – why not create an inexpensive iPhone app that features knowledge that could be stored within?  This data could be as simple as a white paper or book that has been transcribed and can be accessed via a mobile device?

For the most part, these mechanisms can be used for both acquiring information and sharing of information.