Real-time search hit the big time this week, as both Microsoft/Bing and Google announced major deals with Facebook and Twitter to incorporate public timeline posts into their search results.

• Up Close With Bing’s Twitter Search Engine
  Bing announced massive deals with Twitter and Facebook this week, which may quite literally change the face of search.
• Google Social Search Is Coming & More On Google-Twitter
  Google follows hot on the heels of Bing’s announcement, meaning both of the major players are now looking very seriously at delivering real time results.
• Official Google Blog: RT @google: Tweets and updates and search, oh my!
  The official announcement from Google.

And then there was all the other fun stuff to fill your Friday afternoon.

Content and marketing…

• The New Era of Inbound Marketing
  The effectiveness of brand advertising, direct mail, trade show marketing and cold calling sales have all diminished rapidly in favor of a new set of channels we all use to buy – nearly all of which center around the web.
• Writing TO Your Customers—Not AT Them
  “Copy that focuses strictly on your company and practically or completely ignores your prospects doesn’t work nearly as well as copy that speaks to your target customers in their language and about the benefits they will receive.”
• Five Killer Press Release tips for Small Businesses
  So we’re not a small business, oh well. What this article does is really highlight ways to think about the function of a press release in brand-related activity. It’s not just about announcing a new feature; it’s about attaching your brand to something people find interesting enough to pass along.

More technical stuff…

• How Google Uses the Toolbar Data
  This very question came up in the roundtable today, and hey, lookiethat – one of the things they track is page load time. My, my, my.
• Brands vs Query Refinement: Is Google Using The Second Search?
  An interesting theory on what Google’s big “brand” update (aka “Vince”) earlier this year is really doing, sparked by a comment from Google itself.
• Google Removes PageRank Data From Webmaster Tools
  This makes a big statement about how little value that little green bar really has.
• An update on Rich Snippets
  Rich Snippets make it possible to show structured data from your pages on Google’s search results. Some tools and information about microformats (RDFa) and related things we’re hoping to be looking into more in 2010.

Looking at the big picture…

• Defining Search Engine Optimization
  Defining search engine optimization is often focused on the *mechanics* of search – crawling, indexing, ranking. This argues a broader, commercially focused definition, which is very much in line with where TJG wants us to be.
• Search Engine Optimization: The Truth About SEO
  As long as things can be searched, they can be optimized for better performance in search.
• Whiteboard Friday – Future-Proofing Your SEO [video
  SEO is an ongoing process, but a lot of the fundamentals have stayed the same for years. Strategically, where should we focus to make sure we can keep up in the years to come? A look at three core areas: Technical, Content, and Marketing. Something for everyone!

Looking at the *really* big picture…

• Is Justin Timberlake a Product of Cumulative Advantage?
  In short: People like what other people like.
• Filthy Linking Rich
  Long, but fascinating exploration of network theory – and ‘the rich get richer effect’ – as it applies to internet popularity.

And finally…

• Some people just don’t get it

The picture says it all.
Enjoy!

SEO basics, best practices, and tactics

• Terrible SEO Advice: Focus on Users, Not Engines
  Rand sparks a debate: “In my view, SEO starts with the user (of course), but cannot ignore the incredible importance of search-engine targeted (and specific) tactics”
• Is Choosing Search Engines Over Users A Fatal Flaw In SEO?
  Jill Whalen responds to Rand: “If you listen to this advice, your SEO will be fatally flawed from the get-go”
• SEO Truths Or Should That Be SEEO?
  SEEO = Search Engine Evolutionary Optimization. The “truths” are mostly based on observation, and fluctuate based on change…
• When the PageRank Toolbar Goes Dark…
  Where PageRank is the great distorter is that many site owners – not SEOs – value their sites by that alone.

Marketing and content

• Can Viral Marketing Be Manufactured?
  The very nature of viral content makes a traditional marketing plan next to impossible. How can a marketer improve their chances of striking viral gold?
• The Web Marketing Checklist: 37 Ways to Promote Your Site
  A useful checklist – All you can do to promote your site online
• 10 Useful Social Bookmarking Websites to Promote Your Content
  What it says on the label
• Link Building With Content: How To Attract Links And Leads
  This article outlines how to merge the practice of linkbait (we call it linkable content) and the strategies of content marketing to maximize the value of your content creation and publishing efforts.
• Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Tips for News Search
  Tips, background and FAQs for all publishers interested in Google News Search

Pretty graphs

• 4 Visual Charts on the Value of SEO Tactics
  Particularly interesting graph on the value of XML sitemaps, which we’re working on next sprint. Would be a fun exercise to scatterplot where we think each of our sites land on these various other graphs.
• Explaining (Some of) Google’s Algorithm with Pretty Charts & Math Stuff
  Interesting [and heady] charts about the Google Algorithm ranking factors.

The big picture

• Why SEO Training Should Be An Organizational Imperative
  Failure to train people can lead to serious problems, with a frightful waste of time, blown schedules, wasted expenditure and ultimately a failure to effectively capture search traffic.
• The Guardian / Trafigura Thing – Gagged by Carter Ruck Solicitors? Fail.
  The days when corporate malfeasance could be hushed up by a deal cut in the smoke-lined back rooms is over.
• Now is the Time to Cash in on Your Passion
  The key to success in business hasn’t changed – provide good customer service and work your butt off. [Video, full of profanity but great]

Enjoy!

SEO basics & best practices

• 10 Common SEO Mistakes
  This could also be called, “Why SEO touches every part of the business.”
• 5 Common Pieces of SEO Advice I Disagree With
  There’s a lot of “best practice” suggestions out there which aren’t really the “best.” Rand at SEOMoz offers opinions on a few of them.
• The SEO Playbook – Welcome to the Rabbit Hole Alice
  An old post, but an “advanced beginner’s guide” full of value. Quote: “Technology and marketing were formerly unique disciplines with very different types of people. SEO’s are the folks in between.”
• 4 R’s of SEO: Robots, Ranking, Relevance & Results
  It all comes down to this, really.
• Brent D. Payne Interview | Tribune Company SEO
  Brent is the the in-house Director of Search Engine Optimization for Tribune newspapers, which include pubs like the Chicago Tribune and the LA Times. A great case study in practical SEO at a large company.

Content

• Title Tags Revisited – What’s a Title Tag and How Important are They to SEO?
  A solid reminder about the power of the well-formed meta title.
• 6 steps to KILLING long tail keywords for SEOs & Content writers
  A good look at researching and identifying long-tail keyword opportunities, with a bunch of specific detail about how to put various tools to use.
• The Zeroth Law of Writing for SEO
  The zeroth law of SEO is this: Write an article whose title is a question people are asking Google and whose body is the answer.

Technical

• Optimizing Your Web Page Speed
  Load time can impact how much of a site gets crawled and indexed by search engines, but can also affect user experience and conversions. It’s unfortunate this site is so completely wrapped in advertising, because there’s some really useful info buried in these pages.
• A proposal for making AJAX crawlable
  Google continues to work on better seeing what users see, regardless of how it’s delivered.

And completely unrelated to SEO, but so painfully bad it must be shared…

• Windows 7 Launch Commercial
  In Redmond, no one can hear you scream.

Enjoy!

Week 2 of 2008:

Wikia launches:
The much-touted launch of Jimmy Wales’ stab at user-generated search results. Is it really an SEO free-for-all? Only time will tell.

Graywolf on Wordpress SEO
Michael takes a great look at how to maximize the keyword benefit of your post titles, post slugs, and page names.

Self Made Chick
Self Made Chick talks about blogging in first person. A particularly useful post as I ‘find my voice’ here, but the rest of her blog is great as well. It probably resonated more with me this week than it might normally as I’d just been talking with a friend about ways she could get a little extra income for herself, and SMC has some great first-person experience doing just that.

AdSense changes the rules
Google announced changes to the AdSense referral program, and there’s lots of interesting commentary going ’round about it. Problogger calls it flat out stupid, while Andy Beard rationalizes and then looks at exploiting it, and Bruce Clay offers a very reasonable opinion: it is bad business to alienate your best customers. I couldn’t agree more.

Google Operating System: Google Artificially Promotes Recent Web Pages
One of many articles on the subject which probably caused the most stir this week. I even contributed my own two bits about whether ‘new’ equals ‘better’ at Google now.

DomainTools blog: Lazy webmasters cost their employers millions of visitors
Whether it’s laziness or thoughtlessness, I’m running into this all the time. From the user POV, making a site work both with and without ‘www’ is just a no-brainer (and, frankly, I want people to anticipate my mistypes.)

On the other hand, from the SEO POV, it’s a pain in the ass if there’s subdomains or alternate spellings creating duplicate content issues that I don’t know about. But, letting our domain management service profit from our parked domains is also a huge wasted opportunity.

Problogger.net: Using stumbleupon to get on the radar of other bloggers.
A useful reminder that the best results are not instant results.

10e20.com: Top 50 search and social media happenings for 2007
Of course loads of people did ‘end of year’ posts; this one was particularly exhaustive and includes a number of small but significant events. Definitely a good collection, with loads of links that are worth a read.