The battle between FaceBook and Google mightbe overrated, but in terms of innovation, both companies are definitely doing their best. In the “50 Most Innovative Companies of 2011” list, published by Fastcompany Magazine, Facebook, the leader in 2010 is placed third (“For 600 million users, despite Hollywood”).

Notably, one place ahead of the world’s largest social network is the micro-blogging website Twitter (“For five years of explosive growth that have redefined communication”). 200 million users mark is certainly not far away.

At the very top, placed first, is Apple (“For dominating the business landscape, in 101 ways”). iPad is probably the reason they went two places up from last-years third position.

And what about Google? And Microsoft? Don’t worry, both are there. Google is sixth (“For instantly upgrading the search experience”) – one place behind Groupon (5), whose courage is also admitted (“For reinvigorating retail — and turning down $6 billion”). Microsoft is only 37^th – but still 9 places up from last year. Bing, and Win Phone OS 7 are both noted as good products, but it is the hand-free Kinect that impressed Fastcompany, “turning the human body into a game controller”.

Another notable inclusion is LinkedIn (“For turning 90 million members into the world’s most useful career database”) and Russian search engine Yandex (26) that is given credit for successfully battling Google in the Russian search market niche and for various complex algorithms. The list, of course, includes off-line companies, such as Nissan(4, “For creating the Leaf, the first mass- market all- electric car”), Trader Joe’s (11, for “For vaulting past Whole Foods to become America’s favorite organic grocer) and Snohetta (35, “For design that’s both social and beautiful”).

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Several polls, conducted recently, approve that the search engines are still regarded reliable by the internet users, yet the influence of “spammers” worries many searches.

Over 33 percent of the responders to the question: “Have Google’s Search Results Become Less Useful To You?”, said that the spammers “have gained a significant foothold”. Over 40 percent responded with the “kind of” statement, making a total of over 75% percent noticing the negative influence of “noise” on Google Search. With less than 4% stating that results got better, it seems that the spam issue needs to worry Google algorithmists.

Nevertheless, almost 90% still find Search Engines (and most use Google, of course) do either “excellent” or “good” job of finding relevant information, and about two-thirds of users rate Google results as “useful”.

With other search engines trying to close the gap between the runaway leader in the Search Industry, they might well switch their attention to inventing better search algorithms. Yet, there is no guarantee that those will produce less “noisy” results. And even if they do, and Google will lose a considerable amount of market percentage – the spammers will probably quickly adjust their techniques to alter these “new-search-algorithm” results as well…

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via Flickr

Hope everyone’s having a great weekend, short and sweet post today of 7 tips to become a better SEO.

A search engine optimization specialist is a dime in a dozen nowadays, everyone from designers, developers to your marketing executives are calling themselves SEOs. There is a misconception that been an SEO simply involves some knowledge of how search engines work and getting links.

1. SEO for glory not for money. What separates the good from the bad is that great SEO work for the results. If your sole focus to become an SEO is for the money, than my last 9 tips will seem like a nuance. Great SEO work for the glory of the results. The pride of seeing their hard work bare fruition is something most people don’t understand, sure you shouldn’t get too emotionally attached to your work. But the driving force of good SEO is their passion to deliver the results.

2. Willingness to learn. No great SEO will claim they know everything there is about search engine optimization, those that do should be questioned about their knowledge and proof be shown. SEO has been and in my opinion will continue to be an evolving industry. As the world demands better search results from search engines, companies like Microsoft and Google will continue to change their services to fill the demand. It is a pre-requist for any SEO to constantly educate themselves. A simple question to ask when hiring an SEO. ( what publications, blogs, websites do they frequent and contribute to )

3. Willingness to share. SEO is a community based industry, a lot of work comes from referrals. And if you are unwilling to share your ideas with others and join discussions. You will find yourself a very lonely SEO with no work. I am not implying that to divulge your company secrets or all your knowledge to the world, once you become part of the community and build solid relationships with other SEO’s that you trust, this is where sharing of ideas can really bring great benefits.

4. Under sale, over deliver. We have all come across the loud mouth, Cr*p talkin salesmen that promise the world but can’t deliver the product. Don’t be that person, if you are in a client facing role, a great SEO presentation will include facts, accurate projections and great presentation skills. Always be honest with your clients when dealing with deliverables and results, sure most client won’t understand what it is exactly us SEO’s do but a great SEO should have the ability to ‘dumb’ down the answers. Be conservative in your traffic projections because when you over deliver results, everyone is happy.

5. Develop your analytical skills. A great SEO needs to possess an analytical  mind, be able to gather data from different sources and combine / analysis the data to determine a favourable outcome. How can you perform an accurate keyword analysis, traffic projection or simply how many backlinks to acquire if you don’t have good analytical skills.

6. Learn to use these tools. Your job as an SEO will often require you to use these programs. Don’t rely on sys admins or designers to do the work, otherwise you could be waiting a long time, SEO is a time dependent service. The quicker you start, the faster you will see results.

• Google and other search engines. ( pretty obivious, but you would be surprise how many SEO’s dont know the basics )
• Cpanel / Plesk
• Server based traffic statistics programs ( AWstats, webalizer, mint, pikwik )
  
• FTP programs
• Basic HTaccess knowledge
• Google webmaster tools
• Google Analytics
  
• Basic HTML editors ( dreamweaver / notepad )
• Popular content manage systems ( wordpress / joomla )

7. Develop your creative mind. No one likes a robot or a drone, SEO is a creative process that requires you to create solutions for many different clients in different markets. If you are a freelance or inhouse SEO, having a creative mind will help you with your sales pitch, if you can consistently put forward new ideas to your clients that will increase their traffic, they will love you for it. Ideas can be big or small, such as these simple creative link-building concept.

I hope you have enjoyed these tips and have taken away some ideas to help you on your SEO journey. As always, if you agree or disagree with my views, please share them in the comments.

Share this post http://bit.ly/13iV6b . Sphinn this post.

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A compilation of the most newsworthy, ground breaking, interesting and useful stories that matters to the search and marketing industry, sourced from websites, blogs and tweets. Can’t wait for the weekly round-up? Follow us on Twitter @little_engine for the latest on search and marketing.

Google Caffeine

Google announces public testing for the new search infrastructure on Google webmaster blog.

Search quality engineer Matt Cutts updates and answers questions on Caffeine

Will Google Caffeine effect Google Local Listings – some thoughts and comparisons

Lil Engine evaluates and tests Google Caffeine -  Exclusive overview and comparison

SEO & SEM Tools

GooBingHoo.com – Compare side by side search results from Google, Yahoo, Bing and now also with Caffeine.

20 free keyword research tools – Excellent list of free to use keyword suggestion / volume comparison research tools.

FireFox Addon: Monitor the Page Size with View Dependencies – via SEJ

Optimize your crawling & indexing – Good tips provided by Google Webmasters blog , slideshow and text wrap up

Matt Cutts:  Straight from Google – What You Need to Know about Word Press Optimisation, very good video for WordPress users that want to learn some simple optimisation tips [Video] 45 min

Small Google PageRank update – Mostly changes in internal pages, SEO’s reporting mostly drops in Pagerank for internal pages, especially those sites with a large index.

Matt Cutts on nofollow – The debate continues with this video with Jen Lopez ( SEOMoz ) and Matt Cutts ( Google ) @ SES San Jose 2009

Why are .com sites ranking highly in UK SERPs? – Matt Cutts on Google Webmaster YouTube

Pie chart of component’s of Google’s algorithm – via SEOMoz.org

Pie chart of component’s of Google’s algorithm

Online Advertising / Marketing

Google Adwords Conversion Rates Don’t Vary Much with Ad Position from Chief Economist at Google, Hal Varian.

Google Adwords – Sponsored search ads now displaying closer to organic results. Keep track of CTR’s in the next day or so. Advertisers reporting a 5 – 10 % increase in clicks.

Google Adwords – Googler’s have reported different text size / type and location changing on Sponsored Results Ads. Appears Google is doing quite a lot of A / B testing on Adwords.

Google Adwords – New Search Ads Quality Guide , Google adds some pretty useful resources to their Adwords help section, such as: how quality score affects your ranking and how quality score affects how much you pay.

Is Your Business Ready for Online Marketing? – Great 60min video of Warren Lanier, CEO of Bridge Point Marketing and David Kamatoy. Some really useful tips for business owners and entrepreneurs, covering the differences between traditional advertising, SEO and social media marketing.

Social Media Marketing

10 Really Tangible Ways To Measure Social Media Success – nice tips on measuring the success of  social media marketing campaigns with sites such as Twitter and facebook.

United Breaks Guitars Song 2: Yes, Dave is back with another YouTube music video on his broken guitar. Will he get as much exposure as his first hit? I doubt it, this song is pretty weak and really doesn’t bring anything new or fresh to his first song . Maybe my conspiracy theory is true, maybe Dave is working on a Viral campaign for United!

From the Li’l Engine Forum

A new visualized web search engine, sleagle.com, was born today – 08/18/2009 : Join the Discussion

Cheers

Thanks for checking out the first ever Li’l Engine weekly search roundup! I’d love to get some feedback on my writing style and also the topics covered, perhaps you may have more to add to this roundup? or want to see a particular topic covered more, let me have it You can contact me directly via my personal twitter account or just leave a response in the comments.

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