In order to understand the rise of paid content, it’s necessary to understand the meaning of the nofollow tag and  how it is used (and some would say abused) by large sites like Twitter.

The nofollow tag is used to tell some search engines (*cough*Google*cough*) that a hyperlink should not influence the link target’s search engine ranking. It was originally intended to reduce the effectiveness of search engine spam. Spam comments were the nofollow tag’s original targets: spam comments on blogs were used to get back links and try to squeeze a few drops of link juice from as many places as possible. By making comment links nofollow, the webmaster is in effect saying, “I am in no way vouching for the quality of the place this link goes. Don’t give them any of my link juice. Maybe it’s a good site, but I’m not taking chances.”

Nofollow links are not meant for preventing stuff from being indexed or for blocking access. The ways to do this are by using the robots.txt file for blocking access, and using on-page meta elements that specify on a page by page basis what a search engine crawler should (or should not) do with the content that’s on the crawled page.

Nofollow was born in 2005, and since that time, in the SEO arms race between the search engines and those who want to game them, websites started selectively using the nofollow tag to “sculpt” page rank for pages within their own site. In other words, a link going to an internal page that was ticking over nicely could be made into a nofollow link in an attempt to “conserve” PageRank juice to give to another internal page that was just starting out, or struggling, and needed some help.

Well, Google frowns on this, insisting that you’re better off in the long run to use links to your site’s pages but not to selectively use the nofollow tag in an attempt to juice up the pages you think need a boost. According to Matt Cutts, the only time you should use nofollow is when you cannot or don’t want to vouch for the content of a site. An example would be a link added by an outside user (say, in a comment thread) that you don’t trust. Cutts suggested that unknown users leaving links on your guestbook page should automatically have their links nofollowed.
Right, so what does this have to do with paid content?

The nofollow tag was supposed to squash paid links, which Google hates.

Paid content companies take advantage of Google’s emphasis on domain authority, by buying up trusted sites like eHow (purchased by the seemingly insatiable Demand Media) and dumping lots and lots of esoteric content into it. Why do they do this? They get the domain authority, and the esoteric content helps ensure that when someone, somewhere searches for an article on, say, how to make a butterfly shaped cake, the content that they paid a content writer a couple of bucks for will show up at the top of the search engine results. In other words, they’re targeting the proverbial “long tail.”

How do these sites know what content to buy? They have algorithms that comb through keywords and keyword combinations and determine where there are gaps in information. Then the content buyers commission writers to write content specifically to fill those gaps. You may have heard the statistic that 20 to 25% of queries on Google have never been searched before. That’s a huge, huge number of queries. The more of those queries you can anticipate and answer, the more hits your site will get over the long term.

While link spam and comment spam were clear attempts at short term efforts for sites to claw their way to the top of the search engine rankings, and were relatively easy to squash using nofollow tags, paid content is more of a long term strategy, and it’s not clear what, if anything Google can do about it.

What seems to be happening is that sites like Twitter are kneeling down before their Google overlords (as one side of the story goes) and automatically making even the most harmless links (such as your own link to your own website on the “Bio” part of your Twitter profile) nofollow links. That has seriously ticked off a lot of long term Twitter users who legitimately poured in lots of very real, original content and can now no longer get any link love from that Bio link, even though it’s from them, to their very own site. When this happened, the metaphors about Google and Twitter ran rampant: “throwing the baby out with the bathwater,” “shutting the barn door after the horse gets out,” “cutting off its nose to spite its face,” etc.

The strategy seems to be that if nofollow links are being used as they were intended (well, as Google intended anyway), sites that are all promotion and no content would have a harder way getting to the top of the search engine results pages. Google’s fear is that paid content will game the system when it comes to odd or unusual searches, and the person who really does devote his life to making the world’s best butterfly-shaped cakes will lose out to the paid content sites who had writers or videographers hack together a 5-step instructional page or video.

Whether it will work or not is yet to be seen. As for now, paid content sites are doing pretty well for themselves. And the search engines that cater to them, like Ask.com, which wraps a few “real” sites in with sponsored results, are doing pretty well too. From February 2010 to March 2010, Ask.com’s share of search engine traffic went from 2.84% to 3.44%, while the traffic for the other (and admittedly much larger) search engines stayed relatively flat. Have a look at the screen shot of Ask.com’s results for “How do I bake a butterfly shaped cake” to see for yourself the influence of paid content on this search engine.

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Most of us have noticed the new and improved Google search results pages by now. The biggest thing (in my opinion) is the new left hand column you get when you click the new “Show Options” link at the top of the results page. Whereas before if you wanted to search from a certain time frame, or make other refinements to the search, you had to go to the Advanced Search options page, now you can do a lot of those refinements right from your original results page.

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The fundamentals of SEO apply regardless of which search engine you want to rank in, but each of the major ones has some finer points, so let’s get right to them.

Yahoo!

You may have heard that participating in Google AdWords would penalize your site in other search engines, but Yahoo! insists that this is not the case. They really have nothing to gain by dropping sites that are relevant, and if they did, they’d be cutting off their nose to spite their face. But the age of your domain is important because a longer track record ups a site’s relevancy. It’s only one score, and it’s one you can’t do much about, but it’s something to keep in mind: SEO is a long term idea.

Yahoo! suggests registering domains for more than one year at a time. It gives your site a long-term focus and keeps you from accidentally losing a domain because you didn’t find the email that it was time to renew. They also suggest you should buy the same domain name with and without dashes. This will keep you from losing so-called type-in traffic. However, all SEO pundits say that the more dashes, the harder it is to type in, and the more spam-like it will look, so don’t get carried away.

Like with Google, with Yahoo!, relevant inbound links from high quality pages are gold. This is one of the hardest parts of SEO, but it’s one where there really aren’t many shortcuts. You want links from sites that belong to the same general neighborhood of topics as yours. If you have a site that sells organic flour, a link from a fishing tackle site isn’t going to help you much, if at all. And when it comes to giving out your own links, be careful here as well. If you link to a lot of sites that are or could be penalized, you could be hurting yourself by association. If you sell text links, check out every site that buys from you to make sure you’re not endorsing spam, porn, or other content that search engines frown upon.

Make use of Yahoo Site Explorer to see how many pages are indexed and to track the inbound links to your site. The first screen shot shows the results of the analysis of one site. As you can see, there are 503 pages on the site, and 5,838 inlinks, each of which you can explore further. To maximize crawling of your site and indexing of pages, publishing fresh, high quality content is the key.

Bing

There have been some case studies about what Bing looks at compared to Yahoo! and Google when ranking sites. When ranking for a keyword phrase, both Bing and Google look at the title tag 100% of the time. Prominence is given a little more weight with Bing than with Google, while Google favors link density and link prominence more than Bing. Bing evaluates H1 tags, while Google does not, and Google considers meta keywords and description while Bing does not. What that all boils down to with Bing is that having an older domain and having inbound links from sites that include the primary keyword in their title tags (another way of saying relevant inbound links) are keys to optimizing for Bing. Like optimizing for the other major search engines, link building should be a regular, steady part of your SEO effort.

With Bing, it’s easier to compete for broad terms. With Bing, keyword searches result in Quick Tabs that offer variations on the parent keyword. This has the effect of bringing to the surface websites that rank for those keyword combinations. The goal is for content-rich sites to convert better than sites with less relevant content. The multi-threaded SERP design brings up more pages associated with the primary keywords than would come up with a single-thread SERP list. Also, Bing takes away duplicate results from categorized result lists. This allows lower ranked pages to be shown in the categorized results.

The Bing screen shot shows the results for a search on “video cameras.” To the left is a column of subcategories. Results from those subcategories are listed below the main search results. While there are some differences to SEO for Bing, the relatively new search engine isn’t a game changer when it comes to SEO.

Google

It sometimes seems as if SEO is synonymous with “SEO for Google,” since Google is the top search engine. And it also seems that when it comes to SEO for Google, a lot of the conventional wisdom has to do with not displeasing the Google search engine gods by doing things like cloaking, buying links, etc.

The positive steps toward SEO with Google include keywords in content and in tags, good inbound links, good outbound links (to a lesser extent), site age, and top level domain (with .gov, .edu, and .org getting the most props).  Negative factors included all-image or Flash content, affiliate sites with little content, keyword stuffing, and stealing content from other sites. It isn’t so much that Google wants to seek out an destroy sites that buy links, but they want the sites with actual relevant, fresh content to have a shot at the top, and with some sites trying to game the system and get there dishonestly, Google has to find a way to deal with these sites without hurting the good sites.

In fact, Google wants users to report sites that are trying to cheat to get to the top of the search engines. On the screen shot, you can see a copy of the form found at https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport?pli=1 for reporting deceptive practices. You have to be signed in to your Google account to use this, by the way. They want to get away from anonymous spam reports.

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If you’ve read this blog for any length of time, you might be scratching your head and saying, “What?”

We’ve come down hard on link exchanges for the purpose of building your Google PageRank or search engine standing, and there’s good reason for it. It started out as a way to cheat to get to the top. You give some links, and you get some back. It sounds harmless, and when done “organically” it’s not just harmless, it’s a great way to boost your position in the search engine rank pages (SERPs). Say you run a blog about motorcycle gear and you’ve been at it for awhile, so you’ve built up some history. You might find some of the site you wish would link to you (but that may never know you exist) and simply ask if they would link to your site. Quite often the answer is “yes.” Most legitimate websites have enough good will that they’ll give a promising newcomer a little help.

However, in between the link farms, which are created solely to increase back links regardless of relevancy or reputation, and doing it the old fashioned way by asking sites to link to you, there are some programs that walk a middle path. They may have a legitimate website where site owners can categorize their site and find other sites that are about the same (or nearly the same) topic. For example, such a site might have a category for cooking blogs and another category for political blogs, another for sites on antique book appraising, and a bunch more categories.

The idea is that each day you’ll go to your category or one that’s closely related, look at several sites, and click a button that gives that site some link love by placing a link to it. And every day a bunch of other sites in your niche will do the same thing and hopefully leave you some back links in exchange.

Is this “cheating”? Will search engines penalize you for this?

It’s hard to say.

In the screen shot you can see part of Google’s Webmaster guidelines that kind of / sort of address this. Clearly, exchanging links for the sake of links regardless of relevancy or quality is not good. Google will penalize your site for this.

On the other hand, it says that “link schemes” can damage your standing and include among “link schemes”

Excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging (“Link to me and I’ll link to you.”)

The important word in that statement is “excessive.” How do you define “excessive”?

One way that link exchanges may seem excessive has less to do with their sheer numbers and more to do with their relevancy. If you run a site about organic gardening and exchange links with a couple of, ahem, “adult entertainment” blogs, you’re doing much more harm than good.

If, however, you participate in a link exchange with a relevant category and you find a few sites that you wouldn’t have found otherwise, that are good fits for your site as far as relevancy and quality, then there’s no real problem. If you had found those sites organically, you probably would have asked for links from them anyway. You just had a little help finding them.

Look at it this way: If Google gave no influence to back links, either good or bad, or if Google didn’t exist, would you link to those sites and ask for links to yours? Or alternatively, would you link to those sites even if you had no idea if they would link to you? If the answer is yes, then you’re probably OK.

If you run a site and you have, say three hours a day you devote to research and / or link building (I wish!) then you probably shouldn’t devote more than one of those hours to participating in a targeted link exchange. Spend the other two working on other off-page optimization like searching out new sites to evaluate and possibly ask for back links. That way you won’t risk an explosion in link numbers that would tip off the search engine gods and make them think you’re up to some illegitimate link-swapping.

When you find a relevant site that you really like, and you read it and are convinced it would be a good back link to have, asking directly for that back link means a lot more than the three or four links you might get on an “I’ll link to you if you link to me” site. For one thing, it’s great to get that vote of confidence when someone likes your site enough to ask for a link. The first time some cool site contacts you to ask for a back link is a milestone of sorts.

And another thing to consider is this: how many high quality sites do you know of that have link exchange “badges” – particularly above the fold – that indicate their participation in link exchange sites? Not many, I’d bet. While they’re not exactly signs of desperation, they show exactly what you’re up to, and indicate that maybe you can’t get back links any other way. Fair? Of course not. But that’s the reality you have to deal with.

Link farms and paid link exchanges really will harm your site, no question. Targeted link exchange programs where you give and ask for links based on relevancy and perceived quality can be OK, as long as you don’t depend “excessively” on these sites for links.

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Some people have the idea that the best domain name is the most generic, but that’s not always the case. In most cases, a domain name tied to your brand is better. Think about it. If you’re searching for a certain brand of organic pet food, a domain name matching that brand is going to be more intuitive to you than simply organicpetfood.com (which, as of this writing, is available). The name that you use to advertise your products is almost always the best name for your domain. People who don’t search will try this first in their browser, and if it matches, they’ll almost certainly remember it.

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Link building is still one of the most important factors in your search engine results page (SERP) rankings and in your Google PageRank and will be from the foreseeable future. Links are still the fundamental connectors on the web, and legitimate links are still a great way to judge importance of a site and just how trustworthy a site is. Google’s search algorithm has learned to devalue purchased or traded links and emphasizing trusted, genuine links. And when those links are further bolstered by the vintage of the domain, user data, and other factors that are hard to fake, that’s when SERP rankings rise.

15 Effective Link Building Methods

Here are 15 great ways to build up the kind of links that will increase your PageRank and your SERP position.

1. People love to link to lists. People like to Digg lists. So include lists. They have an air of authority, and they’re fairly easy to write in many contexts. If the top 10 how-tos have been done to death in your opinion, why not list the top 10 myths about your area of expertise?
2. Speaking of lists, you could create a list of top 10 gurus or authority sites. Sometimes this even results in the guru giving you a back link. Cool.
3. You’ve heard it before, but it bears repeating until everyone gets it: write good content that is easy to understand, is spelled correctly, and is free of grammatical mistakes.
4. Give your site an understandable privacy policy and “about” section. This makes your site appear trustworthy, as does a mug shot of yourself. If you need help creating a privacy policy, the Better Business Bureau has easy to follow templates at http://www.bbbonline.org/Privacy/sample_privacy.asp
5. Consider using a pay-per-click ad campaign. It will get relevant traffic to your site, and regardless of how people find your site, if they like it they’ll at least come back, and may well link to you.
6. Syndicate articles at ezinearticles, eHow, GoArticles, and similar sites. Syndicate a press release and send it to some reasonably influential bloggers and journalists. But make sure that it’s a press release that’s actually about something newsworthy, or it will go straight to the circular file. If you track who picks up your press releases you can contact them directly to offer exclusive news.
7. Link to sites in the news in your niche. To find them, do a Google news search on your niche or keywords, as you can see in the screen shot for news searches on 401k investing.
8. Build local (geographical) links by joining the Better Business Bureau, asking for a link from the local chamber of commerce, or submitting your link to relevant government offices.
9. Answer (or ask) questions on Yahoo! Answers or Google Groups and provide links to resources that are relevant.
10. Create a Squidoo lens and link to expert documents and popular tools in your niche. You can also create a link back to your site.
11. If you participate in any forums, check which ones allow you to leave signature links or profile links. Don’t do this without asking first, or you’ll incur the entire forum’s wrath. But a high number of forums do allow signature links or profile links.
12. Write relevant product reviews or product lists on Amazon, mentioning your background in the niche and including a link in your reviewer profile, and review products on sites like ePinions.
13. If you really think you can keep it regularly updated with fresh content, start a blog, link to other blogs, and comment on other blogs. Also list it in some of the better blog directories, like bestoftheweb.org (http://blogs.botw.org/).
14. If you can afford $25 or $50 in prize money, hold a contest. Contests attract links and are a cheap form of advertising.
15. Use your face-to-face relationships to create linking relationships. Trade conferences are great places to find and talk to industry leaders, politicians, and the occasional celebrity. Sometimes the cost of a one-day registration can pay for itself in traction you’ll get from interviews and pictures.

What NOT to do

And for good measure, here’s another link: 5 really bad ways to get links.

1. Buy links. Once Google realizes what you’ve done, they’ll ban you, as will the other search engines. You’ll have to claw your way back into their good graces over a fairly long period of time to get indexed again.
2. Swap links. While not quite as blatantly dishonest as buying links, you’re still getting together with others to squeeze link juice from a stone. You’ll at least get penalized and at worst get de-listed by the search engines.
3. Spam every forum you can find with links, regardless of whether they allow signature links. The few links you get this way will not make up for the bad karma you sow by doing this.
4. Follow as many people as you’re allowed to on Twitter and flood the place with tweets about every tiny thing you can come up with all day long. Anyone dumb enough to follow you back will quickly realize their mistake.
5. Set up a fake “survey” site about what the best product is in your niche. Then, using a different IP address, write “reviews” rating your product the highest and containing links to your awesome site where you sell your awesome product.

You can’t get away from link building when it comes to getting traffic, moving upward in the SERP listings and increasing your PageRank. But don’t try to take the easy way out. The work you put in getting links legitimately will be well worth it over the long term, while ill-gotten links will sabotage your efforts very quickly.

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Statistics from early 2009 claimed that iPhone users accounted for some two-thirds of all mobile browsers. Now, while that particular statistic has been questioned and debated, there is little doubt about the effect of the iPhone on mobile browsing. The advent of the Google Android phone will only make mobile web surfing more mainstream than it already is. When it comes to optimizing your web content for Google Mobile Search, there are a number of things you can do.

Some people say that you should make a mobile version of your regular website, while other say that you should optimize your existing site for mobile browsing. But whether it’s your normal site optimized for mobile, or a new mobile version of your site, there are steps that anyone wanting to rank high in mobile search results should do.

Step one is to make sure that your website is mobile compliant. This means that your pages are formatted for people browsing the web with their phones. Mobile browsing implies a lack of time to complete a search. Perhaps instead of mobile “browsing,” the term should be something more like mobile “hunting.” But since mobile users are also short on screen space, the pages should be designed to cater to this reality. Do you know what your site looks like on a mobile web platform? If not, do a mobile search to see. You’ll notice that a lot of your site’s goodies are unavailable. But this makes some choices all the more obvious.

• The most important information on your site should be at the top.
• Your site needs to be easily navigable from a mobile platform.
• Font sizes need to be usable
• Your page should look attractive on a mobile phone browser screen.

If these things don’t check out, then you need to make some changes to get your site ready for what many experts see as the coming tsunami of mobile searching.

Why should you go to the trouble? The current industries seeing the most growth in mobile searches are business, entertainment, and travel. According to the Mobile Optimization Association, mobile searchers tend to be young, high income professionals with promising careers, or, to put it more bluntly, people with more disposable income than usual.

Web pages for mobile browsing are created in XHTML or WML. They must be W3C compliant. W3C stands for “World Wide Web Consortium” and sets guidelines about how a web page should be structured. They publish best practice design principles for webmasters. Without going into the nuts and bolts of getting your site to be W3C compliant, you should know that there is a W3C Code Validator at http://validator.w3.org/ that anyone can use to ensure that your site renders on all the major browsers and platforms in a similar manner.

Before deciding exactly how to optimize your site for mobile, there are a few things to know about the people who use mobile browsers. First of all, they tend to use the same search engine on their mobile device as they use on their PC. Even though there are 234 million wireless subscribers in the U.S., only 10% use mobile search (which is still 23 million people). Adoption rates of mobile browsing are much higher in Europe. Finally, mobile searchers are goal-oriented: they want to get the info and get out. They don’t tend to browse or surf.

A few general practices for optimizing your site are:

• Keep your content brief
• Use brief, custom titles
• For mobile stats, check out MMetrics.com
• Mobile sites need to be as simple as possible to ensure compatibility among all mobile browser software.

There are two main opinions when it comes to optimizing your site for Google Mobile: 1) Optimize your existing site; and 2) Create a new mobile-only site. Both approaches have their advantages and disadvantages, which we’ll go into next.

Optimization of an Existing Site

If you want to optimize your existing site, make sure that in mobile search your pages are independent of device. Search results on mobile devices use a different data set than web browsers do.

Use external CSS style sheets because they limit how much code has to be downloaded and are helpful in scaling up or down for different screen sizes. You can have a separate style sheet for hand held devices.

Use text links rather than images. Images may not download at all and will increase page loading times. Here are a few do’s and don’ts for optimizing an existing site for mobile search.

• Put navigation buttons below content. People don’t like having to scroll down every time a page loads.
• Don’t use flash or frames on your pages. They’ll either be unsupported by mobile browsers, or they’ll slow everything down.
• Avoid pop-ups
• Advertise your site as mobile compatible and get links from directories and mobile sites
• Put the prefix tel: before a phone number in a link so that the mobile device can call it with one click
• Put your business into your Google Local index so it will automatically be listed in Google Voice Local Search.
• Since most users don’t scroll on mobile browsers, ranking in the top three results is a very big deal, so do what you can to optimize your site in the result listings
• Google allows you to submit a separate XML sitemap for mobile. It’s a good idea.
• Optimize for mobile ASAP to get into the results early on. One report says that a search for “McDonalds” on Google mobile has a mobile-friendly page from the BBC as the top result.

Creating a Mobile-Only Site

The argument for doing this is that mobile users are goal oriented rather than simply browsing. Some sites have taken to using a subdomain approach rather than using a separate domain like .mobi. That would give your mobile site a name like mobile.yourdomainname.com. It allows you to retain the “brand” of the top level domain rather than having to rebuild branding for a new domain name. Here are some tips for optimizing a mobile-only version of your site.

• Information should be three clicks or less from the home page.
• Organize navigation logically for mobile users: place likely popular buttons first, using text links. Put navigation buttons underneath content to keep users from having to scroll each time they click a new page.
• Make word links short to keep them from taking up too much valuable screen space.
• Have a sitemap for your mobile-only page.
• Use optimized heading tags, just like with your standard web pages.
• Test and validate your mobile site using simulators like Skweezer and validators like .Mobi Validator or W3C Mobile Web Validator.
• Have a link-building campaign specifically for your mobile-only website.
• Have social book marking and tagging functions on your mobile site.
• Use the tel: prefix in phone number links so users can call the phone number in one click.

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The relationship between targeted traffic and search engine ranking page (SERP) position shows that search engine optimization, or SEO, treads a fine line between being an art and being a science. Obviously there are specific algorithms that are used to rank sites for a given search query, but finding out exactly how they work is shrouded in mystery.

Even without, say, Google giving up how its search engine ranking is determined, every time there is a new factor taken into account by an algorithm, SEO researchers are pretty quick to learn in general what that new factor is, and less scrupulous site owners are ready to pounce with less than honest ways to try and game the system.

One fairly recent example is back links. Once it became general knowledge that search engine ranking and Google PageRank took back links into account, “link farms” and sites where you could buy links sprung up like so many mushrooms after a rainy spell. It was then Google’s turn to ferret out sites using these techniques and either de-list them or drop their rank significantly.

It’s like an arms race: as soon as people figure out and exploit some “new” wrinkle in SERP generation, the search engines have to find a way to stamp dishonest practices out. Otherwise, the search engines aren’t worth much to people doing real searches. This arms race continues because making it onto the first page of search results is good, making it “above the fold” (in the upper 700 or so pixel rows) is better, and ranking number one is best.

In 2006, some AOL search engine ranking data was leaked, and SEO researchers pounced. The analysis showed that the number one position brings with it a 47% average click through rate. Positions two, three, and four have click through rates of 13%, 9%, and 7%. Clearly, bringing your ranking up from third or fourth to first makes an enormous difference in a site’s traffic and its bottom line if it is a commercial site.

Of course, these figures are only approximations, but they do seem to hold water. People notice great differences between their statistics between the top rankings. Anecdotal evidence suggests that going from the #2 to the #1 spot can increase traffic by 100% or better. Dropping from #1 to #2 corresponds to a 30% to 50% drop in search volume.

As you move downward through the first SERP, the rate of decline of click throughs falls, and one interesting quirk that could be an artifact is that the number 10 position gets a slightly higher rate of click throughs than the number 9 position. Some speculate that users will be more likely to glance at the last listing while scrolling down to suggest searches or page navigation buttons. Once you move off the first SERP you’re close to being invisible. For all but the very highest volume queries, the non first SERP listings will generally offer no benefit to site owners except in unusual situations.

A factor in your SERP position is the quality of your site’s meta data. To ensure that your web pages get the best shot at appearing high in the search engine results, you need to give some thought to the meta data in your web pages. Meta data is data describing other data. For your web page, meta data includes things like the page title, keywords, and description.

In Google, the display of a “snippet” of your site will be longer, the longer the query is leading to the site. In other words, a detailed query that hits your site will sometimes show a three line snippet rather than the traditional two line snippet. The main reason this makes a difference is that it can in some cases limit the results shown “above the fold” to the top three results rather than four.

As you can see in the accompanying screen shot, a search on “chloe light gray leather riding boots” results in a long snippet for the top result, though the others in the top ten are still short snippets.

A good snippet can improve click through rates, and you can be sure that if extended snippets cause only three listings to show above the fold, then position in the top three results becomes even more important. In other words, yes, people are too lazy to scroll down in many cases.

Now, while the extended snippets come from actual content of the page it refers to, meta data is used in other cases. A well-optimized page has a title containing the target keyword phrase, and the keyword phrase from the title (with slight variations) should be made of phrases most used to find your page in the SERPs. Putting all the title keywords into the meta description will maximize the number of times your meta description is shown as your snippet. If the meta description contains all of the keywords from the user’s search phrase, it will be used as the search snippet for your page.

The meta description should also contain, if possible, a call to action that will make the user want to click on through to your site, and the description should be accurate so that the user doesn’t jump right back to the SERP from your site. A well optimized meta description, title, and a URL that is rich in keywords can all work together to boost your click through rate even if your site is ranked third or fourth rather than first on the SERP.

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In August 2008 Google launched its tool called Google Insights for Search. It’s like Google Trends on steroids. There are many new features designed with advertisers and marketing professionals in mind to help them (and anyone else who is interested, such as the average website owner) understand search behavior.

Google Trends displays how frequently a search term is queried in relation to the total search volume throughout all regions of the world in different languages. Google Trends produces a graph where the horizontal axis shows a simple timeline (which goes back to 2004), and the vertical axis is how often a term gets searched for devided by the total number of searches worldwide. It also produces popularity broken down by location and language.

Google Insights is a more sophisticated tool to help people gauge interest in relevant search terms. For example, Google Insights can help you figure out which messages go over best. Suppose you make high-end espresso machines. You can use Google Insights to determine whether your advertising should highlight money savings over coffee shop coffee, taste test results, or performance and features. Google Insights can also be used to determine seasonal variations in search behavior and to help advertisers and marketing professionals create more effective brand associations.

As just a quick example, typing the search terms “espresso,” “home espresso machine,” and “gourmet coffee” in the category “Food & Drink” for 2009 yields the data you can see in the first screen shot. when you look at the graph of “Growth Relative to the Food & Drink Category” you can see that it takes a big jump in December that is most likely due to Christmas shopping. Looking at the terms by region, you can see that Greece, Netherlands, and Germany are the regions that searched most on “espresso.” The only blip at all for the term “gourmet coffee” comes from the United States, and it’s very small.

But you can also learn that the top three searches of related terms are “coffee espresso,” “espresso machine,” and “cafe espresso.” The top three rising searches are “espresso on line” (popular in Italy), “espresso apparaten” (tops in Netherlands), and “cowgirl espresso” (the most popular in the U.S.). With this information I could zero in on Greece, Italy, and Netherlands and try to get to the heart of the popularity of the search terms there.

Researching With Google Insights For Search

You are not limited to Google web searches. You can also analyze results from Google News, Product Search, and Image Search. You can break the data down even further from there. For example, you could look at hot Google News searches over the past week, month, or quarter. Queries can be broken down by region into individual metropolitan areas. This is a tool that news journalists find helpful in gauging interest levels in different subjects among their readership base.

One researcher gauged the interest of the U.S. college basketball tournament known as “March Madness” for a period of one week during March 2009. The results showed that interest was highest in the states of Kentudky, Iowa, and Kansas. In 2010, journalists could gauge popularity of search terms related to the World Cup in South Africa in various regions around the world. In a nutshell, what Google Insights does is help anyone who is interested (webmaster, ad agency, small business owner, academic researcher, or otherwise interested party) measure interest in search terms relative to their particular area of research.

Suppose, for example, you have a seasonal business, perhaps a surf shop in Torquay, Australia. While you know that your peak business will occur in January through March, maybe you want to know when people start querying about surfing holidays in Australia. If you plug “surfing Australia” and “surfing holidays Australia,” you’ll discover that with the exception of 2004, there are peaks of interest at the beginning and end of each year as one might expect. This can be seen in the second screen shot.

But scroll down further and you can see that the rising searches include “rip curl australia,” “asp surfing australia,” and “surfing in australia.” Further probing shows that Victoria is the state with the most searches, and Melbourne is the city with the most searches on “rip curl australia.” So as the theoretical owner of a Torquay surf shop, I may decide to pitch my advertising especially aggressively in Melbourne.

You can use Google Insights to flesh out keyword ideas and perhaps tweak any Adwords Campaigns you’re running. You can download the results to a spreadsheet for convenience. To download data to spreadsheets you will have to sign into your Google account. Google Insights is available in 39 languages, and will soon add a forecasting feature that will be available for some queries. An Animated map function will allow Google Insights users to see how interest changes with time and location.

Google Insights is a flexible enough tool that users can think of countless ways to use it. Beyond just expanding your keyword lists or looking at economic trends, you can use it for things like satisfying your curiosity about why some other site ranks higher in the search engines than yours. Even historians of the post-2004 era will find a wealth of information about how search queries evolve over time and across world regions.

Small business owners, ad agencies, and marketing specialists can use Google Insights to compare brands in real time over real markets. If there is a clear indication that a particular ad campaign is working well in a particular region or city, they can more accurately target offline advertising and even promotional events. Research using Google Keyword Tool has shown that search volume estimates are reasonably accurate, particularly in terms of relative value. That means that you can have a healthy amount of trust in the results you get from using Google Insights.

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caffeine roll out planned for 2010

The Google Caffeine sandbox has been switched off today, replaced by this message.

We appreciate all the feedback from people who searched on our Caffeine sandbox.

Based on the success we’ve seen, we believe Caffeine is ready for a larger audience. Soon we will activate Caffeine more widely, beginning with one data center. This sandbox is no longer necessary and has been retired, but we appreciate the testing and positive input that webmasters and publishers have given.
Thank you – Google

So it looks like Google is finally rolling out the Caffeine updates into its live search, with the holiday season approaching Google has put webmasters and SEO’s mind at ease by deciding not to roll out the changes until January 2010, as confirmed by Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s webspam team on his blog today.

Some key comments from his post regarding Google Caffeine;

1. I know that webmasters can get anxious around this time of year, so I wanted to reassure site owners that the full Caffeine roll out will happen after the holidays. Caffeine will go live at one data center so that we can continue to collect data and improve the technology, but I don’t expect Caffeine to go live at additional data centers until after the holidays are over.
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