2010 is looking to be a whirlwind of a year for online marketing. With the internet appearing on more devices, as well as more types of devices, than ever before, businesses have and expanding variety of mediums to promote their business with. As always, there will be a select few that lead the pack by drawing hungry traffic to their websites like a pack of stampeding Spanish bulls. The following is a list of people and services to watch that I believe will make a tremendous impact in the next 12 months.

The Cheezburger Network (& founder Ben Huh)

If you have ever seen those cute images of cats with funny captions (like the one above) on the internet, chances are you’ve seen Ben’s work. Ben Huh has almost singlehandedly taken fragments of online culture and organized them into digital cash cows. Owning popular sites like icanhascheezburger and FAILBlog, Ben is able to forecast the types of online humor that people respond to. Following what The Cheezburger Network is up to gives online marketers the edge when deciding what types of content will be popular on their own sites and what will inevitably “#FAIL”.

Reason to watch: Capable of making just about anything with traffic profitable.

Google Webmaster Central Blog

If I had made this list last year this blog would have made the cut then as well. The Google Webmaster Central Blog is by far the best place for beginners to start leading about making websites “search engine friendly”. This blog is also where Google officially announces any news or changes that they might make to their core search service, which quite frankly, happens very frequently. Also, you might want to check out the Google Webmaster Central YouTube channel for instructional videos as well.

Reason to watch: Most reliable SEO information for beginners.

SEOMOZ

CEO (and SEO) Rand Fishkin has been doing an excellent job at providing search marketers some of the best advice and tools on Search Engine Optimization. The blog at SEOMOZ features some of the most solid advice around and also features a wide selection of articles written by guest writers. Look to Rand in 2010 as we learn how to leverage the latest changes in real-time search and how to manipulate from them.

Reason to watch: Best SEO blog.

The Oatmeal (aka Matthew Inman)

This SEOMOZ veteran has basically taught us a masters class on what it means to create viral media in the last couple months. The comics an quizzes found on The Oatmeal have been a popular featured item on the news site Digg as well as twitter and the rest of the blogsphere. Although the content may be juvenile and ofter crude in nature with posts like “6 Reasons Bacon is Better Than True Love” you can bet that Inman will make the masses laugh out loud while wasting time at work.

Reason to watch: Linkbait Expert.

Twitter

Despite all of the hype that we have been hearing over the past year or so around twitter, expect to hear more of it this year. 2009 was the year of fruition and widespread adoption of Facebook. Everyone and their grandmother is on Facebook now (mine is and she’s 71). Expect to see the same thing happen for twitter this year. What does that mean for us? Expect to see more companies using it as a marketing tool. This means designing and setting up accounts, initiating and monitoring communications, reputation management, content creation and delivery, and much more. Anything that is of any importance or interest appears on twitter before anywhere else. It is a better form of consumer communication than just about anything else currently.

Reason to watch: It’s “the nervous system” of the internet.

So these are 5 of my major rescources to watch and utilize in the next year. If you are interested in what didn’t make the list or how to utilize these resources, feel free to follow me on twitter or contact us by email.

1. Bing Webmaster Center

The first problem that webmasters usually have with new sites is getting them indexed in the first place. When you submit a site to Bing it can often be slow to index it at first. Often, only part of the site will be in Bing’s index at first. This can be terribly detrimental to a site’s success if a critical launch date is a priority. Luckily, Bing’s webmaster center has an area where users can submit their own XML sitemap (more info here). This allows Bing to crawl a website more quickly and thoroughly.

For example, MTCutters, who sells High Speed Steel Tool Bits, came up #1 for their targeted phrease  ”Line Bore Measuring Tools” in Google the day after launch but not in the first page for Bing. With Bing Webmaster Center we were able to upload a sitemap and see it indexed the next day.

2. Utilize Bing Maps

In case you haven’t checked up Bing maps lately, Bing has been “Stealing The Crown” from Google when it comes to proving an online map service. Their new map beta is most impressive and we can expect them to take market share here if Google doesn’t do something quick.  Make sure that if your website has a physical address that it is listed on Bing Maps. All that this entails is typing in you business name and state into the search bar and see if it comes up.

3. Target Long Tail Opportunities

Bing makes it a little easier to be found using long tail keywords because of it’s “Related Searches” feature. Bing tries to help it’s users narrow down what they are looking for by suggesting more specific phrases that they might be looking for.

For example, Tape Man Blue, an online distributor of Blue painters tape, who was doing 100% of sales from Google and direct traffic. After we looked at the phrases that Bing was suggesting, we saw a 6% increase in sales from Bing within 2 weeks and allows us to diversify traffic for this online retailer.

4. Check Your Outlinks

This is actually a lesser known trick in the SEO world. By using the search operator “linkfromdomain” on bing, we can see all of the pages that a given site links to. By typing “linkfromdomain:envoca.com” into the search bar on Bing (Bing is the only search engine that supports this) we can see the quality and relevancy of sites that we are linking to. This is important for quality control purposes because it is quite common for sites to become hacked or spammed in such a way that they link to “bad neighborhoods” on the internet which will almost always make your site rank lower.

Also, if your site is having difficulty ranking for a specific subject or keyword, use this tool to make sure that the sites you are linking to contain that same subject or keyword. Search engines often judge a sites context by whom it associates with.

5. Tweet it

Bing and Google are currently racing to be the first and best at the “Real-Time Search” game. Bing is trying to establish itself as the engine that indexes social networks like Twitter and Facebook the quickest. One trick we often use to get a new page quickly indexed on bing is to post a link to it on twitter (see the image at right). Because Bing is clamoring to quickly index our tweets, they are also indexing links just as fast.

If you have any questions about the information above or optimizing a site for Bing in general, feel free to email us your question or post in the comments section below. We will be glad to answer any questions you might have.

One of the more crucial factors in getting a site to rank well on search engines that is often overlooked by webmaster is the process of

Not to say that a site can rank for a keyword solely based on how many links it has, content is still the #1 factor in determining what keywords a site will show up for in search results. However, the main purpose of acquiring links to a site is to make it rank higher in the field in which it is already established. This is often referred to as link authority or Google pagerank.

How Links Affect Pagerank

Google’s pagerank measurement tool is a feature embedded in the popular Google toolbar which rates a site’s authority on a scale of 1 to 10. There have been many attempts by people outside the Googleplex to determine just exactly how many links one needs in order to achieve a certain pagerank. Below is a table that illustrates an estimation of how many links you might need to achieve a certain pagerank.

By looking at the chart at left we can see that in order to achieve a pagerank of 5, a site would (in theory) need 555 links from sites with a pagerank of 3 or as few as 3 links from sites with a pagerank of 6. Thus we can conclude that not only is it good for a site to have a large quantity of links, but that it is also helpful if the sites linking are of a high pagerank themselves.

Aside from that, search engines are also concerned that sites are receiving links from a variety of sources. For example, if a Real Estate website has 100 links pointing to it that are all from twitter profiles, it might appear that a spammer is at work trying to promote the site. However, if a competing Real Estate site has 10 links pointing to it from sources such as a chamber of commerce website, an associate’s real estate blog, a home finder directory, etc… it will always rank higher than the site with 100 spammy links all from the same source.

Link Diversity

SEO guru Rand Fishkin from SEOMOZ gave an excellent presentation this week on the importance of link diversity and how it affects your site.

Here at envoca, we make it a top priority to make our client’s sites appear as authoritative and trustworthy as possible so that they can rank high in search results. One of the services we provide is “SEO overhauls” for existing websites that need to be revamped in order to generate more traffic from Google.  If you would like to know what we can do to make your site get more search traffic feel free to contact us by email or give us a call.

It seems that Bing was the first to release a product to the public capturing the concept of “social search” by offering the website BingTweets.com which offers a mashup of Bing search results alongside what people are saying on twitter. Then, this past week, Bing officially announced that it would be partnering with both Facebook and Twitter to provide search results followed by Google making a similar announcement quickly thereafter.

With both Google and Bing gunning to be the first at implementing social networks into the core of their search algorithms, we can expect to see major changes in the way sites rank when people search for them. Without a doubt this has the potential to be the biggest game changer in online marketing in over a decade.

To find out more about Google’s entry to the social search arena, search guru Matt Cutts explains below how Google’s new experimental social search feature works.

“Why do I need SEO?” is a question that we at Envoca seem to hear a lot these days. Search engines like Google and Bing are making it easier and easier for normal people to get their sites listed so why should anyone hire a Search Engine Optimizer?

The truth is that while getting listed on search engines is easier than in the past, getting found by potential customers is harder than ever. The basic truth is that the more people that start to market themselves online the competition there is. As this happens, you site gets pushed down the list of millions of results that Google returns when people search for your product or service. Ever wonder who all of those sites belong to? People that haven’t invested the time and money in genuine SEO services.

Many people simply think that they can buy a book or read a blog on “How to Get Your Site to Rank #1 on Google” and suddenly their site will get tons of traffic. This could not be further from the truth. Saying that “Anyone Can Do SEO!” is not an entirely inaccurate term. It’s kind of like saying, “Anyone can rebuild an airplane engine.” or, “Anyone can be an astronaut.” or better even, “Anyone can lose 50 lbs in 2 week guaranteed!”. While none of those statements are entirely inconceivable, they are all fairly misleading. Some sources will even tell you that all you have to do is insert a secret line of code containing keyword into all of your pages and you will immediately see results.

Real Search Engine Optimization

The truth of the matter is that real agency’s that offer SEO services have to do a large variety of tasks to optimize a site to rank well. These tasks involve extensive competitive research, a variety of modifications to the actual website in question, as well as implementing many external features completely outside of the website itself.

Any good search engine marketer will be happy to give you a run-through of the process step-by-step, just as any good auto mechanic will be happy to tell you exactly what he is repairing and why. If you have any specific questions on what your site might need to rank better on Google feel free to give us a call at 888-301-9525 or email us.

Inconsistency Leads to Fragmentation

This is the most common error we see where inconsistency has lead to fragmentation for companies because sometimes they add “inc.” to their name or change their address from suite #123 to ste. 123. These differences water down your brand where Google is getting better at this, it still takes time to merge nuances. Look at the example below.

Change in business name, phone number and address are creating different listings, if merged together, this listing would be much more powerful with the combined feedback score, website citations. Until your local business is standardized, this fragmentation will continue to negatively affect your online local presence.

The process we have developed and has worked for our client is the following 6 week process.

The first step in this process is to claim existing business through the three major search
engines, Google, Yahoo and MSN local, verify the information and fill in the profile to be as complete as possible ensuring that all of your business information, specifically business name, address, and phone number are correct and consistent for each location. Get listed in Google’s Local Business Center.

The second step is to take that standardized information and submit it following data providers and data pushers. Submitting your data to multiple locations will only help increasing the number of citations you have for your business.

Here are the 3 major  data provider to consider.

InfoUSA – To get listed with InfoUSA and other huge databases, you must post your business name to Universal Business Listing. Submission is starts at $30 a year. It is our experience that you should not have Universal Business Listings syndicate to Google or Yahoo for you, because—well we can talk about that in another blog post, just opt out of that and submit to the search engines manually and optimize your site separately.

Data is due by the 5th of each month to be pushed out by the 8th.

Localeze – Basic submission to Localeze is free if the business is on a very tight, however we recommend upgrading to the enhanced listings for $100/year per location. Deadline for changes is the 15th for any updates or new listings you want to promote.

Best of the Web – A directory, BOTW features categories (much like the Yahoo! Directory, in which you should also get listed, and which also costs something to join). The cost for submission is $99.95 a year or a $299.95 one-time charge. Use the “Submit Site” link to add your site to the directory.

Once you claim your local business listings and submit your business to the data providers you can watch your information propagate, but may take 4 weeks before you continue onto step 3.

Step 3 in the process is to manually claim these businesses on the various Internet Yellow pages
and local social networks so that you can begin to interact with the traffic from those sites. Tracking your traffic tightly will uncover sites which convert visitors into leads and many of the local internet yellow pages and local social networks have advertising programs which can additional boost your prominence on the local sites.

Just those 3 steps are going to take you a long way in the local search verification of syndication and taking advantage of these automated sources will save businesses hours and hours of time and help keep the business information consistent.

I have to admit at first I was not excited about Bing. At a glance it appeared to be yet another attempt to design a search engine that grabs more of the market from namely Google and Yahoo!. With Microsoft’s $100 million advertising budget it we noticed that Bing was getting a fair amount more attention then previous versions to the point that clients were actually contacting us to make sure their sites are ‘optimized for Bing’.

In the first few weeks I was committed to doing the basics on bing, the obligatory checking our site on Bing, watching market share. I really drug my feet on this. I was sure this was a trend that would not stay around.

The main reason I was not exited was we have no idea if the market for Bing will continue to grow. Until it does I cannot see a scenario where tailoring and optimizing a site for Bing would be worthwhile when we can get more impact and ROI with established tested techniques.

Second, my experience and indeed most people’s experience with MSN’s past dabbling in search engines; has been frustrating at best. I would need someone to show me the Bing has something that other search engines to not.

In contrast to my traditional views, Garrett Gillas, our on-site optimization expert, couldn’t be more thrilled with Bing. He is such an enthusiast, he started BingSEOguide.com and has ‘Bing Tones’ installed on his phone – what a nerd.

In response to my concerns I learn that Bing is already getting a tremendous amount of traffic, The metrics vary wildly but it looks like it holds a strong position at #3 with the top search players and has several events which are being talked about which could boost the market share even more.

1) Discussions of merging with Yahoo! The implications of this could be outstanding and really force us to take a look at how our search budget is divided.
2) Launch of Microsoft’s new operating system. Historically we have seen a boost in traffic when new operating systems are shipped and I am sure 2010 will be no exception.
3) Talk of launching new Microsoft Stores.

Garrett also reminded me that Bing was pioneering a feature that would give users an independent reason to use them, instead of just being good enough that users didn’t seek out a better replacement. That feature of course is real time search. We will talk about this in more detail, but basically the idea would be that Bing would integrate real time results from Twitter and news sites. This new search model could have a huge impact on publicizing information and in the way we approach search engine optimization.

In light of this information, what’s a search engine optimization company do?
Any good search engine optimization company will be following Bing closely, but at this point, we are not changing our established strategy to do special optimization for Bing.

Citations

1. Crum, Chris. “More Bing Numbers Than You Can Shake a Stick at,” WebProNews, June 13, 2009.

Ever since we started seeing Blended search, the practice in which search engines display videos, images, news stories, maps, and other types of results alongside their standard search results, has become increasingly common on major search engines. And optimizing video content to take advantage of blended search is by far the easiest way to get a first-page organic ranking on Google.

Last month Nate Elliot at Forrester published an interesting blog post titled, “The Easiest Way to a First-Page Ranking on Google.” In his post, Nate discloses the results of a study/experiment that they conducted whereby a series of popular keyword searches were run on the major search engines and the number of video results that were displayed were compared to that of regular HTML documents and organic results (text results).

When looking specifically at result sets on Google, they found the following:

On the keywords for which Google offers video results, we found an average of 16,000 videos vying to appear on results pages containing an average of 1.5 video results-giving each video about an 11,000-to-1 chance of making it onto the first page of results. By comparison, there were an average of 4.7 million text pages competing for a place on results pages with an average of just 9.4 text results-giving each text page about a 500,000-to-1 chance of appearing on the first page of results. What it means: on the keywords for which Google offers video results, any given video in the index stands about a 50 times better chance of appearing on the first page of results than any given text page in the index. Those are some attractive odds.

The problem with using this number as a sales tool is that it suggests that a site owner can create video of any quality, slap it on YouTube and it will magically be on the top of Google – sorry its just not that simple.

First, I have never seen a video make it onto the first page of Google before it has 400 views. even for relatively uncompetitive keywords. So while we and many development companies have a tool that can simulate views, the implication is that the video has be to be good enough that it will be viewed widely. That can be as simple as creating a script with unique content focused tightly on your topic. We have found that informative videos with a small plug for the sponsoring company will get the most views and click throughs to the websites.

Second, videos like websites have to be optimized. Dozens of online tutorials have been written on this subject, but at the very least videos you upload should have :

1. Have a file name that includes your keywords. Less than 20% of publishers, or even marketers, insert keywords into the file names of the videos on their site, and even fewer use more advanced tactics like writing keyword-rich captions and annotations, or creating online video libraries.
2. Add a descriptive title to your video. This is a suggestion from the mouth of Google , “When users search for a topic on Google Video, they will find your content easier if you include the subject of your video in your title. For example, a video title such as “SS-59 submarine” may work better for a video than simply including “submarine.”
3. Provide a clear description of your video. We recommend that your “metadata” field clearly describes the content of your video, while also highlighting any characteristics that distinguish your content from your competition. The metadata you enter will appear above your video when users play it on Google Video. If your metadata attracts users’ attention they will more likely watch the entire video, and visit your website.
4. Include a brief call to action with a link back to your website.
5. A little known secret we found was when we hired a scopist to create a transcript and then added closed captioning we saw a boost in our placement. According to Google Video their Googlebots actually read through closed caption files.  For more on putting captions on Google Video hosted videos see Reel SEO.

Once the video is optimized and uploaded there are several additional features which effect where the video displays within search engines. These factors include:

• A modest amount of views. I rarely see videos with less then 400 views shown on the first page of results.
• Viewer feedback. Some marketers say the more the better I haven’t really found that to be the case, but a handful of comments does have a positive effect on how your video is viewed.
• Ratings. Similar to feedback video with ratings have a slight advantage over clips with no feedback or ratings.

The moral of this post is, if you’re not optimizing your videos, you should start video can be a way to leverage existing content and give you another method to have your message available for your clients.