Good SEO is about a lot of things- you should make sure your website is well-designed to be easy to navigate (for humans and search engines), eliminate duplicate content, intelligently internally link, convince nice people to link to you, do smart keyword research, and make sure to actually use those keywords in your meta data, page titles, and URLs. But that’s all so…easy. Tasks like these might make up the definition of search engine optimization, but SEOs who are dedicated to the practice of SEO that only considers how to play search engines are the reason that so many people badmouth SEO. It doesn’t have to be that way. SEO, for someone who cares about the long-term fate of a website and the real value of that site, is a much more inclusive concept. And the beauty of thinking of SEO in this more expansive way is: it gives you more stuff to do. You’re not confined by the boundaries of “traditional SEO”, and you can be more innovative in getting yourself- or your clients- value from a website, and at giving more value to your visitors. Everyone is happy, and when everyone likes you better, you’re going to have more success online.

There are a lot of ways to consider the value you’re offering visitors now and improve upon it, and some of them are so simple that there’s really no excuse not to integrate them into your SEO strategy. If your site is all basic-SEO-optimized up and you’re thinking “what a great job I did”, then: too bad. You’ve got so far to go, but don’t worry: this is the fun part. You always have to keep in mind all of the SEO basics, but once your site is tidy, it’s time to look into making it cool. And this is how.

1. Give the people what they want

You surely have analytics data. If you don’t, you need to get some ASAP. Determine where people are entering your site, and with which keywords, and what they’re doing when they get there, and when they’re leaving. Analyzing this data is like a little treasure hunt. Who’s getting what they want? Who isn’t? Can you figure out what you’re not offering them? You can also use the questions people are asking when they contact you to form the basis of additional information you need to be providing.

Analytics, and your own visitors’ queries, are a great place to get ideas for:

Website Optimizer tests- Test the various value propositions you’re offering to your audience, and let them tell you what they want to see.

New content for current pages- Address the unanswered questions that come up frequently!

New pages- if you offer something and it’s not apparent to people that you offer it, that…is bad. This is one of the best ways to expand your reach into a whole new group of keywords you’ve never ranked for before, and increase your website’s usefulness for your visitors as well.

2. Ask the industry

No industry is static, and that’s why you can’t optimize a site once and say done. The pace of change will vary from industry to industry, but everywhere, new terminology, trends, news, advances, and scandals will occur. It’s going to happen, and you need to make sure you stay knowledgeable about it in order to update your keywords and content to stay relevant.

Talk to the client- If you’re working for a client website rather than your own industry, it’s important to touch base frequently about what’s going on, and how those occurrences can be integrated into your site content.

Add an industry events calendar to your site- Especially if you, or your client, attend events frequently, you can list industry events and mention your attendance, which is fantastic both because it tends to be easy to rank for conference and event names, exposing you to a large industry audience for branding purposes, and because it lets people know they can find you there for personal interaction.

Add an industry news section to your site- This is a great way, if you are not in the industry of the site you’re optimizing, to keep apprised of what’s going on and identify new areas for keyword and content targeting. It’s also useful, if you just write small summaries of each news item, as a way to integrate a variety of relevant industry terms onto your site.

3. Give people a chance to interact

Social media etc. etc. etc. – there are a ton of ways to interact with your audience now. Pick a social media platform or two that you can be dedicated to, let people tell you what they want, and be willing to respond by giving it to them or telling them why you have a better alternative.

4. Don’t forget your roots

Local SEO- If you’re a business with a local presence- whether you’re targeting a nationwide or worldwide audience or not- it’s usually silly to ignore your hometown business. They’re right there. Local SEO isn’t just the same as more widely-targeted SEO efforts, but it can be done in conjunction with them, and a lot of the things you can do- from opening a Google Local Business center account to integrating local keywords and an address on your site- are so straightforward it will probably cost you more to ignore them than execute them.

The SEO game is never over: there’s always a way to be better, and the key to long-term success is to keep reaching for it.

Google is retiring the Google Advertising Professionals (GAP) program, and replacing it with the new Google AdWords Certification program.

“We’ve had a lot of great feedback from agencies and today we’re announcing changes designed to offer them better training and more rigorous certification in AdWords proficiency, and to lower costs for those who help advertisers get the most out of AdWords,” says Penry Price, Vice President, Global Agency Development at Google. “We’re also making it easier for advertisers to find certified agency partners to work with them on digital advertising.”

Features of the new training program include:

- New training materials to help agencies better understand recent changes in search marketing and AdWords functionality, available via webinar series, learning center, or on-site training at Google

- More challenging certification exams to test practical application of knowledge and best practices (rather than simple recall of knowledge)

- Advanced-level exams to highlight competency in search, display, reporting and analysis

- A redesigned Certified Partner badge, which includes a “Click to Verify” element so advertisers can view the partner’s profile page for additional information.

Google has also launched Google Partner Search, which a directory that pairs advertisers with Certified Partners, as well as new AdWords API pricing.

How does Bill Gates inspire students to change the world? Tune in here to find out. Gates is kicking off a college tour today with a speech to students at UC Berkeley. He will talk about the big challenges facing the world today (poverty, health, energy, climate change) and what can be done to tackle them. The key is innovation in both the public and private sectors, using technology in smart ways, and changing people’s economic incentives.

Gates and his wife Melinda are spending much of their time and money on these issues through their foundation. But you don’t have to be a billionaire to try to make the world a better place to live. In partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, we are proud to present his speech in the live video below.

He begins with a rhetorical question: “Are the brightest minds working on the most important problems? Probably not.”

What’s the next big thing in social media? Is it Google Buzz? Is it Chat Roulette? Is it Foursquare? Is it Gowalla? Is it something you won’t hear about until tomorrow, next week, or next year? While it is certainly a good idea to be aware of trends, it’s also important for businesses not to get to fixated on them, and go rushing into things that may or may not make sense for them.

Shiny Object Syndrome

As 10e20 President Chris Winfield discussed with us at Search Engine Strategies last week, a lot of people get caught up in “shiny object syndrome”. This is essentially where businesses get caught up in the hype surrounding the latest service, trend, or fad, and feel like they have to be involved to stay relevant, and jump in because of that.

This is not the best way to go about things. “You should never get involved in something, just because you think you have to,” he said.

Winfield made a great point: think about if you had put a large amount of time and money into a Friendster strategy or an Orkut strategy, only to find that these networks would never offer you the benefits you could’ve received from using these resources on a Facebook strategy.

It’s important to consider your goals and think about what you need to measure in your social media efforts, from a business standpoint. “Not all companies should be measuring the same exact things,” notes Winfield.

Portability

Perhaps the best approach you can take is to have a relatively portable social media strategy. In other words, look for ways to engage with customers that don’t limit you to a particular service. That way, if they flock to a new one in the future, you can go along with minimal hassle. Maintain consistency in your brand’s persona and how you deal with customers, and you’ll probably find that this can be transported from one channel to another, despite technological adjustments that may need to be made to the strategy.

One good thing that businesses likely have to look forward to is a more open web, which will allow users of separate services to communicate with one another. Just yesterday, Cliqset and Status.net claimed to have implemented the first live example of the Salmon protocol, and for the first time ever, the users of two independent, public web entities are able to communicate with each other, without being on the same service as the person they are communicating with.

“This is a great demonstration of Cliqset’s larger vision of social networks being siteless, and we think it’s going to be the future of how all services interact and, more importantly, how users of these services interact,” Cliqset tells WebPronews. Major social media players are already heavily involved in similar initiatives.

Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other such sites are – in general, anyway – doing quite well on a global basis, according to new stats from Nielsen. Nielsen revealed this afternoon that people all over the world are dedicating a lot more time to social networks.

A report stated, “On average, global web users across 10 countries spent roughly five and a half hours on social networks in February 2010, up more than two hours from the same time last year.” Italians and Australians actually took the lead, too, beating the U.S. average of 6 hours and 3 minutes by 25 minutes and 22 minutes, respectively.

Then here are a couple more interesting findings: “Overall, the active unique audience to social networks grew nearly 30%, from 244.2M to 314.5M in the last year. In the U.S., the average active unique audience grew to 149.M from 115M in February 2009″ (which also works out to 30 percent).

Time Spent On Social Networks Up 60%

Facebook made Nielsen’s last points of comparison anything but close calls, though. It beat the other social networks by wide margins in terms of “% Reach of Active Social Users,” “Sessions per Person,” and “Time per Person.”

Facebook, then, would appear best positioned to find advertisers and generate revenue outside the U.S.

Although the “thud” wasn’t verified until this afternoon, it seems that an online giant fell a couple of days ago. According to new data from Hitwise, Facebook managed to beat Google in terms of visits between March 7th and March 13th, becoming the most visited website in the U.S. for the week.

The graph visible below makes the changeup pretty clear (blame the sloppy enlarged bit on us, not Hitwise). What’s more, it doesn’t look like Facebook’s going to relinquish its lead anytime soon.

Facebook Unseats Google As Most-Visited Site

Heather Dougherty explained, “The market share of visits to Facebook.com increased 185% last week as compared to the same week in 2009, while visits to Google.com increased 9% during the same time frame.”

Then here’s one more interesting fact, courtesy of Dougherty: “Together Facebook.com and Google.com accounted for 14% of all US Internet visits last week.”

Anyway, this development represents a major win for Facebook. The ability to represent the social network as the number one site should count for a lot as corporate representatives talk to advertisers and investors, and could result in a direct boost in revenue. A further snowball effect in terms of user interest might occur, too, since most people like to be part of something that’s popular.

How important is your domain name to you brand? Most online businesses would probably consider it to be quite important, and with good reason. Sometimes before searching, customers may simply opt to go to the “yourbrandhere.com” URL simply because it makes sense. Now, sometimes that URL is already taken, and for start-ups, that’s something to consider in itself.

As Monte Cahn, Founder and President of Moniker mentioned in a recent interview with WebProNews, it’s a good idea to make sure the domain name is available when coming up with a name for your brand, or at least make sure that you are able to acquire it. Products have their own brands, and this way of thinking can also be applied to them in many cases. Cahn notes that even the big companies make mistakes in this area. For example, you would expect Apple to own iPad.com, considering the huge announcement about the device the company made this year, but someone else has that domain.

Cahn also stresses the importance of covering your brand in terms of domain names. This means getting all variations possible. Get typos, different extensions and country codes, etc. Use 301 redirects on misspells of key brands (including singular/plural versions). However, when it comes to domain names for different products, he says it’s best to build sub-sites around those with their own content, which can help drive link juice, SEO value, and traffic.

Getting the .com that reflects your company name is not always possible, unfortunately. In these cases, it may serve you well to find a different aspect of your brand to center your domain around, but this will require a greater level of promotion of that URL than a simple companyname.com. For example, if there are unique key phrases within your company’s slogan, you may find such an opportunity there.

Domains should be easy to remember, not too long, easy to spell, relevant to your brand, and avoid complicating characters such as hyphens. I think one key to a successful domain name is simplicity, although there are always exceptions to the rule.

It’s been a pretty big week for Facebook. Not only is there a lot of talk about Facebook’s potential for becoming the top news source on the web, but the company celebrated its sixth birthday, is passing the 400 million user mark, and began rolling out some new design changes. In addition, the company is said to be rewriting its messaging feature and preparing to launch a webmail product, but first things first.

The Birthday and 400 Million Users

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg discussed it in a blog post last night. “Today we’re celebrating our sixth birthday, and this week there will be 400 million people on Facebook. Just one year ago we served less than half as many people, and thanks to you we’ve made great progress over the last year towards making the world more open and connected.”

“Facebook began six years ago today as a product that my roommates and I built to help people around us connect easily, share information and understand one another better.” he added. “We hoped Facebook would improve people’s lives in important ways. So it’s rewarding to see that as Facebook has grown, people around the world are using the service to share information about events big and small and to stay connected to everyone they care about.”

Facebook hosted a celebration and announced some releases at the Facebook headquarters last night. This was followed by a hackathon where Facebook staff stayed up all night coding and building new ideas for products.

Design Changes

Facebook announced some new changes to the design of its homepage. Users can find their newest notifications, requests, and messages in the top menu. When a user receives a notification, they will see a red bubble appear in the left-hand corner by the search bar. When the icon is clicked, a drop-down menu appears with the most recent notifications. The Home/Profile links are in the top-right corner with the Account menu, which includes privacy settings and the log out link.

Facebook Notifications

The menu on the left-hand side of the screen has been completely reworked. “The left menu has been organized to make it easier for you to communicate with and discover content from your friends. You can now access your messages and other core features all in one place, to the left of your News Feed,” says Facebook’s Jing Chen. “With the Photos dashboard you can browse recent photos of your friends, and the Events dashboard lists your upcoming events along with events your friends are attending. The Friends dashboard will help you find friends, see which of your friends have recently updated their profiles and filter your News Feed by Friend Lists you may have already created.”

Chat has also been made more prominent with a list of online friends displayed on the left. The new apps and games dashboards, which have been discussed lately, can be accessed from the menu as well. The dashboards feature personalized updates from the apps, and they have launched with new privacy settings.

The changes are still rolling out, so it’s possible that you do not have them yet, but you will soon enough.

The Webmail Product

Michael Arrington is reporting that a “source with knowledge of the product” says Facebook is launching a webmail product. If MySpace can do it, surely Facebook can too. It’s being referred to right now as “Project Titan”, although the name will likely change.

Facebook’s messages as they stand right now, lend to email notifications. When you check your email, you find that someone has sent you a message on Facebook. If Facebook gets you using its own email service, it’s cutting out the middle man, and that means…you guessed it – more time spent on Facebook.

Facebook As the Web’s Top News Source?

I’ve already written on this topic this week, but basically, the more time people spend on Facebook, the more convenient they may find it to simply get their news feeds there. If Facebook enters the email game, that’s only going to get people using Facebook that much more, and even open up yet another way for them to get their news on Facebook, through email newsletters and news alerts.

Update: Microsoft has announced some changes to its partnership with Facebook. Facebook will now be taking over its own display advertising, and will get a more feature-rich version of Bing search for its web search.

Have you seen possible Caffeine effects in use? Tell us about it.

Back before the holidays, Google made it a point to assure everybody that Caffeine would not be rolled out (except for at one data center) until after the holidays were over – January at the earliest. The reason for this was that Google didn’t want to shake everything up during a key time for businesses (they didn’t want a repeat of the Florida update).

The company let everyone know about its intentions at PubCon in November. In fact, a few days ago, Google’s Matt Cutts posted a video running through his presentation from that event on his blog. He also provided the slideshow. It covers much more than just Caffeine, but if you missed it, you may want to consider watching it anyway (Caffeine discussion starts at about 22:10 in the video and at slide 29 in the presentation).

“It’s a re-write of our indexing infrastructure. It’s taking the old way that we used to index things that we’d crawled around the web, and we’re replacing that with new architecture that’s fresh and that had been written to be more scalable, more flexible, [with] the ability to attach different types of data, and in the process of indexing, the ability to do more documents for a more comprehensive version of the web, and the ability to do it faster,” Cutts says of Caffeine.

But enough background. Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable points to a WebmasterWorld forum thread where administrator Tedster claimed to have seen Caffeine in action at a number of IP addresses. He wrote:

I’m seeing the Caffeine data-set being served via this set of IP addresses: 64.233.169.147, 64.233.169.105, 64.233.169.103, 64.233.169.104, 64.233.169.99,64.233.169.106

It seems to take 5 IP addresses to build the complete SERP, where in the past it often took only 3.

Schwartz also pointed to another member’s post (Whitenight), who said:

Well, just tripled checked with offices/employees in Texas, Colorado, and Indiana. All 5 “control” keywords/sites showed live Caffeine.

That member’s latest post says that the Caffeine Dataset is also on http://66.102.7.99 and http://66.102.7.104.

We don’t know for sure if this is all really Caffeine in action though. Google hasn’t commented on it, and has not made any announcements regarding Caffeine since what Matt said above. Some people don’t believe this is Caffeine at all. As Schwartz notes, we’ll have to wait for Google to say something.

Still, January is almost over, and Google said it would wait until after the holidays, specifically mentioning the month of January. It’s about time for this to be rolling out to some extent. Speed has been emphasized a significant amount in Caffeine discussion, and Cutts told us that page speed would likely become a ranking factor. Regardless of whether or not you are witnessing Caffeine in action yet, rest assured that it will be here sooner or later, and any edge you can give yourself in the meantime is for the good of your own site’s performance. Speed will not only supposedly help you in search going forward, but it just makes for a better user experience.

As you know full well, the search industry is constantly changing, and that means SEOs and businesses must adapt. This is always made abundantly clear at the change of each year as the previous year is reflected upon, and predictions about trends in the upcoming year are discussed. SEOs know that adaptation and ongoing education are crucial. The problem is that businesses don’t always understand just how much the search landscape actually does change. This can present a whole different set of challenges for both the small business and the professional SEO.

What are some SEO tactics you’ve had a hard time convincing clients to employ?

Searching for Profit founder Amanda Watlington recently discussed some arising trends in the search industry and how understanding the changing search landscape is of vital importance. One example of change is the possible inclusion of site speed as a ranking factor in Google. Matt Cutts dropped that bomb a couple months ago, and while many welcome it, a lot are dreading it.

For one, businesses and clients of SEOs simply may not be so eager to put forth the time and money required to make the necessary adjustments to their sites to optimize for speed, although it is clearly in the best interest of the customer’s experience anyway.

Another challenge, as Watlington mentions, is personalized search. Companies don’t always get that not everybody is necessarily going to see the same search results for any given query, and it can sometimes be difficult for SEOs to convince them that this is the case.

Although things appear to be looking up, budgets have been tight, and businesses are demanding better results for their bucks, but they are not always aware of the big picture, which is why it is up to the hired SEO professional to educate them as best they can, and for other businesses to educate themselves.

Luckily, there are plenty of industry resources freely available on the web. After all, you’ve probably read about the very tactics you have in mind there yourself. SEOs should find instances to back up their case to convince stubborn clients. Some of them are just hung up on outdated trends. Obviously this can make it hard to produce the results they are after.

“The evolution has been slow, and I don’t think we’ve helped it as much as we could,” Watlington says of companies’ understanding of SEO trends.

If you are the client of an SEO or a business trying to get things done yourself, don’t stay hung up on old tactics that might be outdated. At this point, these are some of the things you should keep in mind:

- Site Speed (it’s going to matter, so don’t ignore it…here are some things to consider)
- Personalized Search (Not everyone is going to see the same Google results)
- Universal Search (Showing up here requires attention to different indexes)
- Real-Tme Search (look for more evolution in this area)
- Changes in Local (there are frequently tweaks made by Google here)
- Some things do stay the same (things like reputable links will always be in style)
- Most importantly, stay informed (just keep up with the latest in industry developments)

As Watlington notes in the interview, metrics are very important, and there has been a great deal of focus on them in the industry in recent years. New metrics come about, just as new tools do. Metrics can help illustrate the bigger picture, custom-fit to a particular organizations goals.