Last Monday, Google officially launched its real-time search results, and in doing so became the first major Search Engine to include live, real-time search results on standard search results pages.  Live content and discussions from Google partners and social media sites, including Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed and more, will now be included in your search results.

You can read more about Google’s Real-Time Search Results here or watch the Google Real-Time Search Video below:

When a search triggers real-time results, they will be displayed under “Latest Results For [your search term]“.  Not every search will trigger the Real-Time results, but you can try it for yourself by going to Google Trends and clicking on one of the “Hot Topics”.

If you manage a Facebook Page, you are sitting on a powerful SEO opportunity, but you may be missing out on all that glorious organic search traffic supercharged by social networking.

Here is a summary of the 10 key SEO Strategies Every Facebook Page Owner Should Know:

You should read the full article at Inside Facebook, one of my favorite blogs and the leading source on everything Facebook.
Full article: 10 key SEO Strategies Every Facebook Page Owner Should Know

1. Pick the best name for your Facebook Page – don’t change it

2. Select the best URL for your Facebook Page

3. Use the “About” text box to place keyword-dense prose near the top of your Page

4. Use the “Info” tab to include more important keywords, text, and high priority links on your Page

5. Create “Static FBML” boxes and tabs to place lengthy content and more static links on your Page

6. Post direct links to your website (or other relevant sites) in your Page’s stream

7. Add photos with captions, events with descriptions, and a discussion forum

8. Get more inbound links to your Facebook Page from the web by posting links to your Page on all your websites

9. Get more intra-Facebook inbound links by getting more Facebook fans

10. Strengthen intra-Facebook reciprocal linking by getting fans to comment and like content in your stream

Implementing SEO for Facebook Pages is a simple strategy that could yield huge returns in the form of top rankings and increased organic traffic.  After reading the full article, review your own Facebook Page and consider areas where SEO is needed.

Q.  What is one of the best ways to supplement SEO?
A.  Paid Search

Q.  What is one of the most effective ways to learn/teach?
A.  Through music

If you are considering adding Paid Search to your search marketing arsenal, or if you currently manage paid search campaigns, you need to take a moment to hear what The SEO Rapper (AKA Poetic Prophet) has to say.   You probably won’t see him on MTV, but he’s well known in the SEO community.  He has some good stuff to say.  As for his rapping skills, I’ll let you be the judge.  Peep the flow…

“Paid Search 101″  – The SEO Rapper

By the SEO Rapper (AKA Charles Lewis, Chuck Lewis, Poetic Prophet)

Will Microsoft’s Bing succeed?  I think it is WAY too early to tell.  The real numbers will start coming in after the  dust settles from Microsoft’s staggering $100 million launch campaign.  After that tapers off, if Bing can hold its ground and metrics involving loyalty, search results pages, queries, etc. remain strong, Google may be forced to take Bing on head to head.

Contrary to what many SEO professionals have been blogging about, I do hope Microsoft succeeds in its quest for a viable search engine.  Diversity and competition in the search business is healthy, and will benefit both businesses and consumers.  It will help keep things fresh, and ensure that the major search engines are constantly innovating.  And from an SEO perspective, it would be fun to have another good search engine to play with!  Ultimately, the SEO business will benefit as well.

I’ve been focusing heavily on SEO for Bing, and what components are most heavily weighted in Bing’s algorithms.  Here are two simple tools that let you compare Bing Vs Google search results side-by-side:

1) General Bing VS Google comparison tool:
http://www.bing-vs-google.com/

2) Compare Bing VS Google search results in various European versions:

http://www.blackdog.ie/google-bing/

Comment on this post, and discuss your opinion of Bing compared to Google.

Also, follow me on Twitter @ChrisAburime.

• Is your content relevant to the web site or blog that you want to linking to you?
  • Don’t consider acquiring links from web sites or blogs containing content that isn’t relevant to the content on your web site or blog.
  • Relevancy is weighted heavily by search engines when analyzing inbound links and calculating link popularity. If the content isn’t relevant, the inbound link is quite useless.
  • Think about the user and proper organization of the web when seeking out sites or blogs for inbound link building. Is your web page or blog content relevant or closely complimentary to what the user is reading? If not, move along.

• Is your content unique and does it provide any value to visitors?
  • If your content isn’t unique or offer some kind of value, link popularity will be hard to come by. Make sure your content is original and provides something useful for the visitor.
    For example: Don’t just list your products. Tell me about how they are different than the other options, and how they will make my life easier.

• Are you empowering others to build link popularity for you (social link building)?
  • Think of the social nature of the web. If someone thinks your web site or blog contains something actually helpful, unique, relevant, interesting, different, etc. they will probably link to it or share it with others.
  • Add social bookmarking and sharing functionality to your pages and allow your visitors to build inbound link popularity for you! Free services like AddThis and ShareThis are a great place to start for beginners.

• Does the web site or blog linking to you use “nofollow” attributes (incorrently referred to as nofollow tags) for outgoing links?
  • Simply put, the nofollow attribute is used to tell search engines that a link should not influence the ranking of the target page and web site in any way.
  • Format used for links: <a href=”http://www.sample.com/target-page” rel=”nofollow”>This is a nofollow link</a>
  • If a site uses the nofollow attribute, it will be useless to you for helping build link popularity. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t seek out a link on this site if it is relevant. It just means that the benefit to your search engine ranking from that link in particular will be zero.
    
  • Commonly, blogs use nofollow in links from blog post comments.
  • Some sites use the nofollow attribute strategically for SEO purposes to sculpt PageRank and organize the flow of influence given by links. This is a strategy I may cover in future posts. How to find out if a site uses nofollow for outbound links:
    You can find out if a site uses this attribute by looking at a few pages on the site with outgoing links and viewing the page source code.
    1. in a browser, goto the “View” menu and select View Source)
    2. in the window containing your source code, goto the Edit menu and select “Find”
    3. in the find box enter “nofollow”
    4. look for the attribute in outbound links pointing to other web sites (not internal links pointing to pages on the same domain)
    5. If you find the attribute used in this format, <a href=”http://www.sample.com/target-page” rel=”nofollow”>This is a nofollow link</a>, the site uses the nofollow attribute

This is just a basic overview of some of the most important tips for building link popularity. There are many SEO strategies for effective link building, but high link popularity can be achieved with very little marketing or technical experience. Post a comment if you have any questions on this blog post. I’d love to discuss.

Check out this SEO video of a fantastic presentation / lecture on white hat SEO tips for blogs by Google’s head of Webspam, Matt Cutts.  For those of you who don’t know, white hat SEO (or whitehat SEO) is the term used to describe SEO best practices and SEO strategies that do not violate a search engine’s guidelines and policies.  For blogs, a simple way to ensure that your blog is using white hat SEO techniques is (1) write content for the reader first and the search engine second, and (2) make sure your blog and blog posts follow blogging SEO best practices (covered in this video).  Doing this will ensure that that your blog is indexed appropriately by search engines and not penalized in search engine results. 

During this 1 hour presentation, Matt Cutts speaks candidly, in a mid-sized auditorium, with an audience of bloggers from all walks of life.  Some are completely new to SEO and others are seasoned SEO experts.  Matt shares his own advice on SEO and blogging, and covers the most important issues regarding SEO for blogs focusing on how to use white hat SEO techniques to make your blog more search engine friendly.  He also cracks some superb, albeit geeky, jokes.

Check out Matt Cutts’ blog, and the PowerPoint he used during his lecture on White Hat SEO Tips for Bloggers if you want to follow along during the video.

This video was originally recorded by John Pozadzides @ onemansblog.com

This is just a basic SEO tutorial, and represents ONE way of optimizing internal links.  If you have a different link optimization strategy or have questions about this one, I invite you to comment on this post.  If you are looking for a complex, advanced SEO guide to link optimization, this post is not for you.

One of the most underutilized, yet highly impactful, SEO strategies is optimizing your internal links and site navigation.  An easy and effective way to do this is to use targeted keywords within the link text and navigation throughout a web site or blog.  Like so many SEO tactics, this simple improvement will make a big impact on your overall SEO efforts, and help boost your search engine rankings by enhancing search engine crawlability, sculpting page relevancy, and controlling content theming.  It is also a key factor in improving usability and accessibility, which is very important to search engines.

Search engines, like Google, place a lot of weight on the use of links and how pages relate to each other on the web.  Some consider links as one of the primary factors used by search engine algorithms to calculate relevancy and importance (and PageRank for Google).   By ensuring your internal links and navigation contain keyword focused text, you are giving search engines much more information to properly assign value to each page, as well as your web site or blog as a whole.  If you use images in your navigation, including keyword focused ALT attributes (or ALT tags as some SEO professionals and web designers incorrectly refer to them) will help to accomplish this as well.

Implementing SEO for keyword focused navigation and internal linking
So how do you start applying SEO to internal links and navigation?  As with any SEO improvement you make to your web site or blog, start with a clear goal in mind, and build an SEO strategy around that goal.  Think beyond the obvious reason behind dabbling in SEO (to increase search engine rankings).  For an internal linking strategy to be successful, focus on making your site’s navigation and internal links more accessible and intuitive.  Think about the keywords people may use to search for content on your page.  Do some keyword research using a tool like Keyword Discovery or Google AdWords Keyword Tool.  I’ll cover how to do effective keyword research in future posts.  

Start by building a short list of keywords (5-10 initially) for which you are trying to improve search engine rankings.  Once you are pleased with your list, begin navigating through your web site and identify pages on your site that contain content or topics related to those keywords.  Using your keyword list, match web pages on your site with keywords on your list.  Make sure the content on each page is highly relevant to the keyword(s) with which you have matched them.  NEVER use keywords that are not very relevant to the content on the page to which you are linking.  

I have created a brief SEO video tutorial on how to optimize internal text links & navigation using Microsoft Excel as a simple SEO tool.  If you don’t have Excel, any spreadsheet program will do.  See below for an example.  Keep in mind that this a basic SEO tutorial designed to get you started. 

Also, look for part 2 of SEO for internal links & navigation, which will focus on making sure your links are search engine friendly and your navigation is crawlable and visible to search engines.

I have been an SEO professional and educator for over a decade, and have successfully optimized everything from complex international web sites for Fortune 500 corporations to simple, local web sites for small businesses.   A common attitude among many of my clients, from CEOs to web designers, is that they don’t necessarily want to master SEO.  Most just want to know enough about search engine optimization to make smart, educated decisions when optimizing their web sites, or choosing an SEO firm, so that they can maintain and improve their search engine rankings without spending too much time or resources.  This allows them to focus on the business goals behind SEO and their other marketing initiatives.

SEO for the Average Joe is an SEO blog and educational resource for people who manage or own web sites and blogs, but are not necessarily SEO experts.   Whether you are an online marketing manager for a large company, a small business owner, a blogger, a seasoned web developer or designer, or the owner of a small web site, SEO for the Average Joe will give you practical, powerful knowledge that you can easily apply to see measurable results.

In the coming years, I hope to grow this blog to become one of the top educational resources for SEO tips & tools, SEO video tutorials & guides, and more.  Until then, this is just a good place for the “average Joe” to learn Search Engine Optimization from a simple and practical perspective.

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