In my travels today I came across a few articles I just had to share.

• How Social Networking Could Kill Web Search as We Know It
  Source: Popular Mechanics. April 16th, 2008.

  Excerpt: Such a prediction probably seems ridiculous when Google has a market capitalization five times that of Ford and General Motors combined. After all, Google has developed a superfast, highly efficient method of making sense of the most overwhelming mass of data mankind has ever created. What’s more…” read on
  

• 20 (Rare) Questions for Google Search Guru Udi Manber
  Source Popular Mechanics. April 16th, 2008.This is an excellent interview and it even covers a response (as shown below) from Guru to the concept that social media will kill search.

  Excerpt: (Interviewer) “While we’re talking on the subject of personalization, a colleague of mine said that search as you know it is falling to the wayside and changing dramatically as social networking comes into play—trending toward this MySpace-Facebook model where people look to their friends or their community as the take-off point. Do you see that as a bona fide trend? And, if so, does search become less important?” (Reponse from Guru) “Search has always been about people. It’s not an abstract thing. It’s not a formula. It’s about getting people what they need. The art of ranking is one of taking lots of signals and putting them together. Signals from...” read on

I hope you enjoy those two articles. It seems this week is a Google-fest over here at StepForth, what with our debut of “How to Optimize for Google, Part 1 of 3” just yesterday on our SEO blog and in our weekly web marketing newsletter. Oh well, the fact of the matter is Google is a monster company and the more light we can shed on the monster the less anyone has to fear it. Well, unless you taunt the monster… and I am recommending you don’t.

Today I was kindly offered the opportunity to participate in Webcology on WebmasterRadio.fm with Jim Hedger and Dave Davies. The discussion we had was all about what it takes to keep rankings high in search engine results after successfully attaining them. Here is a link to the episode on the Webcology page where our show will be archived and to Jim’s article on Keeping it Up and here are a few tips from me on the essentials of maintaining rankings:

1. Keep adding content to your website in the form of a blog or informational pages and where appropriate provide relevant textual links to the pages you want to maintain rankings. Check out our comprehensive tutorial on how to create, market and manage your own blog.
2. If you write articles for your blog(s) try submitting them to article sites like ezinearticles.com. If your article includes links to your website these external sites will provide link juice to your content and help you maintain visibility.
3. PRWeb is a great tool for telling the world about your company’s accomplishments; see this video interview on link building and publicity with PR Web. By submitting a carefully written press release to PRWeb you can (depending on the service you choose) attain a large number of incoming links. These links will not necessarily provide long term impact because they tend to devalue after a week or two but inevitably you will get additional long-term links out of the process. By the way, if you don’t know of a topic to create a blog about consider creating one that just offers company news releases – there is nothing wrong with that.
4. Submit your blog’s RSS feed to the multitude of RSS aggregation sites (news sites) online. These sites will help pump up the visibility of the content you write. This is particularly important if you rarely have time to write new content for your blog because it will give you the most bang for your effort.
5. Keep in tune with the changes at search engines by monitoring sites like Search Engine Guide, Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Land, and of course StepForth’s SEO News Blog. If you hear of a pending or current algorithmic update on a key search engine find out all you can about it and prepare your website to bear the change – if necessary. If you find you aren’t sure what to do in response to an algorithmic update just contact a reputable SEO and get their opinion. You can find reputable SEOs in many places but to be sure you know who you are asking do a little digging to find out just how long they have been practicing SEO.

These are just a few tips but they cover the main points that everyone should know about maintaining rankings. If you have any SEO questions just use our Free SEO Questions submission form.

At the exact same time (both at 10:50 am PST) Google announced it’s spider (Googlebot) was now indexing a variety of forms Matt Cutts jumped in on his blog with his perspective where raised a great point that hadn’t occured to me. Essentially this new spider function will allow the indexing of form-based drop-down menus which previously were road blocks to search engine spiders. This form of navigation is unfortunately used quite often as primary navigation by web site owners so this recent addition to Googlebot’s super spider powers may mean huge rank increases for such websites.

That said, according to Google this doesn’t always mean this content will be indexed… which begs the question whether form navigation is still a good idea to rely on. At this point I hardly think it is now an acceptable navigational tactic. After all the other search engines first have to jump on board and implement a similar capability or else form navigation will alienate them entirely.

Thanks Matt for your ever wise post. Oh and did you all know that Matt Cutts and I are best friends forever? (BFF)

I am in disbelief. Less than 40 minutes ago the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog announced that Google can now fill out web forms and spider the resulting content. Previously this was not only not done by search engines but it was well known that such content would be useless since it wouldn’t ‘necessarily’ be formatted for the eyes of searchers. Apparently Google is now throwing this concept to the wind. Read more…

In this article two important marketing strategies are reviewed: search engine optimization and social media.

Just as the spokes of a wheel are held together and strengthened by its hub so too is the planning for a successful marketing campaign. The greater the integrity and quality of the hub, the better are the chances that the spokes will stay true and provide far reaching performance.

In this series we have looked at several ‘spokes’ that contribute to a winning web marketing strategy. Part 1 looked at several of these building blocks: marketing budget and timelines, market research, and competitor analysis while Part 2 discussed the importance of keyword research, focus on achievable phrases, creating relevant textual content and search friendly website design. A future article will deal with the remaining spokes: link building, blogs, newsletters, and website analytics. Read more…

We are proud to announce that StepForth is once again rated one of the best blogs on the net by the BIGLIST of Search Marketing Blogs. Created and managed by respected web marketer Lee Odden of TopRank the BIGLIST is a comprehensive list of the best marketing blogs online – at least it is now that we are on it

All joking aside the StepForth team is proud to be recognized for their writing efforts in the search marketing space and plan to continue delivering the best work we can – or not at all. And of course I would be remiss if I didn’t stress that the StepForth SEO News Blog is comprised of articles from more than just myself – our team rocks!

Here is the entry as it is shown on the BIGLIST:

StepForth SEO News Blog – (Welcome back!) Since 2003 the StepForth blog has covered a range of search marketing industry news and sets a great standard for SEM blog writing. Kudos to Ross Dunn for a great job.

If you haven’t subscribed to our blog feed yet or our weekly SEO newsletter then just check out the links below to see what all the hoopla is about!

Recession, recession, recession… I don’t know about you but I have had my fill of this doomsday word! It seems to me the panic caused by this word simply increases the chances of a recession occurring. Recessions, however, have a silver lining because they provide business owners with the opportunity to look long and hard at their expenses and this can provide valuable insight in strengthening the business long after a recession recedes. Some cut backs may become obvious such as eliminating frivolous office expenses and are a wise move but should business owners cut back on their web marketing? Lets look at the circumstances within web marketing where cutbacks may or may not make sense.

When You Should or Should Not Cut Back on Pay Per Click or Search Engine Optimization Campaigns
So what is unnecessary marketing? Logic dictates that any marketing that is not profitable is not worth keeping. That said, how certain are you that a particular form of marketing is not profitable? Perhaps the following questions and notes will help you decide Read more…

Over the past couple years it has been impossible to avoid the buzz about images and their increasing role in search; such as universal search which is becoming commonplace among the major search engines. But universal search is only the most prevalent news and only the baby-steps of a new format of search that is about to take over the Internet. Do I have your interest piqued? I will now lay the foundation of my statement to hopefully get you as excited as I am about this unstoppable search evolution.

Evidence 1) Photosynth
If you have any technology mavens as friends it is likely you saw this incredible video presented by Microsoft at the TED conference last year discussing Photosynth. To quote Microsoft Lab’s Photosynth home page this software

“takes a large collection of photos of a place or an object, analyzes them for similarities, and then displays the photos in a reconstructed three-dimensional space, showing you how each one relates to the next. In our collections, you can access gigabytes of photos in seconds, view a scene from nearly any angle, find similar photos with a single click, and zoom in to make the smallest detail as big as your monitor.” Read more…

With great joy the staff at StepForth want to welcome into this world Emma Marnie Van Achte, the newborn daughter of Scott Van Achte; our Senior SEO at StepForth and friend.

Emma was born March 03, 2008, 5:54pm, at 7lbs, 8oz

Congratulations Scott and Lyndsay! You have an absolutely gorgeous baby girl and we can’t wait to meet her and spoil her silly

Here are more pictures of Scott and Lyndsay’s long awaited day.

Lots of love from your
StepForth family.

1-800-GOOG-411 is now available in Canada! First, I must admit, this may very well have happened a while ago but if it did I must have missed the news; thanks to Garret Rogers at ZDNet for the heads up. Either way, it is cool and I haven’t heard of anyone in my circle of friends that uses it yet but they really should.

Here is an illustration on how Google’s free entirely voice-activated 411 service works:

Read more…