Few things here.  Keep in mind these factors are just my opinions based on my experience as a web designer. 

To start off, alot of people hear the website lingo of "optimization".  "You have to optimize your site for the keywords you want to rank on Google for..."  Just because your website is optimized does not by any means mean that you will rank high on Google.  You could have the most optimized website on the web and rank pretty low on the search engines.  Ranking high on search engines requires a number of things. 

First and foremost, in my opinion, is inbound links to your site.  Google counts up the number of links coming to your site and says, "Oh since this site has 10,000 links to it, it must be a pretty important site, we will put them up there at #1 or #2."  How do you get inbound links? There are numerous methods, but in my opinion the best way to get true inbound links is by providing quality information that people want to read.  It doesn't matter whether it's helpful information, gossip, news, etc.  If people find it helpful or interesting, they might post a link on their site linking to yours.  In my opinion, a blog is a great way to do this.  But, the blog has to be incorporated into your site.  It can't be a website of it's own because the inbound links would go to some other domain and Google wouldn't see them as one in the same.  Now, there are ways to get links to your sites that Google frowns upon such as what Google calls "link farms".  Link farms are websites that charge you to put a link on their website or other websites.  If Google catches you buying links, your website could be blacklisted and not appear in the search engines.

One side note about links is the quality of links that you get linking to your site.  Google actually rates your website believe it or not.  Your website has a rating of 3/10.  So if a higher rated website lets say a 9/10, link to your website, that link is worth more to Google than a link that's lets say 4/10.  No one knows the exact math, but 1 link with a rating of 9 or 10 may be worth 50 links of 3 or 4 quality.  Know what I mean?

Second, is traffic, which can come from any source... social networking sites, adwords, email marketing, etc.  Why traffic though? Because the more traffic you get, the more people that get to see your site, the more chances you have at getting people to link to your site and show others.  And the obvious reason, the more traffic, the more money you make.  But making money really doesn't contribute to SEO in any way heh.  So all in all, traffic helps everything, SEO & sales.  Because if Google sees a site that's getting 100,000 hits a month and there is a site that only has 1,000 hits ranked above it, Google will say, "Oh, well obviously this site is more important because it has 99,000 more visitors per month so we will bump them ahead of the other site." 

Third, is optimization.  When you do get ranked after getting enough links and traffic, you want to be ranked for the right keywords.  That's where optimization comes in.  You optimize your site so that you are ranking for the right keywords that you want to rank for.  This is a catch 22 though, the more people that search for a keyword on Google, the more competitive it is to climb the rankings.  So you have to really decide what keywords you really want to fight for.

One exception to these SEO factors is domain names.  If you go out to Google and type in "Cincinnati Golf Apparel" and there is a website called exactly that, "cincinnatigolfapparel.com" then typically you will see that site ranked higher than anything else regardless of links, traffic, and optimization.  That's not always the case, but you will see it majority of the time.

Hope this helps!

In my blogging experiences, I have learned quite a few things that I decided to share.

1.) You have to provide value to your visitors.  This is in my opinion, the most important concept to keep in mind when writing on your blog.  If there is no value, no one will come back or visit in the first place.  This means, don't just go on rants about your products or services.  If you are writing on your golf store blog, post tips for golfers, post videos for golfers, post recent golf news.  Whatever it is that will grab a person's attention and make them want to come back.  But the bottom line is, provide value.

2.) Don't forget the importance of blog titles and tags.  I didn't realize how big of a deal these really were.  But you want to cater your blog titles towards what you think a person would type into Google if they were trying to find this kind of information.  Why? Because that's one huge source of traffic, it's as simple as that.  As far as tags go, whatever tag you use the most Google will likely recognize as what your blog is mainly about.  However, I would not list tags on your posts that aren't really related to the content of your post.  You will just frustrate your visitors and they may leave or not come back.

3.) Learn what ping services are.  Ping services are basically how you notify the blog directories that you have posted a new post on your blog. Most of the major blogs have a section dedicated to ping services in the blog admin section.  Make sure the major ones are included, Google, Yahoo, etc. Why? Another source of traffic to your site. I have posted a list below of some of the ping services we use.  Feel free to use any of them.

4.) Lastly, I just wanted to point that Google if not already, probably will incorporate ranking criteria based on how frequently you update your site.  I mean this obviously won't be the only factor in their huge equation, but it will be important.  So if you are posting a blog entry once every few days, your site could rank higher...

Hope those helped!

Chris

First off, some may not even know what canonicalization is when referring to domains.  Canonicalization is to refer to a webpage consistantly by one URL.  For instance, http://www.cincinnatiwebdesign.com and http://cincinnatiwebdesign.com are two different URL's that lead to the same place.  So what's the correct URL or canonicalization to use for SEO?

The answer to that question is, it doesn't really matter which you use, but it's important that you pick one and use it CONSISTANTLY.  I'll explain why this is important.  Let's say you have 10 links pointing to http://www.cincinnatiwebdesign.com and 10 other links pointing to http://cincinnatiwebdesign.com.  Google sees that as 2 different URL's with 10 links each.  And of course, depending a little on Pagerank, a person with 20 links to 1 URL will rank higher than a person with 10 links.  Got it?

One last note, let's say you choose to have the www.yourdomain as the primary URL.  Well, you can redirect the http://yourdomain.com to http://www.yourdomain.com and Google will eventually see that as 1 URL and not 2, but this does take time depending on how fast Google indexes your site.

Lastly, remember also when linking to your homepage from within your own website to use http://www.yourdomain.com and NOT http://www.yourdomain.com/index.html.  Google will see those as 2 domains again and you will not get that internal link counted for your URL that you are using as your primary.

Hope that helps! Happy coding

Let's just start out by saying even I underestimated the power of links.

Do yourself a favor, what keyword do you want to be #1 on? Go out to Google or Yahoo and type in your keyword to find out where you are in comparison to everyone else.  Let's say you come back as #10 for "New York Hot Dogs" and you want to be #1.  Now, look at the #1 person on Google and copy that sites web address.  Now go to http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search;_ylt=A0oG7zeeyStMVEoBHfnbl8kF?p=&y=Explore+URL&fr=sfp and type in "link:" + their site address.  So for instance it would look like "link:http://www.yourdomainhere.com" and hit enter. (make sure http is included)  Look at the number of results in the left hand column.  Now, hit back, and type in the URL of your web address.  More times than not, the person that is #1 will have more links coming into their site.  The only exception I have found is when the actual domain name is the keyword.  For instance if there was a website named www.newyorkhotdogs.com it will probably rank pretty high regardless of the amount of links.

Now, another thing to note is that if you have 5,000 incoming links to your site and the person that's ranked 1st on Google only has 4,000, there may be a few reasons for this.  First, perhaps your content is not optimized for the keyword you are trying to rank on.  Second, maybe the person that is 1st is linked by higher quality sites.  For instance if the New York Hot Dog #1 website has a link coming from The Wall Street Journal and you have a link coming from Joe Blow newspaper, Google will rank the Wall Street Journal linked site higher because it's a higher quality site.  You can tell what Google thinks of a site by looking at the "PageRank" google assigns to each page.  If you download the Google toolbar you can easily see this.  Google ranks a site from 1 to 10, 10 being the highest, 1 the lowest.  So for instance a site like the Wall Street Journal is probably ranked above a 5 and the Joe Blow newspaper would be ranked a 1 or 2.  No one knows the exact math behind it, but what I am saying is that having 4,000 links that are ranked a 6 is a lot better than having 5,000 links ranked a 2.  Get my drift?

More to come soon.  Next I'll cover linking strategies.

High rankings in Google search results are coveted by nearly all webmasters, but Google is constantly making changes to keep them on their toes. Actually, Google is said to make roughly one change per day.

One recent change in particular, however, has gotten some webmasters riled up. It's being referred to as "Mayday," and some claim it is costing them money.

Ex-Googler Vanessa Fox, who spoke on a panel with current Googler Matt Cutts at Google I/O last week, quotes Cutts as saying, "this is an algorithmic change in Google, looking for higher quality sites to surface for long tail queries. It went through vigorous testing and isn’t going to be rolled back."

She also says Google told her that it was a rankings change, as opposed to a crawling/indexing change. This, she says, "seems to imply that sites getting less traffic still have their pages indexed, but some of those pages are no longer ranking as highly as before."

"This change seems to have primarily impacted very large sites with 'item' pages that don't have many individual links into them, might be several clicks from the home page, and may not have substantial unique and value-added content on them," says Fox. "For instance, ecommerce sites often have this structure. The individual product pages are unlikely to attract external links and the majority of the content may be imported from a manufacturer database. Of course, as with any change that results in a traffic hit for some sites, other sites experience the opposite."

This is not the first we've heard about "Mayday". There's been discussion about it around the SEO community all month, but this is the first we've seen it really addressed by Google.

Most savvy webmasters have learned by now that they can't rely on Google rankings alone to drive traffic. This is why social media opportunities presented by networks like Facebook and Twitter have become so attractive. The way people search and obtain information is becoming more and more diversified, not only spread out around different applications (largely due to increased mobile usage), but also within search engines themselves.

For example, Google recently rolled out its big SERP redesign, which gives users a great deal more options for filtering their results (or at least puts these options in the spotlight). The importance of ranking in a completely natural, organic search has become greatly diluted over time. Don't get me wrong, it's still nice, but it's getting harder to rely on as well as less critical for discovery.

Source: http://www.webpronews.com/

1. Use Keywords

This seems obvious, but use keywords in not only your content, but in your titles, and your updates. If you're writing an article, you have to consider what people are going to include in their updates if they share it on a social network, whether this be Facebook, Twitter, or anything else.

More often than not, they are going to include the title. If the right keywords are in the title, then those keywords are also more likely to appear in any ensuing tweets, Facebook updates, etc. If someone searches for those keywords, they will be more likely to find your content in a real-time search.

The same goes for your own Tweets/status updates. Even if you are not sharing an article, if you want your update to be found, use relevant keywords. Again, obvious, but true.

2. Talk About Timely Events

Simply mentioning events that are current will put you directly into the results for any searches having to do with that topic, provided the right keywords are in play. This is a method that could and (surely is) being exploited by spammers, but that doesn't mean you can't provide legitimate conversation and simply put yourself on more people's radars, without throwing links at them every time.

3. Have a Lot of Followers

If you have a lot of followers or friends on social networks, or even just readers of your blog, you are going to get more people sharing your content. The more people sharing your content, the more impressions of your content will be making their way into real time searches.

There is no easy way to instantly get a bunch of legitimate readers/followers. It will take some promotion. Provide useful content that people will link to and it will spread virally. Provide clear ways for them to follow you (like links to Facebook pages and Twitter accounts on your blog).

4. Promote Conversation

Whether on your blog or on a social network, spark conversations. Talk about topics that people are interested in. This is tied to number 2. The more conversations you are involved with, the more retweets (and equivalents on other networks) you are likely to get. And again, this means more impressions in real times searches.

5. Include Calls to Engagement

These are buttons you can put on articles that show the amount of retweets/diggs that article has. They kind of act as a meter for engagement.

These buttons are certainly not all-encompassing. They only represent the conversation on 2 channels, and not the web in general. I'm sure there are other buttons that can be used in addition.

More importantly though, they provide a "call to action" to share the content. People can digg or retweet a story with a simple click, and you're one step closer to being found in somebody's real-time search.

Wrapping Up

Real-time search is much more basic (at least so far) than say, Google Search. You're not ranking for relevancy. Really, you could hardly call it ranking it all. It's about visibility. That means, you have to get people talking about your content/updates.

Social media by nature is viral. Real-time search is nothing more than putting things in chronological order. You have to keep people talking to stay relevant to "right now."

Information from: http://www.webpronews.com

Microsoft has made deals with both Facebook and Twitter, which will see Bing feature updates from both networks in real-time search efforts. This means that social media just became an even bigger part of search engine marketing, particularly with Google also on board with Twitter and rumored to be talking to Facebook.

Twitter Search only shows you results displayed chronologically, which has really always seemed to be the essence of real-time search to me anyway. But Bing has a "Best Match" option, which attempts to give certain tweets more weight than others.

Bing weighs tweets by follower counts. "If someone has a lot of followers, his/her Tweet may get ranked higher," says Bing. "If a tweet is exactly the same as other Tweets, it will get ranked lower."

This is of course the earliest stage for any kind of algorithm Bing may have in place for its Twitter search feature. The feature is still in beta after all. It will be interesting to see if Microsoft makes more details available for how it ranks tweets moving forward. This could be a whole new nut to crack for SEOs. Consider that Bing results will be taking over for Yahoo if the Microsoft-Yahoo deal goes through, plus there is still Google's Twitter results to worry about.

Yet another reason to join in the social networking game.

Here are 5 tips to help you get found in real-time searches.

I was just reading an article that was talking about how Google does not use the "keywords" meta tag in its web search ranking. There are a lot of people out there that still put a lot of stock into this, but they are basically wasting their time.

Just because Google ignores the "keywords" meta tag, that doesn't mean it ignores all meta tags. In fact, there are several that the search engines definitely use. For one, Google sometimes uses the "description" meta tag as the text for search results snippets. But even then, the "description" meta tag isn't used to influence ranking.

This doesn't mean that Keywords on your site are useless, this just means the actual meta tag keyword is useless.  If you are not familiar with html code, meta tags sit behind the scenes and aren't even viewable to customers unless they view the page source.  Keywords in your content where customers can read them are still very important.  As I like to say, content is king.  It has to be in your content before it can be on Google.  So think about what people will type into Google and make sure those phrases are in your content.

So do yourself a favor and stop wasting time with adding in "Keywords" to the meta tags.

~Corey