According to a study by Portent, an internet marketing firm, Google is steadily decreasing the number of manipulative links it will tolerate before it downgrades a site. When Google first introduced Penguin, the algorithm would permit 80 percent of a site’s incoming links to be spammy before it took action; that number then dropped to 65 percent and then 50 percent by the end of 2012 (which is end range of the study).

To come up with the findings, Portent examined thousands of incoming links for 50 major websites, and the effect those links had on sites’ prominence in search listings.

If the findings are correct, the upshot is that companies will have to be even more cautious about search engine optimization (SEO) tactics that rely on external links. These links are one signal that Google uses to decide if a site is popular, which has led some companies to acquire non-organic links through trade, purchase or other means. In one famous example, JC Penney used SEO tricks to appear as the top search listing for a wide range of terms, including “bedding” and “area rugs” before Google took action.

In some cases, it may be unfair for a site to be punished for outside links — particularly, if they have control over the sites that are linking to them. To prevent this, Google offers a “disavow” tool that sites can use to indicate that they don’t want particular links to considered as part of their search score.

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Now, a handful of U.S. colleges are snapping up the program for their own students, to make sure that digital blemishes don’t discourage offers from potential employers.

In the last few months, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Rochester and Elon University bought the software for their seniors, in addition to the founders’ alma mater, which purchased the program for all of their students (previously they piloted the program with seniors).

College students are slowly waking up to the fact that searchable photos of themselves funneling beer or tweets that were clearly written under the influence aren’t going to help them get their first gig. But Mike Cahill, the head of career services at Syracuse University, said Brand Yourself helps students not only become more aware of the impression they make online, it can help them actually change their search results.

A more affordable approach to online reputation management

“It used to be that an error on your resume would put you in the do not consider pile,” he said. “Now, if you’re further along in the process, your online reputation [can put you there].”

According to a 2010 study from Microsoft and Cross Tab Marketing, 75 percent of human resources departments are required to do an online search before making a hire. And a study this year from Brand Yourself and Harris Interactive found that 42 percent of online U.S. adults that searched for a person online, did so before deciding to do business with them.

It’s hardly surprising that individuals’ online reputations affect their professional opportunities – and companies like Reputation.com and Integrity Defenders have been providing services for a while that promise to help individuals clean up their digital identity. But BrandYourself’s interesting difference is that instead of charging potentially thousands of dollars, it provides a Web-based program that lets people improve their own results through search engine optimization (SEO) — for about $10 a month.

“The software takes you through the process of making search results more friendly for your name,” said Ambron, BrandYourself’s CEO, and the SEO brains behind the operation.

What’s your ‘search score’?

To start, users can register for free and get their “search score” (or an assessment of the first page of results for their name). Then they can submit links that they want others to find online (i.e. their LinkedIn profile, About.me page, etc.), as well as receive specific recommendations for boosting the visibility of those links (such as connecting a personal website to profile pages or featuring your name more prominently on a site’s URL or page heading). The site lets users submit and receive recommendations for three links but to add more, they have to upgrade to the premium service. This week, the company also launched a Facebook game that lets people compare their search score to their friends’ on the social network because users were already sharing their scores online, Ambron said.

Web publishers and others who do business on the internet may be familiar with the basics of SEO, but Brand Yourself is bringing those tactics to individual web monitoring in a way non-techies can actually understand and apply.  It’s not as comprehensive as Reputation.com, which monitors clients’ digital reputation across a broader spectrum of sites and databases and can provide more targeted services. But it’s a much more affordable consumer option.

The company initially launched in 2010 as a service for managing online reputations on search and social networks but re-launched early this year with a more specific focus on search. Since then, it’s raised $1.2 million (on top of about $300,000 in seed money), won a startup competition at SXSW and grown to include 10 employees. To date, Ambron said, the service has attracted more than 150,000 registered users and more than 3,000 paying members (excluding students at Syracuse, John Hopkins and its other college clients).

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There are plenty of things to be concerned about when it comes to Google’s new “personalized search” features, including the risk that the search giant is waving a red flag in front of antitrust regulators by throwing its weight around. But for media companies, one of the key facts about this change is that it makes a social-media strategy even more imperative. In some ways, as Jeff Sonderman of the Poynter Institute points out in a blog post, Google has just made social connections and links the new search-engine optimization strategy, whether you like it or not. If you ignore that message, be prepared to see your content suffer.

Just to recap the news, on Tuesday Google launched what it is calling “Search plus your world,” a bid to personalize search results for users who are logged in (the feature can be turned off for those who don’t want it, but it’s enabled by default). Although Google seems to have ambitious plans for the feature by calling it “your world,” for the most part, the results that are highlighted in a search come from Google’s own social network, Google+. They can include links that have gotten a +1 from people in your network, photos that have been uploaded or, in some cases, comments and profile pages.

Google has made social a key ingredient

But that’s not all: As Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land notes in a breakdown of the new features, even when users aren’t logged in with their Google profile, the search results they get will include profiles from prominent Google+ users, companies and celebrities in the spot normally reserved for Google ads (or what TechCrunch blogger and venture capitalist MG Siegler has taken to calling the “Google Juice Box”). So a search for the term “cars” will show Google+ pages for brands like Ferrari and BMW, along with the number of Circles they appear in, as shown in the screenshot below.

Obviously, inside that “juice box” is one place brands are going to want to be, and Google is no doubt counting on that impulse to boost demand for Google+ profiles and other content. That and the fact that Twitter results don’t seem to be as prominent as those from the search giant’s own network — even for terms that suggest a user is looking for a Twitter profile — has raised speculation about whether Google is risking even further attention from antitrust regulators (Google says it would like to include Twitter content but is prevented from doing so by Twitter itself).

Real engagement will mean more than an inactive profile

But the real lesson for media companies is that whether you want to be part of Google+ or not, because the search giant is giving so much prominence to those kinds of results, you need to consider doing so, if only so that your content is more obvious when someone does a search, as Harvard professor Ben Edelman notes in a post on the changes. It is no different from making sure you have keywords and tags and other SEO-friendly tools in place on your stories, but because it’s social it is also a bit more complicated.

Most media outlets — at least those that care about social media or engaging with their readers — should already have some kind of social strategy, whether it’s Twitter accounts for writers or Facebook pages or blogs. Google has now made it at least as important (if not more so) to have a Google+ profile, so that it will show up in search. But it’s not enough to just have one; the search company will likely also be looking at activity and engagement levels when it comes to ranking results as well, so outlets like the New York Times that have a lot of followers and engagement will benefit.

As ProPublica’s social media editor Daniel Victor points out in a post on Google’s changes, just setting up another profile on a network like Google+ with no real plan for how to use it to engage with readers is a waste of time. What the search company’s changes mean (theoretically at least) is that actual relationships with users — in which they decide to share or vote up content — are going to mean as much or more as keywords and other SEO strategies. And if you take the time to build those relationships, they will have benefits far beyond just higher rankings on Google.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user George Kelly

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Updated: According to a number of reports, Google has been promoting its Chrome browser through a sponsored-post marketing campaign that appears to break — or at least bend — many of the search company’s own rules about “good” web content. The web giant has also come under fire recently for removing a Google+ avatar belonging to TechCrunch writer-turned-venture-capitalist MG Siegler, which was apparently judged to be offensive, even though similar content routinely appears in search results. As Google tries to move farther away from being just a search company, it continues to trip over its own feet.

The Chrome promotion, which was first highlighted by SEO Book, involves sponsored blog posts that link to the company’s browser download page and also include a video about Chrome’s supposed benefits for small businesses. As Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land notes, the campaign is a great example of the kind of spammy, low-quality content that Google has repeatedly declared war on via tweaks to its algorithms — including the recent Panda update, which penalized sites such as the New York Times-owned About.com and “content farm” Demand Media for their mediocre content. As Sullivan puts it:

That’s perhaps the bigger problem with this campaign, much more disturbing to me. Google’s paying to produce a lot of garbage, the same type of garbage that its Panda Update was designed to penalize.

The company that Google contracted to run the campaign said the Chrome promotion is a fairly standard program, and that one sponsored post which included a link without the “no follow” tag — a key requirement made by Google so that sites don’t try to game its algorithm in order to achieve a higher Page Rank — was simply a mistake. But even so, the fact that the entire campaign seems intended to deliver spammy results from sites to boost Chrome’s profile makes it look like a perfect example of the kind of content that Google keeps penalizing everyone else for producing. So will Chrome be penalized in search results the way others have been?

Update: Google has told Search Engine Land that it will lower the PageRank of the Google Chrome page for at least 60 days as a result of the marketing campaign.

Does Google delete offensive content or not? That depends

In the MG Siegler incident, the TechCrunch blogger included a humorous profile picture on his Google+ account with his middle finger extended, and then wrote about how this avatar was removed by Google for breaching its rules. MySpace co-founder Tom Anderson argued that this was perfectly understandable, and that social networks need to make these kinds of judgements so that they don’t “turn into a cesspool… sorta like MySpace was,” but others — including author Jeff Jarvis — said Google was playing a dangerous game by excluding some forms of content, since this slippery slope could lead to concerns about its search results as well.

Those search results in turn could be part of the reason why Google is so concerned about Google+ content, as Danny Sullivan notes. Since pages — and avatars — from the social network are now showing up prominently in search, as Google integrates its new offering into all of its properties, the company is undoubtedly a lot more interested in controlling what kind of content appears. And yet, as Siegler pointed out, photos almost identical to the one he posted appear in Google’s search results all the time.

These two incidents may seem silly or inconsequential, and in many ways they are. After all, who cares whether MG Siegler has a photo of himself giving people the finger on his Google+ profile? And the Chrome campaign could just be a sloppy marketing program that was outsourced to the wrong company. But they both highlight for me how Google is trying to have its cake and eat it too: it wants to force other content producers to adhere to the purest standards, but apparently makes an exception when it comes to marketing its own products, and it seems to have one principle for content on its own social network and another for content in its search results.

The reality is that attempting to manage multiple lines of business that in some cases conflict with each other — like the world’s dominant search engine and a growing social network — is going to be an ongoing problem for the company, regardless of what happens in these two specific cases. If Google isn’t careful, they could even become part of a much bigger problem: namely, the antitrust investigation into the company’s behavior around search results and favoritism towards its own properties.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Mark Strozier and Woodley Wonder Works

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Here are a few of the tips that were shared during the panel to help you write blog content that will help your search engine rankings with no knowledge of SEO techniques or web development required.

Write Great Titles

Keep in mind that you are writing titles for human beings, so your title should be catchy and convey the meaning of the post as a first priority. While you write the title, you should also be thinking about the keywords that people might want to use to find your content and make sure that you have included a keyword or two in the title. I’ll illustrate this with a couple of examples of good and bad titles.

• Bad: Dawn’s Thoughts for March
• Better: Analysis of Facebook and Twitter Demographics in March
• Bad: Day 1 of LinuxCon
• Better: Mobile Linux and Open Standards on Day 1 of LinuxCon

Write New and Interesting Content

Write content that people will want to link to and discuss. If you are rehashing the same stories as every other blogger, people are much less likely to read and respond to your content. Write posts that are new, fresh and unique with analysis and insight from your unique background and perspective. You can talk about a news story that other people are blogging about, but spend some time writing about your experiences and ideas that offer a different perspective than the rest of the crowd. Use research in new ways, interview interesting people, and talk about your experiences. By offering something new, people are much more likely to read your blog post and link to it, which is where the real SEO magic is found.

Include Personal Anecdotes

Nothing makes a post unique quite like personal anecdotes based on your experiences. I saw this first-hand when I started writing for WebWorkerDaily. I wrote what I thought was a brilliant post on using Yahoo Pipes and then I wrote a short, quick post about how I dread answering the question, “So, What Do You Do?” during the holidays when talking to non-technical family and friends. The “brilliant” post got a few comments and some traffic, but nothing like the short, personal story about how to answer that difficult question. Human beings read our blog posts, and personal stories resonate with people in a way that technical facts and figures never will.

These are just a few of my tips for writing content that people will enjoy reading and then link to, which generates better search engine rankings.

What are your tips for using content to improve your SEO?

Photo by Nathan Bergey, used under Creative Commons.

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In this post, I’ll discuss some basic SEO techniques and how to apply them.

Understanding the Jargon

The first thing we need to define is SEO itself. We already know what  the acronym stands for, but what does it mean? According to the SEOmoz dictionary, SEO is “the process of increasing the number of visitors to a web site by achieving high rank in the search results of a search engine.” So when you perform SEO on a site, you are making sure that when someone types in relevant keywords into Google (or other search engines), the site will appear in the results. Ideally it should appear within the first page or results, or even as the first result. Here are some other common SEO terms, together with definitions:

• Keyword: The word or phrase that users enter into search engines.
• Crawlers, bots and spiders: These are the names given to the programs that search engines use to browse, analyze, and index your site.
• Search volume: This is the number of people who search for a given keyword. Some tools measure this per day, per month, or per 100 days.
• Competition: These are the other sites that aim to rank well in the same keyword as you do.
• Search engine result pages (SERPS): The term itself is descriptive — these are the pages of results that appear when you type a keyword into a search engine.
• Back link: A link to your site from another site.
• On-page optimization. These are the SEO techniques you apply on your blog or site itself, and therefore have most control over. It doesn’t involve outside factors such as getting backlinks from other sites.

How Important is SEO?

Applying even the most basic on-page optimization can bring in better, more qualified traffic from search engines. Still, SEO is not the only way to draw new visitors to your site. Nothing beats creating quality content that people will want to share. SEO is just the polish that will make your site appear more accessible to search engine crawlers. Without solid content behind it, SEO by itself will not make a difference in the long run.

At the same time, there’s such a thing as overdoing it. Don’t apply short-sighted techniques, such as stuffing your site with unnecessary keywords, or getting hundreds of back links from irrelevant sites. Doing this will make your site seem like spam to visitors, ad could even be banned by the search engines from showing up in SERPS altogether (Google has some guidelines on techniques to avoid here).

Choosing Keywords

The first step is to come up with a “seed list.” Think about all the possible keywords (or phrases) your target audience will use when looking for a site like yours. If you’re providing a specific service, make sure to include keywords related to that service.

After that, check out the search metrics of the words in your seed list, to find out which to optimize your site’s copy for. You need to find out the search volume and level of competition for each keyword. You can do this with some free tools:

• WordTracker’s free version. (Doesn’t include competition data.)
• Keyword Discovery‘s free version. (Doesn’t include competition data.)
• Nichebot Classic. It’s powered by WordTracker, but links to competition data (although you have to click to get the numbers).

Here’s a good rule of thumb to remember: apart from relevance, good keywords have high search volume but low competition. The mistake many beginners make is that they aim for the most popularly-searched keywords (those with high search volume). While there’s nothing wrong with that, competition for those terms is so strong that it’s hard to rank well for them in the SERPS. By adding a few modifiers (additional words to make a more specific phrase) to popular keywords, you have a better chance of ranking well.

Getting to Work

Performing on-page optimization throughout your web site is easy, especially if you are familiar with HTML. Even if you aren’t, there are dozens of online tutorials out there which can help you find and tweak the code on your web site with little difficulty.

URLs. The first thing you should look at is your URLs. Does your domain name contain an important keyword? If it does, that’s a bonus. If not, then channel your efforts into crafting SEO-friendly URLs for the pages of your site or the posts of your blog. For example, a page about hiring logo designers is better if given the following url: http://www.example.com/hiring-logo-designers. Avoid using only dates, numbers, and irrelevant words as the URLs of your pages. Note that descriptive “search engine friendly” URLs may not affect ranking themselves, but people will be more likely to click through a page with a descriptive URL from a SERP.

Page title. This line of text (in the <title> tag) appears on the title bar of your browser when you’re looking at a web site. It should contain your primary target keywords, but don’t overdo it. This title will appear in SERPs, and you don’t want it to look like keyword-stuffed spam.

Headings. The heading tags of your pages (<h1>, <h2>, etc.) serve a dual purpose. They show your readers the hierarchy of information on a page, and they are also useful for SEO. Use relevant keywords within these tags.

Content. Your content should contain a few of your choice keywords, but you should be careful that the added keywords aren’t detrimental to a visitor’s reading experience. Make sure the keywords are there when necessary, but don’t insert them in every other sentence just because you think the search engine bots will like it.

Additional Resources

If you want to learn more, here are some guides you can start with:

• I already linked to the SEOmoz dictionary above, but the entire site has a collection of good resources, particularly The Beginner’s Checklist for Learning SEO and Beginner’s Guide to SEO.
• WebsitePublisher.net has a clear and simple SEO guide.
• As for what you shouldn’t do, Lyndsay Walker wrote a two-part series on SEO tricks to avoid.

Have you ever tried optimizing your site? What were the results?

Image by svilen001 from sxc.hu

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Don’t get me wrong: Flash is fine when used for specific purposes, such as video playback and animation. But it can be overused. There was a fad for Flash-based web site introduction screens several years ago. We quickly found that just about everybody was clicking the “skip intro” link. (There was even a site dedicated to Flash usability called “Skip Intro.”) As a result, Flash introductions are much rarer these days. Still, Flash is ubiquitous, and that can cause problems.

• There are too many Flash sites that are one big SWF file. This can mean that site visitors must wait for the whole file to load before links become clickable. And, of course, in such sites the browser’s back button is disabled, or will take visitors completely away from the site (unless the file was displayed in a popup window, and I’m sure everyone realizes the problems that that causes).
• Despite the Google improvements, Flash sites are not as search-engine friendly as text-based sites. See SEO expert Josh Freedman’s Ten Tips for a Better Website.
• As of a year ago, Flash had not yet achieved 40 percent penetration of the cell phone market.
• Adobe claims that “Flash content reaches 99 percent of Internet viewers,” but this figure only applies to the U.S., Canada, the UK, France, Germany and Japan. What about the rest of the world?
• Because of the file sizes involved, Flash sites don’t work well for folks with limited-bandwidth connections.
• Flash sites can be made accessible to those with disabilities, but require special techniques that are not widely used.

I’m sure that Flash enthusiasts will have lots of ways to get around these limitations. But really, why build a site that requires such workarounds, when you can make an appealing site with no, or limited, use of Flash?

When do you use Flash, and what alternatives have you found for creating visual appeal on your sites?

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That’s just the topic of a report from Forrester analyst Sarah Rotman Epps. While you can buy a copy of ” Executive Q&A: Social Tagging For eBusiness” for $279, here’s a free recap of the advice offered by Rotman Epps.

Consider using taxonomy-directed tagging, but give the choice. If your site suggests specific tags to the user, that encourages consistency and makes the tagging process easier for users to figure out. But don’t deny users the ability to come up with their own tags — that’s not very social. Just as it is with the people who update dictionaries, watch for the most popular uses of tags over time to expand the company collection.

Automate the process of coming up with that initial taxonomy of tags. Rotman Epps mentions several tools that can help. Endeca Technologies and Mercado Software can both extract phrases from product text that already exists on the site, and PowerReviews will do the job in a turnkey fashion by reviewing sites related to a product category, interviewing people and doing survey work.

Decide beforehand whether you’re going to go with a manual or automatic approval process for user-created tags. If your organization is concerned about filtering out junk, you may choose to go with the manual approach. The downside: It’s time-intensive, and, after all, what you want to engender with tagging in the first place is putting at least some of the content generation burden onto users. Rotman Epps says that “the relative newness of the technology makes this a concern that few companies had to confront.” She references companies that have gone the hybrid model — allowing any and all tags without prior approval, but bringing to the forefront only those tags that enhance the searchability of the site.

Broaden the appeal of tagging by making it easy to do. Have users select tags with check boxes or menus; provide help at points where it’ll best serve the readers in mouse-overs and popups; integrate tag functions with site search and navigation.

Let the user set the privacy level. Forrester recommends that you let a user determine whether his or her tags are viewable only by the person who set them, by that person’s network or by anybody using the site.

Do you have a tagging scheme worth sharing?

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