If you own a website, having an account with Google Webmaster Tools is invaluable. It can provide you with a wide variety of information about your site, its traffic, and how Google perceives it. In particular, webmasters just starting to learn SEO have many questions, and Google Webmaster Tools has the answers.
http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Google-Optimization-Help/SEO-FAQ-Answered-by-Google-Webmaster-Tools/

It’s like every SEO marketer decided that “social media,” was the ticket to a sweet consulting gig. It’s important to distinguish that the people who have championed the cause for social computing are often deeply involved with the “social media” community.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/redux_lets_move_away_from_social_media_and_get_dow.php

Real-time search is still an emerging concept. At this point, using a real-time search engine will bring you results by time/date. This doesn’t always cater to relevancy, which is why there is still a lot of work to be done in this field. Real-time search is much more basic (at least so far) than say, Google Search. Social media by nature is viral. Real-time search is nothing more than putting things in chronological order.
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/09/02/tips-for-getting-found-in-real-time-searches

For those who value Google’s often delayed toolbar pagerank, Google is giving you all a nice New Year’s Eve present – the annual page rank update.  It seems Google is now making this an annual gig as it also made a toolbar pagerank update the same time last year.
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-toolbar-pagerank-updating-for-new-years-2010/15855/

Social builds links. SEO needs links. Most users, when reading an article they enjoy, don’t skip back to Twitter to grab the shortened URL. They simply grab the URL from the address bar already open above the article. Fast and easy for the user means downstream link building for you, so take advantage of this by making sure the Social Media program running at your business is aware of your needs.
http://searchengineland.com/6-new-years-resolutions-for-in-house-sems-32347

If you go to Google.com and type “hamburgers,” “shoes,” “candy,” “grills,” “beer,” and hundreds of other terms of ambiguous local intent, Google will almost always show you local results on a map that’s tied to your IP address. Today, Google intentionally showing less local results for web design / SEO queries. For example, [web design sacramento] doesn’t display local listings today. This is an accurate representation of user intent.
http://searchengineland.com/google-hides-seos-web-designers-32671

According to a comment on DigitalPoint forum, if you are interested in improving your Google SERPs, then it’s your Google backlinks you should be analyzing. If you are interested in improving your Yahoo SERPs, then by all means use the Yahoo site explorer.
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1632350

Times Square was evacuated earlier today when the bomb squad was called in to inspect a suspicious parked van. It turned out to be nothing, but as people were scrambling for information they would have been better off doing a search on Bing than on Google. Google was perfectly capable of showing the best realtime results. The problem is that the best results were hidden on Google’s realtime updates page and Bing’s Twitter search page, which combines Tweets with headlines. Google’s realtime results which show what people are saying on Twitter provides much more relevant information than its stale news search results on the main search page.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/12/30/realtime-search-off-bing-beats-google/

Using YouTube may become a much less passive experience in the near future. Google applied for a patent on a “Web-based system for generation of interactive games based on digital videos,” and several facts point to the search giant moving ahead with the idea. Considering that YouTube can already handle annotations and time markers, this concept would be easy enough to implement.
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/12/30/google-gets-patent-for-youtube-gaming

Content duplication has been a buzz topic in SEO for a while now. There is still the lingering perception that there is some sort of duplicate content penalty despite repeated assurances from multiple Googlers to the contrary. Penalty or not, it is clearly the case that the site where content originates may not always rank best for that content.  Google wants to do their best to make sure they keep the content of their results pages as distinct from one another as they can.
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/12/30/content-syndication-is-your-friend

Sometimes the ideal AdWords strategies are counterintuitive. If you’re in a competitive market, you need to use every optimization tactic you can. Both your quality score and competitor bids are factored into the price of your AdWords clicks. Once your keywords and ads have a good history, CTR is the biggest factor in quality score. Before you have any clicks, however, your quality score will be hugely impacted by how Google predicts you will perform.
http://searchengineland.com/four-unobvious-strategies-for-improving-google-adwords-profitability-32132

The mobile web is a fascinating space that is still in its infancy. As online usage increases regardless of the device used, accessibility is going to be the next lever to increase online usage.
http://searchengineland.com/top-10-reasons-your-website-should-go-mobile-32566

According to a comment on cre8asiteforums, no-follow links are not worthless. Yahoo Answers is no-follow yet it still generates a decent amount of traffic.
http://www.cre8asiteforums.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=74205

Some people think that the traffic you get might be worth more than the page rank. It might be easy way to get traffic without a high page rank. Not sure how good the traffic converts so you might want to make another site and try that one first.
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1626573

According to a comment on DigitalPoint forum, Alt tags help some visually impaired visitors who need to use text readers to understand a page format and so should be used. They can’t see the images, but can detect text in ALT tags. In addition to this, they also help you rank better with search engines.
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1627876

Hitwise tweeted this morning that Facebook reached the number one most visited site in the US for the first time ever over the Christmas holiday, pushing past Google. That means pretty much Hitwise is comparing Facebook’s overall traffic to only one aspect of Google, Google web search. Potentially, some visits to Google’s personalized home page might also be in there. But also potentially, a chunk of Google traffic isn’t being counted correctly.
http://searchengineland.com/hitwise-facebook-more-visited-than-google-on-christmas-32554

The Reuters article suggests that there has been some growth in Bing’s Chinese usage since its launch in June. The Chinese Internet is heavily censored by the government, which has been an ongoing source of controversy for American companies and search engines doing business there. Google and Yahoo have been roundly and repeatedly criticized for their participation in that censorship.
http://searchengineland.com/microsoft-hopes-to-grow-bee-ying-bing-share-in-china-32527

Collecta has announced a real-time search tool that taps into content posted on MySpace. The dedicated MySpace search includes the public comments, blog posts, videos, photos, and links that are posted by MySpace users. It can be accessed at myspace.collecta.com for now, and Collecta says the MySpace content will eventually be incorporated into its primary real-time search results on collecta.com.
http://searchengineland.com/collecta-launches-myspace-search-32521

According to a comment on SEOChat forum, Yahoo indexes faster than Bing. Bing places more value on on-page content but tend to index new pages really slow.
http://forums.seochat.com/yahoo-search-optimization-60/yahoo-seo-strategies-277538.html

Google’s announcement of personalized search for everyone has stirred a lot of mixed reactions from the search industry. Personalized search will mean effectively manipulating influencing your users to click on your listing. And then there’s the launch of Real-Time search results from Google (just a few days after the rollout of personalized search). So expect conversations your favorite social media sites like Twitter and Facebook to show up in your respective search results. Personalized and real-time search was definitely the next step for Google (and probably for the rest of the search engines).
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/personalized-real-time-search/15739/

Google Wave was officially launched in beta a couple of weeks ago and already plenty of people realize its potential usefulness. URL Search is going to get more and more popular once more and more waves are being created: it allows to find all waves linking to a particular page.
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-wave-search/15785/

Google is getting serious about realtime search, adding Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace streams into results and adding a recent “updates” option which is addictive. But behind the scenes Google is also getting ready to push out an entirely new way for indexing the Web. Codenamed “Caffeine,” Google has been testing it since last summer in one datacenter, and is now getting ready to push it out across all of Google.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/12/28/google-caffeine-faster-search-index/

Today, two consumer groups, Consumer Watchdog and the Center For Digital Democracy, have asked the FTC to block the deal on anti-trust grounds and possible privacy issues. In a joint letter to the FTC (embedded below), the two groups say that Google’s acquisition of AdMob would lessen competition in the mobile advertising market, having a potentially negative impact on consumers, advertisers and application developers and others. AdMob is the leader in the mobile advertising space, which is chock full of competitors, including Greystripe and others.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/12/28/consumer-groups-lobby-ftc-to-block-googles-acquisition-of-admob/

Following October’s release of Google Analytics new features, Google has just released another set of very cool new features. Among them is “Annotations,” a tremendously useful new feature both to analysts as well as executives, who are usually not up to date on granular details about website activity.
http://searchengineland.com/google-analytics-adds-new-features-31624

It is highly recommended working on the website’s sections to make sure both people and search engines would find and scan them easily. If your site contains a lot of content pages, why not adding some links from your HTML made pages to accurately guide people towards finding and visiting them. For the search engines, creation of XML files would be great since by using a single file, all of your main pages would become accessible.
http://www.bing.com/community/forums/t/647128.aspx

Onpage optimization is only one small part of the search engine ranking equation. Optimizing your website as your sole tactic will not help you to get to the number one spot on Google (for anything competitive at least). There are no set rules for achieving high search engine rankings. The search engines keep their algorithms secret in order to avoid manipulation.
http://www.seo-scoop.com/2009/12/16/learn-seo-how-to-do-onpage-search-engine-optimization/

Mobile advertising is poised to become a huge growth area, with research firm Kelsey Group seeing the market grow from just $160 million in 2008 to $3.1 billion in 2013. eMarketer projects mobile advertising spending in the US will balloon from $648 million in 2008 to over $3.3 billion in 2013. While some believe search will account for the biggest chunk of the market, others expect geo-aware advertising, another way of bringing “relevant” ads to users, to have a bright future, too.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/12/26/location-based-mobile-advertising-platform-adlocal-enters-america-wants-to-win-with-japan-know-how/

Right now ‘quantity’ still rules on the Web, ‘quality’ is hard to find. Perhaps that’s why Reuters is betting on the subscription model – it hopes that consumers will just subscribe to quality content, thereby removing the need to search for it. What Demand Media, Answers.com and AOL are doing is having a much greater impact on the quality and findability of content on the Web.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/content_farms_impact.php

There are a number of reasons that press releases can be great for search. They’re great for spreading word to the media (journalists/bloggers), they can contain links, when used with credible news wire services, they are often looked upon with some authority.
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/12/21/press-releases-can-have-a-long-search-shelf-life

In the US Yahoo still ranks as number one but Google News reportedly falls down the list below the traditional news domains, such as NY Times and CNN. However, over at Nielsen (via Editor & Publisher) the numbers appear to be quite different than the comScore data above — especially the ranking of Google News.
http://searchengineland.com/yahoo-top-news-site-google-second-people-spending-more-time-with-fewer-sites-32451

Search engines today serve over 25 billion queries a month in North America alone, with the lion’s share of those queries serviced by Google. But it’s never too early to watch out for the new kid on the block. Facebook today handles over a billion queries a month, and that number is growing. With such a large audience, it’s hard to believe they will allow those searches to go un-monetized for long.
http://searchengineland.com/five-search-marketing-predictions-for-2010-32014

More people around the world get their news online from Google News than from CNN or the news properties of the New York Times. In November, 2009, according to comScore, Google News attracted 100 million unique visitors worldwide, making it a larger news site than CNN (66 million) or the combined properties of the New York Times (92 million). But do you know who is even larger? Yahoo News, with 138 million unique visitors worldwide.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/12/23/google-news-cnn/

Google published a long manifesto on the “meaning of open” in the form of an email to all employees republished as a blog post. In it, senior VP of product management Jonathan Rosenberg, makes an eloquent argument for why open systems always win and urges Google’s employees to always strive to be open when designing products. An open Internet spurs innovation and brings more consumers on board, which ultimately means more searches and increased use of Web applications.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/12/22/google-open-when-convenient/

In a Security and Exchange document filed on Tuesday night, AOL plans on cutting about one-third of their staff, about 2,300 people. The filing said, “the Restructuring will include the reduction of approximately a third of the Company’s current employee base, which will be conducted on a voluntary and involuntary basis.”
http://searchengineland.com/aol-to-cut-staff-by-one-third-32446

A recently released Google Labs product called Fusion Tables allowed users to grab data from spreadsheets, text documents, PDFs and other sources and create compelling, comprehensive visualizations from a merged data set. Google has just announced it’s releasing an API for Fusion Tables. The API integrates with Google Maps, App Engine, Base Data and Visualizations APIs, as well, to allow for motion charts, timelines, graphs and maps with all the data available and running on Google’s infrastructure.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google-fusion-tables-visualization-api.php

According to a comment on Bing forum, the principles of good SEO which Google has in their basic SEO guide are applicable to all search engines. Design a good clean, clear, validated website, with lots of one-way backlinks. For Bing specifically, there are few other things that can help which includes backlinks containing keywords and webpages containing keywords. Also ensure that you have correct meta-tags in your page headers and Bing relies on these more than Google does.
http://www.bing.com/community/forums/t/652128.aspx

Worldwide, the iPhone alone accounts for about 33% of mobile web traffic and IDC predicts the number of mobile web users will hit one billion by 2010. As the technological barriers come down, people will increasingly use their phones on-the-go to access social networks, search, read content and find location-based information.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/10_ways_social_media_will_change_in_2010.php

Jeremy Stoppleman, the CEO of Yelp, has walked away from an all-but-signed deal to be acquired by Google for more than half a billion dollars. Then something happened that made Yelp reconsider the deal. Over the weekend they notified Google that they were not going to sell, say multiple sources.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/12/20/yelp-walks-away-from-google-deal-and-half-a-billion-dollars/

Aol is telling a good story, but Citi analyst Mark Mahaney isn’t buying it. AOL is probably the toughest Internet turnaround story, he says in a report today, citing “28% Y/Y decline in its Subscriber base and 38% Y/Y decline in its EBITDA.” He recommends people buy Yahoo, which “will almost surely revert to growth before AOL.” Mahaney also notes that Aol was the only top 5 web property in the U.S. to have year over year declines in visitors.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/12/23/aols-deteriorating-fundamentals-not-a-hit-with-analysts/

Google has issued a statement regarding the company’s pending acquisition of AdMob. This deal will benefit developers, publishers, and advertisers by improving the performance of mobile advertising, and will provide users with more free or low-cost mobile apps. Google says since the announcement, they have seen a quite positive reaction from advertisers and publishers, who are “enthusiastic” about the possibilities the deal might bring.
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/12/23/google-provides-an-update-on-the-admob-acquisition

Google has shared the top retail searches for the 2009 holiday season. These results are based on the company’s Insights for Search tool. Google has been encouraging retailers to start looking ahead to the rest of the Winter season with regards to what people will be searching for: things like Valentine’s Day gifts, Prom dresses, wedding planning, ski equipment, etc. On a positive note for retailers, new research from Market Force Info finds that a good percentage of consumers intend to “splurge” on at least one item over the next few months.
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/12/23/google-shares-top-retail-searches-for-the-holiday-season

The PEW Internet and American Life Project just released new information about use of the internet by Latino adults in the United States. Understanding who’s online and how they search is core to success in search acquisition beyond simply ranking well.
http://searchengineland.com/latinos-online-how-changing-demographics-of-those-online-impacts-search-32326

ReadWriteWeb is reporting from “sources close to the project” that Yahoo will shut down MyBloglog next month. MyBlogLog doesn’t hold the blogging community’s attention today the way it did a few years ago, but if the report is true, it will disappoint many who continue to use the service.
http://searchengineland.com/yahoo-to-close-mybloglog-32371

According to a comment on DigitalPoint forum, if a site is banned from Google’s index, linking to it is an extremely bad idea. Google will think you are voting for a banned site and they’ll just move you out of SERP.
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1623137

Direct Traffic in Google Analytics can be very up-and-down from a day to day basis as you can never really predict how many people will type in your url directly, click through from an email, or click through from a ‘favorited’ link in their browser. That always leaves direct traffic graphs looking a bit jagged. Nevertheless, direct traffic does seem to stay inside the same range as it goes up and down.
http://forums.seochat.com/search-engine-optimization-28/mysterious-direct-traffic-activity-290899.html

YouTube videos are one of the most shared stuff on Facebook and Twitter. So, the YouTube folks joined the rage with its own YouTube URL shortener.
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/youtube-joins-the-rage-on-url-shortener/15699/

We are in the midst of the largest algorithmic changes to Google’s relevancy since the Florida Update of 2003, and perhaps even the largest change for how marketers approach search since Google and Inktomi revolutionized the concept of citation based rankings. What makes this change so important is that the future of search, whether it be Search “2.0″ or Caffeine oriented, is based on much more than the relevancy factors of content, links, queries and relevant infrastructure.
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/2010-a-new-age-for-search-marketers/15711/

Dialogue is in the air: Google’s newly announced focus on real-time search and the rumors of a possible acquisition of Yelp (one of the key consumer-focused local dialogue repositories) both bear witness to the increasing prominence of consumer chatter on the web. The most frequently used feature is the ability to compare key phrases and aggregated opinions with a specific competitor.
http://searchengineland.com/dialogue-is-the-new-marketing-paradigm-32233

In competitive paid search, the wrong landing page will cost you money. Search results pages usually beat sub-category pages on more general searches, but only if the site has robust search results.
http://searchengineland.com/choose-your-paid-search-landing-pages-wisely-32053

SEO is becoming more social these days and any online campaign must consider things like blogs, Twitter activity and other social media. With this said, and if we focus on Twitter for a moment, there are some ‘SEO’ benefits to using Google’s URL shortener. If a service such as tinyURL or Bit.ly fails or is taken offline, each and every link posted on Twitter using these services, would become deadlinks – an issue which would create havoc in the social world.
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1617583