Over the past few years, the Internet has increasingly become a participatory social network where user-generated content is just as important as traditional advertising messages. This means your articles, blog posts, videos, podcasts, and other comments on the Web are now critical sources of information about your company, your products and services. This phenomenon has given consumers a voice and weakened the power formerly held by advertising media. Social media, therefore, becomes increasingly important to a Web site’s success and its visibility in search engines.

Not long ago, search engine optimization focused on fine-tuning your on- and off-page Web site elements in order to achieve better rankings in the search engines. While on-page elements remain the fundamental building blocks of your SEO campaign, it is no longer the entirety of the puzzle. With the rise of social media, it is more important than ever to create and optimize many different types of content in order to dominate the SERPs. The increase in user-generated content, and implementation of Google search personalization and universal search, has helped bring this about.

Search Personalization
In personalized search, individual user search results are reordered based on their previous search behavior and other indicators. Pages can move up or down based on the influence of a user’s Google home page content, bookmarks, search history, Web history, etc. While Google is the only search engine currently adjusting rankings using personalization factors, Yahoo and Ask have variations on this theme with MyWeb and MyStuff.

Google’s reasons for initiating search personalization are that it delivers more relevant results and can reduce spam. Others have challenged this rationale, stating that user interests are not static and can vary by season, mood or other factors. It’s also difficult to know user intent based on click behavior, as sometimes when people click on a link they’ll immediately realize this wasn’t what they wanted and click off. Queries can also be hit and miss, landing users on non-relevant sites which would then be used in creating non-relevant future results for that user.

Because of personalized search, optimization techniques will change, requiring more intense multivariate analyses in the competitor landscape since the leading competitors will vary as the SERPs vary. This will affect analyses of competitor on-page and off-page factors, especially keyword analysis. However, all the basic optimization tactics remain important. Content, in particular, must do a better job of telling search engines what the page is about, and this will result in better rankings for those able to do so.

Universal Search
With the advent of universal search by Google and others, search marketers and site owners will soon find it necessary to optimize their Web sites for a broad range of content types. This means creating content in every media and vertical niche applicable to your brand. Compelling, useful and widely propagated content will create more search visibility and Web site success.

Fresh content will bring repeat visitors and increase the odds that other users and Web site owners will want to share your content with their visitors, creating more backlinks. For most brands, the benefit of encouraging social networking activities is increased search visibility.

Search engine optimization techniques vary depending on the type of content being optimized. We’ve written before about optimizing content for Google image search, video search, news, maps and blog search. Two other areas you can optimize content for are podcasts and your Google Base data feeds.

Optimizing Podcasts
To create a podcast, you must record an audio file to be uploaded to the Web. Once uploaded, users will be able to download this rich media file and listen to it via an iPod or some other media player.

Up until recently, multimedia search engines relied on metadata to determine relevancy of rich media files. However, this was insufficient for finding relevant podcasts because the average podcast is 15 to 20 minutes long and has only 25 to 30 words describing it.

Currently, speech recognition technology is used to determine the relevancy of audio files. Speech recognition and extracting podcast content is essential for indexing content and making it findable by users. One way to do this is to play audio snippets to determine the relevancy of the terms within a podcast.

When optimizing your podcast ensure your content is easily found by promoting only one feed. Optimize the audio file, and then optimize a landing page for each episode in addition to your category page. Make your subscription information visible on landing pages. Create valid feeds and validate them with a feed validator tool such as FeedValidator.org or the W3C Feed Validator.

Your podcast should have a unique, keyword-rich Title tag explaining the subject matter. The landing page should contain a link back to your Web site. The publication date is important. This tag specifies the last time the feed was updated. Include image tags if applicable.

Since iTunes does not redistribute, we recommend building a separate feed for iTunes. You can promote with three separate feeds, a media feed, a 2.0 feed and an iTunes feed. Include a transcript or a summary of the podcast on the landing page, depending on the podcast length. If it is brief, only a summary reviewing the main points is necessary.

Optimizing Google Base Data Feeds
Google Base is a database where you can upload all kinds of online and offline content for sale. Your items will include labels and attributes to help describe the content you are uploading, making it searchable for users. Attributes are the words that describe the characteristics of your items. You can enter multiple values separated by commas for any given attribute. Labels are keywords that can be used to classify or describe your item, such as products, services, and even a house for sale.

The items you submit to Google Base will go in the Base directory, and some items, depending on relevance, might also go into the Google SERPs, Froogle or Google Maps. So the quality of your data is important if you want it to be found far and wide.

Use Google Base custom attributes to optimize your feeds. Google Base allows you to specify your own custom attributes, which means you can include additional information about your items. Unlimited custom attributes can be included in your tab-delimited bulk upload file. Detailed descriptions can make your items more relevant, getting them into the Google index and other vertical databases, providing more opportunity for them to be found.

Since many of those uploading their data feeds to Google Base don’t know about the custom attributes feature, you would gain a significant advantage because your feeds will be more successful than those of your competitors.

Another way to gain competitive advantage is to completely automate your Google Base data feeds. By automating your feeds, you ensure that the information uploaded to Google Base is up-to-date and accurate.

Automate your Google Base data feed by connecting it directly with your database with a process that pulls the most recent data once a day, submitting a new bulk upload to Google Base on a regular basis. Outsourcing this task takes about one day’s time for setup, and then it becomes automated. One resource for such e-marketing services is Hudson’s Horizons.

Though the fundamentals remain the same, search engine optimization is an ever evolving industry, adapting as the search landscape continues to change. It is now important to create and optimize many different types of content to dominate the SERPs. Optimizing your podcasts and Google Base data feeds will go a long way toward expanding search visibility.

By Susan Esparza
Susan Esparza is the Senior Editor at Bruce Clay. She joined Bruce Clay in November 2004 and has written extensively for clients and internal publications. She also knows where the knives and forks go in a buffet line. The latter makes her invaluable to the Bruce Clay organization.

Whether you believe in SEO or Page Rank and wonder which is more important, your thinking is irrelevant. You are wasting your time in wondering what is the correct answer to that question, since even if you knew it, there is little you could do to use that information.

Why do I say that? Because SEO, or search engine optimization, is a way of designing your website, and placing content in it, to satisfy search engine algorithms. Search engines are so sophisticated today that if you achieve that, then you will also satisfy visitors to your website. If you satisfy visitors to your website, then they will stay on the page they landed on and read it. They will then click to read other pages on your website and might even make a purchase.

Sure, some will leave right away, but if the search engines feel that your content is good enough for a high placement in their indices for the search term, or keyword, that your visitor used to get to your web page, then it is more likely that you will achieve a relatively high stick rate of people to your site than a lower one.

Now, consider if you thought Google PageRank more important (and PageRank is correct, not Page Rank). You would then spend more of your time trying to get links back to your website than you would properly optimizing your site and filling it with good content. If you were successful in that difficult job, then Google, and possibly other search engines, would list you a bit higher in their indices, not because their spiders thought your site was relevant to the search term used by the potential visitors, but because other websites thought so.

You will then get visitors to your website, and the page they land on would have to be relevant to the search term they used or they will immediately leave. If it is relevant, they will stay, perhaps visit other web pages and perhaps make a purchase.

So what is the difference? You get basically the same end result. How can you tell which is the more important. There is one simple way to do this, and one that I have used more than once. Design two websites round the same keyword. Make the keyword the name of the website and then apply classical theoretical SEO to one site, including some of the extra special tips that can make the difference between success and failure – in fact that DO make that difference.

Now apply only minimal SEO to the other and make sure you have exactly the same content on each, but rewritten to avoid duplicate content or that would negate the test. However, with the second site, you must generate as many links back to your website as possible, using non-reciprocal links where possible, but reciprocal links where necessary. There are a few ways in which you can generate lots of one-way links to selected pages on your site, and you should make that your home page for the purposes of this test.

Wait 4 weeks then check Google, Yahoo and MSN for the position of each of your home pages. You will find that your first website will generally be listed higher for the keyword that both sites are built round. Check again about 3 months later, and you will likely find that website 2 will feature higher as the links start to take effect, but then the first site will overtake it as it generates its own links naturally. Basically, what this proves to me is that it is essential to optimize your website for search engines in the classical way, but that for best results you must also have a good level of links back to your website. There are simple, ways to achieve both, but that would be the topic of another article. However, in the end, if you apply both, then you will achieve best results. I know that there are exceptions to this, and I have highlighted them in some of my ebooks, but generally that is the case.

So, the answer to the question: SEO or Page Rank, is that neither is the more important. They are both equally important, but it is possible to do one better than the other and then you would be tempted to say that your way was best. But you would be wrong!

If you did find what was the best, you couldn’t use that information since search engines rules are transitory but good honest content and classical SEO have always prevailed, as has a good number of links that others follow to reach your website.

By Peter Nisbet
Peter is an expert on audio-visual file formats and codecs and more information on p2p file sharing software can be obtained from his websites LegalAndFree.com and Online-Free-Movies.com where options are presented and the ethics discussed.

I was chatting to a veteran print publisher who had been producing magazines for over thirty years.

He shook his head in despair, as he told me that every year he sees new magazines hit the newsstands with the publications’ titles placed vertically on the magazine cover.

“Whenever I see this,” he said, “I know it has been produced by a new publishing company that does not understand the industry. Anyone with any experience of periodical publishing knows that publications with vertical titles fail, or at least have to change quickly to survive. The market has taught us this lesson hundreds, if not thousands of times, but still people make the same mistake.”

This message is just as relevant to website layout as it is to magazine design. The web has been around for long enough that rules and best practices have emerged from years of trial and error by thousands of website owners. You can either go with the flow and be grateful that you can learn from the experience of others, or you can swim against the tide and try to convince the market that you are right and they are wrong.

I would suggest that swimming downstream is far easier and will give you a much greater chance of success.

To understand which layouts work you only need to look at the industry gorillas. These are the online content publishers who have been around for years, and who have tested just about every layout combination. Good examples are some of the most read websites on the internet including:

• BBC
• The Financial Times
• The Economist
• The Wall Street Journal

You will quickly start to recognize elements of the page layouts which are common across all these sites. Just as with print newspapers and magazines, these are the layouts that have proven to sit most comfortably with the reader and with the way online users want to consume content.

The key design and layout elements which should remain constant are: Masthead across the top – the masthead is where the logo goes and usually the imagery that supports the subject matter on the website.

The left hand column should contain all the primary navigation, which should remain constant across the whole website. It should list all the main categories of the website, so users can find their way around from every page.

The right hand column on the homepage should provide navigation to individual pages in the site which you want to highlight. Or, it can be used for small applications, such as email newsletter sign-up, scrolling news headlines, links to the forum, etc. This column tends to disappear on the content pages to leave more space for the article and images.

Top menu bar – some sites have most of their navigation in the top menu bar which goes across the page under the masthead (take a look at www.guardian.co.uk or www.forbes.com as examples). I don’t like this for two reasons. First, it restricts the number of menu links that you can have. Secondly, it usually means that the site has flash based drop down menus to enable them to accommodate more links. Flash menus are not user friendly. They force your reader to search for links to the content they are looking for. Don’t make your user work for their answers. Also, search engines find it harder to index sites with flash menus.

Bottom menu bar – This strip at the foot of every page tends to contain links to the site’s terms and conditions, privacy statement, sitemap, etc.

The central column contains the content. On the homepage, this can be a combination of an introduction to the website and teasers to articles. On the content pages, the articles and images sit in the central column.

Search top right on every page – this is the search box used to search the content of the website. This is a less rigid placement than it used to be, but you can’t go wrong if you place it top right.

Time and date – usually placed on the right hand side under the masthead. This is optional, but does give readers the impression that the site is up-to-date.

Within this layout there is a great deal of flexibility to add your own personality and styles, particularly when you overlay your design on the basic page structure. However, at all times your number one goal should be constant; that is to make your website simple and intuitive, for every reader that visits. To achieve this learn from those sites that have a lot of experience.

Don’t be the person that puts a vertical title on the front cover!

By Miles Galliford
SubHub provides an all-in-one solution to enable you to rapidly design, build and run your own content website. Publish for profit on the web. Website: SubHub.com
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