Look for a resurgence in organic search engine optimization and a move away from SEO “trickery” as search engines move to place more value on what a Web page is about rather than how it is linked to other pages and sites on the Internet. The ideas and information on a page - a Web page’s “content” - are going to matter more and more, rather than the page’s architecture and the links that connect it to the wider Internet, as search engines vie to better “understand” what a Web page is about and rank its relevancy to the end user.

The big push is on to understand the “semantics” of a page, trying to digitally comprehend the keywords and concepts of a Web page’s content and ranking them in their relevance to the end user - the person behind his or her keyboard or phone pad keying in search queries.

The debut of Cuil.com, the newest search engine and would-be challenger to industry leader Google, underscores the shift in how search engines now, and will, search and understand a page’s content. Specifically, the team of world leading search engineers that banded together to build the new Cuil search engine claim not only that Cuil (pronounced “cool”) will index a much bigger portion of the individual pages on the Internet, but that they will emphasize the content on the pages rather than the links on the Internet that point to a specific page. (The link structure pointing to a specific Web page indicates its popularity, and hence the reasoning goes, its relevance to the end user. The number of inbound links is a critical part of industry leader Google’s PageRank methodology.)

“Rather than rely on superficial popularity metrics,” according to the new-kid-on-the-search-engine-block, “Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance. When we find a page with your keywords, we stay on that page and analyze the rest of its content, its concepts, their inter-relationships and the page’s coherency.”

“In addition to looking at the popularity of a Web page,” reports the Wall Street Journal, “Cuil also analyzes the concepts on the page and their relationships - grouping similar results under different menus.” Grouping different results under different concept-specific search result menus implies a much deeper understanding of the concepts and interrelationships on the individual Web page, rather than a mere ranking in terms of a “relevancy” that is determined in large part by a page’s popularity based on its links to other pages.

For businesses engaged in online marketing, the move toward a more “semantic” understanding of their Web page content will mean that their search engine optimization strategies will have to focus more and more on finding an SEO company that will help them produce the quality content that will make their organic search engine optimization strategy a success. Using so-called “ethical” search engine optimization techniques and building relevant pages with quality content and information for the end user will increasingly distinguish companies whose SEO and online marketing campaigns are a long-term success from those who look for the quick-fix and short-term boost in rankings brought about by using SEO techniques that are less organic to artificially boost the relevancy of their pages to their target audience.

You may be able to “game” the search engines for a while, but ultimately you cannot game the end users who always know whether the results a search engine displays are relevant to what it is they are looking for. The ability to “game” the search engines will, of course, decrease as they are better able to, and rely more upon, a semantic understandings of the Web’s content. To the extent that new search engine Cuil is better able to conceptually understand and sort the content of the hundreds of billions of web pages that are on the Internet - a number that grows by several billion each day - they may have a shot at making a dent in goliath Google’s market share.

There is no quick-fix key to online marketing success. Yet, with time and effort utilizing ethical search engine optimization techniques will improve your web site’s ranking and drive more web traffic to your company’s web site. But, the concept to stress here is ethical SEO techniques.

Search engines are all premised on providing their users with the information and web pages that are most relevant to the search query that users type into the search interface. Google’s famed “Don’t Be Evil” corporate ethos restated for SEO-types is: “Don’t rig the system to rank less relevant pages.”

There are a number of “quick-fixes” for web pages and web sites that do not rank well for keyword terms on Google and the other search engines. The downside of such “quick-fixes” - keyword stuffing, cloaking, hidden text, paid and dubious links etc. - is that sooner or later (most often, sooner) the search engines will clue into such well-known “Black Hat” SEO tactics, resulting in a permanent banning of the offensive website, or at least a temporary de-listing until the offensive and misleading tweaks are removed from the site. And Google, Yahoo! and the other search engines reserve a contractual right to de-list a site in their Terms of Service.

The Internet is the much-touted “Information Super Highway”. The price for claiming your roadside frontage is creating relevant content that users are looking for online. There are a raft of “White Hat” techniques that will attract web traffic and users to your website, but each of these requires a sustained effort to create relevant content and link structures. While such “White Hat” or ethical SEO techniques - blogging, article writing, participation in relevant forums and directories - take more effort and time to build a site’s relevancy, their effect is much longer lasting and you do not run the risk of having your site shut down peremptorily as a result of trying to game the system. In a “Don’t be Evil” world, “Content is King”, and the creation of quality content and relevant inbound links to your site is the hallmark of ethical and effective SEO and online marketing.

As online marketing and advertising begin to outstrip traditional advertising media - TV, radio and print -  as the medium that will drive customers to their office or storefront (whether that is a digital online office or storefront on a company’s web page, or the old-fashioned ‘bricks-and-mortar’ variety) businesses, large and small, are grappling with how to advertise and market their products and services online and what is the most effective way to do this. 

David Wei, CEO for Alibaba.com, a leading website providing business-to-business (or B2B) networking and connectivity, has observed that, “Going global has never been easier and more affordable for a small- to medium-sized enterprise (SME), especially from the relative comfort of one’s own factory, shop or home office.”  

Mr. Wei notes that, the “Internet has ushered in new tools to bring trading partners together using search engines, portals and online marketplaces.”  Mr. Wei notes that online marketing and B2B marketplaces like Alibaba.com are replacing traditional marketing venues like  trade shows, catalogues and trade associations, just as internet advertising is gradually replacing traditional print, TV and radio as source for advertising placements.

 Importantly, Alibaba.com’s CEO, points out the choice that all businesses, particularly small-to-medium sized enterprises (or SMEs), must face when taking their advertising and marketing campaigns online, or starting up a fresh marketing campaign, is whether to channel time, money and effort into paid advertising and marketing (the banner ads, and pay-per-click sponsored ads on Googl or Yahoo! etc.), or whether to invest those resources in organic marketing.

Pay-per-click has its place and a company can bid and pay for advertising spots, just like it would do for TV and other old media ads, but pay-per-click has its limitations.   “A search engine is more consumer-traffic driven with no budget guarantee,” Mr. Wei suggests, “so costs can accumulate without any reasonable assurance of sales. There is also a serious global issue of click fraud, whereby competitors click repeatedly to increase your pay-per-click advertising costs.”  ”At this time,” Mr. Wei says, “there is no known solution that can eliminate 100% of click fraud.”  With pay-per-click it can thus become difficult to know that you are paying for what you get.

The alternative to pay-per-click is to market and advertise online using the internet’s organic search capabilities to get your products and services noticed and ranked at the top of the search engines’ results page. There is nothing like having your site appear “above-the-fold”, so to speak, on the Google results page for the key words that describe your business to drive sales. While this is not “paid advertising” per se, there are definite costs in terms of the aforementioned resources of “time, money and effort” that an SME will need to expend building an effective online marketing campaign organically.

Mr Wei’s advice for small-to-medium sized enterprises is, that “it is best to have someone in-house with keyword marketing expertise. Otherwise, you should consider using marketing firms which have a proven success rate of getting companies to rank higher in search results.”

Sound advice. But even if an SME tries to build an in-house capability for online marketing, how can the business influencer or decision-maker be assured that the person they are looking to hire has the search engine optimization expertise to successfully orchestrate a full online marketing campagn, particularly if one’s marketing mix is to use both pay-per-click and organic search engine optimization? The answer may be to test the online marketing waters first and take your online marketing and online advertising campaigns to a company whose search engine optimization specialists have organic and pay-per-click experience.

Reading the marketing and advertising trade journal Advertising Age, I was struck by how the comments made by AdAge’s Guest Columnist, Beau Fraser, the managing director of ad firm Gate Worldwide, which were directed at big clients and the advertising and marketing mega-firms and boutiques that serve them apply in some ways to small businesses and their online marketing people. The piece is a bit of rant, really . . . and maybe justifiably so, but I know next-to-nothing of the Madison Avenue-world of advertising. What Mr. Fraser says about advertising at its best, however, - “Advertising provokes thought, differentiates commodity products and helps consumers make better-informed decisions.” - rings true for the product and client services produced by the search engine optimization and online marketing specialists I work for.

Mr. Fraser’s guest column suggesta there are four points that will help big clients allow their big-firm advertising shops serve their maketing interests better. (If any of my bosses’ clients happen to read this, these comments are not directed at you - so don’t take offense. Nor do I think Beau Fraser intended offense for anyone, merely hard-won constructive criticism, all in the name of putting out a better product, and creating a more invigorated climate for both client and ad agency.)

Here are Mr. Fraser’s points transposed, I suppose, with a view to how working with small business SEO amd online marketing specialists can boost the profile, revenue and productivity of small, mid-size and growing businesses lthat rely increasingly on the cyber-traffic to their web pages as well asthe foot-traffic past their storefronts:

1. Avoid treating online marketing “as a pit stop, not as a profession”. - I’m new to this on-line marketing business, formerly having been a lawyer. Yet, even with the staggering amount of reading that was necessary in that racket (yes, racket!) to keep abreast of not only my area of specialization, but the state of the law in general, I am blown away by the amount of information my bosses have to absorb in order to keep abreast with and tap into the best practices in this ever-evolving field. When undertaking online marketing oneself, or when working with your consultants or contractors, I think its essential to treat a business’ online storefront as every bit as important as a retail storefront. Its gotta be clean, persuasive, inviting and intriguing to attract digital foot-traffic and keep them around long enough so you can make your sales pitch and let the person who found your site decide they want the products or services you are offering, Cleaning up a derelict storefront, opening up a new neighbourhood boutique or creating an online presence takes time and effort. Time in the pits optimizing the appearance and efficiency of your site is not time that is spent off the race track where you are competing for positioning and sales. Nobody is going to lap you while you clean up your digital storefront. Quite the contrary.
2. Do Not “Lack Courage” - Change is, or always can be, intimidating - and the pace of change in online marketing is blistering . . . and increasing. (See point 1, above, regarding how much time my bosses have to spend keeping abreast of online technology’s ever-burgeoning possibilities.) Mr. Fraser makes the valid point that clients can have a tendency to “make decisions based on sacred cows, those rules, standards or formulas that are blindly followed because ‘that’s the way its always been done.” Trust in the ‘pros from Dover’ you’ve hired to help you enter the online marketing stream and foster the ’stick-to-it-iveness’ to wait for organic, growing results, some of which may have what is referred to as a long-tail. While there are plenty of fly-by-night SEO operators who can deliver a quick boost to the top of Google’s rankings through quick-fix, questionable means, ranking consistently on the top pages of the search engines requires both short and longer-term efforts to build the web site configurations, content and connectivity. And some of these efforts may seem counterintuitive to how a ‘bricks-and-mortar’ storefront builds traffic and generates sales revenue. It takes courage to take the leap and perseverance to see past the quick fix to the end of the long-tail results.
3. “Get Aligned” with Your SEO Team - To produce optimal results in the search engine optimization game, there has to be a mutuality of interest, where client and provider share the mutual goal of creating a digital footprint that will stand out. Trusting in each other, and having a shared goal and belief in the process, product and progress of results is essential.
4. Make Sure ‘Decision Makers’ are In Touch - For the quick response to changing markets and marketing conditions its critical that a small business’ ultimate decision-makers on matters of site performance, optimization and functionality are in touch with the vision and plan of the SEO, online marketing ‘decision maker’ who is handling your work. In fast-changing times, fast action is most often called for. You don’t want to be sidelined, or have your site sidelined, while waiting for site changes and functions to be approved and then revised pages uploaded through your host server. As technologies emerge evermore quickly and evolve evermore rapidly with new online, internet marketing tools being deployed on a daily or near daily basis, and with emerging new paradigms in business-to-business and business-to-client communications, not only a shared vision but also a fast-action client/marketer response is required.

If you are just entering the online stream, so to speak, don’t hesitate to get your feet wet. Take it from a ‘newbie’ - it’s invigorating. But get with experienced, knowledgable and adaptive specialists who will not only be able tooptimize your site, but will be able to keep you abreast of online marketing developments and the latest internet marketing and search engine optimization techniques as they emerge, whatever these may be this week - or . . . more importantly . . . next week.

My new boss is now officially as jaded as the lawyer I used to be. . . . On my way out yesterday, I poked my head in his office and asked him to look over an article I’d posted on eZine.com for a client, to see if I’d gotten the right mix of keywords – not too many, not too few – in the article’s content. He opened the article and looked up at me with “You’ve got to be kidding me!” written all over him. “To be honest,” he said, “I look at this and all I see is blah, blah, blah . . . link!” “Wow,” jaded, I thought. The article, its content and length was more than he was used to seeing in SEO land, apparently.

And that seems to be the critical balance in SEO copywriting. Yes, we all want to get content up there on the web that has the all-important incoming link to our site, but how to best achieve this while getting the double-boost of attracting readers to the site, blog or social media space you are writing for? After all, in the short-term link building gets the page ranking boost you and/or your clients are looking for – but it’s short-lived. I think my bosses and I agree, and we wouldn’t be the only ones in the industry, that social media marketing – MySpace, Facebook, del.icio.us, dig etc. – is the next wave to ride. But how best to ride it and turn it into a strategy that pays for itself and for our clients? After all, almost by definition users on social media sites - perhaps with the exception of the SEO-types I now rub shoulders with, but I know( or at least hope), that they too tap into what is out there on the internet for fun and frolic) – do not want to be bothered with in your face, blatant marketing content. What’s a poor hack to do?

I think the answer must lie with almost the very first thing I heard about SEO when I first interviewed for this gig. “Content is King!” With Google still trying to figure out how to monetize its social marketing phenomenon - YouTube, all of us seem to be focusing on how we can utilize social marketing media to boost the page ranking on the search engines. What we seem to forget, as I see it as an admitted SEO newbie, is that the blogs like this that we publish are already social media. Readers come to them not only for the information that they want, but to be informed by it. That’s communication, an inherent social medium.

As I write articles for the directories, content for web pages and blog blurbs like this one, I try to keep in mind that their is an end user out there who will, I hope (Are you out there?) read what it is I am writing and feel motivated to take some action as a result . . . post a comment, link to the site, return to see what is new in a week or two’s time, link to my client’s site. That is how the internet grew, and I feel that all of us in SEO should bear that in mind while we’re trying to make a buck or two for ourselves and our clients.

Google faces a great challenge in figuring out how to turn a buck, or bigger buck, on YouTube. Google CEO, Eric Schmidt was candid about that during his recent interview on CNBC. Ultimately, however, if you want to put readers eyes in front of the advertising, products or services you are marketing on line, whether for clients or through affiliate marketing, you’d best be assuring that the product that is going to capture their eye is also going to capture their imagination. Down in the caverns of Google Labs and Google Research, I’m sure they have this uppermost in mind. Good thing they have the cash to back up the imaginative ways they will undoubtedly come up with for marketing their products, ads and services through YouTube, which is becoming greater asset for them every day, if they can only figure out how to capitalize on its social marketing potential. I for one will be keeping an eye on how that plays out how to do the same on a smaller scale in the social marketing milieu the rest of us small fry swim in.

Chris Silver Smith at Search Engine Land put out a great piece on May 5th regarding what seems to be a disconnect between Google’s current page ranking method for local search terms outside of the major markets and what is, essentially, Google’s basic business model. If the internet is, as I understand it to be, a user-driven, ‘digital democracy’ – that is, the end-users (you, us) will migrate to using the hardware platforms and software programs that best enable them to get the information that they want, be it product information, entertainment, news, how-to tips, or whatever with the least effort and hassle – then Google and the other search engine players have a vested interest in ensuring that the person entering their search query, using the words they think will in fact get them the information they are seeking, the information that is most relevant to them.

Curious then, isn’t it, that the typical page rankings that come out of Google when you type in a specific place name for a locale that is not one of the major urban centres still come out in a most arbitrary fashion? As Mr. Silversmith observes in his Search Engine Land article, punch in the name of a town, smaller city or suburban area where most of us live after all, and Google will typically spit out what it sees as being most relevant to that locale in the following order: Local/CityGovernment websites, Chamber of Commerce/Local tourist bureau/visitors’ bureau, local Wikipedia articles, local newspaper websites, etc. This order of page rankings or search results really doesn’t seem to have much to do with what information most users are likely to be searching for. It’s arbitrary, as Mr. Silver Smith says.

Optimizing a website for the search engines - SEO at its best and most effective - is really all about ensuring that Google’s web crawling “spider” program finds your website and indexes the website and its content as being relevant to end-users who type in certain specific search queries. At its best, your website and its content will help your targeted audience self-select your web pages with the help of the search engines. The job of Google, Yahoo! MSN and the others is to figure out how to monetize this process, so that they can make money while helping your potential customers find you.

Mr. Silver Smith suggests overriding Google’s current arbitrary system for ranking locale-specific search terms by doing an end-around and posting material that will get Google to override the priority of local search terms in favour of universal search terms. Probably “grey hat”, but it seems to be effective. He suggests that an interim strategy which will help you get around the current glitch or arbitrariness in Google’s local search page ranking methodology, and get your local business site optimum ranking for a locale-specific query, is to put up a YouTube piece that for whatever Google-logic it deems to be more relevant than its current default ranking according to dry Gov’t websites, Chamber of Commerce websites etc. (Could it be that one of Google’s current top priorities according to Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, in his recent sit-down interview with CNBC’s Maria Bartiroma, is figuring out how to best monetize the surging popularity of its YouTube subsidiary ?)

While this is a good short-term fix – it will work for now – you can bet that in the not-too short term Google will be rolling out local search and mobile search products that will fill in this gap and it will be back to SEO 101 – making sure that your website has the content and links to the information, products and service that your local customer is searching for with his laptop or, increasingly, her mobile phone.

After all, Dr. Schmidt noted how great it was when he was on the road in a major centre and he wanted a cup of coffee to be able to pull out his phone, key in “Starbucks” and have Google Maps show him the nearest outlet where he could get his Grande Sumatran bold, double non-fat latte or Chai tea. You can be sure that Google’s CEO would quickly recognize a lost opportunity and be miffed if he googled in “Starbucks” in Ottomwa, Iowa instead of Ottawa, Orlando or Osaka (should he ever find himself in Radar O’Reilly’s hometown on business) and all he got was a bunch of local Government web sites and Chamber of Commerce balderdash instead of convenient Google Map directions to a hot cup of joe!

Okay…. I admit it…. I’m a newbie….

After writing college newspaper articles, academic papers in law school and all-too-often dry, sterile legal prose as a practicing lawyer – and adding the occasional bon mot as an amateur blogger from time to time just to save my sanity – writing copy for a dynamic SEO firm seems to be both a challenge and a lot of fun. At least, at first….

Q: What do lawyers use for birth control?
A: Their personalities!

“The Challenge” seems to lie in writing for three audiences at once: First and foremost is the faceless guy or girl sitting behind their keyboard, perhaps impatiently searching the web for the information they need. Second is the client, who in the end is the one who ultimately pays my salary. (A fact I’ll have to consider at greater length, as I suspect I would only forget his or her interests at my own peril.) Third, there is the ubiquitous ‘spider’ endlessly trolling the net for its prey.… Or, worse yet, bypassing me and making my best efforts its unwitting victim.

What will the friendly spider’s clinical machine language make of the language I have to use to keep my copy human and accessible for audiences one and two? Will Google’s friendly search engine spider come back and visit me often? Do spiders have a sense of humor? I rather suspect not….

“The Fun?” That’s a no-brainer. Who else gets to come into work, idly surf the net for topic subjects and then gets to write about whatever seem to pique his interest? In a venue where “content is king” and one may be writing for clients as diverse as mortgage brokers, digital broadcasters, trucking outfits or computer leasing firms, the grist for the daily mill seems almost limitless. (And, yes, it seems I’ve heard the mantra “content is king” repeated almost endlessly … even on Day 2. Thank you, Mark Jackson at Search Engine Watch. They were almost the first words out of my prospective bosses’ mouths during our first sit-down.

Of course, this begs the questions. Will there still be a challenge on Day 50?Will writing SEO copy still seem as fun on Day 5,Monday morning? Are there any good SEO jokes out there??? Surely not as many as there are good lawyer jokes….

Search Engine Land’s Grant Crowell reviews Internet Yellow Pages video in a recent post. Grant discusses how IYPs like Superpages.com and Yellowpages.com aren’t getting the SEO thing among many more deficiencies.

The fact is that Yellow Pages publishers still think and react in print time. Get an idea, put it on the drawing board, discuss for a few months and then in six to eight months they will do an in-depth study. A year later, they are “testing” the product. How fast do you think Google would do it? Oops!, it’s done already.

My background is in Yellow Pages advertising and I can tell you that I had no idea what work was till I got involved in search engine optimization. SEM is a advanced marketing. Search engines work at light speed in comparison to IYPs.

Still, it is not the Yellow Pages products that continue to keep clients holding on to old technology, it is the terrific sales force. Pretty tough to keep up to them with little or no feet on the ground, knocking on doors. As long as they have that advantage, they will continue to be heard from in the online marketing world.

The Wall Street Journal reports that R.H. Donnelley Corp has purchased Business.com for approximately $340 million and $360 million.

Business.com is basically an online yellow pages directory and is used for search engine optimization purposes by many small and medium sized businesses.

Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan leads a private equity-group that has won control of BCE. They are paying a premium of $42.75. So why would someone pay a premium on a stock that has been treading water for the past several years?

The same reason that Google has an estimated 40 to 70 data centers filled with computing and storage power and is proposing to pay $ 4.6 billion dollars to create their own wireless network.

It’s all about the pipes.

In the National Post, Peter Nowak, gives us a perceptive vision of why Google would need so much hardware. Peter envisions Google moving into the telecom space in the not too distant future. I suspect Google is moving to a full blown mobile phone supported by advertising.

Read our article on Google AdSense for advice on taking advantage of Google’s ad programs.