We are often asked how long it will take before an optimized web site will start showing up in the search engine results, but of course that’s a difficult question with a complicated answer. Seeing results in the search engines depends on many factors, and each web site’s circumstances are unique. However, here are some points to consider in determining how quickly your site will start showing results in the search engines:

• How many inbound links does your site have? Google definitely cares about not only how many inbound links your site has, but also the quality of the sites those links come from. For instance, inbound links from an authority site with a topic related to yours will benefit you way more than reciprocal links or links from a site that is unrelated (or worse – a link farm). And paid links are a big no-no altogether.
• How old is your web site? Believe it or not, the age of your web site matters to the search engines. New sites come and go all the time, and the search engines want to make sure that your site is established and stable before they rank it in their results. However, a new site with lots of inbound links will quickly get the attention of the search engines, since they assume that if others think your site is worth linking to, then it must be valuable.
• How “fresh” is your content? A static site that never gets updated is not all that interesting to the search engines, no matter how great the content may be. The search engines want to provide their users with sites that are well-maintained and contain up-to-date information. Since there are so many sites to choose from, the search engines will choose the ones that have the latest information.
• How many inbound links do your competitors have? If the top-ranking web sites have 10,000 inbound links and your site has only a few, you have some work to do. You may not need to have exactly the same number of inbound links as the top sites, but you definitely need to be close. And of course, having more is even better.
• How competitive is the keyword you are targeting? This is a tough one, because the more competitive your keyword is, the more sites will be trying to rank for that same keyword. If your keywords are highly competitive, you may want to do some research and optimize for similar but less-competitive variations, at least to start with. Then as you build additional inbound links and add fresh content to your site, you can add back the competitive keywords.
• How visible is your business online – overall? Do you have an existing social media marketing strategy in place? Does your company have a blog? Send e-newsletters? Submit online press releases? Syndicate articles? All of these things can contribute to your online visibility, and will help you naturally build inbound links as people discover your content and start linking to it. Plus, the more places your business shows up online, the more opportunities the search engines have to find you.

Getting good rankings in the search engines doesn’t stop after the optimization work is completed, that’s really just the beginning. You must consistently add fresh content to your site and build as many quality inbound links as possible so the search engines will notice your site. There are no specific timeframes to determine how long it will take to see results; however, the more you can do to show the search engines that your site is a valuable resource, the faster they will share that with their users.

Love it or hate it, Google has an enormous amount of influence over the way in which we find information, communicate with others online, and consume information on the web. Google is so big and powerful that when it announces a new feature, changes an algorithm, or updates its database, the ripples are felt world wide. So what can we expect from Google in 2010? We can expect it will start making waves again, starting with the full implementation of Google Caffeine which is expected to take full effect this month.

To help you be prepared, here are seven ways Google could shake up your year:

1. The Caffeine Update: Caffeine is one of Google’s biggest behind-the-scenes updates in more than three years, and is intended to improve the speed and accuracy of searching on Google. The beta version was launched back in August 2009, with users reporting a definite increase in search speeds, and an advantage for web sites with fresh content. Caffeine also seemed to reward information from social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, although since the beta in August it has already started including real-time search results in its regular organic search listings (see item #2, below). But the big question for small businesses remains – what will the impact of the Caffeine update be on their web site rankings? Historically, any time Google performs a major update, it tends to wreak havoc on search engine rankings and positions for a while.
2. Real-Time Search: in December 2009, Google announced that it has started using real-time information found on blogs, news sites, and social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter as a way of providing users with fresher, more relevant search results. This is great news for users, but what does real-time search mean for small business web sites? It means that if you have a “static” web site that doesn’t get updated very often, it’s likely that your site will fall into obscurity in the search engine results in favor of fresher, more recent information that Google finds elsewhere on the web.
3. Google Goggles: This is a new app from Google designed for use on mobile devices and cell phones that enables users to interact directly in real-time with Google. A user can simply take a picture with a mobile device and use it as a search query – no typing necessary! Google then provides search results based on the photo the user submitted for the search. Of course, this seems very promising and like it could be incredibly useful, but it also introduces an entirely new search method that doesn’t involve keywords or inbound links or any of the SEO elements that are typically important to Google.
4. Google Sidewiki: This tool shows up as a sidebar on your browser window and displays user-contributed information next to any web page. Users can read and write entries in this sidebar, and the comments are saved and displayed beside that web page when subsequent visitors view the page (but only if they have Sidewiki installed as well). The entries are not ranked with the most recent entries first; instead, they are ranked using a Google algorithm that ranks the most useful, high-quality entries first, and takes into account other criteria Google deems important. What type of effect this will have on a web page’s rankings in the search engines remains to be seen; for instance, what if you write keyword-rich entries beside your own web page? Or what if your competitors leave not-so-nice comments on your web page for subsequent visitors to read? This definitely adds another layer of complexity to managing your company’s online reputation, since now you need to monitor your web page comments in Sidewiki as well as all the other tracking & reporting you do for your web site and social media marketing efforts.
5. Google Place Pages: Another business resource to watch is enhanced Place Pages in Google, which extends your existing Google Local information into an online profile for your business. Although this provides your business with added visibility and content in Google (including video, photos, online coupons, etc.), the pages also display aggregated information about your business that Google finds elsewhere on the web. Monitoring your Google Place Page becomes important since you will need to check the accuracy of your Place Page. However, it is also a great opportunity to provide Google with the most complete, updated, search-engine-optimized information about your business.
6. Site-Loading Times: According to Google’s unofficial spokesperson, Matt Cutts, the time that it takes your web page to load into a browser window is now a much more important factor in your Google positions. If your web site is image-heavy or has been built with Flash, a tables-based layout, or contains local formatting code, chances are that your page download times will cost you in the Google search results. Now might be a good time to invest in a web site upgrade to convert your site from old, tables-based HTML to a new, cleaner, and faster CSS-based site with modular files for formatting.
7. Personalized Search: First Google introduced Universal Search, which included results not only from web pages, but also from images, videos, blogs, and other types of information on the web. Then Google introduced Real-Time search, as discussed in item #2, above. In addition to these two concepts, Google is now experimenting with something called Personal Search, where it can deliver specific results to individual users based on their search history and personal preferences. If this is truly the case, doesn’t that mean that each user will get a different set of results from the same search, tailored to what Google believes is that user’s personal preferences? This poses a very interesting challenge for companies trying to get higher rankings in the search engines – how on earth do you optimize for each person’s individual preferences? (Hint: you really can’t).

So there you have it; seven things that could cause some unpredictable results for small businesses trying to improve their rankings in Google. For now, the best strategy is probably to continue following established best practices and “white-hat” SEO techniques, provide great content on a regular basis, and keep building inbound links from quality sites. But don’t be surprised if your rankings bounce around a bit in the New Year as Google shakes things up.

If you are still not convinced that social media belongs in your marketing mix, keep reading. Social media marketing continues to gain momentum as a first-rate marketing vehicle, gaining favor over traditional marketing in many cases. For example, Pepsi will be skipping TV ads during this year’s Super Bowl and instead investing the ad dollars into social media marketing. Pepsi has been advertising during the Super Bowl for 23 years; yet now believes it can reach more viewers and get better results with social media than with TV advertising during the Super Bowl! That really says a lot about the state of social media marketing today.

But beyond being highly effective, a new study from Wetpaint and The Altimeter Group now shows that social media marketing can actually improve a company’s bottom line. The study revealed that companies who were the most engaged in social media marketing increased their revenues by 18% , versus companies not engaged in social media marketing, who showed an average decrease in revenues of 6%.

So if social media marketing is so effective that, as in the case of Pepsi’s Super Bowl ads, it can replace the traditional, and has also been shown to increase revenues by double-digits, it may be time to re-think your social media strategy!

What can your small business do to take advantage of the benefits that come from social media marketing? Here are some tips to get you started:

Start with the biggies: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube.

There are so many social marketing options available today that to establish (and then maintain) a presence on all of them would be virtually impossible for most small businesses. So instead of having a large number of profiles scattered among many different sites, try to focus your efforts on the “biggies” in the space. Currently, that includes Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube. Also, all of these have business profile options available for setting up business profiles and accounts.

Take advantage of advanced features.

These “biggies” also offer various advanced features that help extend the usefulness and marketing impact of social networking for your business. For instance, Facebook offers a Custom Tab feature that gives you additional pages in your profile for custom content. LinkedIn allows you to use RSS feeds from your blog or other resources, and YouTube video links can be easily embedded into your web pages, blog, and other social media.

Integrate everything to work together.

To get the maximum benefit of social media marketing, be sure to integrate your profiles to work seamlessly with each other. Your Facebook page should be able to “talk” to your web site, your Twitter “tweets” should display on your Facebook page, and your blog posts should be RSS-fed to your LinkedIn profile. This may take some outside professional expertise to help with the integration work, but it’s worth it in the time you’ll save in maintaining your social profiles and in the additional marketing reach your messages will have.

Maintain your branding among all your social media sites.

When setting up your social media profiles, be sure to use your existing logo, corporate colors, and the “look and feel” of your existing branding and web site. It’s important that you maintain consistency among all of your marketing channels to reinforce your company and your brand in all the places your customers and potential customers visit. Most social media sites allow for at least some level of customization.

Be committed to posting content regularly.

It doesn’t have to take a lot of time or resources to keep up with your social media marketing, but you do have to commit to spending at least a little time on a regular basis to maintain your social presence. If you have integrated your profiles, it will be easy to post new content and have it automatically propagate to the rest of your social channels without having to enter the same content over and over on different profiles. Of course, having a dedicated social media staff would be great, but it’s unrealistic for most small businesses. Instead, put together a social media strategy that outlines which social sites you want to use, what content you will post, and the person who will be responsible for posting your content on a regular basis.

By including social media marketing in your marketing mix, your small business gets an inexpensive, effective marketing strategy that not only improves your online visibility, but can also contribute to your bottom line as well. So if you’re looking for a way to boost your revenues this year, social marketing may be a good place to start.

There are so many misconceptions surrounding search engine optimization and how it works that often it’s hard to know what to believe. One report says keywords are the most important thing, while another says inbound links are what matters the most in getting good rankings. How can you know what’s real and what’s not?

Here are five things that most SEO experts agree you can count on when optimizing your web site for better search engine positions:

1. There are NO guarantees, regardless of what anyone tells you.
2. Keyword meta tags do not help with SEO, but keyword usage does
3. Meta titles and descriptions are important to the search engines
4. The keywords YOU think searchers use to find your site are not always the best terms
5. Inbound links from authority sites carry a lot of weight in the search engines

There are NO guarantees, regardless of what anyone tells you.

Search engines are constantly changing, improving, and tweaking their algorithms, and the details on how their algorithms work are kept secret. This means that optimization is a constantly moving target, and it is virtually impossible to guarantee any type of results. If your SEO company guarantees top results, make sure you understand what they mean by “top” results. They may be able to get your site to rank for keywords nobody ever searches on, but is that helpful to your business? Of course not.

Keyword meta tags do not help with SEO, but keyword usage does.

Once upon a time when search engines first started appearing on the web, site owners could add keywords in the “behind-the-scenes” meta keyword tag to let the search engines know what the site was about. However, as unscrupulous web sites and spammers started to misuse and abuse this feature, the search engines had to figure out other ways to determine a page’s relevance. One of the things that search engines measure today is how often you use your keywords in the text of your pages. You need to use them enough to be useful to the search engines, but not so much that it’s considered keyword spamming.

Meta titles and descriptions are important to the search engines.

Although the meta title of your page displays in the top of the browser window, many small businesses mistakenly use only their company name (e.g., “My Company Web Site”) in this tag. This is a valuable tag that the search engines do pay attention to, and it is often used as the actual link text on the search engine results pages. Also, the description is typically displayed under the link on the results page, making this an important tag as well. Be sure to use your keywords appropriately in these meta tags, as it not only helps searchers understand what your site is about, but also helps the search engines rank your site higher.

The keywords YOU think searchers use to find your site are not always the best terms.

Sometimes, small businesses make the mistake of thinking they know the keywords that customers or potential customers would type into a search engine to find their business. While these terms may provide a good starting point for real-time keyword research, they are often not even close to what real people actually type into a search engine to find these products and services. By performing real-time keyword research, you can identify the exact terms that searchers really use, making it far more likely that you will connect with the people who are looking for what you have to offer.

Inbound links from authority sites carry a lot of weight in the search engines.

Inbound links that point to your site from other sites on the web are like a seal of approval (or a “vote”) for your web site. If another web site thinks enough of your site to actually link to it, then the search engines give you credit for having useful information worth linking to. If an “authority” site (a site that Google deems as authoritative or important) links to your site, then that carries even more weight. Not all inbound links are valuable, however. Avoid reciprocal links (“I’ll link to you if you link to me”), and links from “link farms” – sites with pages of links but little or no other content of value to a visitor. The most valuable links are from other quality sites in your industry, from relevant blogs in your industry, from established web directories, press release sites, news sites, and from appropriately using social networking sites in your marketing mix.

The Best Small Business Strategy

Since the nature of search engines (and the web in general) is one of constant change and non-stop innovation, the best SEO strategy for a small business is to stick with the tried-and-true techniques that get results. Research your keywords to find the right terms for optimizing – don’t just guess. Then use them appropriately in your text, include the right meta data behind the scenes, and intentionally build your inbound links from authority sites and social networking initiatives. But most of all, be sure to provide fresh content on your site that gives visitors a reason to come back, and the search engines a reason to notice.

Most web users today – more than 80%, use search engines when looking for products, services, and information on the internet. Search engines make it easy for them to type in a combination of keywords and phrases, and in return get a page full of results that may or may not match what they were looking for in the first place. Sometimes, the information is really good, but sometimes it is totally off-target, not relevant, or really old and outdated (or a combination of these). But now that real time search has arrived, things are changing quickly.

Earlier this month, Google announced that it has started using information from blogs, news sites, and social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter as a way of providing users with fresher, more relevant search results. This is great news for search engine users, but what does it mean for small business web sites? It means that if you have a “static” web site that doesn’t get updated very often, it’s likely that your site will fall into obscurity in the search engine results in favor of fresher, more recent information that Google finds elsewhere on the web.

It also means that if you have not yet incorporated a social marketing strategy into your regular marketing mix, it’s definitely time to get started!

Why Social Networking is Important to Search

Social networking is not only a great way to connect with your customers and reach countless new prospects, but it turns out that it can also help you stay relevant in the search engines. Google’s list of current social networking partners includes Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, FriendFeed, and Jaiku, to name a few. But, Google also includes blogs, news sites, and YouTube information in its search results. So if you want your web site to be listed in Google’s search results, it wouldn’t hurt to have a presence on as many of these social web sites as possible.

Other search engines like Bing and Yahoo are also on-board with real-time search results, and they have formed their own partnerships with the social networking sites as they strive to incorporate fresh, real-time social information in their search results as well. So it’s not just Google that’s taking the value of social networking seriously.

Participation IS Necessary

Even if your small business has already set up a Facebook profile or a Twitter account, it doesn’t mean it will help you in the search engines. Google also takes into account your social “authority” and participation on these sites; including the number of connections you have on the web and the type of content that you post, as well as the frequency with which you share it. When you provide useful information and consistently give value to your social networking followers, Google notices and rewards you.

Now What?

So as you can see, social marketing has turned into far more than a passing fad into a mission-critical business objective for many small businesses. However, you might be wondering how you can create a social marketing plan, implement the plan, and also maintain the flow of information without hiring additional staff members or adding more tasks to your already impossibly long to-do list. Well for starters, you could consider creating an integrated social marketing strategy for your business.

Integrated Social Marketing (ISM)®

We think that an integrated social marketing strategy is so vital to your business’ online success that we have actually trademarked the term! With good reason, too – integrating your social networking profiles with each other, with your web site, and with your existing marketing initiatives lets you take advantage of the true power of social networking, and makes it easy to keep information flowing seamlessly, without creating additional work for you or your staff.

With an integrated strategy, you can avoid creating a bunch of little “islands” of social profiles on the web – if you create five stand-alone profiles on five different sites, that just means you have to update five additional things on your task list. But by integrating your social marketing, you can “write once, but publish to many”, and the information automatically spreads among all of your integrated profiles for you. This naturally creates additional places for the search engines to find your fresh, updated information right where they are already looking for it – in the social networking and real-time search sites.

So as search engines continue to evolve and change to provide better search results to their users, it’s naive to think that your “static” web site can somehow show up in the search results without a steady supply of fresh content and at least some social media participation. The web today is a much more sophisticated place, and if you want your site to show up in Google, Bing, Yahoo, and be found by customers online, then you have to get serious about following the trends. Lucky for you, Google and the other search engines are already telling you how to do that – with social networking and real-time search.