I am sure you have already heard of the idea of searching socially. In essence, companies such as Scour allow you to search for what you are looking for, but on the SERPs you get a chance to vote for the results. It’s a very good idea on the surface. In essence, by being part of the community and voting on the provided results, you can help others find what they are looking for faster. But here are the major issues that I see with the current platform:

• Gaming Web 2.0 service is a serious business: Believe it or not people make a living out of gaming Web 2.0 services such as Digg. So it would not be a surprise to me if they did the same to these so called “social” search engines. Sites such as Digg change their algorithms everyday to fight spammers, but there are just too many people trying to spam others.
• Social concept has flaws: Not everyone thinks alike when searching for even the most specific terms. Let’s say I am searching for Chase Credit Cards. I could be thinking about finding a selection of chase credit cards to apply for or trying to find out the latest news about chase products. So a site that has received 30 thumbs up for that keyword could be extremely useful to one person and somewhat useless to another.
• N dimension-based systems work better than N-1 dimension based systems: The system that takes into account only two factors for ranking search results pages is inferior to a system that takes in account 4 factors. Now you may say that voting could add a whole other dimension to search, and make it more effective. While true, the current systems are not perfect, and a binary vote for a results page cannot truly indicate the usefulness of a listing. So in essence, you add more unpredictability to your search pages by taking into account people’s vote.

The social search is exciting and everybody wants to jump on the social bandwagon these days. But in the end, social search can not stand on its own, which leads us to a hybrid social semantic search engine. But we are supposed to get there evenutally…

That’s the million dollar question. What happens if you Digg your own article? According to Digg, you are free to submit your own articles. But in general, it’s a good idea to your readers submit your articles to Digg. Now I did submit my article to Digg a couple of months ago and in 3 days my site was completely dropped from Google. I am by no means suggesting that had anything to do with my ranking drop, but it’s interesting that it has happened to a bunch of other people as well. What’s your experience with Digg? Have you experienced such an issue?

Now that Google is trying very hard to make Flash readable to its bots, should you invest in a flash website in hope that it will be readable to Google in the future? My answer is a quick no at this point. Google’s announcement was great for our industry. Flash sites do look better in general than heavy text sites. I think it would work brilliantly for landing pages that are right now not quite readable to Google.

Google, however, has just started working on this whole project. There is a long way to go before Google can claim this project as a 100% success (read the piece on SitePoint about potential problems). Google will get it right finally, but the time is not now. Here are the reasons you shouldn’t invest money in Flash website right now:

• Flash looks good but is not completely indexable yet.
• Technologies such as SiFR can help but text always works better.
• Text sites are in general more search engine friendly and have less load.
• AJAXification can compete with Flashification.
• Flex is still not where it needs to be (lots of unresolved issues).
• Flash sites won’t have any advantage over text sites as far as search engines are concerned.
• It’s all about content!!

Need I say more?

If you have worked in the SEO industry for even just a little bit, you know the reputation that search engine optimization professional have in other industries. Many think of SEO professionals as gamers: a group of folks who spend days and nights figuring out shortcuts to the top of the SERPs. In fact, many SEOs consider themselves to be gamers. But is it really true? Are we all just a bunch of folks who have nothing better to do than figure out what tricks Google in putting us at the top?

For some people the answer is yes. The Blackhats are certainly gamers, and there is no question about that. I don’t care if you are putting hidden text on your pages or you are using color schemes to trick engines, you are gaming the system.

But BlackHat SEOs are not the only ones who are giving us a bad name. Some white hats, especially those who love to buy links and use reciprocal linking aggressively are to blame here as well. I have been in the same room with SEOs who claim that they like to live on “the edge.” These are the people who give us honest whitehats a bad name. When I do SEO for people, I always think about the ways to improve their content and improve ranking positions by implementing the best practices. Not everyone is familiar with the importance of title tags. Not everyone knows who exactly the search engines work. Showing people how to target the right keyword is different than changing your whole content around a couple of keywords and repeating it a million times throughout your content.

So no. SEO is not gaming search engines. It’s about learning the rules and maximizing value to your readers. Nothing more or less.

Here is an update on the post that we made about Worio tag-based search engine. At the time, Worio was under construction, but now Worio Beta is live. I’ll write a full review of this service in the upcoming days. However, Worio’s tag based approach is very interesting. When you search for a keyword, you basically get two tabs:

1. Search Results

2. Tag Recommendations

You can also vote sites up and down which I think could work well for search engines but also backfire (due to the fact that we have a lot of marketers who are good at gaming these features). Worio takes a little bit of time getting used to, but it’s a very approach.

I had a chance to play with the MSN Demographics Predition tool, and I got to tell it’s a pretty neat tool. If you are doing any SEO, PPC, or any marketing at all, knowing who you are dealing with is a very good thing. Now, I am not sure how accurate the tool is. Here is why:

I logged in to the MSN Demographics predictor tool (you can find it here). And I searched for my favorite keyword “tech deals.” To my surprise the tool shows that only 43% of people who search for tech deals are males. Now if it was 50-50 I wouldn’t have been surprised. But suggesting that females shop for gadgets more often than men do sounds a little bit inaccurate. The word “gadget” shows 69% searches by men. So my suspicion about men being a little bit more excited about toys seems to be accurate. Even the word “tech bargain” shows 58% male dominance. So the tool seems to be a little bit off.

Here is what I know. If you have a list of keywords that you are planning to target for your SEO or Paid Search campaigns, this tool will give you the ball park demographics on them. For most low-medium level campaigns, the numbers should be good enough. But I doubt big companies will be using this tool for their national/international campaigns anytime soon.

I hear these stories about posting to digg getting people penalized on Google. So I thought I write a post clarifying what I think would make your site drop in rankings like a brick in the ocean:

Penalties are very real my friends. Whether you have a blog or a well established website, you can get into trouble for being naughty. So what does being naughty means. Basically, anything you do to take a shortcut in the SEO game is pretty much frowned upon (with some exceptions). Concepts such as keyword stuffing, link stuffing, cloaking & doorways, and link farming are all frowned upon by Google. But there are some exceptions!

The best example for an exception would be Link Buying. I have heard people claiming that your rank would get dropped if you buy links. While no one can be sure about this, Google USUALLY does not ban you for buying links. They do so for selling them. In essence, you need to take an action that can be done only by you for Google or other search engines to ban you.

You may have heard that using a software such as Web Position to check your ranks could get your banned on Google. That couldn’t be further from the truth. It can get your IP banned but not your site. Why? Because someone else (your competitors) could run the software day and night to get you banned. The same would be possible with Link Buying. What keeps your competitors from buying links to your site to get you banned.

So in order to get banned on Google, you need to do the following:

• Implement a tactic (shortcut) that is frowned upon by Google.
• Be the only person who can possibly do such thing!

Using this analogy you can pretty much tell that getting links from digg cannot get you banned nor can adding the webmasters tool to your account (believe me some SEOs claim that Webmasters tool got them penalized on Google!).

One thing that you can be sure in this day and age is that there are always people who look for shortcuts to get ahead. Search engine optimization is a field full of people who do black hat all the time to get ahead. In fact, I have heard it from a few top notch search engine specialists that while White Hat techniques are the right way to do things, it’s always better to go with the cutting edge BlackHat techniques to make sure that you get the job done faster and in a quicker passion.

Google is usually good at catching people who are trying to spam their indexes. But even today they are not perfect at catching guys who are trying some wacky shortcut to get ahead. For instance, today I did a search on my own name (I have a funky last name that is pretty unique), and I was surprised to seem my name show up in listings that had nothing to do with my name. Here is one listing that was particulary interesting on the second page of results pages:

[my name] began Skype has decided to overwhelmed by your financial it is not helpless now an asset of to solidify its position spend even more money

If you check the listing, my name is not there anywhere on the piece. It just shows that people are still using dynamic keyword insertion with success. Why dynamic you may ask? Because my Dad’s full name replaced mine when I looked it up in the same fashion.

I am not saying that BlackHat doesn’t pay at all. But it pays only if you know what you are doing, you know how to protect yourself, and you are darn good. But if you are a newbie who need to go to Search Engine Strategies in hope of picking up Black Hat techniques, then you can be in trouble in no time at all.

If you talk to any of the big guys in the SEO industry, the claim to be above all the nitty gritty SEO stuff such as META Tags, META Descriptions, and W3C code validation. Not all of them do, but a few of these guys tend to just put emphasis on content and content alone.

I have worked in the SEO industry for more than 4 years now, and I can tell you that content is very important, but it’s not everything when it comes to getting ranked high on the SERPs. Everybody has heard the whole “content is king” rant. It’s true. Creating magnetic content on a consistent basis can guarantee you a top spot on major search engine results pages. It’s also true that not everyone can do that. If I were to guess, less than 1% of sites on the web actually offer anything that adds overall value to the web. Out of those 1% sites, only a handful of them are actually real difference makers (e.g. Problogger).

So if you can’t create magnetic content on a consistent basis and you are goning against the other 99% of the web, you should anything and everything that COULD make a difference. Are META tags discounted by some engines? That’s true. Should you ignore them? At your own peril.

If you look at SEO best practices, you can always find a logic behind optimization techniques. For instance, providing ALT tags for images is a usability must. Adding a sitemap could be helpful for someone who is lost on your site and looking for a specific section on your site. Adding these pieces to your site always adds some value, in addition to SEO ranking benefits. So the next time a big shot tells you that you shouldn’t “waste” your time with these things, just ignore!

Blogging is very hot these days. Almost everyone I know has a blog and of course has something to say about something. There are of course multiple blog platforms that offer different features and use different coding structures. It is true that search engines love blogs and forms due to the freshness of content on these items, but also due to SE-friendly struture of some of these blogging web application packages.

While Blogger, ExpressionEngine, Movable Type, Typepad, and Vox are all good blogging platforms, Wordpress is truly the superstar of the show. Wordpress is an almost perfect platform for those of us who want to have the best blogging features plus the freedom to make changes as we wish (I am talking about a self-hosted Wordpress blog here). But due to its dynamic structure, Wordpress blogs are barely optimized for search engines from the very first day, so I thought I share 5 quick things that I have personally done for my own Wordpress Weblogs.

1. Post titles, post titles, post titles: Title tags are one of the most important factors that search engines consider when evaluating your pages. Having the right title tag with keywords that you intend on targeting can make a world of difference. I would put more than my title post as my title tag just to have the opportunity to properly optimize each and every post for search engines. You can either write the PHP code yourself or use a plugin such as SEO Title Tag from netconcepts.

2. URLs: Post URLs are also important for your search engine efforts. Wordpress does not optimize your URLs for you, at least not right from the start. So make sure you optimize your Permalinks using Wordpress’ interface. You can use something like /%category%/%postname% for your Permalinks (go to Settings menu and click on Permalinks).

3. 301 Redirects: you want to make sure that you take care of broken links and 301 redirect them to the right location. You can easily do so with the Redirection plugin for Wordpress.

4. No follow Links: You want to make sure that you are not leaking Pagerank by links that are posted in your comments. In addition, links to META pages can also be no followed to increase your link weight. You can take care of this using All-in-One SEO pack.

5. Finally, make sure you have the right robots.txt for your blog. While many SEO professionals discount robots.txt as an effective SEO optimization technique, it is still important for you to make sure that you avoid content duplication issues on Wordpress. For instance, http://www.example.com/category/post1 is the same as http://www.example.com/post1 in most cases, so want to make sure you don’t get penalized for duplicate content as a result of this. You can either do a change to your .htaccess file to achieve this or add the following to your robots.txt file:
Disallow: /category/*/*

There are multiple ways around this, but the point is to avoid having two exact pages with two different URLs seen by search engines.

Finally, make sure you keep the fresh content coming. Use the keywords properly, and you should see better results by implementing the above changes. There are a few other things that you can do that I will address in a later post.