The Reciprocal Consulting Blog

You bet it has. In fact, it changes in a major way about every two or three years. The most recent change has been with Google’s update Caffeine.

Caffeine has made some significant changes to the search engine marketing game. In fact, some of those changes may yet to be manifested. But one thing is more clear: The competition is a lot stiffer.

Since Google is now indexing more web pages than ever and they are getting indexed faster than ever, you can say that the Web just moved into hyperdrive. Create a web page and it gets into the index within a couple of hours. But will it rank?

Universal search has been around for a couple of years now, but now that we have Caffeine it just got a bit more robust. Google is returning images, videos, blogs, news, real-time information and whatever it can find for just about any search query now. and it’s happening lightening fast. Which means that if you perform a search now for a specific keyword phrase then perform the same search two hours from now, you may very well see different results.

They won’t be drastically different. But they could be significantly different. Maybe that video that was in the No. 3 position dropped down to No. 9 and was replaced by a press release while positions 1 and 2 and 4 moved around, putting 4 on top, 1 at 2 and 2 at 4.

These kinds of changes have been going on for some time now, but not at the same speed. And I think that search engine marketing is about to become a different game altogether. The next couple of years should be super exciting for Internet marketers.

Local search is becoming more and more important all the time. As more small businesses come online and try to compete at the local level, local search will grow in importance.

Several Internet marketers answered a poll and discussed which local search criteria are the most important. Interestingly, most of them agreed on the most important criteria. After that, there was more disagreement but, again, you’ll find a large number of the marketers agreeing on the most harmful local search factors as well.

The top 3 most important local search criteria, according to the poll numbers are:

• Claiming your Place page
• Your business address listed in the city of the search being conducted
• Picking the proper categories for your Place page

Another positive local search factor that is worth mentioning is the number of Internet Yellow Pages and directory listings you have. Many of the marketers in the poll seemed to think that was important.

Regarding negative factors, the following negative factors were chosen as important to stay away from:

• Multiple Place Pages with the same phone number
• Not showing your address on your Place page
• Multiple Place Pages with the same address
• Listing a PO Box on your website without a physical address
• Multiple Place Pages with the same business title

Interestingly, many of the marketers involved in the poll thought customer reviews were important as well. It could be that negative reviews might have an influence in your rankings, but that is subject to debate.

If you’d like to see the results for yourself, you can see them here. It’s quite a read.

There is a florist in New Zealand performing community penance for hijacking the Google Local listings of her competitors. I rather think she should get jail time, but that’s an aside.

If you have a local small business and you want to start marketing your business online but don’t know where to start, Google Local is the perfect place. You don’t even need a website. But if you don’t claim your business on Google Local then someone else just may do it for you and take any traffic or business that you might have received had you done it.

While this is considered criminal, consider that it could happen from someone in another country hijacking your business listing. If that happens then you may never see justice.

It’s best to prevent it from happening before you see your business in a compromised situation. Claim your business on Google Local, Yahoo!, Bing and Ask.com. It’s free and it will save you a ton of headaches.

Search engine marketing has as many definitions as there are marketers, and most of them are right. But what hardly gets talked about among search engine marketers is that SEM is more than just selling your stuff for a profit. You’ve got to do more than attract audiences with keywords. You are selling benefits.

No one cares about your product. No one cares about your company. No one cares about you. They want to know what you can do for them.

The question is, how can you do that with search engine marketing?

First, the two arms of SEM:

• Pay per click advertising
• Search engine optimization (organic search)

So how do you sell benefits through these two primary channels?

With PPC you’ve got to sell your benefits to get a click. Your goal is to get people to your landing page and then sell the benefits of your product there.

With organic search marketing, you use your landing page optimization to get rank your web page, build links to it, drive traffic to it and sell your benefits to your visitors to close the sale.

Search engine marketing really follows the principles of traditional marketing – sell the benefits. You just do it with modern technology.

Twitter has announced that it will start introducing ads called Promoted Tweets, except that these ads will be organic tweets with one exception. They’ll be labeled Promoted Tweets.

And there is one other difference as well:

There is one big difference between a Promoted Tweet and a regular Tweet. Promoted Tweets must meet a higher bar—they must resonate with users.

The plan is this …

Promoted Tweets will be added to users’ Twitter streams according to relevance. If Twitter users don’t reply to or retweet the Promoted Tweets then they’ll disappear. They won’t be shown any more. My question is, Will the advertiser be reimbursed for any unpublished tweets or is the risk a part of the deal? Do advertisers pay a flat rate and take a risk on the tweet not resonating?

This certainly looks interesting and if the first phase of advertisers manage to pull off ads that resonate then I’m guessing that other advertisers will be given an opportunity as well. Will Promoted Tweets become another potential advertising stream for search engine marketers who want to reach their target audiences? Will it fly?

Does your website load slowly? If so then you need to figure out how to get it to load faster because Google has now made page load speed a ranking factor.

This is very significant. If you do any pay per click advertising then page load speed has already been a factor for your quality score. But yesterday Google announced that site speed will now be considered as a ranking factor.

This actually makes a lot of sense. Users don’t like to land on a page and have to wait for it to load. It could mean the difference between them staying on your site or visiting your competition. So why should Google be concerned about that?

Truth is, they’re not. They don’t care if you make any money or not. But they do care if they make money and they do care if searchers have a good experience on any site that Google sends them to. If your site is an AdSense site and it loads slowly then Google will make less revenue. If you advertise your site using pay per click advertising and it loads slowly then you’ll likely have fewer clicks and Google will make less money. See how it works now?

Fix your site load speed or you might start seeing your pages fall in the rankings.

Now that Facebook is the most trafficked website online, is it good search engine marketing?

It depends on what you mean by search engine marketing. If you expect that every message you post on Facebook is going to end up in the search engine results, don’t count on it. But if you mean that some aspects of Facebook have a good chance of ending up in the search results then yes, it is good search engine marketing.

Facebook profiles have been indexed for some time now. If you have a Facebook profile and you are active on Facebook then your profile has a good chance of ranking well for your name. At the very least it makes for good reputation management. But profile pages are not the only pages that have the potential to be indexed in the search engines.

Fan pages, too, can get indexed and rank for key terms. Since businesses can start a fan page without having a Facebook profile, it makes for a great opportunity to target a keyword and get a search engine ranking.

Another way that Facebook could be good search engine marketing is through real-time search. Some of the search engines, like Bing and Google, are beginning to index Twitter, Facebook and other other social networks in their real-time indexing and that could mean great search engine marketing.

So what do you think? Will you be using Facebook more?

It’s called Universal Search. Google has been doing it for a couple of years now. Including videos in the organic search results for certain key phrases. Where do you think those videos are hosted? Most of them are on YouTube.

Most of them, not all of them. But YouTube is the most trafficked video site online and the second most popular search engine. That means that video content found at YouTube is highly valuable to the search engines. You can get your YouTube videos to appear online for search queries and have those videos rank reasonably well for the key search terms you are targeting.

The first step, of course, is to produce a really good video that people want to watch and share with their friends. Secondly, upload it to YouTube.

Beyond that, how do you optimize for the search results page?

Here are a few tips to keep in mind as you optimize your video content on YouTube for the search engines:

• Use your video title as an opportunity to target the right key phrase.
• In the text portion of your video upload, describe your video accurately using the proper keywords.
• Establish a YouTube channel with your keyword in it.
• If you include links in your YouTube video, make sure they point to a relevant page on your website.

Video optimization is just now getting its start, but you can be sure that YouTube videos will have as high a chance to appear in the SERPs as any content can.

When it comes to search engine marketing there are some dos and don’ts. But we tend to think in terms of principles. You can get started with search engine marketing in just a few simple steps and it’s not that hard. Be prepared, however. You will need to spend some money.

1. Step 1: Make a tentative plan. Don’t just wing it. Search engine marketing involves planning and execution. Your first step should be to plan.
2. Step 2: Research. Why is this step second? Because you really should know what general direction you are headed before you start your research. The research will guide you in a more specific direction. What kind of research? Competitive. Keyword. Opportunity.
3. Step 3: Adjust your plan. This is where you hone the details. Take your research and make the best plan you can. Include a budget and be specific about your goals.
4. Step 4: Open accounts. You’ll need accounts with pay per click companies. Set up your accounts based on your budget set in step 3.
5. Step 5: Implement. Remember, it isn’t all about pay per click advertising. Search engine marketing also involves organic search. Make sure they work together.

Now that you know the steps to get started in search engine marketing, why waste time?

There is a heated controversy that has been raging for several years about the practice of bidding on competitor brand names for your search engine marketing campaigns. One camp says it is trademark infringement. Other professionals claim it is perfectly acceptable and likens it to setting up a similar business across the street at a busy intersection in the real world. Who is correct?

There is no easy answer and it is one that you will likely have to answer for your own business if you intend to engage in search engine marketing. You may have competitors bidding on your brand name, but should you bid on theirs?

We won’t tell you how to run your business, but we believe in ethical marketing, which is not deceptive and which is based on a strong commitment to “playing clean”. Competition is tough, and it should be, but it should also be fair. The honest truth is, there are enough keywords in any niche to bid on that bidding on the competition’s brand name isn’t really necessary. But that’s a decision you’ll have to make for yourself. And I hope your sleep habits don’t change.

A new survey shows that Facebook fan pages are effective marketing. This may come as news to some people, but it’s not surprising. What is really surprising is that there was no mention of Facebook fan pages as search marketing tools.

With Facebook, profiles and fan pages are generally indexed in the search engines, but not much else. If you build a highly optimized Facebook fan page then you could see that fan page rank well in the search engines and that could lead to additional business for you. That’s why so many businesses are flocking to Facebook to build fan pages. They are not only effective but good search marketing vehicles.

Search engine marketing is in a constant state change. This may seem a bit odd. Wouldn’t the search engines benefit more by keeping things steady and constant? Not really and it’s a simple matter to understand why.

There is a constant tug of war between the search engines and webmasters trying to get their pages to rank well. But there are different types of webmasters. Not all of them play fair.

The first type of webmaster is the run-of-the-mill webmaster who just wants to run legitimate business. This type of webmaster doesn’t really have the time to learn everything there is about marketing to search engines, but they do take out time to learn what they can. Their goal is to rank as well as they can and not try to game anyone.

The second type of webmaster is the professional search engine marketer. They spend their time studying the search engines, testing different techniques and doing their best to stay on top of the latest changes.

A third type of webmaster is the “blackhat” practitioner. Like the professional SEMer, he spends his time learning the latest techniques and keeping up with search engine ranking changes. However, this type of webmaster will use any technique at his disposal to gain an edge in the rankings. He doesn’t care if the search engines approve of his tactics or not.

Then there is the spammer. This type of webmaster is simply careless. And sloppy. And somewhat lazy. She won’t take the time to study the search engines. She just learns what the popular theories are of the day and chases rumors without testing them. This webmaster will likely have a few websites de-indexed then wonder why.

Finally, there is the clueless. This webmaster doesn’t know the first thing about how search engines work. He just builds his website and hope people show up to look at it.

The search engines, first and foremost, want to show good search results to searchers. But they also want to be fair to each of the types of webmasters above. And to do that, there must be some kind of way to ensure that no one games the search engines to gain an unfair advantage. That’s why the search engines penalize the use of careless tactics and those that attempt to game the results.

But it would not be fair to allow the professional search engine marketers an opportunity to gain advantage over everyone else by letting them in on all the ranking secrets and shutting everyone else out. So the search engine frequently change their ranking algorithms to wipe out the advantages of the professionals and to ensure that no one games the results for an unfair advantage.

This means it is even more important to study and test to see what works – not just for today, but for all time.

Are you in control of your search engine marketing campaigns? If not then who is?

The key to getting ahead and staying ahead in search engine marketing is to know the game. If you are not staying on top of changes in the industry – and they happen every day – and adjusting your marketing based on the direction of the search engines then you are not really in control of your marketing. You can be in control or the search engines can be in control, but not both.

Of course, you could give control of your marketing to someone else entirely and hope things go well. But it needs to be someone you trust. Is there a search engine marketing company you trust well enough to run everything without question? If you do hire a company to run your marketing campaigns, make sure you hire a company who is knowledgeable of the latest search engine marketing tactics and is good at communicating with you. They’ve got to keep you informed.

Search engine marketing has been going strong for a few years now. Social search is just getting off the ground. In fact, Google has made it a point to tackle social search and lead the charge. Only, there are some people who aren’t so impressed with how they’re doing it.

But let’s say that social search were a perfect animal – like organic search (I’m kidding, OK?).

At any rate, let’s just say that social search was at least as good as organic search has been when at its best. Would search engine marketing be any different? Would social search change the nature of search engine marketing? I’m betting it would.

Remember, there are two branches of SEM: Paid search and organic search. How would each of these change with social search? My guess is that each would change in a real sense, but not necessarily in a fundamental sense.

Here’s what I mean: PPC is based in large part on the principles of organic search. You do your keyword research, write a few targeted ads, and watch your rankings based on search engine ranking factors. Social search, however, isn’t anything like that. You still might do your keyword research, but you aren’t so much concerned with rankings. You are concerned with connections. So how will that change search engine marketing?

I think one very important way that search engine marketing will change when social search reaches full maturity is that brands will no longer need to feel threatened by lesser companies who are better at SEO. Brands can actually put more emphasis on their company culture and focus on the benefits of doing business. That’s as it should be.

If you’ve been watching what’s going on with Google lately, it looks as if the company may pull out of China over cybersecurity and human rights issues. If it happens, that will drastically change the dynamics of the world wide web. It will certainly be noticeable in China where Google has 30% of the search market share.

Today I noticed on Google a link below the search box to “Information, resources, and ways you can help survivors of the Haiti earthquake.”

Search engine marketing is more than buying clicks. First and foremost, it’s about using the search engines to get your message across. That includes organic search and paid search.

Both of these incidents – the large one and the small one – affect search engine marketing in some way. If Google pulls out of China, that will leave a lot of businesses in China with one less alternative for reaching their customers. It could also slow down progress toward a more open China. And Google’s link to more information about helping the Haitians is the perfect example of how search engines can be used to make a difference in the world. That’s true even if, maybe especially if, you own the search engines.

Search engine marketing continues to be a growth industry. It is not today what it used to be and it won’t be tomorrow what it is today. Keep you eye on the changing nature of the web and look for opportunities to make your search engine marketing efforts better and more effective than ever.

Screenwerk has a great read here on the Internet on TV.

Imagine sitting in front of the tube watching your favorite TV show and up on the screen (in the corner of the screen so as not to interfere with your viewing) comes a little popup box. It’s your friend who lives thousands of miles in L.A. sending you a chat message through Facebook. You type a message into your remote control to let him know that you are watching a show and you’ll chat in fifteen minutes.

A couple of minutes later you get a another popup box. It’s your mother on Skype. You shout at the TV, “I’ll call you in 30 minutes!” OK, she hangs up.

Across the bottom of the screen you see little text ads scroll by every five to ten minutes. You calmly say to yourself, “Those ads are really annoying.” But then you remember those $60 cable bills. One of the ads, much to your chagrin, catches your attention. (Those ads are provided by Google, by the way.) You pick up your remote and click the ad – a little popup box appears in the top left corner. You’ve been taken to the advertiser’s website.

Since you are still watching your show, you leave it the way it is. When the show is over you send a message to your Facebook friend, “Let’s chat.” You dial your mother on Skype. And you enlarge the website panel in the corner of your TV so that it takes up the full screen. What a multi-tasker you are!

Is this the future of Internet TV? Will you someday be able to chat, talk on VOIP and surf the Internet all on TV? Gone are the commercial breaks, gone are the cable channels and their high-priced monthly bills. Programs are paid for by revenue made from pay-per-click ads. Search engine marketing is bigger and more effective than ever. Can you see it? Am I dreaming? Is it possible?

When a lot of people think about search engine marketing they immediately think about pay per click marketing (PPC). That is a part of it, but that’s not all there is to effective SEM. Search engine marketing is any type of marketing done through search engines, and that includes display advertising.

Of course, display advertising is probably the least effective of SEM strategies. Most small business owners are beginning to realize that now. But search engine optimization ranks as still one of the most effective search engine marketing strategies, and I suspect it always will be.

In some sense, social media marketing can be considered SEM. Real-time search is definitely search engine marketing. Video and image optimization are search engine marketing strategies too. As is mobile marketing when done the right way.

So you can that you have options beyond PPC. Search engine marketing is more than tossing money at keywords, it’s really about devising a strategy for drawing in new customers through the search engines.

Bill Slawski takes a walk down memory lane by showcasing some archived screenshots of search engines from a decade ago. It’s interesting to see what Google, a new upstart, looked like back then. And even better to see some of the sites that are no longer around. But the best thing about Bill’s post is the final comment, “I’m wondering what they might be like a dozen years from now.”

Yeah, I’m wondering too.

And here’s my speculation. I think the search engines will be fully social. Not only will you be able to visit Google and search for real-time information and expect relevant results, but you’ll be able to share Facebook-like information and provide “status updates” in real time as well. Facebook might even be one of the leading search engines. And Google could be one of the leading social networks.

I think Google Wave is the start of a new direction for search engines. You’ll likely be able to search the Web from your desktop – even the “desktop” of your cell phone. There may even be an MP3-size device or Blackberry-like contraption on which you can do all sorts of things including search the Web, send text messages, phone your mother, and project 3D holographic images on your boardroom wall (well, that might be a stretch).

I’m looking forward to the next decade of search. I believe we’ll see some striking technological innovations and likely from some unexpected sources. The part I’m wondering about is what will search engine optimization be like?

Search engine marketing is becoming an integral part of doing business. Not just business online, but business in general. And the reason it is becoming so important for businesses who want to get ahead and stay ahead is because there are so many people online now and more and more going online every day. People are starting to trust the Internet.

It took awhile, but it’s happening. Search engines are becoming as ubiquitous as utility companies. They’re accessible from anywhere and they have all the answers.

Well, maybe not all of them. But all of the important ones.

Remember when telemarketing became all the rage? Every company that wanted to increase its position in the marketplace conducted a telemarketing campaign. Then consumers started blocking the calls, or acquired Caller ID and didn’t answer the phone. Then, e-mail marketing became popular. Search engine marketing is the new telemarketing. If you want to get ahead, this is where it’s at.

But how do you do it? It’s not easy. Like telemarketing, it looks easy, but it is something that you’d better learn in a hurry or let the professionals do it. When it comes to search engine marketing, who do you trust?

Yahoo! was one of the companies that pioneered search engine marketing. Back then it could be called directory marketing. It was one of the first companies to use paid inclusion and the company still relies on paid inclusion to some degree. But not as much as it did in the late 1990s.

Since purchasing Inktomi, Yahoo!s search technology, and Overture, which used to be WordTracker’s main competition, Yahoo! hasn’t really done anything innovative. They dropped Google as their primary search technology provider in 2004 and that kind of sealed the deal on their own fate. It might have been the biggest mistake Yahoo!s ever made. Since then they’ve done nothing but trail and slip.

Recently, however, Yahoo! announced that they’ve incorporated Twitter into their search results, providing Yahoo! searchers with real-time results. There’s nothing innovative about that. Both Bing and Google beat them to the punch. But Yahoo! did do it a little better.

Yahoo!s incorporation of Twitter into its search results includes an algorithmic formula for obtaining relevance to the search query. You’d have thought that Google would be the first to do that. No, it was Yahoo!

Now the question is, where will search engine marketing go from here? If searchers can rely honestly on relevant real-time search results, will that spawn a whole new industry of spam, or will it lead to greater search satisfaction? Will Yahoo!s reputation climb as a result of this new industry development?

My guess is that Bing and Google will respond with a relevance algorithm attached to their real-time search results as well. Search engine marketing, in the future, will likely be real-time based to some extent. But by how much?