The Reciprocal Consulting Blog

Google has announced that it has made 40 algorithm changes in February 2012, which sets a new record. Here are 5 notable changes to Google’s search algorithm changes and what they might mean for you.

1. Local predictions in YouTube – If you search YouTube on a specific topic, Google will predict your intentions based on your location. This could have a significant impact on video marketing for businesses. I think many marketers who use video will be testing this one.
2. Global shopping rich snippets – Rich snippets have not caught on popularly, but they are extremely valuable for search. If you run an e-commerce store, then you should learn about the shopping rich snippet. This one could prove to be a big advantage to webmasters who use it masterfully.
3. Freshness improvements – More and more, users want fresh search results. I’ve noticed that lately Google has delivered these more quickly. This is good, especially for bloggers. If you write a business blog, traditional SEO still works.
4. Improvements to local search results rankings – Speaking of traditional SEO, Google is saying that local search results now rely more on traditional SEO signals. If you run a local business online, then you should be testing this one.
5. Link evaluation – This could be a big one. Google is saying they have turned off link evaluation signals that they’ve been using for years. And that means that many websites that have relied on links for their rankings could see a decline in rankings if they continue to use the same link practices. This is one that will definitely be tested by a broad swath of SEOs in practice.

Google rarely is this specific about its algorithm updates. It’s time to start testing some of these changes to see if you can reverse engineer them. I know many SEOs have already started this process.

Natural language writing does not preclude use of keywords. In fact, you still want to employ some level of keyword usage, but you want to focus your writing on natural language techniques.

In the spirit of Google’s semantic language indexing policies, we’ve come up with 5 rules for natural language writing. Disobey these rules at your own peril.

1. Rule #1: Use Keywords – The first rule is to use keywords, but use them sparingly. You want your primary keyword in your title and if you are linking to another page, use your primary keyword as anchor text. Also, use it a couple of times in your body content for every 500-700 words of content.
2. Rule #2: Substitute Keywords – Take your primary keyword and find a synonym for it. Use your synonyms profusely. In fact, if you’ll write your content with a 5% keyword density, then go back and change some of those keyword phrases to synonymous phrases, you’ll be adding natural language fuel to your content.
3. Rule #3: Keep Your Content Focused – Don’t go off on a tangent. Keep your content tightly focused on one topic. Make salient points on that topic and support them with facts.
4. Rule #4: Speak In The Language Of Your Audience – I’m not talking about English vs. Spanish. That should be a given. I’m talking about using words that your audience can relate to. For instance, if you are writing about celebrities, would your audience say “celebs?” Would they use “stars” instead of “movie stars?” Don’t just use a word because the search engines like it. Use words that your audience will like.
5. Rule #5: Take Out The Fluff – Natural language writing is terse, tight, and to the point. Don’t belabor the message. Say it and get out.

Natural language writing has been around since long before the search engines. Instead of writing for robots, write for real people.

Checking out Google’s classic search page, there is now a little microphone in the search box. Do you know what that’s for? Try this as a test: Click the microphone and speak a search term. That’s right. Just tell Google what to search for.

That’s Google’s voice-to-text search feature. I’ll say it works pretty well. I’ve done a few tests myself.

So the big question is, if you are an SEO or concerned about search engine optimization at all, is this: How do you optimize a website for voice-to-text? And here’s the answer: The same way you’d optimize for text-only search.

The best that I can tell, the search results for voice-to-text and text-only are the same. So what Google has done is taken its search index and converted it to voice-to-text so that people who can’t type or who have physical or mental handicaps preventing them from making a text-only search can still enjoy the search experience. The overall index is the same.

This is a great feature for accessibility purposes. Some countries have laws that require websites online to meet accessibility requirements. That may be why Google introduced this feature in the first place.

SEO is SEO. You don’t have to try to figure out how to do it for handicapped persons. For the most part, their needs are the same as yours. You can, however, spend a little additional time and resource to make your website accessible and the best time to do that is in the design planning stage. Implement a good website design that is accessible to everyone and you’ll increase your searchability as well.

Talk to five SEOs and you’re likely to hear five different answers on any particular question involving search engine optimization. But for now, let’s talk about keywords. Are they necessary?

I don’t think there’s an SEO alive who would say “No” to that question, but why not? We live in a day of semantic language indexing. The search engines rank pages based on ideas, not keyword stuffing. In other words, if your on-page content is clearly about how to change a light bulb and you don’t use the phrase “light bulb” but two times in your article, you could still rank for that key phrase. It’s all about quality.

So keywords aren’t important then, right?

I’d say that’s a wrong assumption to make. While semantic language indexing rules the day, keywords are not discounted. I believe you should still focus your content on keywords, but don’t fixate on any one keyword. That is, use a little semantic language markup.

Are Keyword Tags Necessary?

One area where there is a lot of dispute over the use of keywords is in the keywords meta tag. There are two main ideas regarding the use of this tag.

1. Not necessary. The not necessary camp argues that keyword tags aren’t necessary because none of the major search engines look at them. While this is true, some smaller search engines still do consider this meta tag; and the major search engines are constantly tweaking their algorithms so you never know when they may start considering keywords meta tags again.
2. It doesn’t hurt. The rest of the SEO community falls into the “it doesn’t hurt” camp. Because of the two reasons mentioned above, they argue that it doesn’t hurt to use the tag. Someday, it may help.

It never hurts to employ a strategy that you won’t get penalized for. I would not dispense with keywords altogether. What you don’t want to do is stuff your content with keywords as that might get your pages banned, penalized, or de-indexed. Just use a little common sense in your search engine optimization practices.

If you like to watch SEOs argue (and who doesn’t?), you’ve probably noticed that there are essentially two types of SEOs. There is the “Content is King” crowd. Then there’s the links-are-the-most-important-strategy crowd. Almost all SEOs lean toward one end of the spectrum or the other.

I’ve always believed in both. Content and links, not one or the other. But my philosophy includes the necessary component that links are a form of content.

Only in that context can you truly say “content is king” if you believe that links are important tools for SEO.

It matters a great deal post-Panda.

Remember, the Panda update is the big “content farm” killer algorithm update that Google underwent last year. Big web properties, including many article directories, lost search engine rankings (and traffic) overnight. It caused a big ruckus among search engine optimization specialists all over the world.

And the problem wasn’t links. It was on-page content. But it was low-level content and that’s what Google went after.

If you believe that “content is content is content,” then you don’t understand the power of Google’s strong arm of the search engine law. Google has the power to kill your website at will, though they seldom go after individuals or particular sites. Rather, Google tends to incorporate changes to its algorithms that go after types of websites, or websites that pursue a particular strategy to game results.

So what should we learn from all this? Here’s the takeaway: Content is still king. But not just any content. Quality content.

Quality content is content that a searcher would consider answers the question they have when they conduct a particular search on one of the search engines. If you think about what those questions might be and seek to answer them with your content, then you’ll have a much better chance at winning in the search results.

Michael Martinez said something interesting in a blog post yesterday.

The problem is, as soon as a popular SEO blogpundit shares an idea or strategy with her or her audience, the idea loses value. That doesn’t mean it becomes worthless. It just means the idea loses value. Think of your brand new car depreciating a few hundred dollars as soon as you drive it off the lot. SEO ideas lose value in much the same way.

That’s pretty sage. But what is he saying?

SEO is a game. Popular SEOs figure out what is good strategy and they implement it. It works for them. Then they share it with the rest of the world. Lower level SEOs begin to adopt the strategies that the popular and well known SEOs have shared. Pretty soon, everyone is doing the same thing. Even spammers. That’s when the search engines change their algorithms.

Who are the first people to know the search engines have changed? The well known and popular SEOs. How do you think they became well known?

By the time the big guys figure out a new strategy, everyone else has adopted the old one. But that old strategy isn’t working any more because the popular SEOs have moved on. They’re doing something different.

Here’s the deal. The popular SEOs don’t share their successes right away. They test them first. Sometimes that takes 6 months or a year. Other times, it might take 2 or 3 years before they get around to sharing what they do that works (and you can bet they aren’t telling you everything). By the time they share what they are doing that is successful, those strategies have almost run their course with the search engines. Mass adoption occurs, but the search engines and popular SEOs have moved on.

So what should you make of this? If you think I’m saying “don’t trust anyone,” then you should go back and re-read the post. That’s not what I’m saying.

What I am saying is that you should trust an SEO company that isn’t blabbing all over the Web what they are doing for you that works. You should trust an SEO company that does its own testing rather than just following the leaders. Trust an SEO company that does what’s best for you, not what’s best for them.

There are several mistakes that website owners make when it comes to navigation menus when they attempt to use their navigation for SEO purposes instead of focusing on user needs. And all of these are fixable.

• Multple navigation elements – I’ve seen websites with a fancy navigation menu at the top of the page and the same navigational elements in the sidebar followed by navigation links in the footer. Why? Pick one method of navigation and stick with that.
• Too many pages in the navigation element – Do you really need links to your archives, categories, tags, author pages, and related content? Some of this is overkill. Usually, if you nofollow your navigation links to your archives, categories, and tags pages, then you’ll get much better optimization.
• Complex site structure – Keep it as simple as possible for the type of website you have. That’s easy when your site is only 10 pages. But what if it stretches out to 100 or 200 pages? Or worse, to a couple of thousand? It’s OK to have different navigation menus for separate sections of your website, but keep the navigational elements simple. Don’t overcomplicate them.
• Over-Optimization – Generally speaking, any time you include a navigational element solely for optimization efforts, then you are setting your website up to fail. Ask yourself if it helps your site visitor? If not, eliminate it and look for other ways that you can optimize your website.

Navigational menus are established for users, not search engines. That doesn’t mean you can’t optimize them, but optimizing your navigation menus is really simple. Use the best key phrase for each page on your website and use that key phrase as the link in your navigation menu. If your on-page optimization is spot on, then that should be good SEO. If not, you might need to re-write your on-page content or pick another key phrase to optimize for.

Everyone wants link bait. But link bait doesn’t grow on trees. And it’s not as easy to create as you might think.

Here are 5 reasons creating link bait might just be the biggest waste of your time.

1. You think keywords aren’t necessary – Content is searchable. Even link bait. You must think about how your website visitors are going to find your content before you decide to publish it. What will make them think your article is worth a link? If it isn’t the keywords and it isn’t the way your content is written, then what is it?
2. Link bait isn’t a magic carpet ride – No link bait is ever just created and published without a plan. If you’re too lazy to plan your content, how it will be written, what it will look like, what graphics will accompany it, etc., then there’s no use in creating it.
3. You think it will promote itself – Even link bait needs to be promoted. Will you push it out with social media? Video marketing? Your blog? Will you share it with high profile bloggers in your niche? Include your promotional efforts in your plan for your link bait.
4. You expect too much too fast – You can’t predict how many people will link to your content and when. You can write it, you can publish it, and you can promote it. The rest is up to everyone else. Focus on what you can control.
5. You think quality doesn’t count – All link bait is based on quality. If you don’t think that’s true, then you shouldn’t be trying to create link bait. No one is going to link to content that doesn’t provide value.

Link bait is more than just some fancy SEO trick. It’s a content strategy. Build your strategy on sound marketing principles, not crazy viral hype.

Broken links can kill a website if allowed to go on for too long. That’s why you should identify them quickly and get them taken care of.

So what happens when your website has broken links?

If allowed to linger for too long, broken links can be a ding against your website’s SEO ranking. In other words, they can count against you. One or two might not hurt, but hundreds will. And many webmasters will allow their broken links to continue because they don’t monitor them.

A simple diagnostic tool will tell you if you have broken links on your website. Google Webmaster Tools is free and does the job for you. Google will tell you if your site has broken links.

After you have determined that you have broken links, go to the pages where those links exist and analyze your content. Can you find another source to link to? If so, then replace the broken link with a link to a resource that is just as helpful, or more, to your website visitors. If you can’t find one, then consider revising your content so that the link isn’t necessary.

When you revise your content you invite the search engines back to re-crawl your pages. They will then re-index your pages based on the latest crawl and re-rank them. Some webmasters have seen increased page rankings based on fixing broken links.

If you are looking for more opportunities to increase your website’s search engine optimization, find and fix your broken outbound links. It’s a small thing, but it can matter.

If you run an online web store and are concerned that your SEO might not be up to snuff, never fear. You can always improve your SEO and here are 6 on-page ways that you can give your SEO content a boost. All of these are easy to implement and will produce positive results for your onsite SEO.

1. Descriptive URLs – Let’s start with the URL. Instead of using dynamic URLs, use descriptive URLs that utilize your best keyword phrase for each content page. Your product name, a product description, or a phrase that best identifies each individual product is best for your product description pages.
2. Create Unique Content For Every Product – Every product page should have unique content, and I’ll add that each should have at least 250 words of content. If necessary, combine several like products on one page and give each one a unique description. Is there really that much of a difference between a blue widget and a yellow widget? Do they need separate pages? If so, make sure you provide enough content on each page that you give them maximum SEO value, and that means no duplicate content.
3. Use Category Pages – People don’t just shop for individual products. They also search for categories of product. If you sell cameras, have a section for digital cameras. Have another for camcorders. Make sure each category page has unique content.
4. Link Your Pages Together With Anchor Text – Link your pages together with appropriate anchor text. This alone can give your website a huge boost. Figure out the best internal linking strategy based on consumer buying habits, keyword phrase associations, and complimentary products.
5. Allow User Reviews – Every time you add new content to a page, the search engines return to crawl that page. When they do, they also re-index and re-rank it. Allowing user reviews, even negative reviews, can give your product pages a huge boost in the search engines.
6. Allow Social Media Sharing – Social media sharing can encourage your content to travel far and wide. That means more potential traffic, more potential product reviews, and better SEO overall.

Each of these specific on-page content solutions has at least one associated SEO benefit. If you want to improve your online shop’s SEO, try these on-page content tricks.

There’s a new social media site in town. It’s called Pinterest. And in the last month the site has gained 7 million new visitors.

Pinterest is an interesting social media experiment. And it looks like it could become one of the powerhouse websites, especially for women, its largest set of users.

The cool thing about Pinterest is that it is highly graphic. Take a look at its home page and you’ll see all the photos and images, and it isn’t cluttered.

The way it works is you set up your own pinboard. You can have one for your company just like Mashable has. And just like Mashable’s, it can be branded.

Notice how Mashable’s pinboard has the Mashable name in it. That’s great for reputation management and branding. Then, on the left, you can see the big Mashable logo with the website URL underneat. Again, that’s great for branding, but the URL back to the website provides a useful inbound link for SEO purposes.

If you look at the pins that Mashable includes on its pinboard, they’re not all self-promotional. They spend a great deal of time promoting other items around the Web. That’s great stuff. It’s the way that it should be done.

You don’t have to be a rabid self-promoter to be successful in social media generally or at Pinterest in particular. You just have to have a solid strategy for your online content, a strategy that includes promoting others while branding yourself. That’s the best social media strategy in the world, and your company can make that happen.

There is a misconception among many search engine optimization specialists that SEO must be a focus of content or the content just isn’t good. The truth is, great content and great SEO compliment each other. They can co-exist without hurting each other.

The key to this SEO philosophy is in the use of keywords and links. Keywords are the fuel in every search engine optimization strategy. You don’t want to overdo it, but you must do it.

What does that mean, exactly?

Keywords are a matter of targeting the right phrases for the right audience. If you are trying to reach people who purchase automobiles, then you have to target the right key phrases that attract automobile buyers. If you sell Ford vehicles specifically, then target your phrases to people who buy Ford vehicles. Sounds like a no-brainer, right?

It is, but you’d be surprised at how many SEOs target the wrong keywords for their audiences.

When it comes to links, you want your links to compliment your keyword phrases. They shouldn’t dominate. Anything in moderation is better than the same thing in overdose. Use links that compliment your keywords by incorporating the keywords into the link anchor text and pointing them to relevant pages on your website. Title attributes can also compliment your anchor text.

By complimentary title attributes, I don’t necessarily mean repeating your anchor text key phrase. I mean use a phrase that compliments it and is a more nuanced way of using your important keywords.

SEO is not a science. It certainly isn’t rocket science. Your first concern should be in creating great content. Make the SEO compliment the content.

A reader asked Mike Blumenthal if linking to her Google Places page would make it rank higher in the search engines.

The question has its basis on the longstanding practice of many SEOs to build inbound links to pages on their websites. Such inbound links have often increased the rankings of their web pages in the search engines. But there are flaws in thinking the same practice when applies to a Google Places page would have the same effect.

First, a Google Places page, as Mike Blumenthal points out, is a search result. Linking to it would be like linking to a search results page for a query that is related to your business niche. That wouldn’t boost your web pages any and it wouldn’t make any sense.

Secondly, linking out from your website to an external page would drain link juice that you could put to better use on your internal pages.

While such linking might be detrimental in terms of your website’s SEO, there may be times when linking to your Google Places page constitutes good marketing. For instance, if you want your website visitors to see all the rave reviews your business gets on Google, then you could link to the page. But I wouldn’t do that from your home page and I’d recommend that you do it using a no-follow link.

Sometimes, detrimental or harmful linking practices can be good marketing practices, and vice-versa. This is where you have to do some weighing of pros and cons. Choose a value that is most important to you and perform the action that makes that value work for you.

You know you need to write to your blog every day. But how do you make the time? You’re too busy.

You can fix that. Discipline and a little bit of time organization is all it takes. You can write a blog post every day in 20 minutes or less. Here are the steps to take to ensure that you can have a blog post every day and have it written in less than 20 minutes.

1. Keep a running idea list – Every time you get an idea for a blog post, write it down. Keep a running list. This is easier if you create a keyword list before you set up your blog. Come up with 10-20 blog post ideas for each keyword on your list, and your keyword list should have 50-100 good keywords.
2. Let good ideas sit – Instead of trying to write about something the day you come up with the idea, let it sit a few days. You’ll think of other ideas that can go with it. Write them down. Start with your running idea list and go from there.
3. Cut unsupporting ideas before you write – If you keep a running list of ideas and related ideas, you’ll start to see that some of the ideas you thought initially supported each other are actually not related enough. They could be their own blog posts. Cut them out and separate them. Remember, the goal is to write fast. A nonsupporting idea doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea.
4. Use lists – You can say a lot with ordered and unordered lists.
5. Keep your posts short - Remember, you’re trying to write fast. So keep your blog posts to under 500 words.
6. Write in bursts – If you get stuck on a blog post and can’t think of how to finish it, save it as a draft and come back to it later, when you can think of something fresh.
7. Write about your best ideas now - Why save your best ideas for later? Save time now. Just knock it out.

This blog post took 15 minutes to write. It’s less than 500 words and more than 250, so it should pass Google’s search engine optimization guidelines. Yours will too!

One growing branch of online marketing is online video marketing. It seems to be picking up speed. But there are certain principles that video marketers should cling to if they want their marketing to be effective. One of those principles is to keep it short.

I’m talking about your videos.

High quality shorter videos seem to attract a great response from viewers and have the best potential for going viral.

The reason shorter videos work best is because people in today’s fast-paced global marketplace are crunched for time. A thirty second video will go much further than a one hour documentary. Especially if your goal is to attract attention and drive traffic for marketing purposes.

If you want to provide in-depth videos on a given topic, you are better off using short videos to attract attention to your business and website and using them to drive traffic to your longer pages. You might even put those long educational videos behind a paywall and charging admission. Then you know that someone interested in that kind of time commitment is willing to pay for it. When people put their wallets on the line, that’s a commitment.

Put your marketing budget into your short videos. They don’t provide any more SEO benefit than longer videos, but they are also don’t provide any less SEO benefit. But they do work for driving traffic.

Online video marketing isn’t rocket science. You can be effective with just a little forethought and some respect for your prospect’s time. Draw them in with short videos and close them with your on-page content.

For the longest time now just about anyone you talked to in SEO circles would sing the praises of the No. 1 position in search results. But have you noticed that most PPC specialists – at least the ones who are worth their weight in salt – prefer to get their clients No. 2, 3, or 4 positions in the rankings? Why is that?

The truth is, No. 1 positions are the most clicked-on positions. That’s true for PPC and organic search listings. But those are not the most profitable positions.

The most profitable positions are the ones just below the No. 1 position. Why is that?

What most people don’t realize is that most searchers will click on that No. 1 position, but if it isn’t what they were looking for, then they hit the Back button and click on another search result. SEOs know this. Clients don’t necessarily know this. So everyone is scrambling to get that No. 1 position.

There’s nothing wrong with being No. 1. But you should be seeking to be No. 1 for the right search queries. What questions does your website answer? Those are the key terms you should seek No. 1 rankings for.

SEO results fluctuate. But they are also much more personal. Google now provides videos, images, and personalized results based on who your Google+ friends are your past search history. Your search results are not my search results. That makes the No. 1 position just about unattainable. Trying to get there is an exercise in absurdity.

The job for search engine marketers in today’s search climate is to produce the best content and promote it in the best places. Rankings won’t cure all your ills.

Reputation management has become one of the most important tasks for any Internet marketer, particularly an author. Google has a tool that can help webmasters test their reputations online to see if their content is doing what it should. That tool is the Rich Snippet Testing Tool.

So what does it do?

In a word, it looks at a web page on your website, or any website you want to test, and tells you whether or not that web page is using microformats to present your authorship of the page in the best light. Specifically, it will:

• Tell you whether the page is linked adequately to your Google profile.
• Let you know if the page is linked to your social media profiles at Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, StumbleUpon, Quora, and other social networks.
• Show you a preview of your Google snippet for that page should it be returned in a search results page for your author name.
• Give you the extracted rich snippet data from the page.
• And show you what a custom search engine would see if it were to look at your rich snippet data.

That’s a lot of information. More importantly, it’s a lot of useful information.

Rich snippets are very important for authors and other creatives who spend a lot of time creating content in their own names. Even if you employ a ghostwriter to create your content, you are its author. You should test your rich snippet data on a semi-regular basis to ensure that you are making the most of your microformatting opportunities. It not only has reputation management consequences, but it can affect your SEO as well.

Press releases are good for one thing – links. If you really, really want to build some inbound links to your website and hope that your public relations campaign takes off, then submit a few press releases to the press release distribution websites. But what if you really want to power up your PR campaign?

I’m not saying that you shouldn’t submit press releases. Submit them. You’ll get your inbound links and if you optimize them well you’ll likely see some inbound traffic when searchers find your press release in the search engines. You may even get a call from a reporter or see your press release re-printed somewhere – maybe even off line. But don’t expect your press releases to do all the work. Public relations goes beyond a mere press release.

Good public relations involves some level of relationship building. You need to find out what publications cover your industry. Make a list. Then find out who the person is in those publications who reports on topics that are important to you. Again, make a list.

When you’re ready to start your public relations campaign, contact those people on your list and make a personal pitch. The personal pitch is a lot more effective than a press release. It shows that you have the ambition and the incentive to go an extra step. Most of your competitors are submitting impersonal press releases. But you will be more direct, more personal, and more effective.

When you make a pitch, tailor it to the specific needs of the person and the publication you are pitching to. Is it a lone blogger in your niche? Find out what he likes to write about (you should subscribe to his blog and read it every day) and pitch to that.

Are you pitching to a national news magazine in your niche? What kind of stories do they run? What are their biases. Play to those.

Public relations is about more than building links and sending press releases. If you really want it to be effective, make it personal.

You could call 2011 The Year of the Panda. Panda in this case is a reference to Google Panda, the algorithm update that killed hundreds or thousands of websites instantly, many of them big name websites. It also did in some microsites.

And that makes us ask the question, are microsites good for SEO?

My answer is, they can be if done right. The problem so often is that website designers do not often do them correctly.

So, What’s A Microsite?

A microsite is a small website that serves a specific purpose. It is usually defined as a site that consists of only 3-5 pages not counting the terms of service and privacy policy pages. The focus is very narrow and specific.

You can build a microsite that targets a narrower niche within your broad company website’s niche. But what has killed many SEOs trying to use microsites is they linked them all together in a massive link building scheme. Google caught on and all their sites were de-indexed. Rather quickly.

If you build microsites, build them as standalone webites, not as link satellites for your larger site.

The Real Benefit Of A Microsite

The real benefit to having multiple microsites is not that you can use them to build links to your major corporate website. The real benefit is that you can use them as separate websites that achieve search engine rankings on their own.

If you have three microsites that each target their own specific keywords, that’s 6 times the number of opportunities to rank well for the keywords that you are targeting. That’s in addition to the ranking opportunities of your main website. And that’s if you don’t link them together.

You have to make sure your microsites aren’t associated with each in any way. Treat them like separate businesses and promote them as such.

A brilliant post at SEOmoz illustrates how Google uses its own SEO guidelines to rank its own pages higher in the search engines.

Consider this:

How has Google won so much real estate on their own search pages in such a short period of time? Do they cheat? No, not really – more on this later. Google wins by employing really smart Search Engine Optimization techniques – the same SEO practices available to any online business.

What Cyrus Shepard doesn’t tell you is that Google knows its own algorithms better than anyone else. It has the inside information. Facebook doesn’t. And that’s one of the reasons that Facebook is at a disadvantage.

On the other hand, the SEO principles that Cyrus shares in his post are pretty much all common knowledge. They’re things that everyone – even Facebook – at this point should understand.

One really telling point is how Facebook blocks Google from crawling its profile pages. As Cyrus points out:

Facebook actively prevents Google from crawling most of its content, allowing big G to access “Fan” pages, but limiting information from regular profiles. Now that Google+ has entered the social game, this policy puts Facebook results at risk of dropping in rankings and losing search real estate.

On the one hand, Google+ has an advantage in the search engines because it is owned by the largest and most popular search engine. On the other hand, Facebook doesn’t employ sound SEO tactics anyway, so if you take away the Google+ advantage, Facebook would still be at a disadvantage.

So what’s the lesson here? No matter what business you are in, think about how search engine optimization can help you reach your goals.