Google rolled out personalized search to every user of their search engine and with that signaled the final days of top organic rankings being the metric to measure your SEO efforts with are clearly in view.

Say what? In a nutshell Google places a cookie on your machine and gathers your search history over time and then uses that information to show you what they think you are interested in. For example if you search for diamonds and click on every diamond ring dealer’s website and you do this several times over a period of time you will begin to see less results like Wikipedia (which doesn’t sell diamond rings) and more results for diamond ring merchants at the top of your results page when you continue to search for diamonds.

So what reason is there for SEO? Well, this doesn’t mean Google is giving up ranking sites it just means they want to deliver more relevant results to each user. With that said you will need to optimize your site for your products and services but you should look at traffic, visitor behaviors like time spent on site, etc to gauge the effectiveness of your SEO campaign.

Why wouldn’t I just do nothing but PPC? You should engage in pay per click but keep in mind some studies show 70% of search engine users don’t click on PPC results, so if you only engage in pay per click you are limiting your audience reach.

I have no doubt personalization will impact rankings, it’s a foregone conclusion but it shouldn’t impact your SEO efforts. We moved away from trying to sell rankings a couple of years ago and moved toward selling the impact of SEO, like targeted traffic, etc. So if you are hung up on where your site ranks, GET OVER IT, because where it ranks on your machine probably isn’t where it ranks on mine.

The test was successful and pretty impressive. 34 minutes from the time the post How long does it take Google to add a page to their index was published it appeared in Google’s index.

What does this say for fresh, unique content? Google loves it!

What does this mean for you? You should be updating your site on a frequent basis.

Interesting post from SearchEngineLand.com on a test conducted in Yahoo regarding support of the meta keyword tag. Yahoo was supposed to have dropped support of the tag but this test and one I conducted might prove otherwise. I went to Yahoo and entered a misspelling of leukemia and found one of our clients as the top result. The only misspelling of the term is within the meta keyword tag.

So would I go as far as saying the meta keyword tag is important and make sure you have all of your keywords in it? No, but I would say it can be used to help with terms that might have less competition like a misspelling.

Google’s Matt Cutts announced recently a new infrastructure is being tested called Caffeine. We’ve been monitoring this new update and have found very few changes but thought we might mention a couple of those changes over the existing infrastructure.

• Less blended results - It appears there might be less video and blended results.
• Exact Match Domain Names - There may be slightly more weight being given to exact match domain names.
• More weight given to authority sites - We checked several very specific keywords including long tail and found more authority sites with better positions than the same check in the current infrastructure.
• More pages indexed - We searched SEO and the Caffeine results produced 238,000,000 for seo. while the current infrastructure produced 191,000,000 for seo. We tried this with about 5 other very generic keywords and the results were similar.

This is all very early and certainly not set in stone but at first peak if you’ve done a good job of optimizing your site you should not see significant changes when Caffeine goes live.

On occasion I like to do keyword searches as they relate to our business and in particular the market we target which is regional/local and I’m always amazed at the sales pitches from other SEM agencies but more so from advertising agencies who are selling search marketing services.

What amazes me is to read their sales pitch on how important search marketing is to a company yet when you do a search for keywords relating to SEO or search engine marketing these agencies don’t come up within the first 4 or 5 pages of organic results. Instead where you find them is paid search only, this ought to be a clue they don’t practice what they preach or don’t have the experience to deliver real results.

This goes to my headline, why would you buy SEM services from a company who can’t do it for themselves? Why would you hire an ad agency for a search engine optimization project when they don’t show up in organic listings? How could you trust they know what they are doing when they have not managed to do it for themselves?

Quite often I’ve taken a sales call and the first words out of the prospects mouth were I searched for SEO Dallas and you guys were in the top listings so I figured if you could do it for yourself you could do it for me.

Anyone can open a Adwords account and start a paid search campaign and anyone can fill up a keyword tag so don’t be fooled by the ad agency who dabbles in search marketing, ask them to prove it. Ask them what keywords they show up for in the organic listings, if they can’t show you lots of front page results tell them to have a nice day. Search marketing is about both organic and paid search not just one or the other.

You wouldn’t hire a car mechanic who couldn’t fix his own car so why would you hire an ad agency who doesn’t show up in the search engines?

Great story by Jason Lee Miller at WebProNews on the revised White House robots.txt file. I wonder who I need to talk to about the SEO Cabinet position?

When I started my SEO career in late 1997 it was easy to obtain rankings by simply optimizing the keyword tag and it didn’t take long, maybe a year or two, before that tag was so abused it lost significant value with the search engines. Then the SEO world began to yell to anyone who would listen that the keyword tag was dead. So much so, I remember reading a comment from a poster at a major international SEO firm who said they were not even putting a keyword tag on the sites they optimized. Well, I’m here to tell you from real results the keyword tag is not DEAD!

You heard me (or read me), I have never stopped using the keyword tag for my clients BUT what I have done is to use it for very specific purposes.

How?

Well one example in particular is misspellings. One of my clients resides in the legal>medical arena and during the keyword research phase I found several misspelling of a particular medical disorder that generated good search numbers on a daily basis. As you can imagine the client had no interest in placing misspellings in the visible content on their site so I placed it in a keyword tag along with several dozen other misspellings. For the past 5 years the site has ranked on the front page of Google & MSN for the term and some of the others and bounces between the top three pages on Yahoo. There has been no link building done using the term, no alt tags or other means and certainly no Black Hat Practices are in play. That’s the facts maam, you can draw your own conclusion but I’m sticking by mine … the keyword tag is not DEAD!

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If you’ve not set your robots.txt file to exclude your image folder then you are probably receiving as much if not more traffic from Google images as you are from Google search. Why? Well Google reports that 15% of all queries made are conducted via their image search facility. So it’s possible to receive tremendous traffic from image search and in fact we’ve had clients who have come to us for SEO that are receiving more traffic via image search than content search.

So is the answer to exclude your images folder from being spidered? It could be but you can also take advantage of brand awareness and what we’ll call contact visits (visitors who start with an image search but will explore a site further upon landing from that image search). Brand awareness? Yes, with properly optimized images and rich media you can control how the image/rich media is displayed in the SERPs. Using relevant keywords in the file name and in the properties summary can have a dramatic impact on how your image or rich media file is displayed.

This same practice applies to pdf’s, word docs and almost any file you can place online. Taking the time to optimize your properties summary tab or file properties is a great way to increase brand awareness online.

In the past 18 months the volume of chatter regarding mobile search has grown into a low rumble and all indications are it will swell to a roar in the next few years. While the number of mobile surfers is not at a level comparable to pc based surfers it is growing and doing so at an alarming rate. So much so that Google mobile product manager Matt Waddell called it a watershed moment in a recent interview.

What does this mean to you?

Quite simply if you do not have a mobile version of your website in operation or on the drawing board you will get left behind. Mobile phones have now reached 75% penetration in the U.S. and 4 of 5 mobile phone users now request some sort of internet access when purchasing their phone. These kind of numbers combined with the increased energy from search engines to provide mobile friendly results (both in look and relevance, meaning why deliver search results that don’t look good and then send a mobile user a search result to a website that is not mobile friendly?) it does not take a rocket scientist to understand mobile search will impact the way people conduct business.

So the priorities of the business owner should now include a properly built mobile website to compliment their “pc” site and a presence in mobile search. Both of these tasks can be completed by The Info Group.