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.

I just wanted to take a minute and wish all a Happy Thanksgiving. Times are tough and it seems we hear more negative than positive everywhere we turn but we probably all have at least one thing we can be thankful for, I know I have many. So Happy Thanksgiving and GO COWBOYS!

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.

This is a test of Google Indexing speed. I have added this post at 3:26 pm CST and will post a response when it has been indexed by Google. Remember this is only a test, please try this with your own site.

Since it’s the week before Thanksgiving that means Christmas is upon us and you should have started or be prepared to start a Holiday PPC campaign. I thought I would give a few tips that are the basis to all of the Holiday PPC campaigns we run for clients.

Keyword Strategy:

• Seasonal Keywords - Look for keywords that are unique to Christmas such as Christmas gifts, Xmas gift, Holiday parties, etc. Don’t forget this is a holiday season for many religions, not just Christians.
• Longtail Keywords - While researching your seasonal terms don’t forget the longtail versions. People searching for Christmas gifts may extend that to tie gifts for Christmas. Remember longtail keywords typically convert at a high rate.

Ad Copy Strategy:

• Keep the holiday season mindset when developing ad copy. Use terms that relate to Christmas, Hanukkah and typical holiday speak like “Tis the season”. Don’t forget many shoppers wait until the last minute so if you offer last minute or overnight delivery this is a great time to let people know.
• Sales - Using the term Holiday Sale can be very effective as can be catering to the early shopper with terms like Beat the rush or Order early. Providing a discount to early orders is an option to keep open as well. “Order by Dec 10, Get 20% off!

Landing Page Strategy:

• Holiday look and feel - You’ve enticed the customer to click on your holiday ad so keep them in the spirit by giving your landing pages a holiday look and feel. Maybe it’s a color scheme or adding snowflakes or using holiday lingo like “HO, HO, HO - Welcome!” or all three, keeping the holiday theme going will enhance the visitors experience.
• Expectations - If you are promoting a product that is very popular you want to keep the visitor informed as it relates to stock and delivery. The same is true for last minute shoppers, posting the drop-dead cutoff date for shipping to arrive before Christmas is not only informative but good customer service.

2009 has been a tough year and this holiday season could be make up for a lot of lost revenue. Take more time than normal and put some effort into creating your Holiday PPC Campaign and may the season be a blessed one to you.

If you’re looking for professional pay per click management we are Google Adwords Certified and Microsoft aD Excellence members and welcome the opportunity to speak with you.

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.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt has resigned from the Apple board of directors. On the surface this could be another business announcement like thousands of others everyday. Underneath the surface this could be a bigger indication that the real battle Google is going to have to fight is not with Microsoft or Yahoo but instead is with Apple.

Several products from both are clearly in competition including:

• Mobile - The iPhone is now being challenged by smartphones using Googles Android system.
• Browser - Google’s Chrome since it’s release has beaten Apples Safari in market share
• Operating System - While Google hasn’t released their new Chrome OS one could call it a potential rival to Mac OS X

I don’t think Google is not looking at Microsoft & Yahoo as competitors, I do think they have Apple in their crosshairs.

The Info Group recently received Company Certification status from Microsoft adExcellence. Three employees are required to successfully manage a paid search campaign through Microsoft adCenter and pass the adExcellence test. Mark & Andy Stone and Scott Mattiza all completed the certification process with flying colors.