As we all know, and often write about, Google is always making changes (aka “making us crazy”). Whether an interface, algorithm, or product change, sometimes these stay at the “test” status and never really have an impact on a business’s SEO efforts, other times we’re not so lucky. Either way, it’s important to watch them for cues from Google that you can use to drive new search marketing tactics.

So let’s look at one of my favorite recent updates in Google house cleaning news.

Google Places Pages: Google recently updated their Places pages, de-cluttering and reprioritizing certain elements. In the process, they hid some information that always seemed important to SEOs and provided tantalizing keyword opportunities. However, no big surprise here, the pages are much more streamlined and user friendly.

The biggest change and takeaway is related to reviews. Google has added big pretty buttons inviting visitors to write reviews of the business (as seen in the screenshot below), and they they are no longer displaying reviews from 3^rd sites right on the page (they are instead still linking off to some of those sites, though).

This is Google moving into the social realm (in line with Google+),  competing with sites like Yelp, and telling us that customer feedback is important.

So what do you do with this? It’s simple! Just like you (hopefully) already have subtle drivers from existing marketing touchpoints to sites like Yelp where customers can share their experiences with your business, it would be a good idea to more actively ask them to also drop praise on your Google Places page. It is Google, after all, so it’s probably smart to build up your presence there. Start with your Facebook page, where you should have a nice community of your most loyal customers. Post a light message thanking them for all their support, share your Google Places link, and see if they’d like to share their positive feedback there.

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Making sure that your website has links from other websites is a very important aspect of SEO. Although link building can sometimes be a very slow and very gradual process, the increase in traffic and visibility that results from meaningful links is a great reward.

As an intern looking to learn the ins and outs of SEO, I sought to find out more about some of the different link building practices and strategies out there. When it comes to SEO, things are constantly changing, so it’s important to continuously keep up to date with the latest news about which link building practices work and which don’t. Here are some great link building tips and strategies that stood out to me:

Create “Link-Bait”: It’s all about good content! Create articles, blog posts, videos, infographics, etc. that are well-researched and provide extremely interesting, educational or entertaining content. If you can establish your site to be one of the best resources in a given market space, people will surely link to it.

Guest Post On Other Sites: Find other bloggers in your industry and ask them if you can write a guest post for their site. Blogs are always hungry for fresh content and there are many blogs out there that accept guest posts. This is a great way to get a link back to your own site, build personal brand visibility, and start becoming a part of the community within your market space.

Conduct Interviews: Interview someone in your industry. Some people love to talk about themselves. You’ll raise exposure for your site through the interview and hopefully generate some favorable links or mentions from the person that you interviewed.

(For more of the latest articles on link building tips and strategies, check out this list of 79 Link Building Resources by KISSmetrics)

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It hasn’t even been a month since I started interning here at EIM, yet I feel like I’ve already learned so much. Prior to arriving at EIM, most of my experience with digital media involved managing social media accounts for various local events and businesses and maintaining my own personal blog. As a recent college graduate who studied media and communications for four years, I felt very much aware of the power of social media and how sites like Twitter and Facebook have been reshaping our lives and the way we do business.

But while social media channels can certainly play a great role in things like brand management and customer engagement, it is really just a piece of the marketing puzzle. It’s not enough to just make a Facebook and Twitter page for your business and wait for fans and followers to roll in. It is very important to make sure your social media efforts line up with your overall marketing strategy. It’s also useful to find ways to integrate your social media pages into other channels such as your website, newsletters, mobile apps, print ads, and even TV commercials (see: American Express)

As social media strategist Jay Baer puts it, “Social media is not a solo act. It’s best as part of a jazz combo.” And one very important player in that combo that I knew very little about before coming here was “search marketing.” While working closely with the Web Marketing Team here at EIM, I’m really starting to recognize the importance of search marketing. SEO, SEM, paid search, and search engines in general all play huge parts in gaining traffic to your company website and reaching your marketing goals, whether that means increasing product sales or raising brand awareness.

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The web marketing team here at EIM often gets asked casual questions about search engine optimization, be it at the office or even out at a social event. A client might ask about the newest tactic they happened to read about or how social media impacts organic search results. A family member might ask for an explanation of what exactly SEO means (this is a very common one). And we still get people wondering if you can pay for the top spot in the organic results of Google (you can’t).

With all these questions and varying levels of understanding, and with the almost daily changes in the search and social marketing industry, I thought it would be good to take a look at some basics in SEO philosophy.

5 simple SEO philosophy reminders:

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1. Discipline yourself to stay focused. Content structured smartly and targeted tightly around your product or service offering will attract a more valuable corner of the search engine market and generate higher conversion rates once your visitors arrive on your site.
2. Think about your consumer. Content they want to see and anything that makes their experience on your site more engaging, more pleasant and more productive will lead to them talking about you and linking to you.
3. There are very few quick fixes when it comes to SEO. Search Engines are looking for who’s growing a following, developing quality content, and building a solid reputation within their respective space. The way a business would ideally gain attention and increase sales over time organically is exactly what SEO professionals are trying to emulate. So yes, the very nature of SEO is a manipulation of that organic growth, but it still needs to in fact emulate it. Any tricks that someone might suggest for “sneaking” your site up the results pages is bad business and will likely end up hurting you.

Google announced last week that they’re—wait for it—yes, rolling out another new change to their search results pages. Recognizing the power and popularity of this whole social media phenomenon, they’ve decided to further integrate the social experience. Their desired result is more personalized and trusted search results and happier online searchers. (And world domination, I am sure.)

Here’s how your search results might change:

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• Let’s say you search for a specific restaurant in Chicago and a friend recently wrote a blog post about the horrible service there—because of your connection to her through other networks, that post would be displayed in the search results. You’ll see her link mixed right in with everything else, along with an annotation below the link that you’re seeing this because Sabrina blogged about it. Google sees this as valuable because you’ve just been given insight about the restaurant from a trusted source. Of course, that Sabrina was always such a stickler for service.

• Similarly, if you’re looking for a video that had you laughing so hard you cried, but only really remember the name loosely, and you search for “video with the monkeys and the umbrella,” you may see your friend Bruce’s tweet of the “monkey umbrella video” with the link straight to it. Again, an annotation below that link gives you a head’s up that your trusted friend Bruce tweeted this. This is pretty handy for recalling fun stuff like monkey videos.

• Additionally, Google explains that they’ve granted us more control over the connections we allow in our Google profiles. While we could always publicly connect a Google profile with a Blogger account, we can now do so privately. Basically, they’re trying to give us more opportunity to drive this personalization.

So, you’ve been told 2011 is all about local. As well as mobile. And social. And video. And reviews. And probably a number of other important elements of the online world. So what the heck do you focus on? Well…when it comes to getting your site found on search engines: all of them.

But! Fear not. Don’t freak out. This doesn’t require elaborate marketing campaigns combining all of these mediums. (In fact, avoid that.) And you don’t need to have the next “Old Spice Guy” idea for social media to have an impact. This just means getting your presence into a healthy mix of all of these mediums, which really comes down to providing great service and engaging with your customers. In other words, do good business. And use these online elements in a natural way.

Here’s an example of how you might integrate them into your everyday business process:

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1. Let’s say you have a special 3-day only deal for your retail website. Assuming you have your Google Places page claimed and optimized, you post the deal there on Monday (the start of the sale–one of your slowest days).
2. You also tweet about it and share it on Facebook, thanking your existing customers for being loyal fans
3. An hour later, you notice several retweets of your deal and thank those followers for sharing the love
4. Another friend of one of the retweeters sees the message, but wants to learn more about you first, so they search for you on their mobile phone. Luckily, you have a well-optimized mobile site, so this person quickly finds you and has easy access to exactly the information they needed (maybe info like what your company does, some testimonials, products, etc.).

Surprise! Google recently rolled out another change in their results pages. This time it’s to the local search results. When you do a “local” search in Google—something like “pizza Chicago”—you used to see a contained space at the top with a map and 3-10 short one-line listings of local business, each pulled from their associated Google Places pages. Now you’ll see Google Places results incorporated right within the regular organic results.

Let’s look at an example. Say you’re looking for something unique to do this weekend and search for “dueling pianos Chicago.” You might get the following results.

The 1^st listing (our client, Howl At The Moon) and the 5^th are both supplemented with great information from their Places pages—imagery, address, reviews, etc. But the title and description being displayed are still from the main website. Organic results and Local results living in unison…it’s a beautiful thing.

Okay, so why should you care?

Well, the buzz in the SEO universe is that this new combo of information is giving sites a boost in Google when their Places page is well optimized. Plus, take a look back at that screenshot—the 1^st and 5^th listings are more robust than the rest and look a bit more appealing, right? They just might encourage some higher click through rates.

So what next? Well, we told you in April to claim your Google Places page, so if you haven’t yet done so, get on it! And given the new impact we’re seeing on organic results, here’s a few tips to keep in mind:

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• Be sure to fill out your profile completely…it makes a difference
• What keywords are most important to your business? Use those in your Places description and in your categories, if possible

When Google launched their brand new search engine enhancement Google Instant two weeks ago it sent the whole world of SEO/SEM into a frenzy. Every search marketer was asking questions, and nobody had any answers. (I can picture the nightmares already) But don’t worry search marketers you can slip on your onesies and sleep uninterrupted, because EIM has some answers for you.

What does Google Instant mean for SEO?

1. There is no change to the organic ranking algorithm

Although user experience is significantly affected,  Google search results will be ranked the same as always. (Don’t worry first pagers, your ranking will stay the same)

2. It’s very important to rank above the fold for general terms

There’s been a lot of talk that Google Instant is the death of SEO, but contrary to that rumor it has caused SEO to be even more important than ever. Before instant 68% of people didn’t go past the first page, now that instant is implemented it pushes all of the results down and to get to results on the bottom of the page you have to scroll down.  This means that more than likely the results above the above the fold will receive a significantly larger amount of traffic then the results below, which means you want to optimize to not only be on the first page, but in the top 5.

3. Optimize for both Short-Tail and Long-Tail Keywords

Now that instant’s auto suggest plays a larger factor then it used to, it is important to optimize for those more generic terms so you show up for the early rounds of auto suggest.

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The Google Algorithm has been changed on us again! OMG!

While the case used to be that a domain could only appear twice in Google’s search results for any one query, Google has now expanded this limit. According to Google’s Webmaster Central blog, this applies to “queries that indicate a strong user interest in a particular domain.”  Using Google’s example, if you do a search for “exhibitions at amnh,” 7 of the 10 results listings on the first page are from the American Museum of Natural History’s website; Google identifies pages on the site that each speak to a specific exhibit, because they want it to be easy for the searcher to quickly find info on various exhibits at that museum.

Using our own example, if you do a search for “chicago cubs jerseys” you should see our client CubWorld.com at the top of your organic results page (depending on where you live and how/if you’re logged into Google), followed by an array of other online retailers. But if you do a search for “jerseys at cubworld” you’ll see that 8 of the 10 results (as seen below) are various jersey pages on CubWorld.com. Apparently Google wants to speed up your shopping experience on that particular site.

So, what does this really mean?

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• Your brand is important. But let’s face it, we’re not all Nike or Coca Cola. So your brand combined with rich, compelling, well-organized content is really important. “Cubworld” alone doesn’t hold as much weight as a search query as “jerseys at cubworld” — there’s a band and some boy scout organizations who prove this. So yes, keep focusing on optimizing your site for both brand name-focused searches and other keywords.

With the launch of Google Caffeine and after talk at SMX Advanced 2010 in Seattle, Google’s made it clear that they will start looking more at video sitemaps when indexing websites. Why? Because they’re sexy! Videos are slick, compelling and fun, and people like them. And what does Google like? Things that people like.

Videos and Video Sitemaps themselves are not brand new, but there are related changes in the Google landscape that make them more important.

Universal Search
This actually isn’t brand new either, but many people probably still don’t really know about it. I’ll guess you have noticed over the last several years that pretty pictures and such have been popping up on the Google results pages. This is Google intuitively guessing what kind of content you’re looking for, and pulling the appropriate rich media or other targeted results right into their main search results (see the results snapshot below for “monkeys jumping on the bed”). This is in contrast to a user clicking on what Google calls their “vertical search” options, like Videos, Maps, or Books, to only search that type of content.

Soul Search before Universal Search
This was actually a popular point at this year’s SMX Advanced: Before making yourself crazy trying to get your videos listed in universal search, examine your video pages. It would be a shame to nab a top spot in Google for a page that doesn’t work for you, especially if you had another page on your site already listed prominently in the search results. So just consider: Does this video represent my brand well? Does this video page have supporting copy and calls to action that encourage further engagement with my brand? Am I making it easy for people to share my video with friends or on their social media networks?

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