But search engine optimization should do a lot more than just help you “get found” in the search engine results. It’s about optimizing your website marketing plan so that your website delivers ROI. You probably have invested a lot of money into your website already, including web design and website development. Do you really need to invest even more money into search engine optimization? After all, hiring a great search engine optimization company can be expensive. So how exactly does search engine optimization add value to a website? Let’s look at some specific examples that prove that investing in search engine optimization is, in fact, a great investment.

Let’s take, for example, Gun Barrel Ranch. This western decor and western furniture company hand crafts their own merchandise right here in the United States, in Texas. They have had a website for a while now, and I’ve recently been working on their website’s search engine optimization. They invested in a few good website directory listings such as the Yahoo! Directory and a few others, and have been working on getting more on-topic links to their website. Previously, before they optimized their website, they were getting a few hundred visitors every month, mainly from their own business cards, trade shows that they attend on a regular basis, and a few very expensive, strategically-placed, full-page ads in some offline publications. Now, after my search engine optimization, they’re enjoying hundreds of visitors every day, and now they sell plenty of cowhide ottomans, enough to keep their craftsmen very busy. So, for Gun Barrel Ranch, search engine optimization has paid off tremendously. Their investment in search engine optimization has paid for itself within one month. Where they previously were not found at all in the search engine results, they have a lot of great search engine rankings, and are even talking about expanding their product line further.

Hiring a Search Engine Optimization consultant or SEO firm is very affordable. What if Gun Barrel Ranch wanted to go directly to Google, and show up in Google’s search engine results. What if they paid for their visitors? For pay per click through the Google AdWords program, the average cost per click (CPC) is $1.76 per click for “cowhide ottoman” and $2.71 per click (per visitor) for “cowhide ottomans”. Even if Gun Barrel Ranch wanted to spend only $1.00 per visitor to their website, they would easily spend over $1400 per month just to receive targeted traffic to their website for one product:

Average Monthly Search Stats – cowhide ottoman
Average Monthly Searches: 1,220
Average Cost Per Click: $1.76 USD

Average Monthly Search Stats – cowhide ottomans
Average Monthly Searches: 258
Average Cost Per Click: $2.71 USD

And this is only one keyword phrase, one particular product that Gun Barrel Ranch sells. What about the other products? Currently, this small ecommerce business has about 50 products total and is relatively small. When you compare the cost of Google AdWords to the cost of hiring a search engine optimization professional, search engine optimization is still a bargain.

Let’s take a look at another example. What is the value of a website that does not take advantage of search engine optimization versus the value of a website that has taken advantage of search engine optimization? Let’s take a look at a news website. A news website doesn’t necessarily “sell” something. But, a news website needs visitors, people who are interested in reading the news that they are reporting. A news website may get its news indexed by the search engines, but if they’re not taking advantage of search engine optimization best practices (like making sure that their news articles’ titles are in the “title tag” of the page), they are going to lose out on a lot of potential “free traffic” and visitors that organic search engine optimization is going to bring to the site.

There are literally hundreds of other news websites out there that report the news online. But, what makes one particular news website always show up in the search engine results for many of the most popular news stories reported every day? Search engine optimization can literally mean hundreds of thousands of additional visitors every day, which could then translate into a lot more potential ad revenue for a news website.

Like I mentioned in regards to Gun Barrel Ranch and “cowhide ottomans”, there is a cost for a news website to acquire traffic to its articles. Certainly, one option would be for the news website to actually purchase related traffic. Why not add a new Pay Per Click (PPC) advertisement via Google Adwords, bidding on a few related keywords, for every article that they add to the website? Certainly that’s one way to acquire traffic. Yet another would be organic search engine optimization. Making sure that the news website’s articles (the content) is optimized properly and that they appear in the news search engines (such as Google News) is key. And taking it one step further by integrating the news articles (or submitting them) to the social media websites would help, as well.

So, whether or not your website is selling something (like Gun Barrel Ranch), or whether or not you give out “free information” such as a news website, if you follow search engine optimization best practices or hire someone like myself who does, search engine optimization really does add value to a website: and that value is the traffic, the additional on-topic targeted visitors that your website will receive. Without it then you’re really not going to see any ROI from the money you just spent on great web design.

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Well, take a look at this interesting comment in that TechCrunch article:

Like many of its other recent efforts, especially with Buzz, Google Reader Play is an attempt to encourage more direct sharing and to capture that sharing data. More and more Website referral traffic is coming from sharing service such as Twitter and Facebook. Google wants to be in the sharing game as well.

Oh really? Google definitely wants to be in the sharing game, as well. And wouldn’t it make sense that Google would want to capture as much “sharing” data as they can? Perhaps one reason why Google (and Bing.com) bought the Twitter data feed and integrated it into Google Real Time Search was the fact that they wanted to know exactly who was sharing links with others.

When it comes to search engine optimization, historically it always been about links. Getting links from other websites that are on-topic to your website is important. I personally have always preached about being the “information source” for your industry. If you can come up with as much content as you can about your industry that’s going to help you in the long run. And others in your industry, even your direct competitors, will end up linking to you. I’ve seen it before. When I never thought that one competitor would link to another, one company ended up linking to their biggest competitor because their competitor had published a wonderful industry “dictionary” or “glossary of terms” on their website. The competitor wanted to point to good information. So, they linked to their competitor’s online glossary of industry terms.

But as we continue to evolve on the internet, there are a lot of people who are using social media websites on a daily basis. We’re not only going to static websites where links remain the same for a long time: we’re sharing links with our friends (and those who follow us) on sites like Twitter and even on websites like Facebook.

Suddenly, we all have become “link builders”. We’re sharing our favorite URLs of stories, news articles, blog posts, and funny pictures and videos with each other. Search engine like Google, Bing, and Yahoo! now want to keep up with our sharing data. Why do they care if you share something with your friends?

From a search engine’s perspective, the theory here is that most likely you are sharing something with your friends because you like it. You like that URL enough that you want to share it with everyone who is following you. And so it goes: you liked it, you’re a human, and so therefore someone else is probably going to like it. The search engines are in the business of giving us great search engine results. If you find what you’re looking for, if others have retweeted it and it matches other “search engine ranking factors”, then the search engine will display it in the search results.

And if you’re a search engine optimization expert or website marketing expert or social media marketing expert (whatever we are called these days), then you most likely share that URL because you think there is a good chance that people will visit that link. But, more importantly, we need to start thinking about the data that the search engines, like Google, have access to. They have access to the social sharing data now. And since a human is involved by sharing a URL (a link) with their network of friends, then you better start realizing that social sharing quite possibly could be the next “link building”.

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comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR) , a leader in measuring the digital world, releases its comScore qSearch analysis of the U.S. search marketplace. In February 2010, Americans conducted 14.5 billion core searches, with Google Sites accounting for 65.5 percent search market share.

Websites owned by Google continues to lead the search market in the United States. In February 2010, Google had 65.5 percent of the searches conducted online, followed by websites owned by Yahoo! (16.8 percent), and websites owned by Microsoft (11.5 percent). The Ask Network captured 3.7 percent of the search market, followed by AOL LLC with 2.5 percent.

  comScore Core Search Report*
  February 2010 vs. January 2010
  Total U.S. - Home/Work/University Locations
  Source: comScore qSearch
  ------------------------
                                 Share of Searches (%)
                                 ---------------------
                                                      Point Change
                                                       Feb-10 vs.
  Core Search Entity          Jan-10       Feb-10        Jan-10
  ------------------          ------       ------      -----------
  Total Core Search           100.0%        100.0%         N/A
  -----------------           -----         -----          ---
  Google Sites                 65.4%        65.5%          0.1
  ------------                 ----         ----           ---
  Yahoo! Sites                 17.0%        16.8%         -0.2
  ------------                 ----         ----          ----
  Microsoft Sites              11.3%        11.5%          0.2
  ---------------              ----         ----           ---
  Ask Network                   3.8%         3.7%         -0.1
  -----------                   ---          ---          ----
  AOL LLC Network               2.5%         2.5%          0.0
  ---------------               ---          ---           ---

Americans conducted 14.5 billion searches in February, down 5 percent from January. Google Sites accounted for 9.5 billion searches, followed by Yahoo! Sites (2.4 billion), Microsoft Sites (1.7 billion), Ask Network (540 million) and AOL LLC (358 million).

  comScore Core Search Report*
  February 2010 vs. January 2010
  Total U.S. - Home/Work/University Locations
  Source: comScore qSearch
  ------------------------
                                    Search Queries (MM)
                                   -------------------
                                                        Percent
                                                         Change
                                                        Feb-10 vs.
  Core Search Entity         Jan-10       Feb-10          Jan-10
  ------------------         ------       ------        ----------
  Total Core Search          15,167       14,472            -5%
  -----------------          ------       ------           ---
  Google Sites                9,920        9,475            -4%
  ------------                -----        -----           ---
  Yahoo! Sites                2,583        2,433            -6%
  ------------                -----        -----           ---
  Microsoft Sites             1,715        1,667            -3%
  ---------------             -----        -----           ---
  Ask Network                   574          540            -6%
  -----------                   ---          ---           ---
  AOL LLC                       375          358            -5%
  -------                       ---          ---           ---

* Based on the five major search engines including partner searches and cross-channel searches. Searches for mapping, local directory, and user-generated video sites that are not on the core domain of the five search engines are not included in the core search numbers.

February 2010 U.S. Expanded Search Rankings

In the February analysis of the top properties where search activity is observed, Google Sites led the search market with 13.5 billion search queries, followed by Yahoo! Sites with 2.5 billion queries and Microsoft Sites with 1.7 billion. Facebook.com experienced significant growth during the month with a 10-percent increase to 436 million searches, while craigslist, inc. jumped one position to #5 with 629 million searches.

  comScore Expanded Search Query Report
  February 2010 vs. January 2010
  Total U.S. - Home/Work/University Locations
  Source: comScore qSearch
  ------------------------
                                        Search Queries (MM)
                                        -------------------
                                                              Percent
                                                              Change
                                                              Feb-10 vs.
  Expanded Search Entity           Jan-10       Feb-10         Jan-10
  ----------------------           ------       ------       ---------
  Total Internet                   23,163       22,271          -4%
  --------------                   ------       ------         ---
  Google Sites                     14,045       13,482          -4%
  ------------                     ------       ------         ---
      Google                       10,378        9,929          -4%
      ------                       ------        -----         ---
      YouTube/All Other             3,667        3,553          -3%
      -----------------             -----        -----         ---
  Yahoo! Sites                      2,670        2,509          -6%
  ------------                      -----        -----         ---
      Yahoo!                        2,647        2,496          -6%
      ------                        -----        -----         ---
      All Other                        23           13         -43%
      ---------                       ---          ---         ---
  Microsoft Sites                   1,772        1,720          -3%
  ---------------                   -----        -----         ---
      Bing                          1,549        1,498          -3%
      ----                          -----        -----         ---
      Microsoft/All Other             223          222           0%
      -------------------             ---          ---         ---
  Ask Network                         736          689          -6%
  -----------                         ---          ---         ---
      ASK.COM                         336          300         -11%
      -------                         ---          ---         ---
      MyWebSearch.com/ All
       Other                          400          389          -3%
      --------------------            ---          ---         ---
  craigslist, inc.                    636          629          -1%
  ----------------                    ---          ---         ---
  eBay                                659          624          -5%
  ----                                ---          ---         ---
  AOL LLC                             576          549          -5%
  -------                             ---          ---         ---
      AOL Search Network              317          299          -6%
      ------------------              ---          ---         ---
      MapQuest/All Other              259          250          -3%
      ------------------              ---          ---         ---
  Facebook.com                        395          436          10%
  ------------                        ---          ---         ---
  Fox Interactive Media               403          391          -3%
  ---------------------               ---          ---         ---
      MySpace                         398          388          -3%
      -------                         ---          ---         ---
      All Other                         5            3         -40%
      ---------                       ---          ---         ---
  Amazon Sites                        238          210         -12%
  ------------                        ---          ---         ---

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CheapTweet has addressed a great need by harnessing the power of Twitter to help make consumer dollars stretch further. All day, CheapTweet indexes about 30,000 tweets about deals, filters out spam and duplicate content, and adds more than 10,000 new deals to the web site – many of which are different one-of-a-kind deals from boutique sellers. Deals are then ranked by how much they are talked about on Twitter and CheapTweet user votes. With so many diverse deals pouring into the system in real-time, CheapTweet has developed the DealStream to help visitors find the ones that are right for them.

CheapTweet’s DealStream is a real-time, personalized deals system where you can set up your own stream to track categories of deals, brands, merchants or keywords which are filtered and organized based on a relevance algorithm that takes into account your preferences and deal quality. Visitors can get these results on CheapTweet.com or via a convenient RSS feed.

As well as the DealStream, CheapTweet has recently made upgrades to its search engine, that uses particularized algorithms to combine tweets about the same deals, helping you speedily see what deals are hot, as well as sort through spam. There are also changes to the CheapTweet voting mechanism, allowing you to give deals a thumbs up or a thumbs down. Finally, CheapTweet clearly labels official accounts so shoppers know when they are looking at legitimate deals from a real merchant. Together these changes allow a clean but intelligent means to save money.

CheapTweet (www.CheapTweet.com) is a social deals search engine that scours Twitter to find any and all money-saving opportunities available to consumers. To date, CheapTweet has indexed more than 5 million deals from tens of thousands of sellers. CheapTweet is operated by Appozite (www.Appozite.com), an Austin, Texas-based startup developing social e-commerce software to connect unique and interesting retailers with customers. Appozite also makes TweetReach (www.tweetreach.com), a tool for measuring Twitter campaigns.

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This was an eye-opening experience for Marvin, someone who was trying to “make a buck” by trying to get me to sign up for the multi level marketing scheme that he was involved in, something called “Global Domains International”. In fact, we talked about the fact that it was better to create a unique website, perhaps a blog, with unique content on it rather than using someone else’s templated content that’s duplicated over 128,000 times on the internet:

You see, if you are a network marketer, you probably have been “given free a website” where you can drive “leads” to and get people to sign up to run their own free business. In other words, your website would be a lead generation tool, whereas the network marketing company is “giving you” a free website. Most likely, you’re doing all the work and getting others to sign up for this “opportunity” for them to make more money. But is that what you are really doing? Are you actually in business for yourself, living the “American Dream” so to speak, and actually making money for yourself? Probably not. You’re making some money, but you’re also making money for someone else (the network marketing company and those who are situated “above you” in this whole multi level marketing “program”).

I’m not going to go off on a tangent here and talk about one particular Multi Level Marketing (MLM) opportunity or even several of them. My whole point of this blog post is actually to talk about what these MLMs tend to do: give out free websites. This is easy for the MLM company to do, to set up literally thousands of websites, the same websites over and over again, the same content. But perhaps a different name, the name of the individual who has “bought” the website. In other words, it’s duplicate content.

Duplicate content on the internet is spam, plain and simple. The search engines don’t want it, and people don’t want it.

By using the same duplicate content and duplicate websites, over and over again, you’re not doing yourself a favor. In fact, it’s actually hurting your chances of bring in more targeted leads. One way that a business can bring in more targeted leads is via the internet search engines. In fact, when you are looking for something in particular (perhaps “making money at home or some other keyword phrase), we go to the search engines like Google.com and search for it. The search engines are interested in giving us, the searchers, the best search engine results. What would happen if they gave you a list of websites that are exactly the same, over and over again? You wouldn’t be very happy with that search engine, and you would probably go somewhere else, another search engine.

That’s what the search engines want: they want to give us the very best search engine experience. So, one way that Google does that is they remove all the duplicate web pages: if you’re a search engine optimization expert like myself, then you have probably heard the phrase “duplicate content”: which is not something that you want to be involved with. If you have duplicate content on your website or if the content is already indexed on the web, then it’s not going to rank well in the search engines: or it might not even be indexed at all by Google. And some people actually think that you’re penalized for it.

So, what can you do if you are a network marketer and want to bring in more network marketing leads? What if you have already spent money on a multi level marketing “program” and want to get more people in your network? The best thing you can do is go out and buy a domain name (they cost about $10 to register) and set up a website for yourself (or a blog). Start promoting yourself and start promoting your name. Start posting (blogging) or writing about your multi level marketing experience. Write every day if possible. Keep your website up to date. Learn a little bit about search engine optimization, if you can. Work on getting links to your website. Not to the actual landing page of your own “free website” that the multi level marketing organization gave you, but to YOUR website, to your blog. Start building your own list of followers, people who like to receive information from you, not from the multi level marketing company that you’re involved with this month. Put your time into keeping your own website, your own blog up to date. And even if your ultimate goal is to drive more leads to the multi level marketing program that you’re pitching, your search engine optimization efforts of promoting yourself and your own blog will help you more in the long run. In fact, if you ever switch gears at some point and start something with another multi level marketing or network marketing program, it will be a lot easier for you to change gears and start talking to your followers: those who are on your own mailing list.

If you’ve taken the time to set up your own website or blog, and you are linking and sending your followers on the social networking websites to your own blog, then your blog can link over to whatever opportunity you are involved in right now. By using search engine optimization techniques and by updating your website with unique content on a regular basis, you will end up bringing in more leads than you could ever imagine.

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Adding a blog to your current website, even if it is a “corporate style website” for your business is important. Great website design does cost a lot of money, and putting together a great looking website is time consuming, especially if you want great copy. And once you are really happy with everything (your product pages or your list of services), there is not a great chance that you are going to want to change your website content anytime soon. I know several corporate websites that have not updated their products and services web pages for at least six months.

But after 6 months, your product page tends to become “stale”. Sure, it may convert a lot of people into sales leads or customers who actually buy your products, but in terms of the overall internet experience, we tend to like web pages that have been updated recently. They’re more “timely” and “fresh”. Unless your website is informational in nature and is about a historical event, your website content needs to be updated on a regular basis, especially when it comes to search engine optimization. There tends to be what I call a “newness factor” in that some search engines, especially Google, will give some additional “brownie points” to you when your content is updated. Your web page will get a boost in the search engine rankings, which tends to bring in more website traffic: and then rankings may fall as the web page or the content becomes older.

If you update your website’s content, people will notice. Your competitors may be watching what you do, and when you update something it might get their attention and they’ll come look. And the search engines will notice, as well.

So how can we take advantage of the “freshness factor” when it comes to search engine optimization and optimizing our website for the search engines? Even if you don’t plan on updating your website’s content anytime soon, you can add a blog to your website; and update the blog on a regular basis. Adding a blog to your website has many benefits:

– You can take advantage of the “freshness factor” when it comes to search engine optimization. It also helps if your blog’s content (a snippet of a recent blog post) appears on the home page of your website. If you do not update your home page often, here is a great chance to update it and keep it “fresh” for humans and the search engines.

– If you play your card right, you will get additional links to your website without having to “trade links” or “work on getting more links” to your website. Every time you update your blog with a new blog post, it can be submitted out to the various social bookmarking and social networking websites, which could lead to more links.

– You can publicize the RSS feed of your blog. If you choose to allow the syndication of your blog, your blog posts will appear on other websites (which really is a good thing). That will lead to more publicity for you and your company, and you don’t have to pay for it.

– You can link internally to other pages on your website or even your products and services web pages when you talk about them on your blog. If you syndicate your blog, those links will oftentimes appear everywhere your blog post appears. You can then get more links to other pages on your website this way.

– You can give your website “a voice” by keeping your current customers and your potential customers up to date on what you’re doing. Many of us tend to like doing business with “someone” rather than just “a website”. If one of your employees blogs on a regular basis, they will be “the voice” of your company. I know a service company that has a corporate blog on their website. Their “mascot”, so to speak, not only appears in their television commercials, the mascot blogs on a regular basis. This gives more of a “personal feel” to this large, corporate entity.

But I do not have time to blog!

I totally understand. Who has enough time in their day, along with running a business, to spend time writing a blog post? Well, when it comes to blogging, you do have options. There are several things you can do to make it a lot easier:

– Hire a writer to blog every day. There are lots of great bloggers out there who you can hire to write a blog post every day. It really depends on your industry, but prices could vary from $5 per blog post to $100 or more for each blog post. A ghost writer could be on “retainer” and might charge you a certain fee every month to keep the blog updated.

– Hire a writer to write 30 great blog posts about your products and services. Many popular blogging platforms (blog software) allows you to load the blog posts ahead of time and be posted at certain dates and times. This is a good option, but not necessarily the best: if there is something in your industry that you’d like to write about then you can still write a blog post. Sometimes your “canned” blog posts might not be as timely.

– Tell one of your employees that it’s their job to take half an hour each day and write something.

– Use your current email newsletter as a blog post. If you send out an email newsletter once a week or once a day, consider changing it and posting it as a blog post on your website’s blog. That will go a long way towards being timely content for your readers and website visitors, and you can even track the sales leads or sales you get from that blog post. And since the content only appears in email right now, it’s not going to be considered “duplicate content” when you post it on your blog.

Once you write or post something on your blog, for search engine optimization purposes, you need to take the time to “promote it” on the social bookmarking and social media websites. There is a great free tool called “social poster” that allows you to “fill out a form” with the blog post’s title, description, and tags and post it to several social bookmarking websites. You still must actually submit them manually, but it helps you fill out the form. If recommend using a unique title for each of them and perhaps changing the description when you post, just to make sure that the search engines (especially Google) see them as unique.

For search engine optimization purposes and to get better search engine rankings and more traffic to your website, adding a blog is very important. It gives you a chance to get more links to your internal web pages, it gives your website “voice” that can be used to connect with your current customers and your potential customers. A blog also keeps your website “fresh” and more “lively”. Your website visitors will notice if you update your website on a regular basis: and, more imporantly, the search engines will notice, as well, and reward you for it.

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If you are a Public Relations Specialist, how can you exploit what’s new and exciting on the technology front without overlooking traditional media that still matter? Public relations icon Robert L. Dilenschneider gives veterans and neophytes in the industry the information they need to succeed in THE AMA HANDBOOK OF PUBLIC RELATIONS (AMACOM; February 28, 2010; $35.00 Hardcover).

“This book helps anyone who wants influence to develop the mind-set, intuitive grasp, confidence, strategies, and tactics to bring together all available and emerging tools,” Dilenschneider says. “Those who get the hang of it will not only survive, but contribute to the common good, as well as their own good. Those who do not will find themselves voiceless and ignored…The practice of public relations is filled with those who aren’t being heard or won’t be.”

Written for corporate managers and consultants, students and professionals, Millennials and Baby Boomers, THE AMA HANDBOOK OF PUBLIC RELATIONS offers guidance on combining both the right digital and traditional communication approaches with the means necessary for protecting a company or client from harmful attention online and off.

In addition to his own wealth of experience, Dilenschneider draws on hundreds of interviews with media and Internet experts, business leaders, and consumers to address what he views as the “most critical and useful issues” facing PR professionals today. Spanning topics of interest from the nuts and bolts of digital technology to practical advice on speechwriting, making presentations, penning op-ed pieces, and conducting market research to achieve PR objectives, chapters cover:

– Creating a Web presence that communicates the right message—in a human voice;

– Using blogs, Twitter, and social networking sites to attract, connect with, and win the right target audience;

– Monitoring the Internet, efficiently, affordably, and continually, to keep on top of what is being said about your company, products, services, industry, leadership, and competition;

– Viewing the PR universe in terms of hyperlinks—and profiting from cooperating and collaborating with competitors; and

– Strategically using online and offline communications to reinforce one another, with a commitment to staying current, exploring a variety of options, and conducting pilot projects.

Dilenschneider also devotes a section to the broader PR spectrum, which includes investor relations, tourism, and other specialized areas that require specific skills. Filled with instructive examples, step-by-step action plans, and takeaway information, THE AMA HANDBOOK OF PUBLIC RELATIONS is a valuable resource guide for everyone whose job or company depends on winning influence through communication, on the Web and beyond.

Robert L. Dilenschneider has been a public relations professional for over 40 years. Experienced in a number of communications disciplines, he is frequently called upon by the media to provide commentary and strategic public relations insights on major news stories. He has counseled major corporations, professional groups, trade associations and educational institutions, and has assisted clients in dealings with regulatory agencies, labor unions, consumer groups, minorities, and others.

In October 1991, he founded The Dilenschneider Group, which provides communications services in fields ranging from mergers and acquisitions, and crisis communications to marketing, government affairs and international media. Prior to forming his own firm, Mr. Dilenschneider worked with Hill and Knowlton, Inc. for nearly 25 years, including serving as president and chief executive officer from 1986 to 1991. As CEO, he succeeded in tripling the firm’s revenues to nearly $200 million and delivering more than $30 million in profit.

Mr. Dilenschneider is widely published and author of several books including A Briefing for Leaders, On Power, The Critical 14 Years of Your Professional Life, Moses: C.E.O, The Critical 2nd Phase of your Professional Life, 50 Plus!—Critical Career Decisions for the Rest of Your Life, A Times for Heroes, Power and Influence: The Rules Have Changed, and his latest, THE AMA HANDBOOK OF PUBLIC RELATIONS (AMACOM; February 25, 2010).

Furthermore, Mr. Dilenschneider is a member of the Public Relations Society of America, the International Public Relations Association, the Council on Foreign Relations, the U.S.-Japan Business Council, the Economic Clubs of New York and Chicago, and the Florida Council of 100. He is a Fellow to the International Association of Business Communicators, and in recognition of his contribution in promoting New York City, he received the city’s Big Apple award.

An active board member, Mr. Dilenschneider is a member of the advisory board of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a member of The Bretton Woods Committee, a member of the Board of Governors of the Leader to Leader Institute, and a member of the Soundwaters Honorary Board. He also sits on the Board of Governors of the New York Chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences and the North American Advisory Board of The Michael Smurfit School of Business at University College Dublin.

A supporter of higher education, he has lectured before scores of professional organizations and colleges, including the University of Notre Dame, Ohio State University, New York University and The Harvard Business School. He is a trustee of the Institute of International Education and serves as a judge for The Olin Award, a program of the Olin School of Business at Washington University in St. Louis. In 2001, he received an honorary Doctorate of Public Service from Muskingum College.

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Anyhow, this Search Engine Optimization Report Card that Google is issuing now on themselves is written by one of the same Google employees, Brandon Falls, who originally wrote the Google Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide.

Let’s take a look at Google’s SEO Report card, the elements of their web properties that they have decided to publicly rate, and the rating that they have given them.

Title tag format and length
10%(10 / 100) Needs improvement

Description meta tag use
33%(33 / 100) Needs improvement

Google sitelink triggering for [google product]
44%(44 / 100) Not for grading

Appealing Google sitelinks
32%(14 / 44) Needs improvement

Clear main page result on Google for [google product]
89%(89 / 100) Excellent

Directory form, www.google.com/product(/)
59%(41 / 70) Not for grading

www.google.com/product
46%(19 / 41) Not for grading

www.google.com/product, add ‘/’, 301s
26%(5 / 19) Needs improvement

www.google.com/product/
54%(22 / 41) Not for grading

www.google.com/product/, remove ‘/’, 301s
68%(15 / 22) Satisfactory

Convert to subdomain form, product.google.com/, 301s
54%(22 / 41) Not for grading

Subdomain form, product.google.com/
41%(29 / 70) Not for grading

Convert to directory form, www.google.com/product(/), 301s
36%(10 / 29) Needs improvement

https:// in canonical 7%(7 / 100)
Not for grading

First off, I’m very happy that they are aware of the 301/302 redirecting issue and can handle it when we redirect our domain names or URLs from an old URL to a new URL using a 301 Permanent Redirect. Apparently, though, based on this SEO report card, Google themselves are not doing a very good job at setting up the redirects. Yahoo! Search still has a major issue with 301 Permanent Redirects, just take a look at the backlinks to my domain name, www.BillHartzer.com and you’ll see what I mean. I have several URLs redirecting with a 301 to various pages on BillHartzer.com and they still cannot deal with 301s properly after all of these years. That’s one reason why I’m glad that Bing is going to be powering Yahoo! Search soon. The sooner the better.

The title tags on Google’s web properties gets what I would call an F grade. Definitely a fail. Only 10 percent? You would think that one of the most important elements of a web page on Google.com would be optimized. But apparently not.

There are several items on the list that are indicated as “not for grading”. Why would Google purposely not grade these elements, like canonical tags and canonical issues, as well as subdomains? Perhaps Google does not want to “go into that” can of worms right now? And what about the directory area? Not for grading because again, it’s an issue that they don’t want to address right now for certain reasons? Does “not for grading” mean that there is some part of the current algorightm that they don’t want to talk about?

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Why? Let me explain.

Back in the mid 1990s when I was practicing search engine optimization on my websites to get more trafic from search engines like Excite and Altavista, search engines used the title tag, the meta description tag, and the meta keywords tag to "figure out" what a web page was about. Some of the more "creative" and "enterprising" individuals out there felt that it was necessary to be dishonest when it came to filling out those meta tags just to get more visitors to their websites. We call those people search engine spammers, and that's one reason why search engines need people like Matt Cutts to help clean up the search engine results.

In fact, back in the 1990s, search engine spammers did not care whether or not the information in the meta tag actually matched the content of the page: as long as that keyword brought traffic to their website, they thought that they could "convert" those visitors into actual dollars in their pockets. Once someone had searched at a search engine for a keyword, clicked on the search engine result and came to the search engine spammer's website, back in the 1990s it was actually possible to convert those visitors into dollars. All you had to do was put a banner ad on the page (even a blank web page with only 1 banner ad on it) would make money for the search engine spammer because visitors had nothing else to do on the page but click the banner ad.

The search engines did not look at the content of the entire web page. They primarily looked at the meta tags, and trusted the web page owner or webmaster to tell the search engine what the web page is about. But now, in 2010, we are way past that. Search engines are looking at a lot more factors than the meta description and the meta keywords tag on a web page. There is a great overview of all of the search engine rankings factors right here on SEOMoz. I believe that Google does index everything on the page. What they do with that data and how the use it as a part of their search engine algorighm is always going to be debatable. That's a good thing.

Sure, when we're optimizing a web page we still need to include an appropriate title tag on the page. But what about the meta description tag and the meta keywords tags? I still believe that it's absolutely imperative that when we optimize a web page now and in the future, we need to still pay attention to the title tag, the meta description tag, and the meta keywords tag. The information in those tags need to accurately describe the information that's on the web page where they appear. IF the page is about large blue fuzzy widgets then the title tag should include "large blue fuzzy widgets". The meta description tag should be one sentence in length that includes "large blue fuzzy widgets". And the meta keywords tag should include something like "large widgets, blue widgets, fuzzy widgets, widgets".

Why even bother with meta tags?

Yes, I know it's a pain to take the time to fill out all of this stuff for all of your web pages. Sure, if you are using WordPress and you have some sort of SEO plugin that will do it for you then that's great. But if a website is using a shopping cart or other type of CMS and allows you to fill in all those meta tags (even the meta keywords tag), then you need to take the time to do it. Fill it out. Make sure that they are all appropriate (that they describe the content on the page) and those meta tags are unique. Don't just copy/paste the same meta description and meta keywords tags on the all pages of the website. Why? It's not just for search engines anymore.

It is time to move on.

It's 2010. As online marketers, we must start to think about optimizing our websites for more than just the search engines. Sure, there are still some search engines out there that you and I never use that still support the meta keywords tag. I agree, that is no reason to take the time to write a proper meta keywords tag for every web page on your website. But what about the other uses for the title tag, the meta keywords tag, and the meta description tag? Yes, Olivia, it's not just about search engines. There are social media sites, social bookmarking sites, review sites, shopping sites…I could go on and on about the type of other sites (other than search engines) that might use this meta data.

I could think of a ton of reasons, as a search engine optimization professional, or even as an online marketer, why you should take the time to make sure that your title tags, meta description tags, and your meta keywords tags must be filled out on every web page on your site. Let's just look at two of them, though.

In order to keep pages indexed in the search engines (mainly Google), you'll need at least one link to each web page on your website. One of the more "creative" ways that you could get additional links to every web page on your web site would be to create a spreadsheet of all of the data. For example, you might create a spreadsheet with all of this data:

URL

Title (from the title tag)

Description (from the meta description tag)

Tags (from the meta keywords tag)

Wait, did I just use the word "tags"? Yes, I did. The meta keywords tag could actually be converted into "tags", which are now very popular on social bookmarking, some review sites, and even other sites like blogs (check out what Huffington Post is doing), and shopping sites. If you export all of this data (the meta tags) into a spreadsheet, you will be able to do some pretty cool things with that data. And all of that can eventually lead to additional links to your web pages and, hopefully, more traffic to your website.

Why not use a tool to export all of your meta data into a spreadsheet and create a file that you could then populate a social bookmarking tool (like something similar to Social Poster) that would then submit to Delicious.com? That would then give you an RSS feed of the data and that might help with getting the pages indexed. There are plenty of things that you can do with an RSS feed, like add that RSS feed on other websites. Or, if you have the meta data exported you can even crunch that data, add prices and photo URLs to it, and upload it into Google Product Search.

So, what's my point here?

We absolutely need all of the major meta tags. As search engine optimizers and as online marketers we still need to take the time to fill out all of the meta data on our web pages, including the meta keywords tag, and make sure they're accurate and unique on all of our web pages. Once that is done, you have a lot of options for what you can do with that data. And if you do not have that data, there is nothing you can do with it. We do not know what type of cool sites that will exist in the future that will possibly use the meta data on our web pages. I can assure you that it is probably not going to be a search engine.

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The Buxter Facebook application will also allow you to develop applications for Facebook to boost your revenues in a quick and easy way.

To send money, all you have to do is be connected to the intended recipient on Facebook. Select a friend’s name from a drop-down list, enter the amount to send, and it’s sent, free of charge. To load money onto a Buxter account, you have to set up a ClickandBuy account. You will then be redirected to the ClickandBuy site to do this. Once this is done, deposits to Buxter can be made via credit card, debit card, direct debit or Payzone voucher.

To receive this money, you have to accept the Buxter Facebook application and enter an email address. Receiving money is also free of charge.

The money will sit in the Buxter account until sent to someone else, used for a purchase inside Facebook, or until you want to withdraw it. Withdrawing money back to a ClickandBuy account – in order to access the money that has been sent to you – is charged at 1.9% (min. €2 or $3). The Facebook application will initially be available in Euros and US Dollars.

ClickandBuy has been providing online payment solutions since 1999. It currently works with over 16,000 online traders including iTunes, Orange, Vodafone, msn and the Financial Times Deutschland. Founded in 1999, the online payment system is operated by ClickandBuy International Ltd. in London. As an e-money institution licensed by the UK’s Financial Services Authority (FSA), ClickandBuy’s complete service includes 120 currencies and offers 50 national and international modes of payment throughout 30 countries.

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