SearchInfluence

Go see this movie! ...we know you want to...

I came across a kind of shocking figure the other day while reading about the Facebook IPO. It appears Facebook ad sales generated $3 billion in revenue in 2011. That’s as much money as JP Morgan appears to have lost recently. Whoops.

But here’s an even more brain-wrinkling number: traditional television ads generated $68 billion in revenue last year. You know what you could buy with that extra $65 billion? Bill Gates.

Over the past couple of months, there has been a great deal of hysteria surrounding the unnatural link warnings being sent out in Google Webmaster Tools. These warnings and the release of Google’s Penguin update mean that now is definitely the time to start trying to “act natural” with your link-building methods. While I don’t have any major revelations about this alarming issue, I have been following it rather closely and have some informative posts on the subject to share.

I discussed the value of online reviews in my previous blog post — check it out here: The Importance of Online Reviews: What Your Customers Really Think.

I’d like to delve more deeply into the subject to discuss the ways in which a business owner can use reviews in a proactive manner. Since you’re obviously already following the best practices I described in my last post, I won’t go into depth about them here.

If you are actively involved in your online presence, it’s likely you have heard of Yelp! If not, see below for an introduction to the variety of tools that are available to business owners. It’s brief and very informative!

SEO largely depends upon undisclosed and constantly evolving criteria for page authority, making it inherently unpredictable. Google makes the rules; the industry responds accordingly.

Local results in the SERPs exemplify this. Whether they appear, as well as how they appear, is entirely at Google’s discretion. That being said, Google’s discretion is sufficiently discreet in most instances. Furthermore, most people pay more attention to local results in the SERPs than they do to organic ones, which vindicates their prominence. However, local can get pretty sloppy sometimes. Unrelated businesses weasel into the results here and there.

Search engines are designed to do one thing — make sense of the various documents found on the Web. Originally using just on-page factors like content and meta information contained in specialized tags, search engines moved to analysis of links in the late 90′s with the advent of the PageRank algorithm. This new method treated links as “votes” for websites, using anchor text and website clout to determine what is relevant to a search query. Recently, though still relying on links as the main source for determining a page’s worth, search engines and other Internet spiders are returning to on-page factors to find information that’s meaningful to users.

“New” On-Page Meta

These “new” on-page factors are the culmination of work dating back to the beginning of the modern Internet. The original diagram showing the basics of how the Web would work devotes much of its space to showing the connections between pages, but one corner lays the foundation for what is now known as the semantic web. This image shows a few of the basic properties in the semantic web: rel=author and other relationship markups, Schema’s breadcrumbs and on-page descriptions, and the hCard microformat.