On the negative side for sites with traditional SEO, blended search pushes them down and possibly even off the only page that matters, the first results page.

On the positive side, however, blended search creates SEO opportunities. In other words if you have the capability to produce optimized, high-quality videos, press releases, or blog posts, consider them additional opportunities to make the first page of search results for any given search. This, of course, assumes that you also optimize your mixed media.

Blended Search Increases Visibility

According to a 2008 Jupiter study found on Search Engine Watch, “search engine users click specialized content within general search results more than they do within vertical search results.”

• 36% click “news” results within blended search results
• Only 17% click a “news” result after conducting a news-specific search
• 31% click “image” results within blended search results
• Only 26% click an “image” result after conducting an image-specific search
• 17% click “video” results within blended search results
• Only 10% click a “video” result after conducting a video-specific search

The study also revealed where searchers click:

• 68% of search engine users click results on the first page
• 8% review more than the first three pages prior to clicking on a result

On a related subject, it boggles the mind that when you search the key phrase, “blended search,” on Yahoo, the only result that comes up above the April 2008 Jupiter study is a post from September, 2007, entitled “Marketers Prepare For Blended Search.”

What Is Tip Top Search?

Tip Top is a new real time search tool you can use to find answers to questions from conversations people are currently having on Twitter. Tip Top assumes you will find useful tips for any topic you search and that those tips will be relevant because they represent experience and authority. Tip Top is meant to help people connect with other people already discussing the subject they are searching.

Why Can’t You Just Use Google Even If You’re Looking Specifically for Tips?

Of course you can, but Google sometimes includes old, misdirected, or even irrelevant search results. This is where Google Search Options Recent Results come in, or if you want even fresher results, simply choose Past 24 Hours or Past Hour.

The following are four of the first ten results when searching SEO tips yesterday on Twitter: As you can easily see, they are all diverse, but extremely relevant and useful.

tacimala Top 50 SEO Tips from Pubcon – http://kl.am/4XZY – Awesome list.

GreenBuzzAgency Useful Tips Lowering the Bounce Rate on a website. Good SEO tips. – http://ow.ly/D44v

grigoale SEO tips for YouTube http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/24745.asp

KEFmedia Top 10 SEO tips for PR professionals http://bit.ly/2apZrG . Any more to add? #pr

With Twitter’s version of real time search, obviously, new results are added as soon as they have been tweeted.

When searching SEO Tips in Google and selecting the Recent Results search option, the following came up #1:

SEO for Public Relations – Top Ten Tips PRSA 09 – Online Marketing Blog
Nov. 10, 2009 – Today at the PRSA 09 conference it was a packed room for Top Rank CEO (and author of Online Marketing Blog) Lee Oddden, who gave a presentation on SEO for …
http://www.toprankblog.com/2009/11/seo-tips-for-pr/

As a side note, notice how the Twitter urls that appear in Google search results are optimized with dashes between the words.

When searching SEO Tips in Google and not selecting any search option, the following relevant, awesome title, but really old result appeared first:

55 Quick SEO Tips Even Your Mother Would Love | Search Engine Journal from April 23, 2008.

When choosing the Google Search Option, Past Hour, the number one result was:

16 minutes ago – SEO Tips: What Are The Top Ten On-Page SEO Tasks To Do and To Avoid? via SEO Software For Professionals from Interleado November 19th, 2009 at 12:59 . . .

Again, as with Twitter, these results change continuously, and as time passes, newer blog posts and tweets will be added.

One of the top search results for SEO Tips in Tip Top was:

Top 50 SEO Tips from Pubcon – http://kl.am/4XZY - Awesome list.

And finally, you don’t really have to add the word Tips to SEO when searching Tip Top, because, assumedly, all results in Tip Top will be tips anyway. When I did, however, although the results were different, the Tips from Pubcon tweet did come up in both.

So what conclusions can be drawn from these comparisons? Only that Google, when adding a search options feature, is for me anyway, the clear-cut winner.

First, both Twitter and Tip Top Search results include tweets only, while Google search option results include not only tweets, but also other universal (blended) results, for example, videos and blog posts.

Second, Google Search Options, themselves, are powerful features that enable customization, and for that matter personalization of your real time search results.

And third, while Twitter is what it is, Google is just scratching the surface in the area of real time search. Google Search Options are just the “tip of the iceberg,” so to speak, as Google Wave for real time communication and collaboration and Google Caffeine, the forthcoming Google search algorithm update, will, no doubt, change the face of real time search, and further differentiate Google from its real time search competition.

While some may be under the impression that ranking reports are no longer relevant as an indicator of SEO results, nothing could be farther from the truth. The reason Web CEO Keyword Ranking Reports are still important is because clients simply love them. Web CEO Ranking Reports tell the website owner exactly where his or her website ranks for each key phrase you enter and for each search engine you choose.

Another feature clients seem to love is Web CEO’s Competitive Ranking Report, which compares your client’s search results to those of his or her main web competitors. This tells the site owner exactly where his or her site ranks for each key phrase and search engine you select and exactly where the competition stands for the same key phrases and search engines.

How I Use Web CEO

I’ve been a user of Web CEO for more than three years now and can attest to the fact that the program does what the company says it does and painlessly generates and exports easy to understand reports. The way I use Web CEO is create a keyword search engine ranking report for each new client to use as a benchmark throughout their twelve month SEO contract. After the initial report I create a new report at the beginning of each month and email it to the client. The reports feature both up and down arrows that indicate how many positions the site has moved up or down in the search results during the previous month. In addition, the current ranking report can always be compared to the initial report that was generated before any optimization takes place.

Disclosures

If you’re an SEO professional, you probably hate affiliate links as much as I do. So, in the interest of honesty is the best policy, yes, my recommendation of Web CEO is partly motivated by an affiliate link. The other part, however, is as mentioned before, I’ve actually used the product for more than three years and have only good things to say about it.

Free Trial

Sign up for a Web CEO free trial. Be advised however, that the trial version has certain limitations, for example, you’re limited to a maximum of only five key phrases and cannot export your results as either an Excel or html document. As long as you are aware of the limitations before you download the trial version, it shouldn’t be a problem. All you have to do to make the free trial limitations disappear is upgrade to either Web CEO Small Biz or Web CEO Professional. In keeping with the spirit of the holiday season, Web CEO is offering big discounts on their best featured editions from now until November 21st.

Free Keyword Search Engine Ranking Report

For non-SEO small business website owners I’m certainly not suggesting that you download the trial version or purchase the product. The best way for you to take advantage of Web CEO is to provide my company with a list of five to twenty key key phrases, (business terms that you’d like your site to rank for), send them from the form on our contact page, and we’ll email you back a free Keyword Search Engine Ranking Report within 48 hours.

Free SEO Website Analysis

Please note that our Free Keyword Ranking Report is not the same as our Free 20 Point SEO Website Analysis that may be ordered from the same contact page.

Wordstream founder and VP of Product Development, Larry Kim stated that “while your own web analytics data reveals how people are actually finding and converting on your site, Wordstream’s new features enable our customers to aggregate real, paid, and natural search data alongside keyword tool estimates and other brainstormed keyword ideas into one integrated dashboard.

You can sign up for a free trial account on the Wordstream website.

After you sign up, activate your account, and log in, the first screen you come to requires that you log into your Google Analytics account and verify your Google Adwords account.

According to the trial version, linking your Google Analytics account creates a continuous flow of referral data and allows Wordstream to make profit-driving suggestions based on the actual needs of your clients. Linking your Adwords account allows you to automatically push the changes you make in Wordstream directly to your Adwords account, saving both time and money.

The integration with Google Analytics means that the keywords you research in Adwords will be based on actual keywords that people are searching to find your site. That in itself makes the keywords entered into Adwords more relevant, reduces guesswork, and eliminates the need to input your keywords into Adwords manually.

First you’ll need to decide where to add your new Google keyword based content. While new blog posts or web pages are often the obvious choices, others include:

A new directory, in this case meaning a new Google keyword based section of your website including multiple pages, for example, yoursite.com/keyword/individual-page-title.

A new sub-directory, for example, keyword.yoursite.com

A new article or press release

A new pdf or video

Keyword Research

Next you’ll want to check out the Google Adwords Tool. Simply enter in several key phrases you are considering writing about, for example, for this post, fresh content, new content, add content and most popular keywords, google keyword, and what people are searching for. The Adwords Tool will return a list of related key phrases along with an approximate average number of monthly searches as follows:

fresh content: 3,600
new content: 33,100
add content: 18,100

most popular keywords: 74,000
google keyword: 165,000
what people are searching for: 1,900

You can easily see how these numbers led me to change the title of this post from “Build Your Content Around What People Are Searching For” to “Add New Content Based on Google Keywords.”

By using keyword research based key phrases in your PDF content, title, and description, PDFs uploaded to the web can even help your rankings in the major search engines. While PDFs are now easily indexed, prior to the Adobe acquisition of Macromedia, that was not the case.

When creating a PDF, make sure to enter the document properties, the same as you would for a Flash video. A PDF title and description are just as important to your optimization as they are for an html document. The title, followed by the description, for example, often becomes the search result. You’ll also want to complete the author and subject fields.

Another basic PDF optimization rule of thumb is to use more text than graphics. If you do add graphics, make sure to keep the file sizes as small as possible, and never convert your text to a PDF as part of one large image.

Most resources covering PDF optimization don’t include the tools you need to actually do the job. Instead they probably figure you’ll use the latest version of the Adobe PDF Writer, which at the time of this writing is Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro with a list price of $449.00. A viable alternative, however, is PDFill Printer. Although called a printer, it’s not really a printer at all, but rather a pseudo printer, so that when you want to create a PDF from another application, all you have to do is simply “print” it to the “PDF printer.” Because it’s freeware PDFill Printer has no free trial, no ads, and, of course, a list price of zero, and can be downloaded from CNet.

Last but not least, while there are other free PDF writers, if you want to optimize your PDFs, make sure the one you choose allows you to enter your document properties.

The consensus of opinion among SEO thought leaders is that the higher your Google page rank, the faster Google spiders and indexes your site. If crawl rate tells us how frequently Google spiders your site and is partly determined by how often new pages are added, the faster your crawl rate, the more trust Google has in your content, so the higher you rank.

You can access your crawl stats via Google Webmaster Tools, or now you can check out your crawl rate by adding your site to the Seometer database. Top level domains, for example, http://www.yoursite.com, are free, while there is a $20.00 per year charge for internal pages, such as http://www.yoursite.com/services/. Sub domains such as http://www.services.yoursite.com are also free. So apparently blog urls, such as http://www.yoursite.com/blog are not free. If your blog is a Wordpress blog, however, you can still track your crawl rate free with the Wordpress Crawl Rate Tracker plugin from Blogstorm.

According to the Seometer blog, the average crawl cycle for all sites registered with them is 2.19. So on average Google is updating its cache for these sites once every other day. Comparing your own stat against this average will give you a rough idea where your website is ranked in terms of Google’s crawling frequency.

If you were able to get your hands on a list of directories, blogs, and forums with the fastest crawl rates, you would have a basis for determining which directories to submit to and which blogs and forums to join and comment on. A short list of the top ten most frequently crawled by Google sites on the Seometer home page yields more than a few surprises. For example, who would have thought that the Romow Business Directory (1) would be crawled more often than the Yahoo Directory 1.9)? The top SEO blog with the best crawl rate on the Seometer list is Web Pro News (1.86) and the forum with the best crawl cycle is Web Pro World (1.89). Unfortunately the list only compares sites that are registered with Seometer. Even so, it should still have some value for comparing one site on the list to another.

And finally one way to increase the crawl rate for your inside pages is to build deep links. While most links go to your home page, a deep link is obviously a link that targets one of your inside pages. Here’s a list of free directories by page rank that accept deep links that we submit to as part of our deep link submission service.

In a post last week I mentioned that after reading the book, “Free” by Chris Anderson, the founders of Brownbook  converted their local directory to completely free, meaning free with no strings attached.

The same holds true for my 20 Point SEO Website Analysis, meaning absolutely free with no strings or further obligation.  There are, however, several restrictions, for example, your site must be a business website of at least ten pages; no illegal, pornographic, racist, or sexist websites; and my all time favorite, no make money now, get thousands of Twitter followers, or any other affiliate sites will be reviewed.  So if you’re a business website owner, check it out.

Why is it that only on the web the word free doesn’t always mean 100% free?  More often than not on the web it usually means free with strings attached.  Take for example, Wordstream’s recent release of its new, free keyword research tool.  According to the Wordstream blog this morning, “the free keyword tool by Wordstream has delivered over 100 million keywords to early adopters in its first week of use.”  When they say delivered, they aren’t kidding.  What they neglected to write about in the post was the part about how all you get initially are the first five results.  The rest of your unlimited results, although technically still free, you have to give up your email address in order to have them emailed.

Not really all that bad when compared with others, for example, the free versions of Microsoft Office 2007 that comes with new computers or the trial version of WebCEO, a popular keyword search engine ranking tool.  Hardly unexpected I might add, but your free version of Office will simply stop working after sixty days unless you purchase the licence for it, and the free version of WebCEO is pretty limited to say the least.  It limits the number of key phrases you are allowed to check to five, and even worse, it doesn’t let you export your results.  The full version, of course, allows for unlimited key phrases and full exports to Excel or html.

The following are two excellent sample law firm marketing plans on the web: The first, by Quick MBA, and the second, by Deysot, have one thing in common.  They both seem to be missing one really important section, namely, law firm website marketing.  This leads me to assume that many law firm business plans, even those created by business plan professionals, may also be lacking website marketing as a law firm business plan strategy.

In a previous post I wrote about the difference between strategy and tactics. “Strategy involves the overall plan, while tactics, on the other hand, are actions initiated to reach certain specific objectives.  In other words, tactics are the means by which strategies are executed.”

So, what does this have to do with law firm marketing?  The strategy, or in this case, the compehensive law firm marketing plan, explains why, while the tactics tell us how.  Law firm marketing tactics are not very different from the tactics detailed in my explanation of the website marketing process. Although the steps are similar, the difference is in the details.  For example, while articles must be written and submitted to article directories for both legal and non-legal websites, for law firm articles there are focused directories that publish legal articles exclusively. Examples include Deysot and LLRX.

Similarly, while directory link building should be part of the marketing mix for any website, for law firms there are directories dedicated exclusively to law firms, for example, the Justia Lawyer Directory, which is free and the National Lawyers Directory, which has a one-time review fee of $39.95. The National Lawyers Directory also publishes legal articles, while Justia also includes a blog directory, called BlawgSearch, for blogs focused on the law, and even a Twitter Directory, called Legal Birds, for legal professionals on Twitter.

If you’re an attorney looking for a custom law firm website marketing plan for your firm, check out our free, no-obligation, 20 Point SEO Website Analysis.  The analysis, in and of itself, is not a marketing plan for your law firm website.  It merely covers 20 factors that search engines consider when ranking one law firm website higher than another.  Simply fill out and submit the short form at the bottom of the SEO Website Analysis page, and your SEO website analysis will be emailed to you within 48 hours – with no strings or further obligation attached.

The next step in the process is a custom law firm website marketing plan that adds a plan of action for each specific factor addressed in the SEO website analysis, and explains exactly what needs to be done to improve or, for that matter, eliminate each of the problem areas.

If you happen to be the owner of a small business, or for that matter any business, and you’ve been wondering what all the fuss about SEO is over, you’ve come to the right place. In this post I’ll explain in plain English what SEO is and why your business needs it.

Starting at the absolute beginning, SEO, of course, stands for search engine optimization, which according to Wikipedia, is “the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a website from search engines, via natural (also called organic) search results.”

Organic search results in Google, for example, are the free results you find in the white background in the center of each search results page. They are located directly below and to the left of the pay-per-click ads, which, of course, are the paid ads in the blue background at the top and on the right.

There are two kinds of SEO: What you actually do on your web pages to improve your search engine rankings, logically called on-page SEO and what you do off your web pages, commonly referred to as off-page SEO. Both On-page and Off-page SEO are explained in detail on this site.

Top Ten Reasons Why Your Business Needs SEO

91% of Internet users use Search Engines to navigate the web.
American Internet Users Survey

85% of Internet users use Search Engines to find suppliers and products.
Georgia Institute of Technology

75% of all clicks are made on organic Search Engine listings.
Enquiro Did-it, Eye Tracking Research

85% of all commercially natured search referrals are generated by organic rankings.
Jupiter Research

The majority of Search Engine users believe that companies whose websites are returned at the top of the search results are the top companies in that field. IProspect | Jupiter Research

The only two ways to target the 75% of Search Engine users who prefer/click on organic natural listings compared with sponsored or pay-per-click are luck or search engine optimization (SEO)

If you want to rely on Search Engine Optimization and not luck, there are only two options: Do it yourself or outsource to a specialist company with expertise in SEO.

Companies who outsourced their organic Search Engine Optimization to a Search Engine Marketing firm received a higher ROI than from paid search advertising.
IProspect | Jupiter Research

You could be missing as much as 75% of your target audience if your website is not ranking high in the Search Engines. SEO is the only way to reach that percentage of users. Outsourcing to an SEO specialist saves both time and resources and generates higher returns when compared to in-house SEO or pay-per-click.

If you don’t take advantage of SEO, no doubt your competition will!

Stats provided by UK SEO firm Vertical Leap.