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vineri, 7 ianuarie 2011

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

Our Online Reputation Management Playbook

Posted: 07 Jan 2011 02:18 AM PST

This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

We recently completed an interesting reputation management project and I thought it'd be helpful to post our strategy and results to the SEOmoz community. My hope is that you'll read this and get some ideas, or even better, you'll point out some areas that we overlooked or things we can do to improve our approach.

The Client's Problem

Our client approached us with a problem that we are now seeing fairly often for many companies. As you began to type our client's brand name into Google Search, Google Suggest displayed our client's brand name + the word 'scam' as the second option, directly below their brand name. Talk about damaging your reputation!

We signed a confidentiality agreement, so I can't say specifically who the client is, but below is a screenshot from another large company, Direct Buy, whom we found experiencing a very similar issue.

Our client believed they were losing a lot of business due to this issue, particularly in the case of people who were ready to buy, but then went to do a Google Search to learn a bit more about the company before they plunked down their credit card. There is a great quote from Dave Naylor on this exact problem, "If Google Suggest's second result is 'scam', then people WILL click on it". These customers likely clicked the 'scam' recommendation and were scared off from purchasing from our client.

Our client is not a fraudulent organization in any way, and they offer real services and products to their customers, but the way they offer service is also complicated and in a volatile industry where no company is without its detractors. Even though they deliver their product as stated, and 99% of their clients love it, there seemed to be a small percentage that just weren't happy. Some of these unhappy customers took their gripes to the web. Additionally, there were also a high number of obvious cases where competitors were posting negative information about the company in order to damage their brand. We would not perform reputation management for any company that was a scam or participated in fraudulent or misleading activities, and after fully researching the business, we were 100% comfortable with helping them with their problem.

Because of all of this negative content about our client, when someone indeed clicked the '[Insert Brand Name] Scam' suggestion from Google Suggest, they were finding the first 2 pages of results filled with very negative 'flames' about the company. Some of this negative content was on personal blogs and others on complaint sites and forums. There were even a few positive reviews on blogs that were inundated with numerous scam accusations in the comment section, thus making a positive article turn very negative and harmful to the brand.

Our Research

Before diving right into what we did to change this, I want to talk a little bit about some research we did on this issue. We wanted to understand, as best as we could, how this problem came about. We hypothesized that very few people actually typed in 'brand name scam' initially, but maybe at some point it was just enough to get it to be a suggestion. Once it became a suggestion in Google Suggest, searcher's curiosity was piqued and so they clicked on it at a high rate. Google likely interpreted the large amount of clicks to mean that the phrase is a highly relevant suggestion, and as such moved it up to the top of the list of suggested terms.

Google's official statement on how Suggest works, from this blog post, is:

"As you type, Google's algorithm predicts and displays search queries based on other users' search activities. These searches are algorithmically determined based on a number of purely objective factors (including popularity of search terms) without human intervention. All of the predicted queries shown have been typed previously by other Google users. The autocomplete dataset is updated frequently to offer fresh and rising search queries. In addition, if you're signed in to your Google Account and have Web History enabled, you may see search queries from relevant searches that you've done in the past."

We think there is quite a bit more to it than this. We recently read of a case study where a brand new domain had acquired a 'scam suggestion' from Google Suggest. It was evident that nobody had searched for this domain, let alone searched for the domain with the word 'scam'. What the domain owner found was that two scraper sites had scraped content from his site, and those two scraper sites had the word 'scam' buried in the URL. Based on this incident, we think it is very possible that content and associated words in Google's index may also influence the suggestions.

This SEOmoz Q&A by Dr. Pete is also about this very topic, and Dr. Pete believes it is possible that Google Suggest is biased to serve up the 'scam' suggestion, among others.

We kicked around the idea of working to influence Google Suggest to force out the ‘scam’ suggestion, and may revisit it down the road, but we decided that the fastest way to take action would be to push the negative content out of the SERPs with positive content that the client had complete control over. This way, when someone searched the scam phrase, they'd have to dig deep into the SERPs to find anything negative about the brand.

I know that you may be thinking that pushing bad results out of the SERPs feels a little dirty. I felt this way at first, however, after fully researching various approaches and processes we now believe firmly that it is indeed a Google sanctioned method. Our belief is based on this blog post from the Official Google Blog on how to get rid of negative brand rankings in the SERPs. In it, it states:

Instead, you can try to reduce its visibility in the search results by proactively publishing useful, positive information about yourself or your business. If you can get stuff that you want people to see to outperform the stuff you don't want them to see, you'll be able to reduce the amount of harm that that negative or embarrassing content can do to your reputation.

Our Approach

We pitched the client, and subsequently implemented, a pretty ambitious plan. Our stated goal was to own 90% of the first two pages of Google results in 6 weeks. To control at least 18 positions, we knew we needed to focus on more than just 20 pieces of content. We decided that we would define 50 pieces of content, and as time went on, we'd determine which pieces of content Google was signaling that it liked (by slowly moving it up) and which it didn't. The content we focused on fell into two natural categories, Pre-Existing Content and New Content. The content for each of these categories was as follows:

Pre-Existing Content

Subdomains on the client's website - The client had created two of these before we were brought in. They were subdomains setup that specifically addressed the false accusations.
News articles - A benefit of the client being a big company is that they've already had plenty of mainstream press. We identified positive articles from Business Week, The Wall Street Journal, and other Industry publications to promote for the scam phrase. We found that, even if the article didn't contain the word 'scam', anchor text alone, linking to these strong domains, could get them to rank for the scam phrase.
Wikis - It seems that most industries and niches have their own wiki's. Our client had a page in a niche wiki, so we simply added the word 'scam' into the wiki in a natural way. Doing this, plus a few links, helped it rank for the scam phrase.
Blog Posts - There were a number of positive blog posts about the company already online. The problem was, as I mentioned previously, that the comment sections of many of them were overrun with very negative comments (we could tell most of the comments were anonymous and contained inaccurate and fake information, likely from competitors). So, we chose to only promote blog posts that had disabled comments. Even if a blog post had no comments, we didn't use it if comments were open because they could always turn negative.
Youtube - The client had created a few Youtube videos disputing the mis-information being spread about their business. Since YouTube allows for full content moderation, we found videos to be a great source of positive content that can be controlled.

New Content

Content on the client's website - When the client originally tried to tackle this problem themselves, they had created a few posts on their blog that were optimized for the brand name + scam keyword. Since an official brand site is the most likely site to rank for any query containing the brand name, this was a smart move.
Posts on sites we own - We have a fairly large number of blogs that we run as part of our business. Some of these blogs focus on the same industry as the client, so we simply created posts optimized for the scam keyword. Since these domains are aged and trusted, we knew it wasn't going to be too difficult to get them to rank.
Article Directories - Squidoo, HubPages, eZineArticles, Buzzle, InfoMarketers, Go Articles, and many more - We have nice, old accounts on many sites like these, so we added new articles optimized for our term to them.
Mini Blogs - We setup a number of mini-blogs on WordPress, Blogger, Posterous, Tumblr, and a few other WordPress MU sites we identified that we felt we'd be able to create a blog on that could rank.
New Sites We Created -We bought the .com, .net, and .org versions of the exact match domains for the search phrase (including the word 'scam', eg. brandnamescam.com). We also bought hyphenated versions of the domain as well. We then setup mini-sites on different c-class IP addresses.

As you can see from the lists, our targets included a diverse set of content. The key was that there had to be some sort of control over the page. Either comments had to be turned off (to keep a positive article from becoming negative by a bunch of negative comments) or we needed to have control over the page/comment moderation to ensure we could control the message.

The general content on these pages included customer testimonials, positive stories, general information about the company, satisfaction guarantees, debunked mis-information, and other stories that either didn't pertain to the scam issue at all, or they showed positive aspects about the company. Is this a perfect strategy? No, I don't think so. But we believed that having 2 pages or SERPs with little information about an actual 'scam' is probably enough for most searchers to abandon the topic.

Link Building

After we had our content targets identified and/or created, we started the link building process. One thing I absolutely loved about getting some of these articles ranked was that it took almost no work to get something on page 1. Some of the positive pre-existing articles that we wanted to get on page 1 were on sites like the New York Post, so it basically took 2 lower-quality links with the exact anchor text 'brand name scam' to get it on page 1. It made me (briefly) dream about how easy a job it must be to do SEO for a site like The Wall Street Journal; you can practically rank #1 for any low-competition search term you want!

Our primary link building strategy was built around using article directories. We wrote hundreds of unique, quality articles (no spinning or machine generation) and submitted them to article directories, web 2.0 sites, blogs, and other sites that accepted our content. We varied our anchor text, and spread out the links across sites, and over time, so that the link profile was fairly natural.

Interlinking

We also wanted to interlink our sites in a way where they would all benefit, while avoiding obvious signals of 'link farms' or 2 or 3 way link exchanges. What we came up with is represented in the graph below. We've replaced the actual sites with S1, S2, etc, but this is the exact interlinking pattern we used. Sites that needed more help received more links, while some of the stronger sites only needed one or two links pointed at them.

interlinking websites for SEO

Social Engineering

I also wanted to talk about another tactic we used to take on some of the more stubborn sites that just wouldn't seem to move out of the SERPs. In our case, these stubborn listings were two personal blogs. We heavily researched these blogs to understand the psyche of the authors. We then determined two separate strategies to pursue that would help us with our goal. In short, for one blog we made an offer to buy it outright. We didn't explain our background or why we wanted it (that is irrelevant to the buy/sell process), we just simply made an offer and began dialogue with the owner. In the second case, we talked to the webmaster and during discussions realized that the owner was not interested in the traffic received from the article, so we were able to work out a deal to help move the content out of the SERPs. We treaded very lightly with these tactics for two reasons: (1) We wanted our work to be legal and ethical, and (2) we needed to be very careful that these site owners didn't just create a new blog post talking about how our client was trying to 'buy their silence'.

Execution & Results

The results from our project were near-perfect. We obtained nine of the top ten results on page one, and all ten results on page two. We think that if we had more than just six weeks to complete this, we would have been able to get all 20 of the top 20, but 19 out of 20 wasn’t bad and our client was ecstatic.

I'd love to know your thoughts on how we approached this and what you would do differently. Based on the success we've had, we are looking to expand our offerings in this area. I personally loved the challenge of this and the interesting aspects of the problem.

About the author: Brian Patterson is a Partner at MangoCo, a Search Engine Optimization Company in Virginia. You can follow Brian on the the Twitter @brianspatterson.

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Creative Ways to Get Links from a Reluctant Target - Whiteboard Friday

Posted: 06 Jan 2011 01:01 PM PST

Posted by Aaron Wheeler

Happy new year, mozzerati! Another year, another 52 Whiteboard Fridays to be had. I don't know about you, but I'm totally pumped to see what the whiteboards have in store for us this year! You may notice a new and friendly banjo-pickin' Roger in the beginning of this week's video, and you'd be quite apt in doing so. Our intro graphics have definitely taken a turn for the snappier this year - let us know what you think in the comments.

As for this week's video, Rand is going to show you some great ways to start the new year out right by getting those links you so desperately crave yet, time and time again, are tragically denied. You can do a lot for yourself by simply making a personal connection, openly communicating with your peers, and making other people's jobs a bit easier. After watching, if you think of any other ways you're able to garner these hard-to-get links, please share in the comments below!

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Howdy, SEO fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're dealing with a particularly tough problem, which is when you've got a link target that's extremely hard to approach, difficult to get a link from. You think to yourself, boy, this is a high-value link target. They've got good metrics, good rankings. The link could send me some good visitors and I want to get that brand linking to me. I think it is a trusted domain, and I that it is going to help me in the rankings. A lot of times those tough few dozen or couple dozen links can really push you over the edge in the rankings for particular things. So, I wanted to discuss some creative ways to get links from reluctant targets.

Now, first off, let me just say that I hope this situation doesn't happen. It shouldn't be the case that you first ask for a link and then get turned down. If you think the situation is going to be tough, you want your first impression, that first effort to feel very natural and organic. In fact, it should be natural and organic. They should link to you because they want to link to you because you actually have something to provide that's helpful. That's exactly what these ways are. So, hopefully, you don't get that, "No way I am linking to your site."

So, first off, some creative tactics. Number one, the testimonial. One of the really interesting things that we've seen on the Web is that people, companies of all kinds are desperate for testimonials, particularly ones that do a few things. Number one, they come with a photo. Someone is willing to send a photo of themselves. They are willing to have their full name, their title, and the company they are associated with. There are so many anonymous testimonials that people have stopped believing in those. They worry like, "Hmm, is that an actor? Is that stock photography, or is this a real person?" They've been hard pressed to find people who will leave them testimonials that answer the specific item that they want. If your company provides online surveys and there are a lot of people who are really worried about security and someone leaves a testimonial that says, "Hey, I'm the CTO at a security company and this survey product I always feel secure because I checked out their stuff and I know that I can feel safe using them." Great. That's terrific. That's precisely the kind of testimonial that you want.

Number two, the social connection. This is the idea that building up a relationship through Facebook or Twitter. Twitter is particularly powerful for this in building professional relationships. So is LinkedIn. By retweeting your target, by following them, by engaging with them in conversation regularly, by commenting on their blogs, by participating in their communities, you can make yourself known and typically build that relationship that will eventually lead to the link. The great part about this is you're getting way more than the link. If you think this is a brand that can really help you, a person that can really help you personally and professionally, this is a great thing to do anyway. That is the case with a lot of these. If you really endorse a brand, being able to say nice things about them is a great way to pay it forward and hopefully get some of that in return. Doing the social connection is a great way to build up that relationship.

The next one, the in-person connection, relies on just the same philosophy and methodology. The idea being that you go to the places where you know your target audience is going to be, the people that you're trying to get links from. You go to those conferences. You go to those events. Even if you think, "Well, they're not customers. They're just sort of people that I want to partner with." If they're people that you want to partner with and get links from online, they're probably people who talk to and mingle with and can help your business in offline ways as well. This is exactly what the search engines are trying to mimic with their link graphs. So, going to these events, going out to dinner, I don't know why it's one of those medieval long tables and they're both at two ends, but yeah, I guess not quite as friendly a dinner as I thought. Picking up the check. These are great things. When two people reach for the check and you say, "No, no, I got this one, but maybe, you know, just link to me sometime on your site." Great way to end a conversation, and the person will always, "Oh, yeah, sure. No problem. A link. Phew!" You pick up the dinner. It is a $25 to $50 link, easy. Well, depends on which bottle of wine you get I suppose.

Next one, the press piece. Interestingly, and probably not surprisingly, when press writes about you, when they say particularly nice things about you and they do interviews of you or they have you on a radio program, they interview you for a blog or those kinds of things, you can mention that third party. Link to the target over here in that blog post where you're getting interviewed. Mention them in that radio interview. Talk about their business a little bit. It feels very selfless to them, and it is very likely to get you that link. The mention of you in the press, whether it is a big press piece or an industry press piece or just a blog press piece, is also one of those things where when you ping them and you remind them, "Hey, we were in this press piece. I talked about you," and those kinds of things, it fulfills that mentality of is this a trustworthy business. This builds enough trust to where the linking target can feel like, "Oh yeah, linking to them is probably a really good idea anyway because they're a solid brand, solid website."

Last but not least, the missing content piece. This is one of the ones that I really love quite a bit for multiple reasons. First off, the idea is that your target probably has content they wish that they had on their website. That could be a report, a survey, a blog post, some infographics, a data set, a tool, whatever that thing is that they're wishing. Right now I'm wishing there were a hundred different kinds of reports and research papers I wish people would publish on SEOmoz and submit to SEOmoz. I know a lot of people do. That's fantastic. But what I am saying is that missing content piece, if you can ID what those are, talk to your contact and say, "Hey, I can write those, build those, etc., for you," when they put that piece up, they're going to link to it well. Externally it will likely get linked to well. You'll have a link from there as the content developer, the author, the builder of that. Now, what's beautiful is two things. Number one, you've gotten a link from your target. Great. Number two, you've built a relationship with the target, also great. Number three, people who are coming to that page, who are externally saying, "Wow, this is a really good resource," you're the person who authored it. They're going to give credit certainly to the company that hosts it, but as the author you'll get some credit as well and you'll get traffic from that. That traffic could be interested in what you do. It could be potentially people who will link more to you and identify you when they link to the initial piece of content.

It is just a beautiful synergy here that is happening, really with all of these tactics. That's why I love that creativity, that outside the box kind of thinking as opposed to a, "Well, you know what, I'm just going to link spam." This methodology just works so much better.

All right, everyone. I hope you've enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday. We will see you again next week. Take care.

Video transcription by SpeechPad.com

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Michael Gray - Graywolf's SEO Blog

Adding Revenue Streams Into Your Website or Blog

Posted: 06 Jan 2011 08:27 AM PST

One of my more popular posts from 2010 was about How to Integrate Advertising into Your Blog. In this post, I’m going to expand on that from a strategic point of view and talk about ways to add revenue streams into your website or blog.

Affiliate Marketing – Hopefully before you decided to build a website or blog, you built it around one or more key affiliate programs. It is possible to build a website around a specific brand or product with an affiliate program, but I recommend sticking with general concepts as opposed to specific programs. If a merchant goes out of business or changes their affiliate program, you don’t want to be locked into one program for monetization: you want the ability to change. Additionally, you want as many programs as possible. Run a travel website–it’s a no-brainer to work with hotel, airline, and rental car bookings from numerous merchants. But what about travel insurance, passport, and visa affiliate programs, travel books from Amazon, luggage from specialty retailers, photography equipment and so on? Don’t limit yourself. Look for related programs in related industries wherever possible.

Direct Advertising – A lot of industries have other businesses that are interested in buying advertising, and you can make good money with this strategy. Use a third party service like Quantcast to deliver reliable traffic stats to potential advertisers. Integrate ads into your blog, come up with a rate sheet, and put the information on a page on your blog. Make it as easy as possible for people who are interested to contact you. Respond to them quickly.

Contextual Advertising – Adsense is the 800 lb gorilla of contextual advertising. While I do recommend Adsense, I don’t recommend building a website whose only means of monetization is Adsense. It’s way too dangerous. Intelletext and Chitika are two other alternatives.

Subscriptions – Can you put out premium content or research that is good enough that people are willing to pay a monthly/quarterly/yearly fee to get it? If you can set up a premium monthly newsletter with high quality information that is educational or that saves people time or money, then you are sitting on a gold mine.

eBook – Similar to a subscription, but this is more of a “one-of” purchase. If you can write or have written a white paper or educational manual that people are willing to buy, you have another revenue stream for your website. Or take your best content and aggregate it all in one PDF. If it saves people time/money/effort, chances are good that you could sell it.

Sponsored Posts – Some advertisers are willing to pay a premium to get their message/content in front of an audience. If you go this route, have a style guide or recommendations for advertisers. Also try to find a frequency that works: doesn’t alienate your primary audience.

Events Calendar – If you maintain a listing of industry-related events that no one else does or that can’t be easily replicated, advertisers will pay to be listed in a premium section or have a banner displayed in a prime location.

Industry Directory – The key here is not to charge to be included, but to charge for the service of being reviewed and premium placement. You’ll have to add some people for free to get the list started, and you will have to reject the low quality submissions, but this can be viable if you are willing to put in the work.

eCommerce – If you have a lot of products, you will need a sophisticated eCommerce package. If you don’t, there are lots of simple shopping carts that are extremely easy to use.

While this isn’t every method you could use to add different revenue streams, they are some of the easiest to implement and quickest to start working. Hopefully this has given you an idea or two to add to your website. I’d also recommend reading Is Your Blog Advertiser Friendly and Adsense why Bloggers Don’t Get it from my archives.

How to Use Tags on Your Blog or Website In my opinion one of the more powerful and underutilized...
Thesis Tutorial – Adding Date Based Triggers to Your Posts There are a lot of times when you are working...
Is Your Blog Advertiser Friendly There are times when I’m maybe a little harsh on...
Blog News Reporter: Promotion and Growing your Blog In part two we talked about your your blogging approach...
How to Integrate Advertising into Your Blog So you’ve been blogging for a while, your getting some...

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Adding Revenue Streams Into Your Website or Blog

West Wing Week: Resolutions

Your Daily Snapshot for
Friday, Jan. 7, 2011

West Wing Week: Resolutions

West Wing Week is your guide to everything that's happening at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. This week, the first family returns to Washington, the President signs over 30 bills into law, and West Wing staff share their New Year's resolutions.

Watch the video.

SEOptimise

30 Web Trends You Have to Know About in 2011

Posted: 07 Jan 2011 01:53 AM PST

After writing the rather humorous post on predictions for 2011 I noticed more and more trends so I finally decided to write a 30 trends for 2011 list again this year. These trends are the ones you really have to know about if you ask me. These changes take place already or are unfolding and you can’t afford to ignore them as an SEO, web design or other Web professional. So here they are:

Web Development and Publishing

Google Chrome becomes one of the most important browsers
I’m not a friend of Google Chrome. I tried to ignore it until now but its market share is so significant by now that you can’t ignore it anymore. Make sure to offer your toolbar, add on or custom feature available in Chrome as well in 2011.

RSS is dying
The rumors of of the death of RSS have been returning over the years. This time it seems RSS really has a problem: Google Chrome and Firefox 4 drop or limit RSS support.

E-mail marketing returns
While RSS has struggled over the years an almost dead medium made a come back, e-mail. E-mail marketing and “creating a list” is a must have again. You can’t rely solely on RSS. Even substituting RSS with Twitter and Facebook updates won’t suffice. Aweber and MailChimp are your friends among others.

HTML 5/CSS 3 usage goes mainstream
HTML 5 and CSS3 are around for a while but with significant improvements in browser support their usage will go main stream in 2011. You can have a competitive advantage by applying these still new techniques. In the SEO industry only a few of us have embraced the new possibilities. Our colleagues from SEO Gadget are leading by example.

Scrolling
Did you know that the “above the fold” web design and usability rule is a myth. Modern mice make scrolling very comfortable and people scroll all the way down it seems. Just scroll this.

Social Media

Facebook is the emperor
With Goldman Sachs financing Facebook there is no doubt that Facebook will be the most powerful player. So you need to be on Facebook or you risk a disadvantage to those who have a presence there.

Location rules but not on Foursquare
Foursquare, Gowalla and other location based social media were the rage in 2010 but they are already stagnating. Why? It’s because of the big players adding location features to their own services. In 2011 location will matter but not the small startups that made it popular.

In Africa mobile phones boom and with them social media
Surprise, surprise Africa is not the place war, AIDS and famine spreads but the most promising mobile and social media market. Africans leapfrog landlines, computers and static websites and start using social media sites on mobile phones.

Q&A surges but not solely Quora, Yahoo Answers still rules
The current hype is Q&A site Quora. While it’s a valuable service it’s still barely a blip compared to Yahoo Answers. Other Q&A sites still matter and Yahoo Answers is much bigger than most other social sites like Digg, StumbleUpon or Delicious.

Meta tools that publish to several social sites
These days almost all newly popular social tools apparently support Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and the likes. Amplify, Sendible, Trunk.ly or Sprout Social are just a few of useful examples I’ve tested recently. As you will notice they come from different directions but tackle the problem of reaching all your friends and followers on different platforms.

Social Bookmarking disappears altogether
I predicted the end of Delicious last year but was nevertheless surprised to see it happen. I still hoped the flagship of social bookmarking will stay with us. In 2010 many other social bookmarking had to give up or restructure their services. Standalone social bookmarking won’t survive in 2011. Only services like Diigo that have evolved beyond bookmarking long ago can compete.

Search

Constant change
The only thing constant on Google in 2010 was the change. The number and frequency of changes was mind-boggling. As Google is desperate to find more revenue sources and get more money out of search I’m pretty sure these changes will happen as often in 2011.

Clutter
Do you remember the days when Google was a simple and easy to use search engine? These days the search results are so cluttered and full of annoying ads and other additional results or features that you really struggle. Sadly the clutter is here to stay it seems. It’s not a bug it’s a feature.

Blekko
The new advanced search engine Blekko was huge news in 2010 but it will be daily business for SEO practicioners and other Web professionals in 2011.

Privacy
Google is a privacy nightmare for most of us but until now most people preferred to ignore that fact. In 2011 more and more people will care about it and the FCC and other regulators do as well. Even Google’s search engine competition uses Google employees who have stalked teenagers to advertise.

Alternatives
For the first time in a while there are a few really good alternatives to Google, at least in English: Bing, Blekko, Yandex.com and DuckDuckGo are symptoms for a broader need: People do not want to be forced to use Google, they want choice. They have it again.

SEO

Conversion optimization
Conversion optimization or CRO has been aroond for years but in 2010 it reached new heights. Most reputable SEO comapnies practice and offer it by now. Either you do it as well or you cann sell “search engine submission” and “meta tag optimization” again.

Diversification
Mobile SEO, local SEO, video SEO, social media SEO etc. are not new. Also specialist for each discipline focus on each one of it for years. Still the diversification of SEO services reached a point where no single individual and rarely a company can do it al at the same time. While some preach the rise “digital marketing” of bigger agencies offering everything I don’t believe SEo will stay a one size fits all game. I expect specialized services to flourish.

Facebook SEO
Facebook search and it’s ranking algorithm reached a new complexity in 2010 where the term Facebook SEO has appeared as the logical next step. I see some people who are already specializing in Facebook SEO as well.

Link building on social media
Facebook SEO is just one aspcte of the relationship of Facebook and SEO. When Google and Bing confirmed that Twitter updates and Facebook likes/shares count as ranking factors as long as they are public people in the SEO weren’t really surprised. Those who haven’t yet considered building links on social media or rather using Twitter and Facebook to spread awareness of their business have to now.

RDF/Rich Snippets
While introduced in 2009, rich snippets have become crucial over 2010. Reviews get used for local and shopping search and you can’t ignore them anymore.

Ecommerce

A/B Testing
A/B Testing or multivaraite testing exploded in 2010 with lots of tools and services offering and facilitating it. In 2011 everybody will try to convert the visitors they already have insetad of just wanting more ofthem. A/B testing is probably the best method to find out waht really works on your site.

Mobile Payment
Believe it or not but not only paper money is obsolete by now, credit cards are as well. Waht’s next? Mobile payment via your phone. Everybody uses it in emerging markets only we conservative Wetsreners still stick to the past. Finally some useful use cases appear for mobile payment so that we might embrace it as well in 2011.

Groupon
Groupon was huge in 2010 but it’s not the end yet. In 2011 it will become even more prominent. Use it or lose it.

Reviews
Reviews are the new links. Both local and ecommece businesses get ranked by the number and sentiment of user reviews in Google. So you can’t live without (positive) reviews anymore in 2011.

Real life businesses gaining ground
Many Google local search changes have mostly one thing common: They favor brick and mortar real life businesses with an address. So the Internet uses a big part its virtual aspect as real life businesses get preferential treatment. Also Google Streetview compels people all over the world to clean up their facade or get less customers.

Blogging

Miniblogging
Tumblr, Posterous and a large number of other microblogging or rather miniblogging tools has been gaining popularity over the recent years. By now miniblogging service Tumblr is one ofthe biggest social sites. Tumblr is alos bigger than WordPress.com by now. Also it’s easier to use to has a sleekier web design than both Blogger and WordPress.

Hosted blogging
Spam, security issues and constnat hacking attacks on WordPress, content theft and censorhship on both Blogger and WordPress.com have hurt hosted blogging platforms in the past. With the rise of newe services like Tumblr many private bloggers turned away from self hosted WordPress blogs to hosted blogging platforms again.

More quality less quantity
The myth of blogging daily has been ovecome in 2010 it seems, while some blogs turn media companies blogs several times a day and some group blogs do daily most regular blogs run by one blogger focused more on quality than quantity in 2010. This trend will remain sting in 2011 as the daily bloggers will move on to miniblogging while quality bloggers will focus on thorough research and killer content.

Blogging identity crisis
In 2010 with services like Google Buzz the definition of blogging got blurry. Also when you take a close look at what Facebook and Tumblr do you could consider both services blogging. Content sharing and blogging have finally merged. At the same time the focus on quality in real blogging made it more professional and journalistic. There is an apparent blogging identity crisis palpable 2011.

These trends have been mostly obvious in 2010 already but you can’t ignore them in 2011 nymore or at least you have to know about them. In case you decide to ignore them there will be others who’ll embrace the new opportunities.
SEO is rapidly changing and adapting to new Web trends all the time. That’s one of the reasons people scream “SEO is dead” each time a major change occurs. At the same time the Web slows down, the early phase of innovation is over and only a few big players control it now.

* Image: 2011 by Sebastian Oliva.