Why SEO Alone is Not Enough Anymore
 When it comes to search engine optimization, one thing is true: shift happens. The landscape is continually changing, as evidenced by recent movement in the search engine industry. Will the partnership between Microsoft Bing and Yahoo! impact search or create a long-term competitor to Google? And will the new initiatives that Google rolls out in response impact the search placement of other companies? These are all questions that have been raised in recent years.
It's instructive to look at a typical Google search result to see how much things have changed recently. For example, when you do a search for the "xbox 360" on Google, you get more than just organic results from sites that mention those words. What you see is a broad range of content including news, paid advertising, product feeds and social media results (see image below). This means that you need to concentrate on more than just increasing your organic search placement if you want your Internet marketing plan to succeed.
There is something we like to call the Golden Triangle of SEO: three key areas that must be addressed in order for any SEO campaign to succeed. The first one is On-Site Factors, which takes into account how "search engine friendly" a site's overall structure is. This involves many site architecture factors including how easily the site can be indexed, if it uses Flash vs. HTML and if shopping carts are search-engine friendly.
The second side of the Golden Triangle of SEO is site content. It's still true that content is king: it's important to have content on your site that is impactful, effective and draws the attention of search engines. This means having a proper keyword density along with making sure that the keywords are also used in titles and meta tags. It's also important to have the right keywords highlighted: striking a balance of keywords in different competitive ranges will allow you to see short-term and long-term SEO growth.
The final side of the Golden Triangle of SEO is link building. Having both in-bound and out-bound links adds strength to your site in the eyes of search engines -- it gives your site credibility and respect. However, this doesn't mean that you should concentrate on just having the highest number of links possible! It's critical to think about the quality of your links as well. In many cases, one high-level link can be more effective than several lower-level links.
There are several new factors that are changing the SEO field -- shifts that happen -- and none are more important than social media. Every day, millions of people communicate with social media tools like Facebook and Twitter. Reaching these people can be a critical component of any online marketing campaign. However, any social media strategy needs to be more sophisticated than simply starting a Twitter page and posting your company's latest specials.
Ideally, social media and SEO marketing programs can work together to strengthen each other. A high-quality social media campaign that is interactive and engages audiences can increase in-bound links and improve search engine rankings. At the same time, applying smart SEO practices to social media content will increase the reach and visibility of your social media outreach.
Another relatively new concept is Video SEO. In the example we provided earlier, there were no video results, but often times Youtube videos may show up on the first page of Google results.. Applying SEO concepts to videos not only can increase their placement in various searches but also improve the overall ranking of a site.
Search engines like Google have been looking for ways to differentiate themselves from the competition, and one way has been to attempt to deliver individual users with as much personalized content as possible. The new Google Personalized Search is just one example of this. Not only are search engines taking factors such as location into account when delivering results, they are also considering previous search history and other sites you have visited in the past. The reality is that in many cases, no two searches will produce exactly the same results.
The bottom line is that basic SEO concepts are still critical -- just not by themselves. In order for SEO campaigns to be truly effective, they need to be paired with smart marketing campaigns that involve every aspect of a company's online brand. As with any marketing campaign, it's very important to think about your target audience when you are doing an SEO campaign and how you can most effectively reach them with messages that resonate with them.
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elcome to the latest edition of the Submit Express newsletter, where you can find the latest news about our company and the ever-changing worlds of search engine optimization (SEO) and social media. Since our last edition, Submit Express has continued to receive recognition as innovators in the field of search engine optimization. Most recently, we topped the list of Heardable.com's "21 Most Useful SEO Websites." This comes on the heels of return appearances in the INC 5,000 and Deloitte Technology Fast 500 and being named the Top Search Optimization Firm for 2009 by Website Magazine.
There's more proof that Submit Express leads the way in the SEO industry! Heardable.com recently ranked Submit Express at the top of their list of Most Effective SEO Websites. According to the rankings, Submit Express "blew away most of the competition" thanks to a high volume of visitors and more than one million inbound links each month.
Americans conducted more than 9.17 billion searches in February 2010, according to recent data from the Nielsen Company. Google Search accounted for 65.2 percent of the market share with a total of 5.98 billion searches. Trailing far behind, Yahoo! Search came in second with 14.1 percent of the market share with a total 1.29 billion searches.
Google is adding a new feature to its search results, reports PC World. As a new personalization feature, users now have the ability to give "stars" to certain search results in order to move them to the top of their personal results, along with syncing the results with a person's Google Bookmarks and Google Toolbar. The feature is currently being rolled out and is expected to be available to all Google users within the next few days.
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