In short, they’re great for social search because they make your tweets much more visible in social search than they might be otherwise, and may draw quality followers who are interested in the broad topics you tweet about.

But there’s also a downside. As Google revealed in early 2010, the search giant has deemed hashtags a red flag for spam, and consider it a negative ranking factor. This means that if you use hashtags, your tweets are much less likely to show up in Google’s real-time search results. Until now, I’ve clung to hashtags because (a) I believed Google’s assertion that hashtags were spammy was ludicrous, and might soon be overturned, and (b) I also believed that the benefits of being more visible in Twitter outweighed search visibility. Now with Google’s real-time search in full swing, however, traditional search’s reach can no longer be ignored. I’m going cold turkey.

Here’s how to compensate for a hashtag-free existence:

•Keyword-Centric Profile – Take care to make your profile keyword-rich, including broad topics that you hope to be found for within social search. In other words, if you tweet about the housing market, include “real estate” in the description of yourself.

•Keyword-Centric Headlines – Like any good SEO copywriter, utilize broad keywords within your headline. This may mean that certain keywords get utilized over and over again in your headlines, but that’s an acceptable tradeoff to not being found.

•Consider Custom-Shortened URLs – If you have high-value keywords in your domain name that you feel may help people find your tweets in traditional search, consider utilizing a custom URL shortener from a service like Awe.sm that allows your primary URL to be recognizable.

Facebook's new 'like' button

The game-changing feature, however, is the new ability for Web publishers to add the Like button to virtually any piece of content on any Web property. For example, let’s imagine that you operate a music blog, and you’ve posted a video reviewing the new MGMT album. You also add the Like button to this video that is associated with a subcategory “MGMT” on your site. Anytime someone comes to your site who is also simultaneously logged into Facebook, that person can Like the video. When they do this, it will show up as an item in their news feed, enabling their friends to find your content from Facebook as well. In addition, using the new plugin, it’s possible to view anyone else in their network who has liked that content without even going to Facebook (they’ll be able to see it from your music blog).

Using our example, when important news about MGMT comes out again, you could push a message into the news feed of anyone who Liked the original video and potentially drive them back to your site. They would of course be able to unsubscribe to these messages, so it will be extremely important to stay 100% on message. In other words, this enables you to send users who Liked MGMT content only that content, as opposed to also sending them content about Bob Dylan, Brahams and Ke$ha.

This is a total revolution for both market segmentation and permission-based marketing. It’s difficult to imagine, two years from now, many Web marketers who would still prefer to manage dozens of targeted email lists when it’s possible to allow Facebook users to opt into an unlimited number of topics and digest them anywhere on the Web. This is a critical addition to the social media optimization toolkit.

While embracing these concepts is important, it’s important not to get too locked into any single piece of SMO strategy or functionality in the near term. Facebook will no doubt be making many adjustments and wholesale changes to these new tentacles as they essentially focus test these on its more than 400 million users and the thousands of Web publishers that will no doubt jump in with both feet right away.

The answer to the first question is easy – in the short term, it will affect your search ranking very little. On his personal blog, Google’s Matt Cutts has been very clear about site speed’s impact on search rankings, saying that “fewer than 1% of search queries will change as a result of incorporating site speed into our ranking.” Far more important are page content relevance, site reputation and other high-impact search factors. But just because it’s a low priority item now, doesn’t mean it will be low down the road.

Should you choose to measure your site’s speed, we recommend doing so on a per-page basis using a free tool such as Google’s page speed tool . If your site score seems low (70s-80s), take heart. Here are index page speeds from some of the world’s most popular Web sites according to Google’s page speed tool.

• CNN.com – 67/100
• Salesforce.com – 76/100
• WebProNews – 77/100
• Espn.com – 82/100
• Facebook.com – 85/100
• YouTube.com – 85/100

The answer to the second question really depends what where you are in your overall SEO program. Since site speed is actually measurable, it’s an attractive item to tackle and improve upon. However, you should only do so if you’ve already covered many more of the high-impact SEO items.

There are also plenty of non-SEO-related reasons to improve site speed. It seems clear that Web users like faster Web experiences. A faster experience may increase the likability of your Web site, and in some small way, encourage more Web conversions. Also, remember that
If you choose to tackle Web speed, commonly needed areas of improvement involve combining external Javascript, minimizing DNS lookups and specifying page image dimensions.

If you didn’t see Matt Cutt’s video blog on the matter back in February, now might be a good time to revisit it:

Furthermore, year over year increases in social media spend are expected, with CMOs cited in the study projecting that social media will consume over 17% of their total budget by 2015. Much of the spending patterns between B2Bs and B2Cs are similar, with heavy emphasis on branding, CRM and service promotions. Projected B2B spend over the next 12 months to promote company services is even slightly greater than B2C spending for the same category (11% vs. 10.7%).

Much in the same way that B2Cs followed their consumers to Facebook and Twitter, B2Bs are realizing that the decision makers and business executives inhabit the same space. B2B spend in social media is here to stay and planning now to accommodate its future growth is crucial.

What’s not yet clear is whether most B2B’s have clear ROI expectations, or whether they’re making an investment simply because they need to get a foothold in an increasingly important space.

Back in November, just before the Dreamforce conference, DemandResults launched our answer to that fundamental question – SEO for Salesforce, a highly configurable Salesforce.com app that enables companies to track which organic keywords convert to leads, opportunities and sales. Since then, we’ve been diligently working on the SEO for Salesforce 2.0 edition, which will feature turnkey reports, dashboards, automated tools that check your site for high-impact optimization techniques, and much more. Look for a release sometime in Q3.

Our dev team appreciated the shout-out from Salesforce yesterday when Customer Success Manager Kirti Patel featured SEO for Salesforce in his whitepaper “5 Proven Ways to Generate More Leads.”

“Look for apps that will enhance your SEM efforts. For example, the free edition of the app SEO for Salesforce automatically connects to intelligence data through Google Analytics. Use this information to track lead origins and report by search engine, search type, keyword, and campaign through your entire sales cycle.”

We’re also listening intently to the needs of current app users and integrating some of their needs into the final product. Thanks for all the feedback, everyone.

Don’t have it yet? Download SEO for Salesforce

In 2007, Google began experimenting with personalized search results – serving up a unique set of Web sites in its search engine based on patterns in your online behavior. Until last week, search results were only altered if you were logged into a Google-based service, such as your Gmail or Google Apps account.  This means that most people – regardless of location or behavior – experienced the same search results. Suddenly, however, personalization is the new status quo. Unless a user actively turns off personalization – and Google hasn’t made doing so particularly obvious –search results are influenced by a variety of factors that Google tracks using cookies placed on your machine.  So long as the personalization toggle remains 2-3 clicks from the home page, only a small, savvy number of people will ever see “normal” search results again.

Is Personalization Unfair to Startups?

It would be inconsistent with Google’s philosophy to stop exposing search users to Web newcomers based purely on past search habits.  It will be interesting to see which portions of search results are personalized over time, and whether Google will choose to clearly demarcate them from other results.

Still, the change presents a legitimate worry for any business launching a new Web site.  Consider that new sites already have a very difficult time getting found in Google search. This is because so many items that affect search results– PageRank, domain age and the quality of inbound links, just to name a few – place the advantage firmly on the side of established brands with older sites. Already, our employees have noticed our clients’ Web sites appear in personalized searches more frequently, and in higher ranking position, apparently because they have shown a propensity for visiting them in the past.

Shifting Campaign Emphasis

Depending on how far Google goes with personalization, this change could make SEO even more important than it is already, as companies find themselves working even harder to break into online search results that are dominated by larger and older companies with more popular content. It really depends on how much emphasis Google chooses to place on prior search history, and how those results are displayed.

Although search ranking position will still matter, it may matter a little less than it did before.  This means that much more emphasis needs to be placed on monitoring business performance from organic traffic, such as sales and leads. This type of business knowledge can help companies focus their search efforts on areas that really pay off as opposed to just striving for more traffic volume.

How to Turn off Google Personalization

When logged out of Google, perform a normal search. On the search engine results page, click on the “Web History” link in the upper right hand of the page. Then click on “Disable customizations based on search history.”

DemandResults is nearly ready to deliver an app for Salesforce.com customers that will enable companies to do this. This new Salesforce App will allow clients to track organic keyword queries from a Web landing page that turn into leads, and then track those leads through the entire sales cycle. This will allow SEOs both the validation they need to prove the value of organic search within an overall marketing plan, and also provide insight as to which organic keywords actually drive revenue.

Look for an announcement prior to Dreamforce 2009, where DemandResults CEO Howard Brown will be presenting a session on advanced Search Engine Marketing (SEM).

Upon seeing the video, SEOs everywhere started booking appointments to have their sanity checked. Everyone has a story about a site or number of sites disappearing entirely from search results because of duplicate content. DemandResults handled such a case just this year; and upon the removal of the duplicate content across multiple URLs, the original site recovered nicely.

But when Grothaus described what really happens when Google detects what appears to be identical content, his meaning was clear: although Google doesn’t consider its actions punitive, the results – the disappearance from search results – are virtually the same.

Confused?

Let’s imagine that you own 10 great domain names, but you really only have enough resources to populate one of those domains with original content. You might be tempted to populate the other 9 domains with content from your original site. If you did this without taking certain countermeasures, then this could lead to a process where Google’s spiders, in their desire to show a variety of relevant results, might decide to pick “the best” of these pieces of content to include in its search results. If you’re lucky, Google’s bots might smartly deduce that your original domain name – the one that generates revenue for you – is the one to display, and then bury the other results far below it. But if you’re not so lucky, the results of Google’s process might be to choose to display one of the other sites, virtually disappearing your primary site from its index.

While far from a perfect process, Google’s reasons for doing this are in most people’s best interest. There are far too many Web publishers that attempt to own all the spots in search results for profitable terms. The process, while perhaps not technically punitive, is at least a defense mechanism to guard its product from deceitful Web publishers.

Grothaus also goes into detail about other types of unintentional (non-deceitful) duplicate content, including identical content on multiple URL strings as follows:

·       example.com/

·       example.com/?

·       example.com/index.html

·       example.com/Home.aspx

·       www.example.com/

·       www.example.com/?

·       www.example.com/index.html

·       www.example.com/Home.aspx

The video is a must see for anyone in Web publishing.

According to Google, the tab will feature a broader set of search engine management optimization tools in the future. A Google blog post hinted at competitive bidding data and better analytics tools in the coming months. The company also invites customer feedback during the beta period, which may be a good thing. In the past, our experience with the AdWord’s optimization suggestions have been underwhelming. What’s there now may be useful for more inexperienced users, and it would be great if they could bring in a range of expert-level tools that can currently only be found in 3rd party applications.

Instead, the list is topped by the “All-In-One SEO Pack” and followed by “Google XML Site Map.” The rest of the list is dominated by search marketing, analytics and visibility plugins such as “Random Page Widget-For Visitors & SEO,” “Easy AdSense” and “Add to Any: Share/Bookmark/Email Button.”

In an age where custom WordPress design themes have become a cottage industry, and Web development shops churn out $5000 blog designs like they’re going out of style, it may be a little surprising that bloggers aren’t instead gobbling up free visual bells and whistles such as NextGEN Gallery.

This is just the latest sign that the most daunting challenge facing any Web property today is simply getting found. It wasn’t so long ago that anyone who committed to a niche content focus, and blogged three or four times a week, could rack up significant organic search traffic over time. Those days are over. Just last month, DemandResults was asked to look at a blog that had been updated religiously and continuously for the past year and – with a specific content focus – and was pulling less than 50 visits per month. Surprisingly, the blog was also more or less fully indexed by the major search engines, and it had plenty of carefully categorized content.

Great content is essential, but that alone just doesn’t cut it anymore. Bloggers can still get traffic without having to pony up for pay-per-click campaigns, but even employing XML site maps and basic SEO tools such as the (not) “All-In-One SEO Pack” won’t be good enough in the near future. In order to compete, bloggers also need to have a clearly defined SEO strategy and an advanced understanding of a broad array of search marketing concepts.