So social media and search engine optimization in China is a whole different ballgame. But an important one to play for any American company that wants a presence in the Middle Kingdom, according to Bin Lee and Iris Huang of Glogou.

“Asians are all social media users,” says Lee. “Social media users in China are way more active than Facebookers and Twitter users — social media is their key outlet.”

Glogou has been helping U.S companies sell into China — a “reverse Alibaba,” the company calls itself — for about five years. In a natural progression, last year the company started to explore helping Western corporations build their online profiles in China in addition to selling their products.

The reasons Western companies could need such a service have to do with the difficulties Western companies can face in China, such as what happened to Apple over the past few months — negative press in government-owned media outlets and coordinated astroturf social media attacks. And of course, reasons such as those behind Google’s exit from the Chinese market. Basically, if the Chinese government doesn’t approve of what you’re doing, you’re not going to be successful in China.

Early detection and response — Apple CEO Tim Cook eventually apologized, probably settling the issues — is critical.

But not all the challenges of doing business in China can be chalked up to political problems. In the Chinese government’s efforts to accomplish its goals — whatever they are — there’s a lot of collateral damage.

Source: John Koetsier

China’s Baidu search engine is very Google, circa 2005

“Many US sites are not accessible from China,” says Huang. “It’s amazing how many … often that’s not because of political reasons, often simply due to technical reasons.”

So Glogou provides site monitoring services based in China, confirming that your site is accessible from mainland China and building you a small Chinese site if it is not. And the company provides social media monitoring: checking Weibo for mentions of your company and brand, and monitoring sentiment. That’s a big deal, because Weibo has more users than Twitter and almost as many users as Facebook.

That is due to the fact that social media is Chinese citizens’ key political outlet, Lee says. While the government does censor certain keywords, posts, and sometimes entire topics — such as the pigs floating in the river in Shanghai, which had two million search results before disappearing entirely — it has to grant a certain level of freedom, he told me. Which makes social media a key outlet for political as well as personal sentiment.

“The official newspapers never criticize the government, so people need to release some negative feelings” Lee says. “They criticize the government via social media.”

But it’s not just about social media — search engine optimization is also key, and SEO is an entirely different matter in China than in the U.S.

“We also help U.S. businesses to make sure they are included on Baidu,” Huang told me. “Because if you’re not on Baidu, you’re basically invisible in China.”

In addition to SEO services, the company has built an English interface for Baidu’s Chinese-language ad platform. Baidu has advertising products roughly analogous to Google’s AdWords and AdSense products, which until now have been almost entirely off-limits to English-speaking users.

China’s an important and growing market for U.S. businesses, a fact that social media management big boy HootSuite recently acknowledged by adding Weibo support to its tools.

Which means knowing what the Chinese think of you and your product is probably a good thing if you’re trying to sell into their country.

photo credit: jonrussell via photopin cc

This is a guest post by Heather R. Huhman

Search engine optimization isn’t just a buzzword anymore. Businesses are increasingly turning to SEO strategies to ensure they rank well in search engines.

Nearly 80 percent of users ignore paid online ads, instead choosing to focus on organic search results. And 75 percent of Internet users don’t scroll past the first page of search results, meaning if your page isn’t at the top, it isn’t getting found.

But many companies aren’t making SEO efforts alone. In recent years, plenty of media and software companies have popped up (and I’ve tested out a lot of them), aiming to help businesses get to the top of search results without having to hire a SEO consultant. I’m constantly checking out new tools — I tested at least 10 before settling on my current platform of choice — that can improve SEO for my clients at an affordable rate.

Here are my top picks for services that are helping small but growing companies like yours get discovered on search engines:

SEOMoz

Launched in 2004 with $19.3 million in venture funding, SEOMoz is one of the leading providers of SEO software. It provides campaign software and tools for companies to manage their SEO strategies. I’m a current customer of SEOMoz, but otherwise have no relationship with any of vendors in this article.

Pros: SEOMoz boasts the largest SEO community on the Web. The company’s SEO platform provides weekly crawls and rank tracking, so companies know what issues their website may be facing that could impact its performance. It also provides a competitive analysis so businesses can learn how their competitors are performing. Metrics, keyword analysis, and a browser toolbar complete the experience, so companies never have to sweat their SEO management again.

Cons: The plans start at $99 per month, so companies and individuals should assess whether or not they can afford the monthly subscription.

Ideal User: Any user with basic SEO knowledge who wants more advanced tools with analytics. If you do SEO for multiple websites or clients, SEOMoz will be beneficial to you.

LocalVox

Founded in 2010, LocalVox is a local, social, and mobile marketing platform that helps local businesses to get noticed online. It recently raised a whopping $7.4 million in Series A funding, making it a key contender in the world of web marketing.

Pros: The company provides a platform that helps businesses update their online presence in just one click. Announcements, blog posts, social media updates, and emails get pushed out to local publishers as well as search engines, social media, websites, directories and e-newsletters. With many businesses struggling to find the time to manage and update their online presence, LocalVox makes it simple.

Cons: The platform isn’t free (though it is quite affordable compared to competitors)—there’s a $199 setup fee, and plans start at $349 per month. For businesses that can afford it, LocalVox makes for an easy online marketing solution. 

Ideal User: Businesses with local-only customers and clientele will benefit the most from LocalVox, regardless of their industry or geographic location.

HubSpot

Founded at MIT in 2006, HubSpot’s impressive $101 million in venture funding has helped the software to become widely used across the globe, being used by over 8,000 companies in 56 countries.

Pros: HubSpot’s inbound marketing software helps businesses handle all of their online marketing efforts, including SEO, analytics, blogging, email, automation, and more. The software helps businesses to track leads and ROI, publish blogs and landing pages, and manage content with built-in SEO tools.

Cons: HubSpot has limited blog features—there’s no “more” button, so your entire blog post will be shown on the front page regardless of length. (Others have noted this, too.) There’s also limited customizability when it comes to changing the colors of your site and adding custom style. Finally, what I find to be most restrictive, is the $2,000 required “Inbound Success Training.”

Ideal User: Businesses that can afford HubSpot’s $200 per month (or more) price tag will find the platform beneficial. Those who need a platform that includes step-by-step walkthroughs will also find HubSpot agreeable.

Raven Tools

Raven Tools boasts over 30 online marketing tools for SEO, social media, and content marketing purposes.

Pros: The platform includes a slew of tools for effective SEO strategies, including a Facebook page manager, Twitter tool, and Mailchimp integration. The software is updated on almost a weekly basis with new features, and it’s been touted as having a slick and user-friendly interface to pull your data together.

Cons: Some tools have kinks—for instance, Raven’s contact finder often has slow loading times with less-than-useful results. Businesses also need to determine if they can afford Raven Tools’ price, which ranges from $99-$249 per month.

Ideal User: Small- to medium-sized agencies will find Raven Tools’ solutions to be most manageable.

It goes without saying there are plenty of other software tools businesses can use for improving SEO other than the ones mentioned on this list; these four are simply my personal picks  that I highly recommend checking out if you’re a small but growing company focused on in-house SEO. Some other contenders that make my list of ‘runners up’:

BuzzStream: An effective tool for SEO purposes, but it focuses mostly on advanced link-building campaigns. First-time SEO strategists will want something simpler.

Advanced Web Ranking: This service, while a great tool for SEO purposes, is not available as a Software-as-a-Service solution—only a desktop tool. This essentially means your information is confined to one device rather than being available in the cloud.

WebCEO: As others have noted too, WebCEO’s link-building tools are difficult to find within the platform and offer limited link analysis, opting instead for a raw link count and just a few submission tools.

Heather R. Huhman is the founder and president of Come Recommended, a content marketing and digital PR consultancy.

Follow her on Twitter @heatherhuhman

SEO image via Shutterstock

If your answer is never, you’re probably 75 or older and think “yelp” is a sound a dog makes.  But for the rest of us, we know that reviews are critical in influencing purchase decisions.  So critical that someone even started a business writing favorable book reviews called GettingBookReviews.com (charging, of course, $99 a pop).

If you’ve ever thought about paying for inauthentic endorsements like this, you better pump the breaks because third party review sites are now making it as obvious as Snooki’s spray tan that you’ve invested in fake reviews.

Yelp recently created consumer alerts for business pages that remain for 90 days when they sniff out phony reviews. The alert reads the following: “We caught someone red-handed trying to buy reviews for this business. We weren’t fooled, but wanted you to know because buying reviews not only hurts consumers, but also honest businesses who play by the rules.”

Similarly, TripAdvisor says they have “zero tolerance for fake reviews.” If they believe that a hotel review is contrived, they will remove the review, ensure that the property is penalized in the site’s rankings, and possibly even post a message alerting millions of travelers on what they’ve found.

Considering the clout online reviews hold in consumer purchase behavior, it’s no surprise that some business owners feel compelled to invest in sham reviews:

• A one-star increase on Yelp leads to a 5% to 9% increase in revenue (source: Michael Luca, Harvard Business School).
• 70% of global consumers trust online reviews, an increase of 15 percent in four years (source: Nielsen).
• 80% of consumers change their mind after reading a single bad review (source: Cone Communications).
• One negative review can cost you 30 customers (source: Convergys).
• 7 in 10 who read reviews share them with friends, family & colleagues thus amplifying their impact (Deloitte & Touche)

But here’s the bottom line:

A few “positive” reviews won’t stop customers from continuing to complain about your crappy service or overcooked food. Instead of taking the easy (and sleazy) way out, listen to the concerns your customers are voicing and improve your business. Social media and third party review sites have put the power in the hands of the consumer. Forever. If companies don’t become customer-focused, customer-centric, customer-obsessed, they risk tarnishing their brand reputation and ultimately, losing their company.

 How to improve online ratings the honest way

The problem that many business owners face is that reviews on third party review sites might not legitimately reflect the satisfaction of their customers. Many know they have happy diners or guests; but as the saying goes, “Haters gonna hate.” Pissed off customers are sometimes more inclined to write a damaging review while the satisfied customers will recommend the restaurant or hotel at a cocktail party instead of putting their praise online.

Here’s the solution:

Find those customers who are enthusiastic about your brand, product, or service (AKA your authentic Brand Advocates), and make it drop dead easy for them to write raving reviews.

1. Ask your customers via email, Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, website, or elsewhere: “On a scale from 0-10, how likely are you to recommend our brand to your friends?” Those who answer 9 or 10 are your Advocates.
2. Give Advocates the tools to rate and review your product or property, or direct them directly to the relevant third party review site where they can give you a 5-star review.
3. By identifying your Advocates, you’re creating a virtual marketing force that you can leverage for much more than just reviews. They’ll gladly share offers or other announcements like a new location opening, a new chef, or a remodel of your hotel with their social networks. They’ll create personal stories about how they rekindled their love at your resort or made a new friend with one of the gregarious employees who waited on them.

Whatever you do, don’t pay for reviews or recommendations of any sort. There is no longer room for businesses that don’t understand the importance of authenticity and transparency in the era of social media.

Instead, tap into the enthusiasm of your highly satisfied customers and empower them to fight negative word of mouth for you.

By Cara Fuggetta, Marketing Manager, Zuberance (@carafuggetta)

photo credit: Dave77459 via photopin cc

I gladly put together a proposal that addressed his needs and delivered excellent value. Dutifully, he shopped around and gathered quotes from other agencies as well. However, it soon became clear to him that my proposal was significantly different than the others he was receiving. “Why are you only offering me seven new inbound links when everyone else is promising thousands?” he asked.

At that point, I realized that, like him, many business owners are stumbling around a minefield of misinformation about SEO which is being propagated by snake oil salesmen littered across the industry. The purpose of this article is to expose the lies that business owners are told by low-quality SEO firms. I’ll discuss exactly what those SEO firms are promising, what they are actually delivering, and why they won’t deliver a positive return on investment.

More is Not Always Better
Intrigued by the other proposals he was receiving, I asked him to share them with me. I quickly noticed a bunch of SEO “tactics” that may have worked years ago, but no longer have any positive value in the new, Post-Penguin and Post-Panda (Google algorithm updates) era of SEO. The most common, and most egregious misinformation perpetuated by low-quality SEO firms that I found in the other proposals was that thousands of new inbound links per month was a good thing.

While this would be true if those links were all coming from high-quality publishers with editorial review and unique, quality content, this would be simply impossible to do on a budget of $249/month, which is what one firm was promising.

In reality, if an SEO firm is promising thousands of inbound links, it’s very likely that those links are going to be coming from spammy, low-quality websites that have no favor with Google (and will actually get you in trouble, these days). Common bulk link-building tactics to watch out for include:

• Mass website directory submissions
• Mass article directory submissions
• Social bookmarking
• Link wheels
• Profile links
• Blog commenting

These types of tactics worked long ago, but those days are long gone. Since Google’s Penguin algorithm update back in April of 2012, these tactics can actually hurt your site’s organic search rankings if they look spammy or manipulative.

So, what exactly do you get with each of the tactics above? Let’s dive into a bit more detail.

Mass website directory submissions
Directory submissions done on a mass scale were very popular several years ago, due to the scalability of the tactic. Tons of software programs were developed that automated or semi-automated the process of submitting one’s website to a directory. The problem is that these directories added no value to users; they simply existed to make money off advertising revenue and leach users from search results pages. Furthermore, business owners and SEOs were trained to use manipulative, exact-match anchor text in their listings, which was later heavily penalized by Google’s Penguin algorithm update. Of all the link profile audits I’ve conducted, spammy website directories are the most common type of link I’ve recommended for removal.

Mass article directory submissions
This tactic is different than website directory submissions, because it requires an article to be written and submitted to the directory. This was another scalable and popular tactic prior to Google Penguin, because it worked pretty well, and also had strong support from software that would automate the process. Articles are often “spun,” meaning that certain words or phrases are changed (usually automatically) to their synonyms and then randomized, resulting in something unrecognizable to search engines. This is done to avoid a duplicate content penalty. Unfortunately, the output of the “spun” articles is often gibberish that makes no sense and only clogs up search engine results pages with nonsense.

Social bookmarking
This tactic became popular after webmasters realized that social signals affect SEO rankings. The idea is that if people bookmark a website on various social platforms, that website will gain “social proof” and improve in organic search rankings. This tactic is easily scalable, spawning several web-based services that automate the process of collecting them. The problem is that when Google updated its “Link Schemes” Webmaster Guidelines on October 16th, 2012, it specifically called out automated link building programs, which is exactly what these web-based services are.

Link wheels
When SEOs figured out that they could extract extra value from links by including multiple links to other content that linked back to their own website, this tactic became popular. It worked quite well for months, but was quickly sniffed out and squashed by Google.

Profile links
Like website directory submissions, this tactic became popular because it was easily scalable and supported by numerous software programs which automated the process.  The process involves registering at various forums and social sites that allow users to have a publicly-viewable profile, then inserting a link in the bio to one’s website. This is really annoying for website admins, and results in no value to users.

Blog commenting
If you run a blog, you already likely know what comment spam is. I get dozens per day across my websites. While blog commenting can be a beneficial tactic when done properly (ie, in a way that adds value and insight), I’ve never seen it done by a firm in a way that I’d consider acceptable. This tactic is usually performed on a mass scale by either an automated software program, or by someone overseas who barely speaks English and doesn’t actually read the blog post.

Other Useless Tactics
Aside from the zero-value link building tactics above, I saw several other services promised on the various proposals I reviewed. Among them were:

• Search engine submission
• SEO work (hours)
• Local map and places visibility
• Onsite content writing

Let’s take a closer look at what each of these tactics actually mean, and how to know whether it’ll provide value or not.

Search engine submission
While this tactic may have been useful 10 years ago, before search engines had the capability to crawl vast amounts of the Web quickly, it’s completely useless now. The point of this tactic is to get your website indexed in the search engines, essentially letting them know that your website exists. There’s a way to find out if this will help you or not in about 10 seconds; simply visit Google.com and search for your company name (or your company URL). If your website returns as a result, then you don’t need to submit it to search engines, because they already know about you. It’s as simple as that. I’ve never actually worked with a client whose website wasn’t already indexed in Google and Bing.

SEO work (hours)
While spending hours working on your website’s SEO is not a bad thing in itself, the value of this tactic depends entirely on the expertise of the SEO working on your website. There’s no textbook on proper SEO, and there’s no regulation on who can call themselves an SEO professional. As a result, way too many under qualified self-professed “SEO professionals” are providing services and advice that’s just plain bad. I saw one proposal that included 8 hours of SEO consulting per month (in addition to many of the other services listed above), with the total price being $249/month. That tells me right away that the consulting hours would be provided by extremely cheap labor overseas, and this is usually the type of “SEO Professional” that you should avoid. Good SEO consultants generally don’t charge less than $100/hour, and top-tier ones are in the $1,000-$2,000/hour range.

Local map & places visibility
Local SEO optimization is important, but initial setup is a one-time thing. When a company promises local SEO, ask them specifically what they’re going to do on a monthly basis to improve local SEO results. Otherwise, you’re paying monthly for a service that was only rendered in the first month.

Onsite content writing
One proposal I reviewed promised several onsite articles posted to the client’s website each month. I had him ask for examples of content that would be provided, and wasn’t surprised when I saw the examples that were provided to him. They were littered with poor grammar, obviously written by someone who doesn’t speak English as a first language, stuffed with unnecessary over-use of keywords, and provided no useful or insightful information. Furthermore, each example was only about 250 words.

An onsite content strategy should be an important part of every business owner’s online marketing initiative, but if you can’t read an article and truly feel proud of it, then you shouldn’t post it. Google has become very good at differentiating high-quality content from low-quality content, and Google’s Panda algorithm update will penalize you for having too much of the low-quality stuff.

Conclusion
Now more than ever, business owners are bombarded with bad advice and the lure of cheap services with impossible promises. While several years ago it was relatively easy to manipulate organic search results with quantity-focused spammy tactics, those days are over. SEO success is no longer about specific tactics, but rather an overall strategy. Furthermore, it’s an investment in your business for the long-term and should be treated as such.  I hope this guide helps clear up some of the misinformation pervading the SEO industry.

Did I leave anything out? Did I get it right? Did I save you from a bad deal? Leave a comment and let me know your thoughts!

Jayson DeMers is founder and CEO of AudienceBloom, a Seattle-based SEO agency. You can contact him on LinkedIn or by email.

photo credit: kevin dooley via photopin cc

Old accounts are being re-verified, says Search Engine Journal. That may not sound like a big deal, but it’s a potential disaster for anyone who has had search engine optimizers working on their websites.

“From initial glance at our WMT’s accounts we now have regained access to every old account we have previously been given access to, whether that is a previous client or maybe a site that came to us for some short term consultancy,” David Naylor posted on his search marketing blog today.

Source: David Naylor

Google Webmaster Tools re-verifying old accounts

Hopefully, no black hats are taking advantage of special access to former clients’ sites, as they could cause significant damage by uploading fake sitemaps, requesting removal of key URLs from Google’s index, re-configuring U.S.-based sites to target users in Kazakhstan, Timbuktu, or any other random place, and setting Google’s crawl rate at a ridiculously slow pace, among other things.

Dennis Goedegebuure, a former director of SEO at eBay, confirmed to The Next Web that he had been granted access to eBay’s webmaster tools even though he left the company almost a year and a half ago.

I personally could not verify the problem. In former lives I’ve managed sites with millions of monthly pageviews and had access to those sites’ accounts. A quick check tonight verified that I have not been re-verified for those accounts — which may mean that Google has fixed the issue, or simply that my GWT account was not affected.

The breach goes as far as granting access to sites’ Google Analytics accounts as well, at least in some cases. That allows access to extremely sensitive information that companies and sites do not want former employees or consultants seeing or sharing.

Google hasn’t commented on the issue yet, as far as I can tell, and the Google Webmaster Tools blog has not been updated since November 12.

UPDATED 1:03PM:

Google has now released a comment:

“For several hours yesterday a small set of Webmaster Tools accounts were incorrectly re-verified for people who previously had access. We’ve reverted these accounts and are investigating ways to prevent this issue from recurring.”

Meanwhile, Twitter is doing what Twitter does:

Never screw your SEO… you never know when Google will do something stupid like let them back into your Webmaster Tools account.

—
Ben Cook (@Skitzzo) November 27, 2012

Wonder how many evil thing are being done with Webmaster Tools right now. Best thing Google could do right now is switch it off

—
Kean Richmond (@keanrichmond) November 27, 2012

photo credit: tashland via photopin cc

Or not.

But I am one of the sexiest writers in the world. I know that, because the One True Source of All Knowledge, the oracular fetcher of all truth, says so. I’m speaking, of course, of Google. Type in sexiest writers into your search box, dear reader, and the results will astonish. Or disgust — I can’t predict.

Naturally, it’s all a gag.

But it does show what Tiptopio can do: get you to the top of Google search results. It’s search engine optimization — but a little different. I spoke to founder Katharine VanderDrift last week.

“We’re trying to build more visibility for products and services from the US,” she told me. “Almost everyone uses outsourced manufacturing, shipping products to the U.S. and taking U.S. jobs. I want to help American-made products rank for the first page on Google.”

And, it works for more than folliclely-challenged insecure technology reporters: we tested the service on VentureBeat. Don’t believe us? Look up best blog in SF. Whoa: would that be VentureBeat? As you and I both know, Google never lies.

Some very sexy writers, no?

Tiptopio promises results quickly — in 30 days or less. But the big shock is the price: just $49/month.

I’ve personally authorized search engine optimization campaigns for $15,000 a month and worked with many of the leading firms in the field, and not always had results that good. So I asked VanderDrift about Tiptopio’s strategy.

“Our process is much simpler than most SEO firms,” she said. “We purchase free-standing domains, and we create a content strategy that we call ‘topic modeling.’”

With “topic modeling,” Tiptopio creates a particular concept — such as sexiest writers — builds content around it, and sets it free on the interwebs. The key is knowing to not only create content on that particular topic but to build content on related topics as well.

“For example, we take a phrase or a word, like Superman. To rank for that, you have to include some things about the topic … in this case Clark Kent, Lois Lane, and so on. Google knows these things are connected to ‘Superman,’ and you can’t be relevant to Superman unless these related topics are also there.”

That’s a smart approach, and it’s paired with a ballsy decision: Tiptopio only does on-page SEO, no link-building. That means the company doesn’t pay for links, solicit links, or otherwise try to artificially bump a particular website in the Google link economy. All of its SEO efforts are content based, right on the domain that Tiptopio is trying to get to rank.

In other words, it’s the SEO without the sleaze, something that anyone who has had to hire — and fire — SEO firms will definitely appreciate.

(Except, of course, for the very sexy writers.)

One more thing: the “Made in America” seems to not just be a schtick or market differentiator for VanderDrift.

“I’m very passionate about it,” she told me when I questioned that part of Tiptopio’s strategy. “I’ve done simple studies on products and services, and what happens is they’re completely dominated by massive importers.”

photo credit: Brave Heart via photopin cc

“Being an ad-buyer does not make you a marketer,” Fishkin said today in his talk at GROW 2012. “There are two huge problems with this.”

The first is click distribution: Only 10 percent of clicks on Google go to ads, while 90 percent are on organic results. And the second is cost: Search engine optimization, or SEO, is much cheaper. The average cost of customer acquisition through online advertising is $500, according to Fishkin, but the same customer can be found through great web content for just $100.

Source: Rand Fishkin

Sources of inbound content

Great content makes companies and products more visible in search, gives them great reach in social media channels, and even improves email marketing and PR or news efforts, says Fishkin.

Put together, they’re even more powerful.

Fishkin’s top 10 tips for generating inbound content:

1. Build a content strategy, not just a blog.
2. Be willing to fail repeatedly before you find what works.
3. Content doesn’t just mean blog posts, articles, and info graphics — be willing to get creative.
4. Put all your content on one domain, under one brand (no subdomains!).
5. Experiment with lots of potential networks.
6. Combine keyword research and tweetable titles.
7. Build relationships with the right influencers using three tools: Google Reader search, FollowerWonk, and findpeopleonplus.com.
8. Time things right by using tools to determine when your community is online such as tweriod.com and Google Insights for search.
9. Use del-author from Google and post to Google+ … that puts a picture by the search result for your content on Google, and as Fishkin says, users think ”picture = good, me click picture”
10. Don’t ignore advertising … SEOmoz uses retargeting because social ads get more effective the bigger your inbound brand grows.
11. Combine all these for the biggest impact.

Fishkin is particularly hot on retargeting, saying that “if you come to SEOmoz, we will follow your ass around the web like a lost dog.”

A final tidbit: Post your content to Google+, because anything posted to Google+ is instantly indexed, says Fishkin.

“Google+ is the new Google Submit URL box.”

Source: Rand Fishkin

Inbound marketing tips

Spain-based internet marketing company BlueCaribu recently did a review of SEO resources online. And some of the results are astonishing. India, for example, is the nation most interested in search engine optimization. Germany, hardly at all.

Search engine optimization, of course, is the black art of ensuing that your website bubbles up to the top in organic or unpaid search engine results. It’s also getting harder and harder to accomplish, as Wordstream recently showed.

Other fun facts? Amazon has almost 3,000 books on SEO. 13 million blog posts have been published with “SEO” in the title. And Twitter averages almost 250,000 monthly tweets about SEO.

See all the details in the infographic below:

Image credit: Nasirkhan/ShutterStock

Online marketing company Wordstream just completely a study of “high commercial intent” search phrases — keywords that indicate a potential sale may be near. For those queries, Google’s unpaid search results have almost disappeared from “above the fold” screen real estate.

VentureBeat spoke with Larry Kim, Wordstream’s chief executive.

“We’ve seen more and more sponsored results and fewer and fewer organic links on Google pages,” Kim said. “The pace has accelerated considerably over the last 12 months, and especially the last 90 days.”

The net result of Google’s various changes and updates is that search engine optimization is becoming less and less effective. When even the highest-ranking sites are buried beneath a sea of paid links, highly search engine optimized sites are essentially competing for ever-smaller slices of the same pie.

Kim calls it a “war on free clicks,” as Google aggressively monetizes search results.

And it seems to be working. Particularly since Google integrated Google Shopping results into main search pages, sponsored results account for 64.6 percent of clicks, compared to only 35.4 percent for organic search results. Note that this is only for terms that indicate searchers are looking to buy something.

Perhaps a bigger problem, Kim says, is that almost half of web surfers can’t consistently tell the difference between sponsored results and organic results. (Just a month ago, search expert Danny Sullivan asked the FTC to review Google’s ad-labeling practices for similar reasons.)

The Google rationale is fairly obvious. Google’s revenue is still 97 percent from advertising, and the equation is simple: Google revenue = number of searches X number of ads X clicks X cost/click. Make any of those numbers bigger, and revenue goes up.

Judging by the number of ads on this page, Google revenue is going WAY up.

The question is, however, will users eventually rebel against an extensively commercialized search environment?

See all the details of Wordstream’s research in the infographic below:

SEOmoz

Every website that wants attention on Google uses search engine optimization. It’s an ever-evolving set of tactics to get search engines, such as Google and Bing, to connect keywords to your website, so when someone searches for “lol cats” they end up at I Can Haz a Cheezburger. But anyone who’s ever been on the Internet can tell you that it’s so much more than that.

Instead of trying to constantly game the system by injecting posts with the tag “boobs,” SEOmoz is hoping you’ll hand it the reigns to get your website properly optimized.

The company’s product, called SEOmoz Pro, crawls your site every week to figure out if your SEO tactics are doing anything at all. It will also give your insights on the performance of specific keywords with advice on how to shift your SEO approach. One of its most important tools, Open Site Explorer, measures how many inbound links your competition gets. Inbound links refer to when someone links back to a website, which gives the site credibility and higher page ranks.

Competitors in this space include GShift Labs and Raven Tools all of which provide search engine optimization services for marketers and businesses. There are many more as well, and SEOmoz counts on its passionate community of marketers to set it apart from the competition.

“It’s been painful and challenging to build the backend of Google on a one million investment. We are planning to build a larger fresher web index, do development on the backend, and work on the code. We’re also hiring new employees,” said SEOmoz chief executive Rand Fishkin in an interview with VentureBeat.

Foundry Group led the round, with an additional investment from Ignition Partners. Despite a long struggle to secure an investment, the business seems to be doing well. SEOmoz’s revenue was $11.4 million in 2011, and the company predicts it will see between $18 million and $20 million in 2012.

SEOmoz also plans to make a few acquisitions of SEO and social media companies with its new funding, according to Fishkin. Its current clients include big names such as Disney, FedEx, Yelp, and Sun.

SEOmoz was founded in 2007 and is based in Seattle, Washington. The company has raised $19.1 million in total funding and has 60 employees.

Pretty girl with computer image via Shutterstock

Search engine optimization is often a moving target. Search engines change their standards and practices for how they crawl sites, and most website content managers struggle to find the perfect balance of keywords and internal linking to help their sites get picked up by Google, Yahoo, and others. Now, Google’s throwing a wrench into the machine with plans to penalize websites that go too far to optimize their content.

Cutts had this to say about how Google handles well-optimized websites versus those developed without much SEO:

Normally we don’t pre-announce changes, but there is something we’ve been working in the last few months and hopefully in the coming weeks we hope to release it. The idea is basically to try to level the playing ground a little bit. So all those people who have been doing, for lack of a better word, over optimization or overly doing their SEO – compared to the people who are just making great content and trying to make a fantastic site, we are trying to level the playing field a bit. We try to make the GoogleBot smarter, try to make our relevance more adaptive, so that if people don’t so SEO we handle that. And we are also looking at the people who abuse it, who put too many keywords on a page, exchange way too many links, or whatever else they are doing to go beyond what you normally expect. We have several engineers on my team working on this right now.

Cutts makes no mention of what sort of punishment would befall an overly optimized site, though in Google’s world, not showing up in the first three pages of search results could be punishment enough.

This may coincide with Google’s plans to revamp its search engine, which includes more direct answers and facts on its results pages, the Wall Street Journal reported last week. The company plans to introduce ”semantic search,” which will better understand the meaning of words to provide more relevant search results.

SEO image via Shutterstock

Well, it’s finally happened. Google web search has been Google-Plus-ified.

Today, Google is bringing some specific new features to Google web search, its flagship and most widely used product. In addition to the usual assortment of links, pictures, news items and shopping results you’d see in a typical Google search results page, logged-in Google+ users will now also find several kinds of Google+ content sprinkled in among the normal search results. There are even promoted Google+ profiles and pages — an attempt to compete with Facebook’s highly successful social ads, we’re betting.

We’ve been telling you this was coming for ages, so we hope you’re not too surprised. Eventually, Google+ will be part of everything Google does on the web and mobile.

Yesterday, VentureBeat spoke at length with Jack Menzel, Google’s web search product management director, about the newest changes.

“This isn’t the entire Internet, it’s your entire Internet,” he told us. “With Google+, we understand who people are, and we use that.”

This Google+-powered approach assumes certain ties between relevance and personal connections. Links shared by your G+ connections are given more weight and will show up in the first page of web search results with a person icon on the left.

You will also be able to see Google+ posts in search results based on keyword relevance. Basically, Google+ posts are seemingly indexed just like every other page on the web, but they’ll only show up in your search results if the poster is connected to you on Google+.

Photos posted to Google+ will show up in web and image search results — again, only to searchers who are connected to the original person who posted the photo in question.

Finally, you’ll also be able to search for specific people who have Google+ profiles using a Facebook-like people search tool.

The Google+ links, posts and pictures that will appear in your searches are from you, from your friends, and from persons of note (broadly speaking). Mostly, said Menzel, you’ll only see content from people you’re connected to.

For every piece of social content that shows up in a web search, you’ll be able to see who it’s from, with whom it’s shared and why it’s appearing. “Everything we show you, we label that very clearly and explain why that’s showing up,” said Menzel.

“Security, transparency and control are of paramount importance,” he said. “When we’re returning these personal results, it really is between you and Google … We’re using secure code.”

These social search integrations, which Google is calling “search plus your world,” can be toggled on and off by using the “person” and “world” icons in the top right corner of search results. It’s so easy it takes just one click to disable or enable the new features.

And of course, there are promoted Google+ accounts. On the right side of the results page, you’ll see featured profiles and pages, along with a link reading “Learn how you could appear here too.” While these promoted accounts are currently algorithmically determined, we’re seeing this real estate and approach to Google+ page promotion as eventual competition with Facebook’s highly successful social ads; as such, it might be the most important part of today’s announcement.

The business and financial dynamics between Google and Facebook have many points of conflict, but none is greater than the fact that Facebook has for some time been stealing Google’s ad revenue due to its ability to serve highly targeted ads based on social graph data. With Google+, Google is making a bid to acquire and build a social graph just as rich as Facebook’s — richer, in fact. So seeing Google+-related ads is one signal that Google is ready to start putting its social tools to work.

While we struggle to think of a scenario in which our friends might know more about any given topic than the Internet does, we’ll give Google the benefit of the doubt for now. But Menzel said that the judicious addition of a smattering of social media can amplify without overwhelming.

“It usually isn’t the case where you’re making a binary decision of using only personal results or only general results,” he said. “When you’re looking for something new, it’s the mix of those results that’s the most powerful and the most useful.”

And, as Menzel told us, “The more information you have associated with your Google+ profile, the better it gets.”

Google+ results are coming today to web search, and although the company can’t talk timelines for future rollouts, we fully expect to see Google+ results in Google News, Google Maps, Google Shopping and other search properties soon.

“For this launch, we’re just talking about web search and image search,” said Menzel, “but I wouldn’t rule out improvements to those other products.”

If you, like your curmudgeonly correspondent here, bristle at the thought of yet another change to what was once a simple, beautiful product, remember that short months and years ago, image and shopping and news results were not included in the basic web search, either. Eventually, Google+ will be a ubiquitous part of the woodwork — just as Google has planned all along.

As we relayed to you lo these many months ago, Googlers see Google+ as “more than a social network or a collection of communication tools; it’s Google’s plan to bring social information into everything you do on the web, from shopping to search to email and beyond,” in the words of a team member working on building and marketing Google+.

In the end, Google+ is the new mode of Google usage. It’s a unifying umbrella for a diverse network of web and mobile apps. It’s the company’s plan for a stable financial future. Google+ is, in fact, not a mere social network.

UPDATED: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that SEOmoz had secured a second round of funding. We regret the error.

Search engine optimization software company SEOmoz is close to raising a $25 million second round of funding, sources tell VentureBeat.

But according to chief executive Rand Fishkin, the company did not actually raise the round of funding. Instead, the company is looking for a round that size, but has not yet found the right investors.

Fishkin told VentureBeat, “We haven’t closed anything. If we get good terms and a good deal and a good investor we’d love to [sign].”

Fishkin wrote about SEOmoz’s continued search for funding in a blog post here.

SEOmoz is a “software as a service” company that supplies businesses with a way to monitor and implement changes to their search engine optimization campaigns. Its software is called SEOmoz Pro and it is available in three versions: Pro for $99 a month, Pro Plus for $199 a month, and Pro Elite for $499 a month.

Fishkin confirmed that the company is profitable on its own and is expecting between of $11 and $12 million in revenue this year. SEOmoz has not received funding since a $1.1 million round from Ignition Partners in 2007.

Essentially, SEOmoz Pro is a unblinking set of eyes on your SEO campaign. It will monitor your site’s and competitor site’s page rank, crawl your site for performance impacting problems and suggest changes to improve rankings. Even more, the SEOmoz Pro software uses its scraper Open Site Explorer to report back with data about the competition’s SEO gold: inbound links. Inbound links are what give a website more credibility. If there are a lot of external websites linking to your site, it makes your content seem more worthwhile.

Open Site Explorer analyzes the data surrounding these inbound links, such as text used to describe the link and which links are stronger than others,  and allows you to compare your site to the competitor’s.

The company has been doing well, with roughly 14,000 clients using its Pro software.  Clients range from small to medium sized businesses all the way big brand names including Disney, FedEx, Zillow, Yelp, Rackspace, Citrix, Mozilla Firefox, and more.

In January 2010, co-founder and chief executive Rand Fishkin wrote a detailed blog post about his experience trying to gain venture funding. The post explained his pitch, feedback and the inevitable denial of new capital.

Regardless of the lack of VC deals, the company seems to be enjoying itself. When VentureBeat originally contacted SEOmoz for comment, representatives were unavailable. According to the woman who answered the phone, the whole office had rented an ice cream truck and were satisfying sweet tooths in good start-up style.

SEOmoz currently has 45 employees and is headquartered in Seattle, Wash.

The service “grades” websites and determines how often they will pop up in high spots on search engines — a process called search-engine optimization (SEO). The service also gives smaller- and mid-sized companies tools to quickly create and manage blogs and landing pages for their websites. The analytics part of the software gives companies a way to track the behavior of incoming and outgoing site visitors and tune the website to make them more likely to stay.

Salesforce in particular seems to be throwing around a lot of money lately — the company has made three acquisitions in the past couple of months. It dropped a whopping $212 million on Web-application developer Heroku in December, and then spent an undisclosed amount on email contact manager Etacts. Salesforce also acquired Web-conferencing provider Dimdim for $31 million. The company’s cash reserves dropped more than 50 percent to $424 million, down from around $1 billion in January last year, according to a recent filing with the securities and exchange commission.

Google Ventures, which is a profit-driven investment arm rather than a strategic investment arm for the search giant, probably won’t be taking on any of HubSpot’s tools, said Rich Miner, partner with Google Ventures. But Google does want to offer HubSpot on the Google App Store, according to HubSpot co-founder Brian Halligan. Salesforce, on the other hand, will be working more closely with HubSpot to bring its services into Salesforce’s online customer relationship management (CRM) software.

HubSpot wasn’t planning on raising money in a fourth round but was convinced by Sequoia Capital’s general partner Jim Goetz to start another deal to become a part of Sequoia’s portfolio, Halligan said. Goetz will become a board observer with HubSpot but won’t be an official board member as part of the deal. Hallinger talked about going public the last time the company raised money in 2009, but those plans have apparently gone on the back burner.

“We think these guys can really help us make a dent in the universe,” Hallinger said. “In terms of going public, we’re too early.”

HubSpot has raised $65 million to date across four funding rounds. Its most recent round, worth $16 million, closed in October 2009. General Catalyst, Matrix Partners and Scale Venture Partners — all existing investors — also participated in the most recent fundraising round. The Cambridge, Mass.-based company was founded in 2006 and has more than 4,000 companies as customers. The company has 192 employees.

San Mateo, Calif.-based BrightEdge uses tools to help companies increase their prominence on search engines like Google.

The company said it is now integrating social media signals into its platform, giving marketers valuable insights that allow them to optimize their social media activity for SEO return on investment.

As such, BrightEdge will also analyze the content of Tweets and Facebook “likes” and “shares” to pinpoint the exact areas in social media that will boost SEO, and offer specific recommendations to increase activity in these places.

“Search is the starting point for the vast majority of transactions on the Internet,” said Yu. “With the top search result on Google receiving up to 10 times the clicks of the top pay per click ad, it’s critical for marketers to manage SEO and break their brands through increasing clutter on the Web.”

The money at stake is huge. The SEO market opportunity in the U.S. is greater than $40 billion, three to four times larger than paid search which, according to independent technology and market research company Forrester, was close to a $13 billion market in 2009.

Studies have shown that for every click on a paid ad, there are three clicks on natural search results. BrightEdge is now capitalizing on those metrics more cohesively, said Yu.

“This means that [our] social media teams, which have been siloed off from SEO and focused on generating conversations and sentiment, now have a huge opportunity to influence SEO, improve search rankings, and increase revenue coming from organic search,” he added.

The company uses a scalable infrastructure of crawlers that follows the latest “politeness” rules to deal with the challenge of frequent scans on a large number of keywords, pages, backlinks, and sites.

Its closest competitors are customized in-house solutions and similar SEO companies Covario and ConductorSearchLight.

BrightEdge has been growing at a rapid pace. In the last few months, the company says it became the first SEO platform with global capabilities; was joined by the former chief architect of Baidu to consult on international platform expansion; and introduced BrandSafe Link Audit to expose disreputable SEO techniques to brand marketers before they end up in the headlines.

Founded in 2007, BrightEdge has so far raised $8.5 million from Battery Ventures, Altos Ventures, and Illuminate Ventures.

I can only ask: What took so long? I first blogged about Google’s increasingly terrible search results in October 2007. If you search for any topic that is monetizable, such as “iPod Connectivity” or “Futon Filling”, you will see pages and pages of search results selling products and very few that actually answer your query. In contrast, if you search for something that isn’t monetizable, say “bridge construction,” it is like going 10 years back into a search time machine.

Search has been increasingly gamed by link and content farms year by year, and users have been frogs slowly getting boiled in water without realizing it. (Bing has similarly bad results, a testament to Microsoft’s quest to copy everything Google.)

But here’s what these late-blooming critics miss: Yes, Google’s search results do indeed suck. But Google’s fixing it.

The much acclaimed PageRank algorithm, which ranks search results based on the highest number of inbound links, has failed since it’s easy for marketers to overwhelm the number of organic links with a bunch of astroturfed links. Case in point: The Google.com page that describes PageRank is #4 in the Google search results for the term PageRank, below two vendors that are selling search engine marketing.

Facebook, which can rank content based on the number of Likes from actual people rather than the number of inbound links from various websites, can now provide more relevant hits, and in realtime since it does not have to crawl the web. A Like is registered immediately. No wonder Facebook scares Google.

But the secret to Google’s success was actually not PageRank, although it makes for a good foundation myth. The now-forgotten AltaVista, buried within Yahoo and due to be shut down, actually returned great results by employing the exact opposite of PageRank, and returned pages that were hubs and had links to related content.

Google’s secret was that it could scale infinitely on low-cost hardware and was able to keep up with the Internet’s exponential growth, while its competitors such as AltaVista were running on expensive, big machines running processors like the DEC Alpha. When the size of the Web doubled, Google could cheaply keep up on commodity PC hardware, and AltaVista was left behind. Cheap and expandable computing, not ranking Web pages, is what Google does best. Combine that with an ever-expanding data set, based on people’s clicks, and you have a virtuous circle that keeps on spinning.

The folks at Google have not been asleep at the wheel. They are well aware that their search results were being increasingly gamed by search marketers and that this was not a battle they were going to win. The answer has been to dump the famous blue links on which Google built its business.

Over the past couple of years, Google has progressively added vertical search results above its regular results. When you search for the weather, businesses, stock quotes, popular videos, music, addresses, airplane flight status, and more, the search results of what you are looking for are  presented immediately. The vast majority of users are no longer clicking through pages of Google results: They are instantly getting an answer to their question:

Google is in the unique position of being able to learn from billions and billions of queries what is relevant and what can be verticalized into immediate results. Google’s search value proposition has now transitioned to immediately answering your question, with the option of sifting through additional results. And that’s through a combination of computing power and accumulated data that competitors just can’t match.

For those of us who have watched this transition closely and attentively over the past few years, it has been an amazing feat that should be commended. So while I am the first to make fun of Google’s various product failures, Google search is no longer one of them.

There’s a new trend in search engines: Searches tailored to the individual and his or her social network. Most recently, Bing and Facebook announced a partnership that would allow Microsoft’s search engine to return results based on the Facebook “likes” of a user’s friends.

Unsurprisingly, many in the search engine optimization (SEO) field have wondered how this will affect the industry. If search engines are returning customized results tailored to the needs of one particular person, will SEO professionals be able to ensure top placement for their websites? And the inevitable follow-up question is: Will SEO practices change in response to this development?

The answer is yes

The simple answer to this question is yes. We believe that it is imperative that SEO practitioners adapt to the changes in search engines. However, believing that this is a dramatic change to SEO is misunderstanding the industry itself.

At the end of the day, the people who program search engines and the people who optimize websites typically have the same goal — providing users with the best search returns possible. In that sense, we are all working together to ensure that people get the answers to their questions.

It is impossible to ignore the importance of social media today. Facebook has more than 500 million users. Sites like Yelp, LinkedIn, and Twitter continue to affect the way people interact with the Internet, and many SEO professionals have already begun to work social media into their arsenal of services. In this sense, the Bing-Facebook agreement is an indication of how important social media optimization should be to an overall search-engine optimization plan.

Understanding modern SEO

SEO today is about more than merely securing top-page placement for websites. It is about meeting all of a client’s online needs. It is about consulting with a client on natural search, pay-per-click search, social media strategies, video proliferation, and more.

The realities of search-engine optimization have changed dramatically over the course of its existence. Many SEO firms are now involved in all aspects of their clients’ online needs, and the services they offer have become so diverse that the name “SEO company” may no longer apply. That’s why we like to think of these firms as DMAs: Digital Media Agencies.

So what’s a Digital Media Agency?

SEO is still a major part of a modern DMA, but it is just one of many vital services a company must offer in order to succeed. Yes, a DMA’s goal is to secure top-page placement for its clients –- but that is just one of many goals. A DMA also manages a company’s online reputation, handles PR campaigns, and directs the many other aspects of their online brand. It is a full-service shop dedicated to marketing its clients on all aspects of the Web.

Will SEO professionals have to alter the way they do business in order to respond to these changes? We believe they will. But we believe the new Bing-Facebook agreement merely highlights a change that is already occurring, as some SEO firms transform into full-fledged DMAs.

HootSuite One of the original players, HootSuite allows users to monitor all of their social profiles, including popular networks Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. The company recently announced it would start charging users; the cheapest paid plan is $5.99 a month, which gives unlimited services (you can still use it with limited access for free). The tool allows users to collaborate with teams, assign tasks, and schedule updates. VentureBeat uses HootSuite internally to manage its social media interactions.

Netvibes This neat little tool started as an RSS feed reader, but it now allows you to create a custom dashboard based on your interests. The Netvibes dashboard pulls content from around the Web, including social networks. It pulls updates from Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, but also photo and video services like Flickr and YouTube, making it ideal for businesses monitoring a wide range of interactions with multimedia content that they publish online. (A wedding photographer, for example, might monitor comments on sample photos and videos.) It’s also handy for business owners on the go. The company recently partnered with Orange — the world’s fifth largest telecom operator — to deliver widgets to 130 million mobile users. The partnership will bring Netvibe’s catalog of some 200,000 widgets to Orange’s mobile users throughout Europe, Africa, and the Middle East across a wide variety of handsets.

Jungle Torch A large number of customers find local business services and products through search engines like Google and Yahoo. So local businesses should be thinking about search engine optimization, or SEO. Jungle Torch is a SEO dashboard which determines your current position among search engines, compares your ranking to competitors, and suggests keywords and links. It also monitors buzz about your company on blogs and other online properties, which can influence your business’s search ranking.

Trackur This tool, a personal favorite, allows users to easily monitor based on keywords and phrases, track trends, gauge influence of blogs and consumers as well as gain detailed reporting. Trackur is a paid service, but a basic monthly plan is just $18. Even the highest-priced plan, the Ultimate, is just $377 a month. Other services, like Radian6 and Visible Technologies, will cost you at the minimum $500 a month — making them designed for big businesses with big budgets.

G5

G5′s marketing tool targets local businesses looking to be found online and generate traffic as well as leads to their websites. The tool leverages Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Yelp, Craigslist, and other sites to drive customers through paid online advertising to clients websites. Once there, G5 helps to engage with users by providing tools to create a “call to action,” which may be a request to fill out a contact form or call the company. All activities are tracked and measured through the marketing tool as well, including figuring out where traffic generated and whether leads converted to sales.

Local online advertising is projected to grow from $8.9 billion to $16.4 billion by 2013, according to research firm Borrell Associates. Another online advertising company, Yodle, recently closed $10 million in funding and launched Yodle Organic, a new product to help local businesses increase web traffic and search engine optimization (see image above written by Yodle CEO Court Cunningham). ReachLocal, another local online advertiting company targeting small and medium size businesses, recently decided to IPO for $54 million.

The Bend, Oregan-based company claims to have 160 clients with over 2,400 properties. Funding was led by Volition Capital. The firm’s Roger Hurwitz and Sean Cantwell, Principal will join G5’s board of directors.

Google’s spokesman for page rankings has confirmed that the company made a major, permanent change seeking to return “higher quality” pages for product searches. Website managers who make their income from Google search results traffic don’t necessarily agree with quality of Google’s changes.

What Google seems to have done, according to Search Engine Land writer Vanessa Fox, is change the ranking of pages that seem to be auto-produced from databases, and don’t have unique additional content such as user reviews. (Update: Fox writes in the comments below this story: “Rather, I said this was a change to the types of pages that rank well for long tail queries. I simply used an e-commerce site with that type of structure as an example of a type of page that would generally receive long tail traffic that might no longer be considered “high quality” enough to rank well.”)

At Google’s I/O conference for developers last week, search results spokesperson Matt Cutts told Fox that Google, which makes hundreds of changes per year to its results ranking formulas, had made a very major and permanent change that should bring “higher quality” content to “long tail” searches — specifically, searches for unpopular products that don’t have lots of original Web content created for them.

Website managers who share tips at Webmaster World dubbed the May 1st change “MayDay,” a pun on an old radio distress call term used by ship and airplane pilots. “Traffic dropped 50% in a few days,” one early respondent wrote.

However, the changes haven’t affected all Webmaster World community members the same. For some, traffic went up. What matters is that some sites have seen a sudden, serious drop in Google-referred traffic, which means a similar drop in sales that will affect their businesses’ profitability. Google says that this change is permanent. Many e-commerce sites will need to scramble to find ways to regain Google’s favor.

[Homepage photo: faungg]