The opportunity is really the product of a collision between Desktop and Mobile worlds: the explosive popularity of apps are reshaping the Web’s link graph around the App Store and Android Market sites.

It comes as no surprise that “Popular Apps” listed in the App Store and Android Market pages are driven by app download volume and rating quality. But these app profile pages and app “directories” (like the App Store’s Lifestyle category page) are also webpages.

As search engines continue to index, display, and rank app pages for search-dominant mobile users, app-mania is simultaneously driving  a geometric expansion of the backlinks and social popularity of these ordinary webpages – giving them extraordinary influence over organic search results.

The net effect, based on our own analysis of top ranking mobile iOS apps, appears to be a powerful feedback loop: App Store popularity gets rewarded by incremental Google visibility.

Burned by Google Inc.'s recent changes to its search formula, small businesses are experimenting with strategies to recover lost Web traffic while seeking out new ways to generate sales—some even scaling back daily operations.

Seeing a 40% decline in sales since Google adjusted its algorithm, online ergonomic-products retailer Ergo In Demand Inc. in Central Point, Ore., reduced its 17-person staff to five, moved to a 4,500-square-foot office space from one more than double in size and cut $4,000 in monthly software subscriptions.

Arianna Huffington

I underestimated Arianna Huffington when she launched her Huffington Post in May 2005. I didn't trash the site the way Nikki Finke did, though. Finke called Huffington the "Madonna of the mediapolitic world [who] has undergone one reinvention too many," and slammed her site as a "humongously pre-hyped celebrity blog" that represented the "sort of failure that is simply unsurvivable." And those were among Finke's nicer comments.

Instead of critiquing Huffington's debut copy, I speculated as to whether she was up to the job of "impresario." On the scale of things, my write-up is more embarrassing today, now that Huffington has sold the Post to AOL for $315 million, than is Finke's pissy take. Huffington has proved herself a first-rate entrepreneur, incubator of talent, and media visionary.

Ordinarily, when a gigantic media organization swallows a startup like HuffPo, it lies about wanting to preserve the founder and all the talent he or she has assembled in their leadership roles. Then they fire them. But in this instance, AOL has handed Huffington the keys to its entire editorial kingdom—national, local, financial, as well as MapQuest and Moviefone—and christened her president and editor of AOL's Huffington Post Media Group.

Article Highlights:

• While search engines favor websites that are continually updated, content needs to be around long enough to be crawled and indexed
• Instead of letting 404 pages litter your site as it matures, SEO professionals can use a 301 to redirect users
• If your website includes search functionality, you have access to valuable user insights that can influence an SEO strategy

Google today launched an ambitious effort to speed up searching. But what they really did is kill SEO.

Google says:

"Google Instant is a new search enhancement that shows results as you type. We are pushing the limits of our technology and infrastructure to help you get better search results, faster. Our key technical insight was that people type slowly, but read quickly, typically taking 300 milliseconds between keystrokes, but only 30 milliseconds (a tenth of the time!) to glance at another part of the page. This means that you can scan a results page while you type."

The most important consideration for marketers or anyone who creates content, however, is in the bullets...

"Smarter Predictions: Even when you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, predictions help guide your search. The top prediction is shown in grey text directly in the search box, so you can stop typing as soon as you see what you need."

Here's what this means: no two people will see the same web. Once a single search would do the trick - and everyone saw the same results. That's what made search engine optimization work. Now, with this, everyone is going to start tweaking their searches in real-time. The reason this is a game changer is feedback. When you get feedback, you change your behaviors. 

Think about it. When you push a door and it doesn't open quickly, you push harder. When you try to drive a car up a hill and it doesn't go as fast as you would like, you step on the gas. Feedback changes your behavior. 

Google Instant means no one will see the same web anymore, making optimizing it virtually impossible. Real-time feedback will change and personalize people's search behaviors.

::LATER: Google is saying expect traffic fluctuations around organic keywords.

The principle that works behind social media optimization is to mainly draw traffic to the site. Drawing a good amount of traffic is in fact, one of the best ways to get the site popular among various social media platforms and search engines like Google, Yahoo etc. The thing that mainly needs to be done is to write good articles and then get them circulated in the various social media platforms so that people can read them and come to visit the site. This not only helps in getting good traffic for the website but also helps in getting popular among internet users and various social media platforms. Once the content in the form of articles are floated among the various social media platforms, social media optimizers get hold of them and use them to optimize the site, which further helps in the promotion of that particular website.

If your company is new to search engine optimisation (SEO) then you need to remain in control of the work that’s being done,  whether you’re using an agency or you’ve hired someone in house.

Of course, not everyone has time to research optimisation tactics so they may not understand the work that’s being done on their company’s behalf. So here are my five tips to help you successfully manage your SEO team:

5 key things to remember about keywords

Greetings!

When it comes to effective web copy, smooth word flows and proper style tones just aren't enough anymore. Nowadays, getting "found" requires keywords. But how do you find them? And where? Follow these tips, and you'll be a proud keyword geek in no time. 

In 1997, Google's founders created an algorithmic method to determine importance and popularity based on several key principles:

• Links on the web can be interpreted as votes that are cast by the source for the target
• All votes are, initially, considered equal
• Over the course of executing the algorithm on a link graph, pages which receive more votes become more important
• More important pages cast more important votes
• The votes a page can cast are a function of that page's importance, divided by the number of votes/links it casts

A great series of illustrations explaining the Valuation of different types of links

Social Media Optimization: SMO is the New SEO – Part 1

As a brand, publisher, designer, photographer, artist, or filmmaker, the social web is your new distribution channel as well as your portfolio for intellectual assets. Whether you’re in the business of creating, marketing, selling, or distributing media, the social Web is an incredible medium that can create a brand, establish visibility, and build demand, all without active promotion. It’s about letting your expertise or work market itself through the practice of a socialized form of inbound marketing that helps make content discoverable when people search.