Gooogle made an update recently dubbed “The May Day Update” that has rang some bells in the SEO community. The main complaint is that it has shrunk the amount of traffic coming into websites as a result of long-tail searches.  Most websites didn’t see a drop in their rankings for their more important keyword phrases. Some websites, my dental internet marketing website included, actually saw a bump in results. There is only speculation as to why some have gained and others have lost. Google hasn’t confirmed or denied any of the theories.

One theory is that the drop in traffic isn’t really a result of Google changing the way it handles long-tail searches at all. It’s a result of Google further devaluing links from sketchy websites or websites of low importance. This means that websites that saw a drop after this update are simply seeing a drop in their rankings as a result of losing some of the links that maybe shouldn’t have counted before in the first place.

Others (See Tedster’s theory in this Webmaster World discussion thread) say that it is indeed a change in how Google deals with long-tail phrases, but only inasmuch as it has changed its phrase match methodologies. Meaning that if someone typed in “Denver seafood restaurant quiet dinning Lodo”, rather than just showing results that match individual keywords, it may be identifying phrases within the long-tail search, in this case, “Denver seafood restaurant” and displaying indexed results that are relevant to that entire phrase.

Another theory is that Google is just culling some pages from its index that it deems not important enough to take up space in its memory in order to keep the speed increase up that it has seen as a result of its Caffeine update. This would mean that if your site was getting traffic on some of its ancillary pages from long-tail search phrases, it’s not that Google has changed how it’s displaying results for those phrases, it’s that those pages of your site are just GONE from Google’s index, so they aren’t showing up anymore.

Whatever the cause, if you’ve seen a change in your traffic from long-tail search phrases, stop and take stock of your traffic. How much has it dropped? Be sure to look a month or two before May 1st and compare it to now, bearing in mind that not quite a month has passed since the May Day Update hit. Do a site: search on Google and see if you have fewer pages showing up in Google’s index. Use some internal link building to donate some link juice from more important pages to some of the long-tail content that was dropped from the index so that Google may re-include them. Acquire some more high-quality links to replace some of the low-quality links that Google may have discounted. Above all, just make sure that your SEO strategies are focusing on sound, white hat SEO techniques. If you’re doing that, you’re less likely to feel the sting of these updates. In fact, most algorithm updates will help you!

Millions of people create and use blogs for a variety of reasons. Some people blog about politics, news, religion, personal endeavors or a myriad of different things. Working online has become very popular these days and many people are starting to discover that blogs can be a useful and powerful SEO tool as well. If you are running your own personal business or running a company, you can use blogging to boost traffic to your website by creating an SEO blog. In the following article, we will review some steps that you can take to make your website and blog SEO and advertiser friendly.

Optimizing your posts is the first step that you can take in making your SEO blog. You want to make your title focused around the main topic or idea in your posts. You will want to repeat this title or term throughout the blog. However, you will want to repeat the term in a way that sounds the most natural. You will not want to throw in your keywords just anywhere. Making your blog posts enjoyable and easy for your readers to read is great for business and optimization. Updating your blog on a regular basis is also needed for optimization. You never want to let your SEO blog be stale. This will lead to a loss of readers. When you are updating on a regular basis, you will be able to hold the attention of your readers. Asking for feedback from your readers is also a great way to keep them interested in your blog.

Social bookmarking has become very popular. By including social bookmarking buttons on your blog posts, you will be making it easier for your readers to share your blogs with others. This is a great way to increase traffic to your blog and website. Video is another great way to optimize your blog and interest your readers. You can use videos to show products that you offer or you can use them solely for your readers’ enjoyment. When you create interesting and informative blog posts for your readers, they are more apt to spread the word about your business or company.

With Google’s amazing success, you can bet there are many competitors wanting a piece of that pie. Well here are a few beta and upstart search engines working to change the face of search.

Hakia

Today’s search engines bring popular results via statistical ranking methods, but a popular website may not always be credible, and a credible website may not always be popular. As a result, searchers suffer in many ways ranging from wasted search time to using misleading information.

Twine

People use Twine to keep track of their interests. Twine is a new way for you to collect online content – videos, photos, articles, web pages, products – and bring it all together by topic, so you can have it in one place and share it with anyone you want.

Wolfram|Alpha

Wolfram|Alpha’s long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. We aim to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything.

Scoopler

Scoopler is a real-time search engine. Scoopler aggregates and organizes content being shared on the Internet as it happens, like eye-witness reports of breaking news, photos and videos from big events, and links to the hottest memes of the day. It does this by constantly indexing live updates from services including Twitter, Flickr, Digg, Delicious and more.

TweetMeme

TweetMeme is a service, which aggregates all the popular links on Twitter to determine which links are popular. TweetMeme is able to categorize these links into categories and subcategories, making it easy to filter out the noise to find what your interested in.

OneRiot

Increasingly, the web’s most interesting content is what our friends and other people are talking about, sharing and looking at right now. However, when people search for that content, traditional search engines struggle to surface these fresh, socially relevant results. That’s the hole – and it’s a big one – that OneRiot is filling.

SearchMe

SearchMe, the first multimedia search engine: Search for information, videos, music, images, news and more, and find the most relevant results displayed in a comprehensive blend of multimedia and non-multimedia web pages.

Cuil

The Internet has grown exponentially in the last fifteen years, but search engines have not kept up—until now. Cuil searches more pages on the web than anyone else—three times as many as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft.

Kosmix

Kosmix is a guide to the Web. The website lets users explore the web by topic, presenting a dashboard of relevant videos, photos, news, commentary, opinion, communities and links to related topics. Kosmix’s categorization engine organizes the Internet into magazine-style topic pages, enabling people to navigate the web.

FriendFeed

FriendFeed is a service that makes it easy to share with friends online. It offers a fun and interactive way to discover and discuss information among friends. It’s fast and easy to start a conversation around shared items, or to show that you like something a friend has shared.

A good starting point for YouTube optimization is to make videos that are short, sweet, and straight to the point. People want instant gratification, not wanting to sit around watching a 30-minute video on how to use a cell phone headset. Videos should be kept to a few minutes to reduce production time, upload time, and download times. Have a script prepared so you do not mutter or stumble upon your words. Film the video in the highest quality format you can. Crisp, clean videos will receive more attention than grainy, hard to see videos. Do not make videos private and always allow for comments. This user interaction can help increase video views and move you up the YouTube video rankings. Using Annotations, text boxes in your video, can help deliver your message or promote your website or company. Make sure not too over use annotations as they can become annoying and distracting from your videos main purpose.

Since the search engine spiders cannot read or comprehend videos you must use the text fields to optimize your videos appropriately. This means doing keyword research and making sure your keywords appear in the title, description, and tags of your video is imperative to a successful YouTube marketing campaign. Maximize on the amount of text you can have in these fields. More text means a better chance of someone finding and clicking into your video. Make sure you use original titles and descriptions otherwise your video will get lost in the millions of videos with similar names. Original content is what YouTube wants to see. The more originality you add the better off you will be. You also want to have a user name with your brand or website name so it is easily remembered.

You have to put everything into perspective to increase views, as the average video only receives one hundred views annually. According to YouTube guidelines there are many factors that influence rankings and can help optimize your videos. These include the video title, the description, tags, incoming links, comments, subscribers, ratings, playlist additions, flagging, embeds, shares, age of video, channel views, subscribers, views, and the number and quality of sites that host or point to your video. You want to interact on YouTube by watching other videos, commenting, subscribing, creating channels, and making friends. Interaction helps with the viral marketing, where one person tells another person about the video. This person tells five others and so on. Doing this will increase your video network and views. All these factor into ranking high for YouTube optimization.

If you’ve been the owner of a website or a blog for any length of time, you’re probably striving continuously to improve the SEO of your website or blog. The more effort you put into SEO, the better your ranking will be on the various search engines, which in turn means your website or blog will enjoy more traffic as a result.

Of course, even though you more than likely already use several social networking sites, you may not yet be sure of how much those sites can help improve your rankings. One of the best sites to take advantage of is LinkedIn. The main reason for this is that the site already enjoys phenomenal rankings due to the profiles which are hosted on it.

In the event that you already have a LinkedIn account then you can already begin improving your website’s SEO with your LinkedIn account. In fact, let’s take a look at a few simple ways for using LinkedIn in order to improve the SEO of your website or blog:

Step 1: Making Use of Anchor Text and Links

Even though this is incredibly simple, it’s of the utmost importance, if you want to increase the SEO of your site. You need to use anchor text in order to link to your website from your LinkedIn profile. When you create links to your various websites, it results in potentially profitable backlinks, and this is why it’s important to use anchor text which makes use of specific keywords which are relevant to your website.

You need to bear in mind that major search engines such as Google will quite literally scrutinize anchor text when they rank websites. This of course means that if you had web site specific key words to your anchor text, your SEO will be vastly improved. In other words you need to avoid using names like “My Website” or George’s Blog, but instead, you should try to be a little bit more creative.

Step 2: Keyword Focus When Composing Your Profile

When you sit down to type up your LinkedIn profile, it’s imperative that you focus on using the most relevant keywords. During the process you’ll be required to include a headline, personal interests, summary, and also job descriptions and etc. Without over doing it, try to keep your profile rich with relevant keywords relating to your specific website or blog.

Step 3: Add Connections

The importance of using LinkedIn for adding connections simply cannot be stressed enough, particularly if your goal is to improve the SEO of your website. In doing this, you’ll effectively be making your website more visible, bearing in mind that the more connections you have, the more visible your site will be to people out there in cyberspace. Over and above increasing your website’s visibility on the LinkedIn site, you’ll also be increasing the overall visibility of your own website or blog on the internet.

Step 4: Customize Your URL

Lastly but not least, you need to customize the URL which you have on the LinkedIn site, bearing in mind that LinkedIn members have an opportunity to customize their profile URL, rather than making do with the default one. In fact, you can even choose to change the URL to your own name, the name of your company, or even the name of your website. You can rest assured that if you do this it will result in your profile becoming far more visible, and this in turn goes a long way towards improving the SEO of your website.