I lifted this article from TechCrunch where it was published on May 7th.  Forgive me, TechCrunch.  As a business Internet consultant, I try to explain the my clients that it is a full-time job to keep up with the moving target of Digital Marketing.  This article explains the coming rule changes in search.

Editor’s note: The following guest post is written by Shashi Seth, the senior vice president of Search products at Yahoo! Previously, Shashi worked at Google where he developed the monetization strategy for YouTube and was also the product lead for search.

Search is about to change quite radically.  For more than a decade, search has been stagnant: the core product has not changed much.  Users have changed radically in that time frame.  Even though the kind of content users consume is different, search engines are still focused mostly on web pages.  Users have become less patient and have less time on hand, while search engines still require users to dig through and extract information from the web pages to find what they’re looking for.  In addition, users are spending more and more time on their mobile phones and other connected devices, which require a completely different kind of user experience for search.

When we talk about Search, keep in mind that Search, Discovery, Recommendations, and Serendipity are all essentially the same thing.  Why?  Well, to start with, one would need a comprehensive index of content for each of these things to work.  This gives you a world view, so to speak.  How that index is created has changed over time, and what goes into that index has changed.  About ten years ago, the index only consisted of HTML pages, but that information has been changing.  How the index was created was heavily focused on signals provided by HTML pages, links, consumption, etc.

Today, many social signals are consumed, including how often and how quickly an entity or URL is being embedded elsewhere, whether it is with positive or negative intent and sentiment, and is it trending up or down since last week/month.  Search engines have mostly focused on the backend and infrastructure, and rightly so, because search requires a delicate balance between some of the most complex technologies, and a vast amount of infrastructure.  Solving today’s user needs requires a different focus: a special blend of science, a finely tuned user experience, cutting-edge design skills, and a slightly different mix of engineering and infrastructure.

The question now is—how do search engines respond to this new world?

The answer, to put it simply, is to re-imagine search.  The new landscape for search will likely focus on getting the answers the user needs without requiring the user to interact with a page of traditional blue links.  In fact, there may be cases where there are no blue links on a search results page at all.

Search engines will keep assimilating content from many different sources and aim to provide immediate and rich answers.  You ask a question and you get answers, nothing else.  The user may not even type the full question.  Search engines will have to become more and more personal, understand the individual user’s preferences, location, type of content preferred, context from previous search and browse behavior, signals from social graphs, and much more.

Search has been a pull mechanism for information and content, while social sites such as Facebook and Twitter are push.  For search to succeed in today’s world, it has to become more push, which is why we at Yahoo! have been so focused on what we call contextual searches.  A contextual search is when a user happens to be away from a search box, maybe reading an article on Yahoo! News, and comes across a name, or place that he/she wants more information on, yet they don’t want to spoil the reading experience and leave the page, open a new tab, and do a search.

With Infinite Browse, Yahoo! currently enables users to highlight the term and get a small pop-up search result out of that action, without leaving the page. Yahoo! also identifies and underlines interesting terms/entities on the page, so when the user hovers over the word or words, additional information is provided.

Imagine a future where this information is entirely pushed to you without prompting the search, so engagement with the content you want is immediately at your fingertips.  This will prompt more and more searches to happen away from traditional search results pages, and will happen more in context of wherever the user may be—reading a news article and wanting to know more about a topic or entity, accessing information on a commuter train, getting recommendations pushed while writing an email or social conversation on that topic, and much more.

In the near term, innovation in search will provide more in-depth answers.  For example, if someone types the name of a Major League Baseball team, they get a search results page with the team’s homepage and likely a couple pieces of recent news.  In the next phase of search, you will type the name of that baseball team and without hitting the search button or leaving the search box, you will be presented with an interactive display that includes a link to their homepage, recent news, the results and box score of their last game, their overall record and standing in their division, a schedule of upcoming games, photos, videos, and social media streams.

How about searching for a restaurant? In search today, you find links to the restaurant’s homepage, address, phone number, and rating.  In new iterations of search, you will type the name of that restaurant and be provided with its address and map, a view of its menu, the option to reserve then and there via OpenTable, see its ranking on Yelp, CitySearch, Zagat—along with photos, tweets, what your friends have said about it in your private social networks, and a quick and simple way to compare it with other similar restaurants.

The next chapter of search is going to be about providing answers and not just answers from Q&A sites (although Yahoo! Answers hit a billion Q&A last year).  We obviously believe in these types of “answers” and leverage it heavily, yet there are plenty of other types of real-time answers.

Most search indexes are in the 10s of billions of URLs, trending towards 100s of billions of URLs.  Information is dynamic and changes frequently.  For example, the movies running in a theater next to you are changing every week, and the timings may change even more frequently.  The San Francisco Giants score changes frequently too, as do the players stats.  So, while Q&A sites are really interesting in solving a certain set of needs for users, they are only a piece of the puzzle.

But the rise of Q&A sites across the Web speaks to the underlying need for better answers.  A new era in search is just around the corner that will make it easier to access the information, services and answers people are looking for.  A list of links just doesn’t cut it anymore.

The economical challenges today create both a need and opportunity to identify low cost strategies to build and Digitally Market your business.   There are several cost effective strategies that can be utilized.  Link building is one of the best traffic building strategies available for internet marketing.

You can also write articles for submission to some of the article submission sites.  Provide relevant material for your articles to prevent spamming.

You should have social bookmarking placed on your content and product pages on your website.  This will make it easy for visitors to share the content, services and products on your website with others.

Set aside time on a weekly basis to continue building links using the strategies noted.

Guest Blogging Opportunities   

This is different than just posting comments on a blog.  The time it takes to produce good quality blog post will limit the number of posts you can provide each week.   Thus, it may take several months before you can receive the results you are expecting.

Forums

Popular online forums also provide opportunities for one way links.  Simply register on the forums, setting up your signature with anchor text including your website link and begin posting.  Be careful not to directly promote your website in the post.  If you do, you will probably be kicked off the forum.  Again more posts results in more links.  

Professional Services

You should not close the door too quickly on hiring a professional service for building links.  If you do not know the ins and outs of link building, a service could be a cost effective method for you to consider.  A trustworth Digital Marketing Consultancy will deliver higher search engine ranking faster and more effectively.

In years past there were actually more search engines gathering information concerning new websites and website content, but now a much smaller number are the work horses.  The smaller ones that are still left work off the results of the larger engines.  Here is the latest market split from May 30, 2010 by Hitwise:

Major players for search engines:
•    Google
•    Yahoo
•    and the new-comer Bing, from Microsoft

Of course, Google is still the big name in search engines.  Google also has multiple other internet products including:
•    AdSense
•    Blogger
•    Gmail

Google sets the standard by which other search engines consider web pages.  Google has a ranking system developed for web pages and list them in relationship to other sites. 

The market share of search engine use for Google is approximately 72% and the closest engine to those numbers would be Yahoo with only about 15% of the market share.   Just a few years ago Google had about 50%.  So the others are being crowded out.

Yahoo also has various products beyond a search engine focus including Yahoo Mail, Yahoo stores, and others.   Not everyone has the same opinion about how to search the Internet, so 15% of internet users still continue to use Yahoo for their search engine needs.  

The software giant Microsoft places a distant third in the battle of search engines, but seems to be gaining some ground, and has been getting good reviews.  With Google unquestionably remaining the search engine leader even if you combine both Bing traffic and Yahoo traffic, it sends a loud message of who the major player for SEO is today.

Ask.com comes in fourth place with less than 3% of the market share although it does lead the multiple small search engines.  This engine was previously known as Ask Jeeves.  This engine presents search results and search request in a different way than the other engines do. 

Being empowered with knowing what the major players are for search engines in the Internet ocean, you will want to make your site search engine friendly or should we say Google friendly.

How to make these engines find your webstie is a whole other ball of wax.  As a starter, you should read and understand Google's Guidelines.

Common mistakes that can result in low search engine rankings

Customers these days don’t just browse or surf the Web anymore – they search.  Search engines allow consumers to search for a desired product or service online by typing in keywords and relying on the search engine to find relevant matches.  As a business owner, you want your website to be found easily by potential customers… so what if it isn’t even being indexed?  

In this three part series of articles, you will learn ten common mistakes that may be standing in the way of your website and the top positions in search engines like Google, Yahoo! and Ask.

Hosting Issues – Your server is too slow
There are a lot of websites out there for search engine crawler programs to try to index.  Some experts estimate that there are as many as 4 billion sites live, so search engines don’t have much time to spend trying to index them.  If the host server of your website has a slow Internet connection, the search engine will attempt to index your text, but will often time out which may result in your site not being indexed at all.  You can help avoid being passed over by the search engines by limiting the size of your home page to less than 60k, or simply by switching hosting companies to someone more reliable.  

Hosting Issues - You’re using a free Web space provider
If you’ve decided to host your business’ website with a free hosting provider, you might want to reconsider.  Some search engines will only list a certain number of pages from a single domain, so if you’re sharing that domain with thousands of other people, you can’t rely on your site being indexed at all.  In fact, some search engines leave off free hosted pages altogether, due to the amount of spam sites they receive from these domains.  

Truly though, as a business owner, your website URL should be one that instills confidence and trust in your potential customers that is easy to remember and to type – and free domains simply aren’t that.  Www.genericsites_forbusinesses.com/~canada/heathersflowers/home.htm simply doesn’t look professional, regardless of whether it was indexed on the search engines. It’s worth it to pay for hosting to get a URL that reflects your business AND is seen by search engines.

You have special characters in your URL
Choose your URL carefully.  Most search engines have difficulty indexing pages with special characters in the URL, such as &, $, =, %, and ?.  Many search engines ignore pages with these characters in the URL entirely, so it’s best to avoid them altogether, just in case.  If the search engines skip right past your URL, they will never get a chance to index the keyword-rich, relevant content of your site.

Ineffective Optimizing – You have text hidden in the background colour
In the past, some people have tried to trick search engines by hiding keyword rich text on a page by making the font colour the same as the background colour.  The text would then be hidden from viewers, but would theoretically still be ‘seen’ by search engine spiders, resulting in a high page ranking thanks to the keyword density.  

Unfortunately for those who have used this trick, most search engines have learned to catch it and will penalize your site for trying to “spam the search engine”.  They can even recognize if you’ve made the text a slightly different colour from the background.  

To ensure that your site isn’t blacklisted or penalized with low index rankings, simply don’t try to trick the search engines.  Make sure your website is keyword rich, and do it the right way.

Ineffective Optimizing – You have overused your keywords
It’s important to realize that overusing keywords on your website can be just as detrimental to your search engine rankings as not using keywords at all.  Many search engines avoid being spammed by carefully filtering out sites that overuse the same keywords or phrases repeatedly, either in their meta tags or in the body of the text.  While there is no magic number to determine what is ‘keyword rich’ and what is ‘keyword spam’, a general way to judge is simply to read the text aloud and objectively determine if the text sounds fake or natural.  If it sounds like you’re forcing the keywords into the text, it’s a good idea to cut some out.

Ineffective Optimizing - You’re using the wrong keywords
Sometimes the problem with your keywords is not how often you’ve used them or how you’ve formatted them, it’s specifically which keywords you’re using in your meta tags and in the body of your text.  When optimizing your site, you must be sure you’re using the words that your customers would likely search for – not necessarily the words you would use to describe your company.  When choosing your keywords, try to think like your potential customers and what they would likely type in to find your website.  

If your business is called “Heather’s Blooms” and specializes in bouquets and flower arrangements for weddings, you won’t want to only optimize for your company’s name or terms specific to your corporate identity (for example, tag lines or slogans like “creative floral creations”).  While some potential customers will search for you by name, the majority will be searching with more general keywords, such as: florist, flower arrangements, wedding flowers, wedding bouquets, bridal bouquets, etc.   Also, optimizing with geographic terms is a great idea, since most searchers will look for a business specifically in their area.  

Your site has poor link popularity
Is your site ‘popular’? One of the factors the major search engines look at when determining the quality of a website is its ‘link popularity’ – how many sites link back to yours.  If other credible sites link to yours, it boosts your site’s credibility and testifies to the quality of your site, which then boosts your rankings in search engine listings.

However, having unrelated links on your site and to your site won’t help your ranking.  Links must be related to your business and the content on your site – for example, if you run a flower shop, a link from a gardening center would be a good one, but a link to a drycleaner would not.  There are many reciprocal link programs that you can get your website involved in, which will help your link popularity – just make sure that the websites you’re trading links with are appropriate ones.

Problems with Content – You’re using frames, so search engines can’t see the text on your site
Using frames to design your website can result in low search engine rankings, because many search engines have problems reading the text within frames.  If your site is designed solely with frames, the only text the search engines can read are the title and meta tags – and that’s just not enough text to ensure your site gets indexed.

The best solution is simply to avoid using frames altogether by designing your site using layers instead.  However, if you site is already built using tables, a good idea is to add a detailed description of your site in the <noframes> section of the HTML that the search engines can read.  This won’t guarantee that your site gets indexed, but it will help.

Problems with Content – You don’t have enough text on your site
Search engine spiders read the text content of the site – they can’t actually “see” what your site looks like or how relevant the graphics on it are.  So, if your site relies too heavily on Flash or images, the search engines won’t have enough text to read to index your site appropriately. While flash and images are aesthetically appealing, they can seriously hurt your rankings if you use them in place of actual text content.  If you still decide to use a lot of images on your website, make sure that first, you write descriptions of the images in the <alt> tags, and second, you have other pages on your site that are text-rich so the search engines have something to read.

Time – Sometimes you just have to wait
If you avoided or fixed all of these problems and your site still isn’t found in a search, don’t panic.  Most search engines take up to six months to index a website.  Due to the rapid growth of the Internet, the number of websites launched every day is staggering.  Search engines simply can’t keep up.  So, sometimes, you just have to wait for the search engines to find you.  While you’re waiting, remember to refresh your content, since new, relevant content will appeal to both search engines and visitors alike.

Do any of these mistakes sound familiar to you?  You’re not alone.  The ‘rules’ of search engine indexing are constantly changing, so what may have been acceptable a year ago could get your site blacklisted from the indexes now.  

The best way to ensure that you aren’t doing more harm than good for your site is to enlist the assistance of a professional – someone who is aware of the most current best practices and can help your site be found by your customers.  Contact John Danenbarger today at John@SEOforSite.com. And for a different sort of on-line presentation that you can also have, check out http://www.seoforsite.com/Digital_Marketing.aspx

The biggest problem with Hitwise's numbers is that the company appears to include YouTube in the "social networks and forums" category that is challenging search. That's a questionable categorization of (Google's) YouTube, a site that some people call the 2nd-largest search engine on the web. A person certainly can use YouTube as a social network - but we'd guess that far more people use it as a search engine. If YouTube is growing (and this analysis says it is) then search is growing. You wouldn't think search would have much room to grow, but YouTube demonstrates nicely that there can emerge new kinds of search at any time. Some people argue that real-time search is the next type that will emerge as a growth industry for the search market. Others point to social search and that kind of amalgamation could throw our search vs. social networking equation entirely!

The arguable mischaracterization of YouTube seems to throw a big monkey-wrench in Hitwise's usually fabulous market analysis, but as a general trend social network is undoubtedly growing. At 2% of web use, according again to Hitwise, YouTube is a major player - but lets think about the rise of actual social networking sites relative to search.

What would it mean if social networking over-took search in terms of sheer visits online? It would mark a sea-change on the internet. No longer would our dominant use of the web be seeking out web-pages built by HTML web-masters! Now we would all be publishing tiny little updates that perhaps only our friends and family care about. We'd be subscribing, more than we ever did by RSS, to syndicated updates from organizations of interest, large and small. It would be (perhaps will be) a very different era and, to be frank, it's going to be harder to monetize. There will be privacy battles. There will be new platforms for innovation.

It's a pretty big deal. Things will really change if current trends continue and social networking rises to the top. That's not as clear as this traffic analyst firm argues that it is, but it could happen. And that's a big reason why Google and Facebook are rivals.