Links, links – we all want them.  Some of us hire external help to get them; others of us are constantly on a hot pursuit for cultivating them ourselves; and some of us just try to make amazing content and hope that they will come.

But links are not a game of quantity, but rather a game of quality.  How can you tell if a link is really valuable?  Here’s an 10-point cheat sheet to see if your inbound link passes the sniff test.   Each of these criteria has its own merit, but the combination of them should give you pretty good insight into the links that are giving your page the most juice.

Evaluating the link itself:

1)      Anchor text relevancy:  Is the anchor text of the link relevant to the keywords and theme of your page?  And beyond the anchor text – how about the content on the linking page that surrounds the anchor text – is that relevant as well?

2)      Anchor text variety:   A caveat to number one  is that all the anchor text of the links coming to your page should not be identical, but should have a wide variety.  It’s completely ok if some of them don’t include your keywords at all and are more generic.  Having too much of the same, indicates there might be foul play at hand.

3)      Authenticity of the link:  If you can place links on the page yourself, or it’s just a random link stuffed at the bottom of the page, it won’t be adding much value to you.  But if it’s clear that someone put the link there because your webpage offers valuable, related content, then it will count for much more.

Evaluating the linking site:

4)      Relevancy of the site’s url:  If the linking site’s url is strongly related to your keywords this is a big bonus.

5)      Relevancy of the website’s content:  Is the content on the linking page valuable, unique and relevant to the keyword theme of your page.  Industry-themed sites can often offer a large value to your page.

6)      Site’s rank for your target keywords:  Does the linking site rank well for the keywords you are targeting.

7)      Uniqueness of the site:  Does the linking site offer some unique, valuable content that is related to your keyword theme.

8)      Age of the linking site:  Has the linking site been around for more than a couple of years?

9)      Page rank of the linking site:  Is the page rank of the linking site and that linking age at least reasonable?

10)   Number of outbound links:  Are you a prominent related mention on the page, or just part of a massive unrelated list?

(1: Create a catchy title that will entice people to read your post.)

All I ever needed to know about great content, I learned at the movies.  These learnings can be distilled down into seven keys (hidden throughout this fantastic post!) (2: Keep the reader in active anticipation of what’s coming next.)

Upon reading his daily Google Analytics report, the internet marketing manager took his iPhone and, in a complete rage, threw it at his whiteboard.  He had tried everything and this was the end of the road for him.  (3: Grab attention so your audience will read on.)

According to analysts, 46.5 percent of all internet marketing managers were in complete and utter agony that month due to unprofitable pay-per-click campaigns. (4: Share some previously unknown, valuable data to emphasize significance.)

All these marketing managers have one thing in common: their hopes and dreams of overnight internet success were quashed by websites that seemed to care about giving visitors a good bounce more than taking their money.  (5: Enable the reader to relate to you and your story.)

How could he go on? As he paced around, he plotted one last course of action, knowing the boss would soon likely pull the plug on his campaign and show him the door.  Aha – he had the answer!  Forget this PPC, CTR, CPC stuff: social media marketing is all the rage these days.  He would start a viral marketing campaign using a chain letter!  That was sure to get the dollars pumping into the site!   (6: A little humor never hurts.)

He patched the hole in his whiteboard, gave his iPhone an apology kiss and set off to work.  In the world of online marketing, there is no such thing as giving up.  There are so many different options to try, you just need to keep testing new channels and messaging until you strike a balance that brings you the results you desire.  It’s OK to make mistakes as long as you are actively engaged in learning from them. (7: Motivate change or action; move your audience to think differently.)

We hope you are able to use all seven of these “hidden” keys to get two thumbs up (and a ton of links) from your readers.  It may take some time to regularly produce amazing content, so until your articles are getting a proliferation of “Likes” on Facebook or re-tweets via Twitter or multiple links from many blogs, be thankful there is no way for readers to throw rotten tomatoes online!  With practice, you’ll get there.

Jamie O’Donnell of SEO-PR interviews Matt Malden, CEO of Yield Software and an exhibitor at last month’s SES San Francisco 2010.  Here’s a synopsys of Jamie’s reporting:

Yield Software’s Yield Web Marketing Suite handles three aspects of automated web marketing. It has a pay-per-click (PPC) bid management module that includes spending on the three major search engines, Google, Bing, and Yahoo.  Second, the Yield Web Marketing Suite offers automated SEO or natural search engine optimization. Using the Yield Web Marketing Suite, Web marketers can get higher organic search rankings for their important keywords and learn how to improve their landing pages, link building, on-page and off-page optimization. Finally, the Yield Web Marketing Suite offers Web marketers a landing page optimization module. Using Yield, marketers can conduct complex multivariate testing of landing pages, using a visual drag and drop interface to automatically implement recommendations.

Yield Software is great for advertisers who want to be more effective in the search space, particularly medium and large-sized companies. Yield Software has also been adopted by digital and interactive media agencies that are conducting bid management, natural search optimization and email campaigns in order to help them generate better search marketing results.

Yield Software empowers any organization in the world to attract high-value customers at the lowest cost. Using advanced algorithms and techniques, the Yield Web Marketing Suite optimizes internet marketing expenditures, attracts visitors to a web site and tunes web page content to have the greatest impact.

For more information about exhibiting at SES, please visit: http://searchenginestrategies.com

One of the frequently over-looked pieces of content on a webpage when it comes to SEO is image optimization.  Optimizing images can significantly contribute to your SEO and also help you get additional exposure on SERP pages now that universal search results frequently include images.

While it might be difficult to get your pages to rank highly for many head terms, you might be able to get an image on page one for the head term, which, if compelling enough can bring you a decent volume of traffic.

Here are the five most impactful things you can do to optimize your images:

Use your keywords in your image file name. Rather than the typical image01.jpg filename, use a filename that it descriptive and keyword rich.  For example, seo-optimization-diagram.jpg. Make sure to separate these words by dashes only so the search engine can read them.

Include variations of your keywords in the image’s ALT attributes.  Many sites do make use of these attributes since they help searches who can’t see get information about what your image is about.  Just be sure to leverage keywords in the descriptors you use.

Include variations of your keywords in the image’s title tag. This one isn’t quite as impactful as the previous two, but should not be neglected.  The title tag is another great place for a variation of your keywords describing the image.

Make sure the content immediately surrounding the image on the webpage is relevant and includes variations of keywords.  The placement of the image on your page does matter when it comes to SEO, and search engines interpreting it’s meaning, so read the text above and below the image and make sure it has variations of the keywords emphasizing the theme of the image.

Get some relevant links.  Not all images will be link worthy, but many are.  Leverage your internal link structure to support your images.  For external links, social media can be a great way to share interesting pictures or insightful diagrams to get link juice pointing to your images.  As with any other piece of great content – just make sure they are easy to share.

One word of caution: keep the number of images on your page in check, unless you are a photo gallery or it’s a catalog of some sort.  Just a couple images on a page is all that is necessary for a powerful punch.

Start to optimize your images today and start to enjoy the road less traveled of SEO optimization.

If you check out popular crowdsourcing websites, you will find the “jobs” sections dominated by requests for social media marketing activities.  It can be difficult to get your social media up and off the ground–especially a regular, high-quality blog publishing effort–so it seems many small businesses have turned to what I would consider to be “black hat” techniques.

Consider the following most common social marketing “job” listings…

Blog and Article Writing. The pay for these ranges from $0.50 to $5.00 per article.  Most article requests range from 350 to 500 words and specify the keywords to be used and the keyword density.  These jobs seem to fall into a gray area.  If you can find good writers out there who can provide you with legitimate content, why not?  However, the quality of article you will get for the most popular price of $1.00 is very questionable to me.  It’s clear these businesses do not agree that truly valuable content is the best approach.

Now we will exit the lone “high-end” job category and get into the low-paying jobs.  Most jobs in this category pay anywhere from $0.01 to $0.50 for the tasks below.  (Personally, I think these folks could do better at the penny slots, or even begging on the street corner.)

YouTube. The jobs pertaining to YouTube involve getting paid for watching a video, voting on a video (some request likes only), leaving comments about a video, sharing a video or subscribing to a YouTube channel.

Twitter. Jobs pertaining to Twitter pay people to make tweets that link to a particular website (tweet included), retweeting messages, or becoming a follower for a business.

Facebook. These jobs typically pay for liking a Facebook fan page, leaving positive comments on a fan page, liking posts on a fan page or liking products or content on a company’s website.

Social Bookmarking. The tasks for social bookmarking are based on bookmarking a page on multiple social bookmarking sites.

Website Evangelism. This one involves posting a comment to popular forums, groups, or other related websites.  The post text and link are provided, along with posting frequency guidelines to avoid raising any spamming flags.  Obviously most of these are no-follow so it is not going to help with SEO.  However, these do certainly help drive traffic through online word-of-mouth which people attribute a high level of trust to.

Joining New Communities. This job involves getting paid to sign up for a new online social group or community.

Forums. These businesses are typically trying to quickly build out large forums in order to give their site more credibility.  Some tasks involve creating questions, most involve writing short answers to questions.

Contest Voting. You can get paid to vote for a particular participant in an online social contest, for example a best photo contest.

Posting Comments. This job requests that you post comments on forums, or on articles to help them appear more popular.

Blogger. This one involves getting paid to become a follower for a blogger account.

I will stop there, but it does get worse on freelancer sites — much worse.

Is it clever to employ the masses? Or, is this all shady?  The more I read the more in need of a shower I felt.  The things I value most about social media are the great content and the implied trust that comes with a comment or “Like” or other social endorsement action, and this type of behavior breaks both.

I am in no way saying that all crowdsourcing jobs are bad.  There are a ton of legitimate jobs out there and thousands of great ways to leverage crowdsourcing.

But, I was heartbroken to see all of the unethical social activity going on.  It’s probably even sadder to see what people will do for mere pennies – I mean, you can’t even get a gumball for a penny anymore.  (Although, in some countries this pay probably ends up working out to be a pretty decent job.)  The best way a business can get a social following — and the endorsements that come with it — is by diligently publishing high-quality content on a regular basis and winning fans for your efforts.  The pay-offs are often in the longer-term, but having earned it the honest way will mean you see real business benefits rather than just a list of hollow gestures.

When looking to hire or partner with someone to help with your search marketing, the traditional ideas of a fancy advertising agency tend to pop into people’s heads –fancy glass office, dressed fancy, talks fancy, creates fancy messaging and images, etc.  However, when it comes to search marketing, Fancy Nancy isn’t likely to get you very far.

Her sophistication and wit will likely mean that her content won’t reach, attract or convert the average searcher you are seeking out.   For online marketing, you should be thinking about working with Redundant Rhonda.  Qualities you really want are redundant, simple, monotonous and patient.

Why am I advocating for Redundant Rhonda?  Who in their right mind wants a boring person to handle activities related to marketing and advertising?

Here’s why…

Quality #1: Redundant

Being successful online is all about keywords.  From search to social, SEO to paid, from your home page to your landing page, keywords (in your audience’s voice) are the heart and soul.

Keywords are not fancy.  These are basic phrases that your leads use to research your offering and find you.  Long tail keyword generation is helpful – there is nothing fancy about this – which is just different combinations of the exact same words or plurals, singulars, prepositions, etc.

Once you know your keyword targets, these keywords and their variations must be redundantly used everywhere you are online:

Pay-per-click keywords

SEO keywords

Website copy

Blog titles

Blog copy

Landing pages

Pay-per-click ads

Website URLs

Google Local profile

Twitter profile

Twitter handler

Facebook profile

Tweets on Twitter

Internal anchor text

Inbound link anchor text

Press releases

Videos

Photos and images

Getting the picture?

Just to clarify: I said redundant usage – which should not to be confused with spammy usage!  Redundantly use your keywords in natural ways that any average person reading the English language would expect to see.

Quality #2: Simple

While Fancy Nancy is likely to come up with some very catchy tag lines, online searches are less about award-winning copy and more about helping people weed through information overload to find you, quickly comprehend what you do and contact you. Fluff need not apply.

Your PPC ad copy (in addition to being redundant) needs to simply state what you do, why it’s better than anything else, and inspiring a click-through.

Your website copy (again, in addition to being redundant) needs to very simply state in easy-to-read copy what it is you do – and why it’s better – with a clear call to action indicating what the visitor should do next.

You only have a few seconds to get a searchers’ attention and turn them into something valuable, so simple words lead to the fastest possible comprehension and action.

Quality #3: Loves Monotony

For managing and optimizing your search marketing, you will need a data geek who is happy with monotony.  My guess is Fancy Nancy would like to jump off the building at this point.  You’ll need someone who is happy pouring over tons of data, slicing and dicing it in oodles of formats, making some optimization adjustments based on the data, and then reviewing all of the metrics again.

The process goes like this: analyze, slice, dice, adjust, analyze, slice, dice, adjust, analyze, slice, adjust… there is no end game. (In the world of consumer products, it’s called “lather, rinse, repeat” — check your shampoo bottle!)  The world of search marketing is constantly changing, so the monotonous process will repeat itself again and again and again.

Quality #4: Patient

While some aspects of search marketing, like pay-per-click, carry with them some instant gratification, the process of getting to great results whether on PPC, SEO, landing pages or social takes time and patience.  Fancy Nancy is likely to want some immediate accolades for a campaign that is launched, but in the world of search, great downstream benefits can take quite a bit of time and stick-to-it-ness.  It can take quite a while to find pockets of great success – which may not last long before the world changes and you need to find new pockets of success.

So, as you think about your search marketing support system, remember this: forget the glamour, the glitter and the fluff and seek out someone who understands how to get you found, keep attention and create real results online.

One of the best ways to ensure your website ranks well for your most important keywords in natural search results is through in-bound links to your site.  But how do you attract them (short of begging other website owners to link to you)?  We’ve got some tips and tricks below that will help you build links to your website.

Before we get started, though, just a quick reminder about links, link juice and the social etiquette of linking:

First, not all links are created equal.  Google, Yahoo! and Bing all evaluate links to your website relative to the quality of the source of the link.  So, for instance, if you get a link from The New York Times it’s vastly more important to the search engines than if Yield Software links to you (we hope one day soon we’ll be in the same league!)  In practical terms, what this means is that the NYT link has more juice than the Yield link, and when the algorithm is determining what your page rank should be, it’s weighing the link juice of each individual link.  Other types of sites that provide powerful link juice are links from .gov sites and links from .edu sites, in addition to links from mainstream media source sites or very popular blogs such as BoingBoing or ReadWriteWeb.

Second, link unto others as you would have the link to you.  If you hope to generate lots of great links to your site, you must also be someone who sensibly links regularly.  The social etiquette of the Web dictates that website and blog owners conscientiously link to the sources of news, information, reference material or other sources of content; this, in turn, will inspire web publishers to link to you.  By declaring you’re a good netizen, people will want to engage you more.

Now, on to those recommendations!

“Top” Lists

One of the all-time best ways to get people to link to your content is through lists.  For instance, the top 10 best ways to evaluate a purchase.  Or three things to consider when making a purchasing.  Remember that your “Top” lists should have some relevance to what your site is all about, but SHOULD NOT be an overt promotion of or commercial about your products and services.  These should be objectively helpful lists that people would intuitive want to share with friends or colleagues or family members (for instance, in their own blogs or via a tweet on Twitter or in a post on Facebook.)

Video

After social networks, like Facebook, video is the hottest segment of the Web.  People can’t get enough of video!  So a good way to get people to link to your site or your blog is use video.  It’s super easy to embed a video in your site (especially if you’re publishing your website or blog on a content management system like WordPress).  As with “Top” lists, be sure to choose videos that relevant to what you do, sell or serve.  If you produce and publish your own videos (which you should!), again, make sure you’re doing something that is going to be useful to people.  How-to videos are hugely popular on the Web, particularly if it’s about something emerging that people want to do but don’t yet understand.

Photos

Believe it or not, photos are still very popular and capture people’s eye.  Photos that capture an amazing moment, or are somehow instructional in nature can always drive interest, links and traffic to your site.

Downloadable Content

Publish content on your site that is new, unique or unlike something folks can get elsewhere.  Perhaps it’s a how-to guide relating to your industry or the services you provide.  If you have the budget, commission a white paper or a study on some important aspect of the work you do.  Or maybe you’ve been doing a great job with your blog over the last few years and have a collection of blog posts that, when taken together, make a terrific e-book on a subject relating to your business or work.  There are a whole number of online e-book publishing sites that enable fast and easy production, and which you can then offer for free download on your site.  It’s easy to say, “oh, no one cares as much as I do about the thing I do” — but guess what: you’re NOT that unique!  If you love what you do, chances are there are a whole bunch of people (potentially tens of thousands, even) who share your interests and passion.

Graphs and Graphics

Another great, link-worthy strategy for your website and blog is the use of graphs and graphics.  From simple charts and graphs created by Excel to timeline graphics, tag cloud graphics and workflow illustrations, folks love great visuals that bring into specific relief that which may be difficult to imagine.  There are many free or low-cost graphic creation tools across the Web (do a search!) that enable you to simply plug in a number of data points and return a beautiful illustration that you can copy and publish.  If you have a little budget, you can also always hire graphic artists to create stunning visualizations of either data or workflow or technology stacks (among many other options.)

At the end of the day, content, even in the 21st century, is still king.  If you consistently publish good stuff on your website and blog, it will be link-worthy.  And when you do publish, don’t be shy about publicizing that fact.  You should copy the URL of your new content and paste it into tweets on Twitter, your Facebook updates, your LinkedIn updates and any other sites where you can provide updates of what you’re working on.

Once you’ve gotten into a rhythm, be sure to see how your site is ranking for your keywords across Google, Yahoo! and Bing. If you’re a Yield Software customer, you can do this quickly and conveniently by clicking on the Natural Search tab in the Yield Web Marketing Suite and checking your link counts.  You’ll also be able to see the sources of those links so you can evaluate how well you’re doing in terms of link juice / link source quality.

A big blocker to an integrated search engine marketing approach is simply lack of knowledge about the different areas.  Commonly, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising guys don’t really “get” search engine optimization (SEO), while SEO guys are kind of put off by PPC campaign work.  But rich rewards await those who stretch beyond their comfort zones and embrace something new or unknown within the realm of search marketing.

What follows are some tips to help you take the information and knowledge you may currently have and start to expand your search engine marketing efforts in an integrated fashion.

PPC for the SEO Guy

If you are used to SEO and are starting PPC, be prepared for a fast pace game, and get ready to spend money on those clicks.

• Use what you already know – start off with your SEO data

1. Actual search queries.  Look at your keywords list in your analytics system.  Use the keywords that are relevant as your target keywords and use any terms that are irrelevant as negative keywords.
2. Look at the geographical source of your visitors and compare the bounce rate, average time on site and conversion rate.  Target the most effective regions for your PPC campaign geo-targets.

• Here’s your PPC blueprint:

1. Organize your keyword list into very tiny ad groups.  The keywords within the ad group should be almost identical with only plural or other very minor variations.  For example, the following keyword list:

Blue shiny widget

Blue shiny widgets

Pink widget

Blue widget supplier

Would be organized into ad groups as follows:

Blue shiny widget ad group with keywords: blue shiny widget, blue shiny widgets

Pink widget ad group with keywords: pink widget, pink widgets

Blue Widget Supplier ad group with keywords: blue widget supplier, blue widget suppliers, blue widgets supplier and blue widgets suppliers

2.  Write ad copy for each of the ad groups that includes the keywords (multiple times), your unique value and a call to action.

Always try more than 1 ad in each ad group:

Blue Shiny Widget Ad Group:

Blue Shiny Widgets

50% Off Blue Shiny Widgets.

Buy Today for Free Shipping!

www.DomainName.com/BlueShinyWidgets

Blue Shiny Widgets

Blue Shiny Widgets – 50% Off!

Order Now for Free Shipping.

BlueShinyWidgest.DomainName.com

3.  The destination page on your website for ads in this ad group, should take the visitor directly to the blue shiny widgets page.

SEO for the PPC Guy

If you are expanding from PPC into SEO, you’ll need to develop some patience.  Changes can take a very long time to happen, but once day do you’ll love the free clicks!

Here are some baby steps to get you on your way:

Use what you already know.  Keywords are also the name of the game here.

Put your keywords to work.  Keywords with high impressions and strong conversions.  This will be your target keyword list for SEO.  Make sure to target the most relevant keywords for each individual page of your website.  If you have a high volume of candidate keywords, start off with those with the least amount of natural search competition first.

Use geographic information.  Review your geographical performance of your visitors to see if you should be targeting any geographic names along with your keywords.

Page optimization.  Make on-page optimizations to ensure your page is relevant to your target keywords.  For example your Page Title should include your most important keywords.  Use your best-performing ads and landing page copy for hints about what effective SEO copy will be.

Page configuration.  Make sure your web page is properly configured and in good overall shape – for example, fix broken links, trim down excessive outbound links, and make sure your page loads fast – ideally in around 2 seconds.

Page content.  Now for the big one – create truly valuable and unique content on your page that emphasizes your keywords.  This one can take some time so leverage any resources you can,

Links.  Set up the internal linking structure throughout your site to point to your content using variations of your target keywords.

Promotion.  Now go market your page’s content to build links.

Your content placement report from PPC can include some clues for good link sites.  Look for other high authority sites in your space – industry organizations, partner sites, etc. that also rank well for your top terms.

Google is constantly making changes to its algorithms, which determine what websites appear in their natural search results and in what order they appear. Most changes do not have significant impacts, but Google’s recent change made between April 28th and May 3rd — called the “May Day Update” because it happened mostly on May 1st, but also “Mayday Update” because of its potential adverse impacts on websites — has resulted in the following for many websites:

• Rank of deeper individual pages within websites
• Rank for long tail keyword searches (three-plus words in the search query)

In a nutshell, Google has cracked down on quality for longer-tail keywords – making its evaluation of deeper individual website pages more similar to how it conducts natural search rankings for keyword searches with one-to-two words.

This is probably due to the fact that more and more searches these days contain more than three words, so it’s necessary for Google to ensure that its search results for these searches bring back the most relevant and highest quality results possible.

You can think of the change this way: your homepage is like the parent and it used to be able to boost up its children (the individual page on its website) just by having great authority itself — similar to how a parent’s reputation can often help children get a leg up in the world. But now, your individual pages have all grown up and are standing on their own two feet. Google is evaluating each of your website pages individually – for their own unique relevancy and individual page quality.

This individual evaluation will help Google ensure that even for the long-tail searches it is always providing a great set of search results.

What this means for websites:

• No more free rides for any of your individual pages based on your overall domain authority.
• All individual website pages must include unique and truly useful content.
• All individual website pages must have a strong back-link profile.

Who is typically “negatively” impacted by Google’s Mayday… er… May Day update?

• Deeper internal pages with duplicate content and no links
• Automatically-generated pages and content farms

Were you impacted?

Review your stats from around April 28th to May 3rd with an eye out on the following:

• Natural search traffic volumes coming to your deeper internal website pages
• Volume of natural search traffic you are received from long tail searches (three-plus keywords)

Google says the May Day change is here to stay, so what do you need to focus on?

There is nothing new here – just the same basic SEO principles, but now it’s imperative that your focus extends across all pages of your website, not just your home page and a few other top-level pages.

Here’s what you need to focus on for all individual pages of your website:

• Make sure you have unique, valuable and truly useful content on all of your individual pages within your site. How do you do this? Put yourself in the searcher’s shoes and think about what would truly help them in their quest for information that no one else is currently doing a great job of providing. Some examples include:

1. Reviews, videos, images, comments, etc. are all great ways to help make your content both unique and valuable to searchers. Leverage user generated content as much as possible so the workload is not so daunting.
2. If you have any copied or duplicate content (like from a manufacturer), replace it with your own unique content.

• Get lots of links for every single page. Ensure your link building campaigns focus on all of the individual pages for your site and not just your homepage and first tier pages. How do you do this?

1. Make it easy to link to your individual pages and encourage others to do this.
2. Link out to others in your blogs, forums, comments, etc to encourage others to link back to you.
3. Promote all of your content pieces individually.
4. Produce very unique and valuable content that others will want to link to.
5. Create a strong internal linking structure within the pages of your own website with long tail variations on anchor text.
6. Leverage social media to help get links tweets, or promoting specific pages with promotional offers and other incentives.

If you’ve been neglecting the deeper individual pages of your site, you can thank Google’s May Day for lighting a fire under your butt to give those pages some love.

Google “Everything” (also referred to as “blended search results”, or “universal search”) provides companies with several opportunities to appear on the first page of natural search results. The days of search results pages (SRPs) being limited to text links are ancient history. SRPs now includes a variety of results, from tweets to images and videos. We encourage you not to limit yourself to just one link presence on the first page, but to go for as many listings as possible. The larger your presence on that first page, the better your click-through rate (CTR) and brand recall will be.

We’ve compiled a list of eight opportunities for landing on page one of SRPs for your keywords that are relevant to most business types, together with a “Cliff’s Notes” version of key points on how to optimize each of them.

1. Organic Search Text Link. This is the traditional listing we think of that used to be the sole content of SRPs on Google. Key optimization points here include:

• Have a properly configured page (good page title, etc.) with relevant and original content related to your target keywords.
• Attain high quality, relevant links from authoritative sources for your keywords with a variety of relevant inbound link text.
• Have a URL that is short and relevant to your business name and keywords.
• To bolster your CTR, make sure your page title is less than 64 characters and includes your keywords at the beginning and your meta description tag is succinct and also includes your keywords at the beginning. Both your page title and meta description tag should be unique. For more on Google’s page title and meta description recommendations read here.

2. Paid Search Ad. These are the traditional AdWords text ads that appear at the very top and down the far right-hand side of the results. To optimize your quality score and CTR you can:

• Choose your keywords wisely – it’s actually good to double up. If you rank well for a keyword in natural search or get natural search traffic for a keyword, you can actually increase traffic and brand recall for that term by also having a paid search ad appear for it.
• To have a strong CTR, write ad copy that is highly relevant. This requires very tight ad group organization so you can get highlights in 2 or more lines of your ad copy by incorporating the keywords from your ad group directly into your ad copy in more than one location.
• Offer something unique from the competition in your ad copy.
• Have your ad take up as much space as possible on the page. Take advantage of location display, site links and product feed links to get more “free” lines of space to have your ad stand out.

3. Local 10-Pack Listing. The 10-pack is the box within the set of natural search results that includes a map and a listing of 10 local businesses. When the local 10-pack appears, it takes up a monster amount of space. In order to make your way into the 10-pack, you can:

• Claim your business listing on Google local. Also make sure your listing is accurately submitted to Localeze and InfoUSA.
• Complete all of your business information on Google local – every single field. When categorizing your business be sure to focus on search queries searchers are likely to use.
• Include images of your business with your local listing.
• Get reviews. Reach out to customers and offer incentives for them to post reviews.
• On your website itself be sure to include your local phone number and business address across your pages.
• Get inbound links to your site from local authorities and location oriented sites, such as local news organizations or local business associations.
• Submit a Geo Sitemap to Google – instructions can be found here. There’s also a great free tool that helps you create a Geo Sitemap.
• For more information on the Google 10-Pack, check out our blog post.

4. An Image. Images can also appear in the blended search results. In order to have your images appear here you can:

• Optimize your image alt attributes to include your target keywords.
• Optimize your image file name with your keywords. Be sure to separate the keywords in the file name using dashes.
• Optimize your image title tag, but this one doesn’t carry as much weight.
• Ensure the text surrounding the image on your page is relevant.
• If possible – try some inbound links, or even internal links with descriptive anchor text to further re-enforce your relevancy.
• Avoid going overboard on the number of images on any page, ensure the number of images is appropriate for the page content size.
• Include the word “picture” or “image” along with your keywords – these are very popular search terms.
• Make sure the image links to your website.

5. A Video. I’ve seen some search queries generate up to eight video listings on the first page of the results – what an opportunity! If you can your video to appear here, you can:

• Create and submit a video sitemap to Google.
• Include your keywords within the video sitemap, in the Title, Description, Tags and Category.
• Optimize your thumbnail image – include the code for the image in your sitemap, specify which one Google should use, make it 80X60 pixels and make sure it’s very relevant to the target keywords so searcher are likely to click on it.
• Get inbound links (even internal) with keyword rich anchor text.
• Make sure the content on your page that surrounds the video is highly relevant.
• Include the word “video” in with your target keyword phrase . Video is a very popular search term.
• Host your video on your website, so that you reap all the benefits.

6. News Listing. Especially for hot topics, news listings frequently make it to the first page of Google’s search results. To have your news item appear here, you can:

• Submit a News Sitemap to Google.
• Only submit original-content news, not republished or from a syndication feed.
• Make your news timely. Check out Google Trends to find keywords phrases that are currently hot and trendy for Google. Use these exact terms as target keywords for your news article.
• Make it a dynamic article – include recent updates and allow comments.
• Include your location. Google loves to show results closest to searchers, so let Google know the location the news article is relevant to and where it’s coming from.
• Have a strong publisher reputation. This can be influenced by how much and how often you produce original content for your news category.
• Do some basic article optimization – URL with keywords, relevant title, keywords in the content, etc.
• Include a .jpg image with relevant alt text and caption with no link.
• CTRs matter — so focus on relevant images and your best lines first to bolster your click-through rate.

7.  Twitter Feeds. Another aspect of universal search means that Twitter feeds can be included on the first page of the Google results. Here are some tips to get your tweets onto the first page (for a primer on Twitter and associated lingo, check out this blog post first):

• Make your twitter handle relevant – your company name is a great choice since it will add to your first page presence. Or, make your handle something simple based on target keywords.
• Be sure to include your target keywords into your Twitter bio and page description.
• Get as many “high quality” followers as possible. These should be highly credible sources for your target areas with high volumes of followers themselves.
• Make sure the first words of your tweet include your most highly prized keywords.
• Use a hash tag before your target keyword, but limit yourself to one hash tag per tweet.
• Your hash tag keyword should also be included in your tweet content if you can do this naturally.
• Timely topics and re-tweets are great – another great use for Google Trends.
• Not only can you tweets appear, but your twitter profile can appear on the first page of the results, too, so be sure to include a link from the Twitter profile to your website.

8.  Product Listing. Feed your products to Google Shopping.  Try thinking outside the box here: you can feed your available hotel rooms, pictures of your software product, pictures of homes for sale — it doesn’t just have to be traditional e-commerce products, but anything that’s for sale on the Web.

• Set up your product feed into Google.
• Provide very frequent updates to your feed — daily, if possible.
• Do some link building on your specific products.
• Include keywords in your product names, product descriptions (in the first words), and product images (separated by dashes in the image file name).
• Optimize your product categories for specific keyword terms.
• Fill in every single detail for the product that you possibly can.
• Don’t use any marketing or sales terms in your product feed.  Stick to words that people would use to find you, not necessarily how you refer to things.
• Including holiday or special event terms can be really beneficial for more long-tail terms.
• Connect to your Google AdWords account so that you get your products to also display along with your AdWords ad.
• Always set your location.
• Get ratings. Offer incentives to get a volume of high rates.
• Have a competitive price (including tax and shipping, if applicable).

As with everything else online – the following four main principles apply and will always get you results:

1. Make great, original content…
2. …from your searchers eyes (that is, use terms your searchers use to look for your offerings)…
3. …that is popular (thanks to links, ratings, followers)…
4. …and locally relevant (whether at the country level or a small town level, always indicate where you are from).

Happy first page domination to you!