Techdirt posted earlier this month to talk about the relatively underwhelming need for Powerset.

We never understood the hype around Powerset. It was the latest in an extremely long line of startups that claimed to focus on “natural language search” — which is one of those holy grails for computer scientists who never stop to ask whether or not there’s actually any market demand for it. As Google has shown, people don’t need to use natural language to search. They’re just fine doing keyword search. Yet, for some unclear reason, Powerset was able to raise a ton of money at a ridiculous valuation, and did so using all sorts of buzzwords (and vague patent threats). But when it finally released a product (just to search Wikipedia) it proved to be rather ho hum. Searching Wikipedia via other means was still more effective.

Many people consider that Natural language searching would only be useful in a two areas:
1. The Jitterbug phone demographic
2. College students caught in a space/time continuum 2 decades ago

The fact is, natural language searches have not become extinct, they have just evolved for the current market. The generations that grew up with an on the internet now think in terms of keywords when they are looking for information. The askjeeves.com search engine tried to go the way of Jeopardy by asking users to search in the form of a question. It turned out to be more difficult to change the innate way people learned to search.
When internet users need to find information, they mostly instinctively form their thoughts by keyword. It was not taught so much as it was learned.

While keyword searches are growing in length, they still average only about 2-3 words. The communication method and the way in which people form searches are much the way toddlers communicate. Short, to the point, and with lot of nouns. A toddler can get his point across by simply yelling “Ball! Purple! Mine!” He doesn’t really need to say “I would like the purple ball for my own.” Just because the other words are missing, it doesn’t mean that the thought process isn’t there.

Keyword searches act in much the same manner. Users haven’t lost their ability to communicate or ask questions or form complete thoughts, they’ve just narrowed down the extraneous words to the ones that will focus the search the most.

I don’t think that natural language searches should be abandoned altogether, though. Someday soon we’ll just ask our computers directly for information, and personally I don’t think I can speak in just keywords. When the time comes for true interaction, natural language searches will have their day.

Michael Brito on Britopian.com began his own coversation on the merits of Social Media conversations verses tradtional search impressions. Obviously each person is biased by their personality in regards to what they value more.
Michael wrote:

So to address the original question of “What’s more important: a million impressions or 5 relationships? and considering that I am referring to all web users in general, I would say it depends who you ask. Paul would say impressions and then narrow it down to a click-through rate – conversion rate – revenue per keyword – cost per acquisition – blah blah blah. Yes, he is THAT ANALYICAL. For me it was about engagement, relationships, conversational sentiment and tone; and I could care less about the clicks and impressions.

Now, Michael’s aquaintance was ‘That Analytical Guy’ focused on the hard numbers, and let’s face it, most companies drill down to the importance of a number. If it’s not quantifiable, than it can’t be put in a spreadsheet. If it’s not in a spreadsheet, then the top execs aren’t looking at it. If the top execs aren’t looking at it, it’s not important. The aquaintance was obviously biased based on what his job, and his personality deemed important. He was a numbers guy.
Michael, on the other hand, is a bigger-picture-guy. He wants to build the relationships, which are the backbone in social media marketing, in order to build his business. That the two of them work together is probably a sign of a healthy buisness strategy.
It’s Michael’s next point that intriqued me:

I would also say that the users who were browsing HP Shopping were “ready to buy” and could care less about engagement and conversations at that precise moment; which is probably a common scenario for most e-commerce related businesses, where users do want to be sold something.

It’s true that once customers are on your site, they’re ready to buy, especially if they’ve clicked directly to you and are searching your products, and Michael explicitly recognizes that.

To do social media justice, however, you have to remember that a good company reputation thorugh social media is imperative. For the social influencers, a bad experience with a company can spread like internet wildfire, and the hundred and thousands of social contacts will read about that bad experience, and believe me, they’ll stay away from the company. The same is true of a good experience read by thousands of contacts…the company in question will be left with a good impression (HA!) in thousands of potential customer’s phychees.

Some businesses just assume that search engine optimization is search engine optimization, out there in the black, battling it out with keywords and meta tags and links. They make no differentiation between National SEO and Local SEO, but they should.

The reality is that there are many kinds of SEO. A National SEO campaign should be run differently than a Local SEO campaign. The differences aren’t monumental. If anything the differences are small, but they add up big in the end.

Geographical Terms: If your business is focused on a certain locality or region, you need to have that clearly stated within your content, title and meta tags. When you are running a Local SEO campaign, it is imperative that you include the appropriate geographical terms in your title tags and on each and every page of your site. The geographical terms should include the city, region, and state(s) that you serve. (This is actually a controversial issue, with some experts saying that having the geo location on the home page is enough, but most experts agree that the information is so easy to add to a page that it is ridiculous to not do it.)

Location Keywords: This is crucial for in inbound anchor texts, as are citations that reference your business with the full address.

Customer Reviews: Customer reviews are one of the most important factors in Local SEO. When smaller Local businesses are competing with the big box giants for customers, a good review can steer a lot of traffic to your site. Given the option, most consumers would rather avoid the “You’re a Number, Not a Name” mentality of the big box chains.

Is your site ready to submit to search engines for promotion? Too many businesses throw their website out to the masses before it’s ready, while a little planning and foresight could make a big difference.

These are some advertising and SEO practice tips to use a checklist when you are preparing your company website.

1. Submit to Search Engines Wisely
Submit your site once every 4-6 weeks or so, with 5 weeks being a good target. While specific directories have their own criteria for submissions, try to remember that submitting too often may be viewed by the directories as spamming, giving you a lower ranking or, worse, omission. Remember to submit your site using the same domain name every time. Many of the larger sites, such as Google, have strick guidelines regarding multiple domain names that point back to the same site, especially if they are just mirrors.
If you don’t have at least your home page and 3 other pages completed, with appropriate content, wait on your submission.

Remember: “Under Construction” or “Coming Soon” is not a page, it’s a bookmark.

2. Home page Prioritization
Your homepage needs to be easily read by two things: People, and Search Engines. (That includes bots.) Avoid the dreaded “Under Construction” and “Coming Soon” links. Customers don’t appreciate them, and search engines like content content content. The only time that “Coming Soon” would be okay is if you have specific descriptions about what is coming soon. But really, it’s not a great idea, so skip it altogether.

Your homepage is not generally the place for heavy flash multimedia effects. Those are difficult to optimize for search engines and visitors with slower connections may get discouraged with the time needed to get into your site and leave it all together..

Most importantly, remember, always always have a site map!

A good internet marketing firm will increase your traffic, conversion rates, and general product or service awareness in your target market. There are many ways for a firm to manage your advertisement campaign, and they differ wildly depending on the company that you hire.

Advertising/Marketing firms and webmasters that promise the quickest results with the dirtiest of strategies are to be avoided all together. Unethical companies will try to get their clients to buy into Commando Marketing, using tricks such as hidden text, interlinking, keyword stuffing, and more.

Under NO circumstances should you risk your company’s reputation and online presence with following BANNED practices:

Keyword Stuffing
One of the most commonly abused SEO tactics, this is when a webmaster or SEO places a large number of instances of the targeted keyword phrase in hopes that the search engine will read this as relevant. The text is usually unreadable except as a string of keywords. It is usually added at the bottom of a page and in a very small font size.

Hidden Text
Hidden text is using text that is set at the same color as the background or very close to it. The idea is that search engines read a load of keywords on a page that is simply trying to bump it’s ratings, without having actual relevant content. This is blatant spam!

The above examples are NOT legitimate SEO strategies. Using them will get your website penalized and possibly blacklisted. If you have hired an advertising/marketing firm for your online business, and they recommend or, even worse, actually implement strategies such as this, it is your website and your business that will pay the price.

BigOak blog wrote a great piece on the continued usefulness of Wiki in the Local Search Engine Optimization wars. A lot of site developers stear clear Wikipedia due to it’s no follow policy enacted last year, but it’s extraordinary popularity with Google is still an essential SEO tool, if you use it wisely. So consider this your reminder to not erase Wiki from your Local Search Engine Optimization strategy.

Even though Wikipedia added nofollow tags in early 2007, backlinks you manage to snag there will still help you from an SEO standpoint. Why? One simple reason: content scrapers. Wikipedia is believed to be the most heavily scraped site in the history of the Internet.

Let’s take this example. Say you were able to secure an external link on the Wikipedia page about cats, here. Congratulations. You just snagged a dofollow link on a PR 4 page, here. Answers.com is one of the many legitimate sites that scrapes content from Wikipedia, and it’s an authority one at that. They were nice enough to keep the content they scrape from Wikipedia dofollow. So how many backlinks will you pick up in the future from that one Wikipedia link? Too many to list, provided your link stays on Wikipedia for any length of time

Back on topic, finding sites that scrape Wikipedia is easy. Infinitely harder is getting external links to stick on Wikipedia. Here are two methods:
1.Fill in missing citation gaps. Wikipedia will occasionally have sentences with a “citation needed” link after them. Create content on your site that revolves around that missing citation. If its quality is high enough, Wikipedia may let that pass as the citation.
2.Manufacture a Wikipedia page that has high relevancy to an existing page. Link to that new page from an existing Wikipedia page. Add an external link to the new page as a reference. This has a higher probability of sticking since the page is fresh and needs sources.

Don’t let the fact that Wikipedia added nofollow tags stop you from using it in your link building endeavors.

Success success

Google Trends is a tool that is designed to show the trends in searches for specific keywords. The statistics go back to the beginning of 2004, and are updated daily. If your business marketing relies even slightly on local search engine optimization, then keywords are a big part of your life. You need to know what keywords potential customers are looking for in order to further customize your SEO campaign to capitalize on that.

So to sum up, you need to know the best keywords for your search engine optimization strategy. And Google Trends will succinctly spit back the statistics on any keywords you enter into it.

Robert Niles wrote an entertaining yet very informative article on Google Trends that can give you some nice examples on how the tool can work for you.

If you’ve not yet discovered Google Trends, click over and have yourself a look.
Google Trends allows you to select up to five words or phrases, then shows you how those search terms rate relative to one another in both the volume of search queries handled by Google, as well as news references tracked by the search engine. It’s an addictive site for a data geek, like me, and essential for any online publisher who wants to optimize his or her publication to attract more visitors from search engines, such as Google.
Your site’s traffic logs ought to show you which search terms readers are using to find your website. But Google Trends shows which terms people are using to look for sites. That’s a key distinction. With Google Trends, you can test related search terms that are not showing up in your traffic logs, to see if they are, in fact, more popular than the terms people are using to find your site. If they are, you will have found the terms you need to start emphasizing in your site’s content and navigation design.
Plus, the site’s just fun to play with.

Most companies have the main Search Engine Optimization tactics already memorized. (Not always followed, but always memorized.) Most articles on SEO press the need for headlines, metatags, and alt tags, but there are a few SEO tips that aren’t always included with the ‘Big Guys.’

True SEO can get complicated, and in all that complication, sometimes the little things are forgotten.

Here are some simple hints to remind you take a step back and get a fresh perspective on things. We’ll cover the more complicated stuff in a later post.

Fortune Favors the Bold. Remember to use your bold tags around one or two of the keywords on each page. Don’t overuse it, though! Fortune doesn’t favor the obnoxious.

Ezine Articles: Search out Ezines in your particular industry and offer them good content about your specialty. Ezine’s usually archive their articles and the links stay live for a long time.

Create Multiple Domains. Search Engines often only list one page per domain, so if your company can warrant multiple domains, you just scored yourself multiple listings on the search engine.

Back off on the Anchor Text: With all the pressure of including anchor text, some inexperienced businesses and SEO consultants over do it, to the detriment of the site. Vary the anchor text on your site and published content; don’t always use the same phrases! If it was that easy, the cheap software promising to optimize your site for SEO would cost a whole lot more.

Site Maps: Every site, no matter the size, needs a site map. Why? Because if every page links to a site map, then search engine robots can scan your site in two steps… page, site map, done.

There isn’t any doubt that local Search Engine Optimization Marketing is a primary goal of most webmasters. It is through local SEO that a business can either move to the head of the search engine pack or be lost somewhere around page 27, which might as well be Nowheresville, Invisastate.

Studying the SEO market can be both time consuming and tedious, but when you’re trying to figure out your competition’s strategy in order to beat them, SEO can turn into game of cat and mouse. A successful marketer needs to find the keywords being used for a competitor’s successful site and develop a strategy to get ahead of them in line. You can’t out play another team if you don’t know the rules they’re playing by.

There are new products on the market that can find out what a specific domain’s keywords are, and other products that center on finding what keywords are being used and by whom.

SpyFu offers strategic research and competitive analysis on keywords. It will find out what keywords your competition is bidding on to optimize their own rankings. Once you know this you can narrow your own local SEO campaign and focus on those words. This can save your business costly trial and error keyword campaigns that generate scattered and possibly useless results.

If Local SEO is at all confusing to you though, don’t expect a product like SpyFu to solve your marketing issues. It won’t. It is a tool to help experienced webmasters and SEO marketing execs make the best and most efficient use of their time. A scapel in your hand won’t make you a Doctor, and SpyFu won’t implement the right local SEO marketing campaign for you.

Matt Cutts recently gave a presentation to a techie crowd at a conference and included the PowerPoint presentation slideshow on his blog. To be honest, it’s rather boring, but he did give three really useful tips about how to keep spammers at bay. Here they are (in a nutshell):

• Build trust and reputation
• Don’t be a target
• Frustrate them so they spend time and money

I particularly like tips #1 and 3. If you build your local business as a trustworthy business and one will a solid reputation for good business practices then you’ll be a lot less touchable. Secondly, make it difficult for spammers to easily do injury to you and they will be less likely to do so. But how does Matt Cutts suggest doing that? One way is by using CAPTCHA.

A CAPTCHA is a simple test that a human can perform but a computer can’t. For instance, what is 5 + 4? Any human can add two single digit numbers, but computers can’t do that (yet). They also can’t type a single word that you tell them to type. If you say “Type the word Pickle” then all a human has to do is type exactly what they see. But computers can’t see so they’ll not be able to pass the test.

These simple tests will drive out most spammers so if you put them to use on your local business website then you’ll find yourself deleting a lot less useless comments.

There’s a new search engine in town that hopes to topple Google. It’s called Powerset. I’ve already read two reviews of Powerset, as well as tried it out for myself, and the two reviews could not have been different. Both were by bloggers that I respect and admire.

Greg Sterling of Screenwerk likes Powerset. Andy Beal of Marketing Pilgrim doesn’t. They both make good points.

Andy Beal is right when he says that Powerset simply appears to be another way to search Wikipedia. But I’d hope that Powerset has plans to take their search engine beyond Wikipedia. Just for the record, they do also pull information from Freebase, as pointed out by Greg Sterling. But the overriding question is, does it provide anything valuable?

I’ll have to agree with Greg Sterling and say that there is some value in it. I tested a query that would intentionally be ambiguous. “Poetry schools” can mean all sorts of things. Under traditional keyword-type queries, anything that mentions the word poetry or school, if the query is made without quotation marks, would be pulled into the SERP. If I’m looking for information specifically about poetic movements, which is what the terms Poetry Schools typically refers to, then the keyword-type query wouldn’t prove much helpful. I tested it in Google and I was right. I got a few results in the top 10 that were helpful, but most of them were not.

On the other hand, Powerset gave me exactly what I was looking for, mostly from Wikipedia and some from Freebase, but without the fluff that came in Google. So that’s one query in particular where Powerset was more useful. But what about local search?

Local searchers are going to be looking for information that is useful to them in their particular neck of the woods. For most people, especially rural searchers, Wikipedia isn’t going to be much help. A search for Texas brought up information organized into 4 tabs: Geographically (about the state of Texas), TV Series, Band, and Novel. In other words, somewhat helpful. But what about Sweetwater, Texas? 515 Wikipedia articles that mention Sweetwater, Texas, a community with less than 15,000 residents.

Among the type of entries found for Sweetwater, Texas are:

• Rattlesnake Roundup
• KTXS-TV
• Registered Historic Places
• Libby Thompson (a prostitute and madam of a famous brothel)
• Women Airforce Service Pilots
• Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway
• Bat Masterson (his first gunfight took place in Sweetwater, Texas)
• Clyde L. Garrett
• Asa Earl Carter
• Willie Amos
• Active Worlds
• Pig Show

So does Powerset, or semantic search, have any local search applications? Possibly. I think so in limited terms, but it can’t go on forever relying on Wikipedia. If Powerset could tap into the search algorithms of the major search engines and aggregate them with its semantic search technology then that would prove a lot more useful. It would have to filter out the fluff that is found and simply include useful search results based on the semantic intentions of the searcher - if that is possible. But for now, let’s suffice it to say, it’s off to a not-half-bad start.

Greg Howlett stepped on some toes with his post about SEO being a dying industry. Of course, he was just repeating what Shoemoney said a day earlier. Nevertheless, I like what Howlett said in this paragraph:

I think, however, that you would be better served by largely forgetting about SEO and focusing instead on building your brand.

That’s essentially what Shoemoney said too. Here’s a sentence buried within the meat of his post:

I don’t think anyone can argue that core SEO has gotten less valuable over the years and I see that trend continuing.

The overarching question is, are they right? And if so, what will this do for local search engine optimization?

Well, I do think that Shoemoney’s observation on SEO declining in value over the years is partially correct. It isn’t that it has declined in value per se, but that it has gotten more difficult to achieve for the average business. It is now more important to hire a professional SEO to help you rank better, but both Shoemoney and Howlett may have a point in that the current trend of hiring an SEO who strictly does technical SEO is going to fall by the wayside. If your SEO is not proficient in branding and marketing strategies then you might as well ditch him for someone who is because that is the future of SEO in general and local SEO in particular.

Branding has always been a core aspect of business marketing, whether we are talking local business or global business. Online, it’s even more important because people do not want to do business with someone they don’t know. You can have the best SEO in the world, but if you can’t built trust with your target market then your business will die. That’s where branding comes in. This principle is no less true if you operate a local business, but with local branding you have the added advantage of being able to draw your customers to your physical location to meet you face to face. Still, you’ll need to rely on branding to make that happen.

The future of local advertising online lies in your ability to create a brand that people will trust. SEO will just be a part of that branding process, though I don’t think that SEO will necessarily die out. It will simply be incorporated into the branding process. I think that’s what Greg Howlett meant with his follow-up post, and I can see the same the trending as well.

Debra Mastaler asked a great question on her blog, Link Spiel:

what’s better at giving us the quick qualifying factor like the PageRank toolbar?

In other words, she wants to know if there is a resource that webmasters can turn to in order to find information on authority - a kind of one-size-fits-all way to determine which sites are the greatest authorities within their niche. Then she recommends Myriad Search.

I hadn’t heard of Myriad Search until I read Link Spiel’s post on it. Then I tried it out. It seems a bit limited, but it does do what it promises to do and deliver results from the four top search engines for a particular key phrase. It looks like a good tool for competitive research.

Just for giggles, I performed a search for “Gettysburg Pennsylvania.” I wanted to try the local angle to see what would happen. You can see the results of that search here.

If I were truly interested in building a website to search the local market of Gettysburg Pennsylvania and wanted to use that place name as my primary keyword then this search for that key phrase is very telling. Here’s what I see:

• The most authoritative site for that key phrase is www.gettysburg.com. Not surprising.
• The most authoritative site for my key phrase is No. 1 on 3 of the top 4 search engines.
• It is also No. 2 on the fourth search engine (Yahoo!).
• The second most authoritative site for the local place name I’m interested in is a government website (the National Park Service) - very important to know that for competitive analysis!
• The Gettysburg Welcome Center’s website is the the third most authoritative site on the local key phrase.
• Also, GWCs website has only half the authority as the No. 1 most authoritative site - great information!
• Coming in below GWC are Gettysburg College, Wikipedia (who’d have thunk?), the local newspaper, and various nonprofits, tourism websites, and local businesses.

Now I know what the competitive landscape is for my key search term. But what if I wanted to compete locally for the key phrase “auto mechanic?”

Well, I tried using my first key phrase along with “auto mechanic,” putting both key phrases in quotes and all I got back was a bunch of useless websites. So let’s try it without the quotes. Here are the results of that search.

I can see who the most authoritative site in Gettysburg for the term “auto mechanic.” It truly is a competitor and I know where he ranks in each of the search engines. It doesn’t look like any of my other competitors are even close. After Mike’s Towing and Recovery, it’s government websites and the Chamber of Commerce of Gettysburg. The next real competitor is an About Us page for Eagle Software, which makes software for auto shops. It looks like I have an in here if I was an auto mechanic in Gettysburg.

So you can see how useful this tool is for doing competitive research at the local level. I hope you get some use of it.

Not all businesses that use local search engine optimization are actually local. They also can be larger companies that aim small in order to eliminate much of the competition. While this is a useful technique, it can also be used as spam, so you do have to be careful.

When a bigger company uses local search engine optimization, it is often used to help bring in extra traffic from local searches. There is often too much competition for general keywords like “amusement parks”, but if you go with “Vancouver amusement parks” you will have a far better chance of being ranked.

This is a technique that many businesses are using these days to increase traffic to their sites. Some use specific local search engine optimization on the whole website, others focus on a different area per page and still others actually set up separate websites for each area. Whichever technique is used, it can really help boost your traffic.

Local search engine optimization is probably one of the most valuable things you can do for your business. It allows people in the area to find you while doing a simple search online and it is completely free, unlike regular advertising.

With larger numbers searching for local businesses every year, experts are predicting a 16% increase in local search engine optimization by 2012. That may not seem like much, but it´s extremely fast growth for this area.

With local search engine optimization doing so well, we can expect to see a lot more competition coming up shortly, so it´s a good idea to hone those local SEO techniques now, before everyone jumps into the water!