Without unique titles the search engine spiders that crawl your website will have less of a chance of understanding what the page is about as well as how to distinguish it from the rest of your site. Therefor your listing in search engine results pages (SERPS)will will suffer.

In fact it’s more than just an SEO tip. When using sharing a link on many social media platforms the show the title of the page that you the link goes to. If the title has nothing to do with what’s on the page, people will not know what the page is about and will be less likely to click on your link. Another example is for pay per click advertising. If you use Google Adwords Google may penalize you because it thinks your page doesn’t match the keywords you’ve selected and as a result your bids will be artificially high.

So, Always use unique titles for each page on your website. It’s not just and SEO tip it’s a basic usability tip.

I wasn’t surprised by the climb in interest for social media. Mid 2008 is when it really started to explode. What I did find interesting is the trend between SEO and search engine optimization. Back in 2004 both terms were searched on about the same amount. However, in the end of 2004 and 2005 search engine optimization dropped off and SEO continued to climb.

The question is does this mean that more people understand that SEO means search engine optimization and therefor search for SEO or is it just that SEO is a buzz word that has really hit the mainstream. What do you think?

“Yahoo Japan Corp. said Tuesday that it will use Google technology to run its search engine and search ad delivery system, after a similar deal in the U.S. was derailed by regulators concerned about a monopoly.”

Did you know that Yahoo search in the USA is dead?

A similar deal was attempted in the USA, but regulators threatened to block it because of fears the move would create a monopoly in search. Instead Yahoo in the USA is now run on Microsoft’s search engine Bing.

Planning on optimizing for the Japanese market?

Google isn’t the main player in the Japanese market. Unlike the USA Yahoo Japan receives about 50% of search engine traffic. Combined they draw 80%. The Japanese regulators seem to be less concerned with a search engine monopoly than US regulators. Although, a comparatively small market if the deal goes through Bing could really lose out in Japan.

More news about the Search Engine Industry

This is my argument for why the level of truly great SEO I described above, belongs on the list of unfair competitive advantages.

1. It’s massively hard to duplicate
2. It’s prohibitively expensive to buy (and just buying the link influence signals violates guidelines)
3. It requires tremendous creativity paired with exceptional execution and a time-bounded network effect (all of the sites I mentioned have dramatically increased their lead over time and continue to do so) -randfish

Many people think because it is something they “can do on their own” that there is not much value in SEO. They think they can do it for free. But even if you have someone internally that has the knowledge to do this for your business, it costs time and their salary. The fact is most companies don’t have the knowledge to do SEO well and they don’t have the time, because they are busy running their business. I agree with randfish, good SEO is a huge competitive advantage because it brings in more leads, exposure, brand recognition, etc..

But do YOU have the time??

Once when I was applying for a job, I think it was in 2006, I had been doing some of my own work in the side under my company name, and the interviewer tried to be slick and in the middle of discussing something else he dropped, “so what’s Blackbird e-Solutions”. I was prepared though and explained it was a side project I was working on. For many people that might have been a little scary, but I fully expect that people will check up on me online.

So, if we know everyone is Binging, Yahooing and Googling each other (sounds a bit obscene doesn’t it?) What can we do about it? Is there anyway to make sure people find what you want them too? Yes and no. What I mean is there is no way to control what other people are posting on line about you. Unless it is some sort of slander and worth suing for but by then the damage is usually done. There was a time when I controlled the top ten for “bryan coe“, now I think 5 out of 10 are sites or profiles I control. Including 1-4.

There are a few things you can do to get your import stuff on the top of the search results.

1. Register a domain name in your name.
This is a great one, but can be tough if your name is Joe Smith. I use bryancoe.us but also own bryan-coe.com as well as others. Just registering it is not enough though, but we’ll come back to this. You ca register you domain here: 1&1 Internet

2. Set up a personal blog.
This can be fun. I started one when I was living a in Europe and wanted to be able to keep my friends and family up to date. (Just so you know this was before Facebook even MySpace) Here some popular blog platforms that make it easy: Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, WordPress

3. Set up social media profiles.
Facebook carries a enormous ranking power, so it’s natural that the profiles also do. You can even customize your own url. The same goes for LinkedIn: Vanity URL. There are a tone of others out there too. Check out the list on Wikipedia: Social Media

4. Set up a website.
This one is for the more ambitious person, but there are some great open source content management systems out there that can make it quite easy WordPress, Joomla, Drupal . Plus many hosting companies offer free site development tools. 1&1 Internet

5. Point your domain.
To come back to the custom domain idea. If you are not so ambitious to set up your own blog or site, that’s ok too. You can register your domain and then point it to one of your social media profiles, such as Facebook or LinkedIn. Ask your host or where you registered your domain for how to do this.

These tips should help you protect your personal brand and help people find what you want them to find.

Universal search has actually been around for some time. All the way back in 2006 when I did some work for Google, we were testing it before it went live in the spring of 2007. Even though it has been over 3 years since it went live, many companies, SEO firms and marketing agencies are still not taking advantage of it.

Search results used to be a very simple and rather boring list of links with the standard being 10 results per page. With Universal search Google, as well as other search engines, added different types of media including images, video, blogs, books and news. The example below shows a simple example for “cats”.

The idea is to give users more complete results. So, what does this do for you and how can you take advantage of it?

Expand Brand Recognition

One of the biggest benefits of using universal search optimization is multiple rankings. By presenting your material in various types of media you greatly expand your chances showing up multiple times in the search engine results. This will help your brand recognition and visibility. Using images and video on your site, and tagging them correctly, is one way to take advantage of this. Hosting your video on YouTube also gives you another avenue get listed. So does hosting your images on a site like Flickr. Get it? Each image, video has the potential to be listed.

Use Social Media

With the popularity of social networking sites there are even more ways to get into search results. Universal search now also includes the sites I like to call the big three: LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. By setting up company profiles on these sites gives you even more ways to be found. Not only can you be found in individual search engines such as Facebook search, but now with multiple listings you could potentially fill the first page of results for your targeted keywords.

Drive It Home

If that’s not reason enough to optimize for universal search, there’s more! (use cheesy game show voice here). By showing up in the rankings multiple times you increase the chances of people clicking through to your content, but what do they do once they get there? You need to add links that lead back to your company site. This will give you more organically grown inbound links which will improve your ranking, provided that the site with the link doesn’t use “no-follow links“. Even if they do use no-follow links you are still increasing your chances of receiving secondary traffic to your site. Plus for the social media example, if you are writing engaging content people will share it with their friends which can also increase inbound links and traffic.

Below is an example of how to structure a campaign around a company site using search and social media.

Bottom line, when implemented correctly optimizing for universal search increases your chances of being found online, your brand recognition, your relevant inbound links, traffic to your site and the chance to reach a broader audience.

#2 Search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing are the enemy.
In fact it is quite the opposite and this one ties into myth #1. All three search engines have webmaster guidelines that can be found on their sites. Only when you are doing something that doesn’t follow their guidelines does your site get treated like an opponent. They want you to succeed!

Yahoo! Search Content Quality Guidelines
Guidelines for successful indexing: Bing
Google Webmaster guidelines

#3 You need to submit your website to 1,000 search engines to achieve a high ranking.
This is one of the oldest myths. 1st where are all these search engines and where do they get their data? Anyone that wants you to pay for a service like this is not looking out for your best interests. In fact they are most likely spamming the search engines, which could get your site penalized or completely removed from their results.

Actually there are not many true independent search engines out there. Check out this tool to see how they are all intertwined. Search engine Decoder.

This is a good post. To things really stick out though. Simply translating a keyword that works in one language to another language is definitely no guarantee for success. You really need to have intimate knowledge of the language/culture of the target market. Ideally you should use a native of the market to help you with keyword discovery. This leads into the second point: “Think local, in every way possible.” This is absolutely necessary for success!

Original post: Top International Search Marketing Failures to Avoid in 2010

“As we begin a new decade, our best chance for success in 2010 is to look back over the failures of our past in order to succeed with our programs in the future. Samuel Smiles once wrote, “We learn wisdom from failure much more than from success. We often discover what will do, by finding out what will not do; and probably he who never made a mistake never made a discovery.”