As widely varied as the information always is regarding search engines, the way they operate, and guesses and ideas about changes that may or not be happening, there is always someone out there who is making huge assumptions about their activity. The problem with speculation isn’t the nature of the act itself, but in how it can turn into the telephone game, and where the person in the front wrote a snippet of an article about funny page ranking activity, on the other end of the spectrum we have people telling you that they were banned from search for buying links or some such. The inception of search engine myths are a danger to the web, not for practiced experts in the field, but for those website owners and new comers to the space. They tend to run with the incredible ideas and notions, and forget that the simplest answer is likely the right one.

Every year we get some of the same myths making the rounds and they crop up year after year. At the outset so far it seems that the first myth to start us off is all about links and backlinking to your site. One of the largest offenders so far is that anchor link text is going to be at the very least a waste of time for you, at worst a detriment to your site. Now to start with, it’s dangerous to start spreading the misinformation that using anchor links on your site is a bad thing, as it is one of the simplest tools in the book to allow search engines to index your site quickly. The only danger that is associated with anchor text and links comes from ending up with backlinks coming from a less than squeaky clean site, but even then search engines have gotten much better at detecting and ignoring them. So the idea that anchor text and links are bad things, is a myth that needs to just finally go away, maybe 2013 will be the year that happens.

And I think one of the biggest myths that needs that just seems to stick around year after year along with the death of SEO, is that backlinks will no longer be the/a defining ranking signal. Anyone who has been involved in the industry for more than a couple of years will tell you, high quality, relevant backlinking isn’t going anywhere in terms of how important a factor it is where ranking is concerned. Here at Freshtraffic, we have more than 20 years of experience of working on the web and scouring the globe for high quality, relevant backlinks for our clients sites. And the number one thing we can take away with that experience is aside from upkeep on those links, is that backlinks are always important. The naysayers who are primarily calling out the death of backlinking are often marketers who are pushing fully into the social area, putting all of their eggs in a single basket. Bing has integrated social signals into their search, Facebook is coming out with their own version of a search engine, and Google has their own social angle with Google+, social is definitely here and it is here to stay. But if nearly two thirds of average online activity is done while not signed into a social account, it shows how much are those marketers losing by focusing on the social only angle.

Online optimization isn’t a one step process, the companies who will remain successful on the web will embrace all aspects of optimizing a clients website. Social, local, on page optimization and off page back link gathering and that is only the beginning of the optimization spectrum.

What was once the most popular place on the web, Yahoo and it’s landing pages, have made the announcement they’re going to make a push into search. With an aggressive new CEO in Marissa Mayer at the helm, she made the message loud and clear that Yahoo needs to improve their search offerings if they even hope to improve their own position in market share.

Way back when the web was still young, in the early 90′s Yahoo was pretty much the premier starting point of the web. It had news, email, a search engine, a small launch pad for you to start hopping about the web. The web portal enjoyed a very strong following for a number of years, until the upstart Google entered the scene and changed the search game forever with its introduction of Pagerank and the search algorithm that went with it. It was lean, mean, and very fast, and Yahoo remained comfortable, for a short time, but before long they found themselves slipping first in search share, and then as a starting point for the web.

From the call yesterday, Mayer admitted that big investments need to be made in the companies search offering, and they’ll carry that on into their mail and homepage as well.

“We have a big investment we want to make and a big push on search. We have lost some share in recent years and we’d like to regain some of that share and we have some ideas as to how.”

It is clear that Mayer is working aggressively to try and recapture some of the lost glory that the company enjoyed some 15 years ago, and ideally to return to its own search engine instead of relying on a Bing powered infrastructure. Initially it looks like Yahoo will start with a new, improved search user interface, and look for a way to rebuild their web home page status from there.

With the vast majority of the world becoming more and more digital and available online, there is so much opportunity for business growth and expansion that it’s almost dizzying. There are new areas of customers, there is no open or close time as your site can be online and selling your products or services for you 24/7. Internet marketing and proper online branding can place you and your business in the position to experience massive growth in business and in connections, all the way from the local sector to the global one.

But there is also the other side of the coin, the flip side of the web and it can be a terrible place. Not referencing black hat SEO or any of the under handed tricks that can be used to rank highly or do shady business. I’m speaking about online reviews, and online reputation management – they say that bad news travels faster than good, and that goes ten fold online.

Any business, especially the smaller local ones face high stakes when it comes to online reviews and their online reputation. According to a study conducted last year, approximately 72% of consumers surveyed said they trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations, while 52% said that positive online reviews make them more likely to use a local business. Yelp is one the more well known services which feature reviews of businesses, and businesses are beginning to encourage their visitors to use the service to rate them by offering prizes to verified posters. So where is the driving force behind that decision? A Harvard study conducted in 2011 found that a one-star increase among Yelp reviews of Seattle restaurants led to 5-9% growth in revenue.

Hitting a little closer to home, it was nearly a disastrous year downtown for some businesses as they were built and improved up around the newly returned Winnipeg Jets franchise to town. When the league was locked out and there was no hockey going on, those businesses began to falter. For any one of them to receive a bad review due to poor food, service, attitude, or what have you, it will be the death of their business. Negative reviews can happen, will happen, as not everyone is happy 100% of the time, but there are correct ways to respond, and incorrect ways. We’ll begin to cover that ground tomorrow, as it’s not a short topic.

You work long enough in the world of online marketing and you begin to recognize a handful of different client types. You can eventually group them into about 5 or so different client types, some more difficult to work with than others.

1) Believes they know your job because of a post client
This type of client is usually the type of client who may recognize that they need help online, but will continually question every step or change that you’ve made. While not entirely a negative client to have in your portfolio, it can lead to some difficulty if they enjoy tinkering with their website because they read something on a forum one time.

2)Needs to control every aspect client
This client, while more than happy to help increase their search positioning, is very tight fisted with the keys to the kingdom. They often are very slow with providing proper access needed to perform all of the tasks which can make your life as an SEO much easier on a day to day basis. When you need to make a change to their sites code, or heaven forbid, their content, you might suddenly find that you no longer have the required access with whish to work. Once you’ve touched base with the steps you need to take, and why, you normally receive the required access, but still extremely bothersome none the less.

3)Very helpful client
The dream client, fully recognizes that they need help online, has provided any and all access needed for you to complete your work and is more than happy to put you in touch with the people you need to reach. This is thankfully becoming more and more the norm in the industry, and while still a rare occurence in the wild of the internet, they do exist, do not give up hope!

4)Helpful, but uninformed client
These clients, while helpful in providing all of the access you require, are almost as troublesome as the client who needs to control every facet of your work, the troublesome part is they truly don’t understand they’re inhibiting your job by working on their website during or after you’ve made changes to their site. Or they have mistakenly uploaded an old backup of their website. Most of the time you just need to contact this client and let them know what they’ve done wrong, and why it’s a bad idea for them to make that type of mistake.

5)Disinterested, disillusioned client
This type of client has often been burned in the search arena, and while understanding of the fact that the world is going digital, really doesn’t believe that the work you do can impact their business. Often slow to pay for their services, or slow to provide you the contacts or access needed for you to truly excel at your work.

The decision was handed out yesterday from the FTC with Google versus everyone else basically, and while some people were happy with the decision, others obviously were not. In case you’ve missed any of the news surrounding the case, the very basic gist of what the complaint was that Google was controlling their monopoly of online search and marketing using anti-competitive practices.

There were a couple of good points made in the ruling, the main point being that a monopoly in a given market is not, by itself, illegal. In order to make a monopoly illegal, you need to gain, or maintain that hold using anti-competitive practices. This has been a long ongoing case in which the FTC poured over 9 million pages of documents after the charges were initially laid. And after all of that work, all of the discussions and meetings – Google has not violated any U.S. antitrust law.

It’s no real surprise that Google would be the target of such a case, they’re supremely dominant in the search industry. The Mountain View based giant accounted for 74.5% of all U.S. search advertising revenues in 2012. Microsoft on the other hand took in a significantly smaller share at 8% in the past year. The argument has long been that Google has been demoting or removing it’s rivals in their results pages in order to drive users to their own properties. And yet, after an investigation that nearly lasted for two years, and after what FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz described as “an incredibly thorough and careful investigation,” the FTC concluded unanimously that the evidence was lacking to charge Google.

While Google is going to make some changes in the way they do business, they’ve been cleared of any wrong doing where search is concerned, as it turns out they’re just better at it than the other options. From Ryan Radia, associate director of technology studies at the Competitive Enterprise Institute:

America’s antitrust laws are designed not to punish companies for growing too big or too unpopular, but to ensure no company stifles competition itself… The thriving Internet sector — a bright spot in America’s otherwise lackluster economy — shows no signs of suffering from too little competition.

There seems to be a fair amount of change coming on the search horizon, all of the previous updates over 2012 helped clean up the search results and with the growing acceptance of Google+ as a social network online marketing is set to make a transition. What exactly that transition will be, no one knows for sure in the search market, aside from the search engines that is. Just what Google and Microsoft have up their sleeves is anyones guess.

There have been the prediction blogs of what is to come in 2013, there have been the blogs reminiscing lost, or gained search rankings for 2012. But on the whole there seems to be two facets which are greatly worth considering for the coming search year. The first would be the social arena, if you don’t have a presence already it’s not too late to get in, but it will be a good bit of work, and the second is in the semantic side of search.

Social is easily described, having a Facebook, Google+ or Twitter page, as well as a blog all helps to draw your customers to your website. You can use the social side of the web in order to introduce sales, specials, or even the addition of a new product or service that you never previously offered in your business. The immediate benefit to using the social web is viewership, anyone and everyone who has subscribed to your feed has your new information the second you press that share button, instant traction. The barrier for entry as well, is extremely low, it’s your time. The more time you are able to put into your social pages and sites, the more potential traffic and news you can generate as a result. Google and Microsoft (Bing) haven’t fully taken on social signals as a heavy ranking factor, although they’re slowly getting there. Just how they will decide to leverage the social signals with other SEO efforts is yet to be seen however. 2013 could be another year of swings up and down the search results.

The other topic which bears some consideration is in the semantic side of search. Using proper markup in your webpages allows the search engines to easily and rapidly generate rich snippets for your website, increasing organic visibility and as a likely result generating more traffic to your site. One of the most basic forms of a rich snippet for example are the breadcrumbs which can be generated by search engine bots visiting your website. Take the search result for Facebook as an example, with only 10 results displayed on a search page, when the top 20% of the page is dominated with internal pages to your search query it definitely helps influence your clicks.

There is a saying that goes something like “If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it must be a duck”. It seems however, that contrary to the aforementioned saying, that even though everything pointed to an algorithm shift late last week, there wasn’t one. All of the signs were there, and the search results pages reacted in such a way that it seemed clear there was one.

Some of the signs that you can look for on the surface are fairly obvious, but some of the shifts need a long term history to double check information against. One of the first things you see as a user, when your results page comes up and you find you don’t recognize any of the returned values, that would be your first clue that there is activity within the algorithm. These shifts don’t often drastically affect the long term results, but an example of a large shift would be when Panda, Penguin, and the EMD (Exact Match Domain) were implemented.

Getting a little more in depth with examining the results page, a fairly common result of the algorithm making any kind of a shift is having a page built of mainly internal pages. To explain, instead of seeing a results page with addresses of www.abc.ca, you see internal pages, www.abc.ca/our-story.html. It is a change that is less noticeable than having a page of results that you don’t recognize, but it is this change that those who work in the realm of search optimization will look for first.

A much more in depth analysis can take place with the SERPs if you have the historical data for a website you manage. This information is one of the larger metrics that we will use as SEOs to determine if there has been a sudden change. Using the historical data we’ve compiled monitoring your website while helping you improve your online rankings will enable us to give a clearer answer to any questions you may have if you’ve suddenly found you’re no longer on the front page.

There is a new player in the mobile search world, one hoping to possibly take on the incredible domination of Google on the mobile front. Facebook has retooled one of their previous features to function as a local search technology, with a catch or two. The function which has been updated, “Previously Nearby” showed you where your friends had checked-in. With the recent update to the feather, it now shows where your friends have checked-in but more importantly, it will also show you local businesses, it has become a local search tool.

You can use the feature to search or browse the listings based on ratings, friend check-ins, as well as the amount of Likes and recommendations. The first filter your search has to pass through is your friend network, but if your friends haven’t visited any of the local businesses the the larger Facebook network will act as the first line of ordering. The idea behind the change is to likely have more people use the check-in feature, as you won’t be able to rate a business if you do not. The basic service idea would be to show you where your friends have been, and how positive, or negative, their experience was.

As a business owner, there are a few hurdles you need to overcome in order to grow, or maintain your position. First and foremost, you would need a Facebook Page to even be inducted into their search service, no Page, no listing. Some of the social media branding advice from Facebook includes:

• Update your Page to include all of your basic information, including your address, store hours, phone number, and details about your business in the About section
• Update your category to make sure you appear when people are looking for your specific type of business
• Encourage your consumers to like, check into, rate, and recommend your place

At present the feature isn’t prominently on display on mobile devices, it is buried in one of the menus effectively rendering it invisible, but that is only the temporary setting. Facebook doesn’t have the massive database of customer reviews that Yelp has, or even that Google has in their database, but with the sheer amount of mobile users that Facebook has on a monthly bases (600 million active) it won’t take long for it to grow. The only one other catch that exists within the new Nearby app, is the use is currently only on the mobile platform. It is a sensible move, as users have to have a mobile connected device to use the check-in feature as it is, but it will likely make it’s desktop debut should everything go well on the mobile front. We may be seeing the first stages of Facebook making a play into the search world with this iteration of local reviews and results pages.

Using the web to find the information and services isn’t a difficult task, most of the time it can be a mundane process to tell the truth. You visit your preferred search provider, type in your terms and go from there. So why such the big deal about who stole what idea from whom, and the fuss over having social results in our search results when they’re entirely different pieces of information?

Because after all, that’s all the web is, a cluster of information which you cherry pick what you want from it. Google has their knowledge graph, which is like looking at a Coles notes version of what you’ve searched for, and Bing has recently adopted the idea and called it Snapshots. It provides the same brief information delivery niche, and likely doesn’t get noticed a good 70% of the time. It’s not because Googles version is just that much better, they’re virtually identical in how they display and offer data, and it likely gets passed over just as much as the Bing variation. It’s just another method to getting the information out there when you search.

How about the social side of the web, there’s Facebook, the dinosaur of Myspace and Google+. Facebook is the monster on the web, with more than a billion accounts passed this year, if they can just figure out what to do with all of the noise that the site generates, perhaps it can come out with some useable information at some point. Because Facebook doesn’t really have a way to generate money, it has it’s few ads that it runs and preferred postings, but that’s been done before and as much as people on the web like change, the ad spaces on Facebook don’t get used anywhere near the same level as the spaces on Yahoo, Bing and Google.

Bing and Google both have their own ideas for meshing the social side of the web into the informative side, but neither has found that magic formula that delivers what the users of today are looking for. On average when someone completes a search, they’re already 50% of the way qualified, either as a buyer or a subscriber – they were prompted by something outside the web in the first place. Facebook doesn’t have the search fomula nailed down to provide any kind of search results page, and the search engines haven’t worked out how to weave the social side of the web into the informational. Yet.

We’ve seen the web grow in leaps and bounds over the last year, the search algorithms have taken the results pages through dips, dives, ducks and doges, and 2013 will likely continue more of the same. The year is likely going to start out fast and who knows, maybe the world will finally see the ideal implementation of a social and search mix on a results page.

Typically when you want to learn the answer to a question, or you want to find the name of that actor in the show you saw, you turn to the internet. Most of the time you have an idea on what site you need to visit to learn your answers, but when you’re not entirely sure where to start you always go back to the beginning of the web. While it’s not really the beginning of the web, search engines do a great job of being a front page, which you can use to access the information you’re looking for.

The web, the way that we interact with it, websites, and search engines have all changed a great deal since this whole thing began. At first the web was just some random websites, that in order to access you needed the IP to get to them. Primarily text based and only informational, it was no where near what we have today. Search engines, Google especially so, have caught the attention of the world. Privacy issues, defamation cases, anti-trust lawsuits, all of them pointed at the largest web index out there, mostly because they’re number one. There is absolute truth about the way Google shares your account information with any devices you use while signed in, it’s how the service learns to deliver you results which you might be interested in. Anti-trust suits are growing mostly for the same reasons that they did against Microsoft a while back with their Internet Explorer browser and how EU users felt they weren’t given a choice with the Windows OS (largely paraphrased). And defamation suits may pick up steam with the recent ruling in Australia, that Google can be viewed as a publisher of the search results page, making them liable for the links they post. In all of these cases the thinking is fairly basic, if you can make the biggest fish in the sea change the way it operates, everyone else will likely follow suit.

A point it seems that lawyers and judges seem to forget however, is that the web is a much bigger place than it was even a few years ago. With somewhere in excess of 2 billion connected users, websites, search engines, and every online resource has had to rapidly change to serve their visitors needs. Search engines like Google and Bing, developed an instant answer service which immediately displays results based on what you’re searching for, based on the most searched terms currently. Instant results vary a fair amount every couple of weeks and often more frequently, but the key point that seems to be ignored: the terms used in autocomplete are the most popular terms that have been searched so far. Your autocomplete searches will vary greatly depending on your search history, the top search trends and the your local search activity. Unfortunately for Google and any other search engine that uses a results page of any kind, the mantra of ‘don’t shoot the messenger’ is still largely unheeded in current court cases.