This column is written by Kimberly Turner from Regator (a great tool that gathers and organizes the world’s best blog posts) – Darren

Hi-dee-hoo, fellow bloggers! Thanks for joining me for another edition of the weekly blogosphere trends, provided by Regator.com. (Click any trend to see posts about it.) Darren’s post “The Key to Successful Blogging: Do Something!” from earlier this week resonated with a lot of you (and with me), so it seemed like the perfect week to look back at some of the important topics we’ve discussed in this column and issue a challenge: Kick procrastination in the butt by putting at least two of these techniques to work THIS week on your own blog. Then share a link to your post in the comments.

If you truly want to take it to the next level, download Darren’s 31 Days to Build a Better Blog, which has enough tasks to last you an entire month and is an incredible resource for any blogger…particularly those who are ready to stop talking about what they’ll do someday and start doing today. Let’s take a look at this week’s most popular stories…and your challenges:

1.  Ground Zero Mosque
Your challenge: If you normally write posts from a neutral standpoint, take a strong stance on at least one important and/or controversial issue this week.
Read more about: The importance of being opinionated
Example: VetVoice’s “Muslims Already Have a Place of Worship at the Site of 9/11 Attacks” backs opinion up with carefully thought-out reasoning.

2.  Star Wars
Your challenge: If you normally steer clear of list posts, write one this week.
Read more about: Writing list posts
Example: Asylum’s “Our 5 Favorite Moments From Star Wars Celebration V” does a countdown with clear subheads and photo accompaniment.

3.  Facebook Places
Your challenge: If you don’t make regular use of videos, give it a try this week in at least two posts.
Read more about: Effectively using videos
Example: Mashable’s “How Foursquare Feels About Facebook Places” allows readers/viewers to get a better sense of the Foursquare VP’s reaction than mere text would’ve.

4.  Eat Pray Love
Your challenge: If you rarely or never do interview posts, do one this week. It can be any format (Q&A, video, podcast, etc.) but it must be an interview you’ve conducted yourself rather than one found elsewhere and reused.
Read more about: Effective interviewing
Example: MovieWeb’s “EXCLUSIVE: Director Ryan Murphy Discusses Eat, Pray, Love!” is an exclusive Q&A.

5.  Pakistan
Your challenge: This week, use an image from a source you’ve never tried before. Make sure the licensing allows you to use it.
Read more about: Great places to find quality images
Example: The Big Picture’s “21 Faces of The Pakistan Flood” uses photos to tell a powerful story.

6.  Dr. Laura
Your challenge: Make use of quotes in at least two different posts this week.
Read more about: Making the most of quotes
Example: Mediaite’s “Dr. Laura Caller Speaks Out: ‘I Didn’t Want To Turn This Into A Racial Thing’” has a quote in the headline that piques curiosity.

7.  Iraq
Your challenge: Brainstorm at least five headlines for a post you’ve just finished rather than choosing the first that comes to mind. Consider each then choose the best one before publishing.
Read more about: What makes a great headline
Example: AmericaBlog’s “Are Iraq combat operations really over?” asks a question to create curiosity then delivers by answering it in full.

8.  Social Security
Your challenge: Set a goal to inspire or encourage your readers to take some sort of action this week.
Read more about: Setting goals
Example: Elder Abuse’s “‘Don’t Steal My Social Security’” encourages readers to sign a petition.

9.  Scott Pilgrim
Your challenge: Cover a story in a creative or unconventional way.
Read more about: How to dig deeper to create unique content
Example: ScreenRant’s “Why Do Critics Care If Audiences Hate The Movies They Like?” identifies a wider trend tied to a popular story.

10. Justin Bieber
Your challenge: If you don’t normally write how-to posts, write one this week.
Read more about: Creating how-to posts that work
Example: Lifehacker’s “How to Create Your Own Slowed-Down Ambient Epics” features both a video walk-through and step-by-step text instructions.

Are you up for the challenge? I honestly cannot wait to see what you’ve created. I look forward to reading each one. Please share your accomplishments in the comments.

Kimberly Turner is a cofounder of Regator.com and Regator for iPhone as well as an award-winning print journalist. You can find her on Twitter @kimber_regator.

This Post is from: ProBlogger Blog Tips.

Blogosphere Trends + A Challenge

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Posted by Dr. Pete

Some of you know that I spend a lot of time behind the scenes here on Pro Q&A. One of the challenges of Q&A is that we often have to tackle complex problems in a very short amount of time – we might have 10-15 minutes to solve an issue like "Why isn’t my page showing up on Google?" with no access to internal data, server-side code, etc.

Of course, I’d never suggest you try to solve your own SEO problems in just 10 minutes, but it’s amazing what you can do when you’re forced to really make your time count. I’d like to share my 10-minute (give or take) process for solving one common SEO problem – finding a "missing" page. You can actually apply it to a number of problems, including:

• Finding out why a page isn’t getting indexed
• Discovering why a page isn’t ranking
• Determining if a page has been penalized
• Spotting duplicate content problems

I’ll break the 10 minutes down, minute by minute (give or take). The mini-clock on each item shows you the elapsed time, for real-time drama.

 0:00-0:30 – Confirm the site is indexed

Always start at the beginning – is your page really missing? Although it sometimes gets a bad rap for accuracy (mainly, the total page counts), Google’s site: command is still the best tool for the job. It’s great for deep dives, since you can combine it with keyword searches, "keyword" searches (exact match), and other operators (intitle:, inurl:, etc.). Of course, the most basic format is just:

For this particular job, always use the root domain. You never know when Google is indexing multiple sub-domains (or the wrong sub-domain), and that information could come in handy later. Of course, for now you just want to see that Google knows you exist.

 0:30-1:00 – Confirm the page is not indexed

Assuming Google knows your site exists, it’s time to check the specific page in question. You can enter a full path behind the site: command or use a combination of site: and inurl:

If the page doesn’t seem to be on Google’s radar, narrow down the problem by testing out just "/folder" and see if anything on the same level is being indexed. If the page isn’t being indexed at all, you can skip the next step.

 1:00-1:30 – Confirm the page is not ranking

If the page is being indexed but you can’t seem to find it in the SERPs, pull out a snippet of the TITLE tag and do an exact-match search (in quotes) on Google. If you still can’t find it, combine a site:example.com with your page TITLE or a portion of it. If the page is indexed but not ranking, you can probably skip the next couple of steps (jump to the 4:00 mark).

 1:30-2:00 – Check for bad Robots.txt

For now, let’s assume your site is being partially indexed, but the page in question is missing from the index. Although bad Robots.txt files are, thankfully, getting rarer, it’s still worth taking a quick peek to make sure you’re not accidentally blocking search bots. Luckily, the file is almost always at:

http://www.example.com/robots.txt

What you’re looking for is source code that looks something like this:

It could either be a directive blocking all user agents, or just one, like Googlebot. Likewise, check for any directives that disallow the specific folder or page in question.

 2:00-2:30 – Check for META Noindex

Another accidental blocking problem can occur with a bad META Noindex directive. In the header of the HTML source code (between <head> and </head>), you’re looking for something like this:

Although it might seem odd for someone to block a page they clearly want indexed, bad META tags and Rel=Canonical (see below) can easily be created by a bad CMS set-up.

 2:30-3:00 – Check for bad Rel=Canonical

This one’s a bit trickier. The Rel=Canonical tag is, by itself, often a good thing, helping to effectively canonicalize pages and remove duplicate content. The tag itself looks like this:

The problem comes when you canonicalize too narrowly. Let’s say for example, that every page on your site had a canonical tag with the URL "www.example.com" – Google would take that as an instruction to collapse your entire search index down to just ONE page.

Why would you do this? You probably wouldn’t, on purpose, but it’s easy for a bad CMS or plug-in to go wrong. Even if it’s not sitewide, it’s easy to canonicalize too narrowly and knock out important pages. This is a problem that seems to be on the rise.

 3:00-4:00 – Check for bad header/redirects

In some cases, a page may be returning a bad header, error code (404, for example) or poorly structured redirect (301/302) that’s preventing proper indexation. You’ll need a header checker for this – there are plenty of free ones online (try HTTP Web-Sniffer). You’re looking for a "200 OK" status code. If you receive a string of redirects, a 404, or any error code (4xx or 5xx series), you could have a problem. If you get a redirect (301 or 302), you’re sending the "missing" page to another page. Turns out, it’s not really missing at all.

 4:00-5:00 – Check for cross-site duplication

There are basically two potential buckets of duplicate content – duplicate pages within your site and duplicates between sites. The latter may happen due to sharing content with your own properties, legally repurposing contents (like an affiliate marketer might do), or flat-out scraping. The problem is that, once Google detects these duplicates, it’s probably going to pick one and ignore the rest.

If you suspect that content from your "missing" page has been either taken from another site or taken by another site, grab a unique-sounding sentence, and Google it with quotes (to do an exact match). If another site pops up, your page may have been flagged as a duplicate.

 5:00-7:00 – Check for internal duplication

Internal duplication usually happens when Google crawls multiple URL variations for the same page, such as CGI parameters in the URL. If Google reaches the same page by two URL paths, it sees two separate pages, and one of them is probably going to get ignored. Sometimes, that’s fine, but other times, Google ignores the wrong one.

For internal duplication, use a focused site: query with some unique title keywords from the page (again, in quotes), either stand-alone or using intitle:. URL-driven duplicates naturally have duplicate titles and META data, so the page title is one of the easiest places to find it. If you see either the same page pop up multiple times with different URLs, or one or two pages followed by this:

…then it’s entirely possible that your missing page was filtered out due to internal duplication.

 7:00-8:00 – Review anchor text quality

These last two are a bit tougher and more subjective, but I want to give a few quick tips for where to start if you suspect a page-specific penalty or devaluation. One pretty easy to spot problem is when you have a pattern of suspicious anchor text – usually, an uncommon keyword combination that dominates your inbound links. This could come from a very aggressive (and often low-quality) link-building campaign or from something like a widget that’s dominating your link profile.

Open Site Explorer allows you to pretty easily look at your anchor text in broad strokes. Just enter your URL, click on Anchor Text Distributions (the 4th tab), and select Phrases:

What you’re looking for is a pattern of unnatural repetition. Some repetition is fine – you’re naturally going to have anchor text to your domain name keywords and your exact brand name, for example. Let’s say, though, that 70% of our links pointing back to SEOmoz had the anchor text "Danny Dover Is Awesome." That would be unnatural. If Google thinks this is a sign of manipulative link building, you may see that target page penalized.

 8:00-10:00 – Review link profile quality

Link profile quality can be very subjective, and it’s not a task that you can do justice to in two minutes, but if you do have a penalty in play, it’s sometimes easy to spot some shady links quickly. Again, I’m going to use Open Site Explorer, and I’m going to select the following options: Followed + 301, External Pages Only, All Pages on The Root Domain:

You can export the links to Excel if you want to (great for deep analysis), but for now, just spot-check. If there’s something fishy on the first couple of pages, odds are pretty good that the weaker links are a mess. Click through to a few pages, looking out for issues such as:

• Suspicious anchor text (irrelevant, spammy, etc.)
• Sites with wildly irrelevant topics
• Links embedded in an obviously paid or exchanged block
• Links that are part of a multi-link page footer
• Advertising links that are followed (and shouldn’t be)

Also, look for any over-reliance on one kind of low-quality link (blog comments, article marketing, etc.). Although a full link-profile analysis can take hours, it’s often surprisingly easy to spot spammy link-building in just a few minutes. If you can spot it that fast, chances are pretty good that Google can, too.

(10:00) – Time’s Up

Ten minutes may not seem like much (it may have taken you that long just to read this post), but once you put a process in place, you can learn a lot about a site in just a few minutes. Of course, finding a problem and solving it are two entirely different things, but I hope this at least gives you the beginning of a process to try out yourself and refine for your own SEO issues.

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One of the biggest challenges for a new bloggers starting out in an established niche is to find a way to stand out from the crowd and find their first readers. Without existing profile and/or credibility – getting those first readers can be very tough.

To combat this a few years back a number of bloggers started to use ‘Guest Blogging’ as a technique to launch their blogs and grow their brands to new audiences. This technique launched many bloggers to prominence – including Leo Babauta, Brian Clark, Chris Garrett, Skellie, Jon Morrow (all of whom have guest posted on ProBlogger) and many many more.

Much has been written on the topic of how to use guest posting but one of the best resources that I’ve seen lately has been produced by Jon Morrow. He’s just released the first in a series of videos (#aff) on the topic and they are well worth watching.

I’ve seen the complete set of videos for myself and they are easy to watch, actionable and inspiring.

Jon himself has used guest blogging with great success – including this fantastic post on speech recognition for bloggers here on ProBlogger which helped many.

Jon’s first video is completely free (no opt in required) and is well worth watching. His future videos require an opt in but you’ll get a feel for whether they’re right for you from the first one. I watched them all and they’re excellent.

Do yourself a favour and set aside some time today to watch these videos.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

How to Use Guest Blogging to Grow Your Blog Exponentially

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Since the majority of people have access to information at their fingertips, the need for real-time has become increasingly popular. As a result, real-time search engines are popping up everywhere to try to fulfill this need.

WebProNews spoke with Jack Moffitt, the CTO for Collecta, about the challenges these real-time engines face. The main idea behind real-time search engines is getting data as soon as it is published. Moffitt says this is challenge for three reasons.

First of all, it’s a challenge because the real-time engines have to convince publishers to send them their data. Secondly, they have to make sure that they get the data quickly. In other words, real-time search engines need publishers to push content to them instead of pulling it themselves.

The third reason it is a challenge is due to user privacy issues. Facebook data, for instance, is private, which means Collecta and other real-time engines cannot use it. In addition, there is the issue of users changing their minds about their data. Sometimes users go back and delete their data or decide to make it private. This creates a challenge for real-time search engines since technologies that distribute these types of action do not exist.

Despite these challenges, real-time search engines are growing in value and will only improve with time with the introduction of new tools and developments.

The term “marketing” gets used a lot and, sometimes, it’s used rather loosely in search and social media circles.

“Not all, but a lot of the search industry tends to be kind of search geeks who are trying to figure out what marketing is,” says Bill Leake of Apogee Results, formerly Apogee Search.

To make a long-term difference in customers, he believes effective marketing is key. Factors such as determining what the customer wants to do, how you can make it happen, and how you can transfer business objectives into strategies that can be implemented, are all instrumental aspects of marketing. He goes on to say that search is just one area of marketing that is important, but it works best when used with the other aspects.

Some people focus heavily on search, since it is easily measured. Other challenges of marketing could result from all the departments in companies and, particularly, within marketing itself. Due to the lack of communication these departments create, many opportunities are missed.

As online marketing increases in awareness, there is also the danger of neglecting offline channels. Online marketing is very valuable for businesses involved largely in the consumer space and B2B. On the other hand, online isn’t as valuable when reaching enterprise level companies and government agencies. Essentially, Leake says businesses need to market wherever their customers are, whether it be online, offline, or both.

He also discusses the recent re-brand his company made and the reason for it. As noted earlier, Apogee Results was formerly known as Apogee Search. Leake explains that the company began doing a lot of social media and didn’t want consumers to think they were limited to search. After tossing around many ideas, the company decided on Apogee Results to let others know that it could return measurable results no matter what it was marketing.

Posted by rolfbroer

This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

Google has found an intelligent way to arrange the results for a search query. But an interesting question is – where we can find that intelligence? A lot of people have conducted research into the indexing process and even more have tested ranking factors on their weight, but we wondered how smart Googlebot itself is. To make a start, we took some statements and commonly used principles and tested how Googlebot handled them. Some results are questionable and should be tested on a few hundred domains to be sure, but it can give you some ideas.

Speed of The Crawler

The first one we tested was Matt Cutts on his following statement: “… the number of pages that we crawl is roughly proportional to your PageRank".

This brings us to one of the challenges large content sites are facing – the problem of getting all pages indexed. You can imagine if Amazon.com was a new website, it would take a while for Google to crawl all 48 million pages and if Matt Cutts’s statement is true, it would be impossible without any incoming links.

To test it, we took a domain with no history (never registered, no backlinks) and made a page with 250 links on it. Those links refer to pages that also have 250 links (and so on…). The links and URLs were numbered from 1 to 250, in the same order as they appeared in the source code. We submitted the URL via “addurl” and waited. Due to the fact that the domain has no incoming links, it has no or at least a negligible PageRank. If Matt Cutts’s statement is correct Googlebot would soon stop crawling.

As you can see in the graph, Googlebot started crawling the site with a crawl rate of approximately 2500 nodes per hour. After three hours, it slowed down to a crawl rate of approximately 25 pages per hour and maintained that rate for months. To verify this result we did the same test with two other domains. Both tests came up with nearly the same results. The only difference is the lower peak at the beginning of Googlebot’s visit.

Impact of Sitemaps

During the tests, the sitemap manifested itself as a very useful tool to influence the crawl rate. We added a sitemap with 50,000 uncrawled pages in it (indexation level 0). Googlebot placed the pages which were added to Google by sitemap on top of the crawl queue. This means that those pages got crawled before the F-levelled pages. But what’s really remarkable is the extreme increase in crawl rate. At first, the number of visits was stabilized at a rate of 20-30 pages per hour. As soon as the sitemap was uploaded through Webmaster Central,  the crawler accelerated to approximately 500 pages per hour. In just a few days it reached a peak of 2224 pages per hour. Where at first the crawler visited 26.59 pages per hour on average, it grew to an average of 1257.78 pages per hour which is an increase of no less then 4630.27%. The increase of crawl rate doesn’t  stop by the pages included in the sitemap. Also the other F- and 0-levelled pages take advantage of the increase in crawl rate.

It’s quite remarkable that Google suddenly uses more of it’s crawl capacity to crawl the website. At the point where we submitted the sitemap the crawl queue was filled with F-pages. Google probably attaches a lot of value to the submitted sitemap.

This brings us to Matt Cutts’s statement. After only 31 days Googlebot crawled about 375,000 pages of the website. If this is proportional to it’s PageRank (which is 0) this would mean that it will crawl 140,625,000,000 pages of a PageRank 1 website in just 31 days. Remember that PageRank is exponential. In other words, this would mean you never have to worry about your PageRank even if you own the largest website on the web. In other words don’t simply accept everything Matt says.

Amount of Links

Rand Fishkin says: “…you really can go above Google’s recommended of 100 links per page, with a PageRank 7.5 you can think about 250-300 links” ( http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-flat-site-architecture )

The 100 links per page advice has always been a hot topic especially for websites with a lot of pages. The reason the advice originally was given is the fact that Google used to index only 100 kilobytes per page. On a 100 kb page the amount of 100 links seemed reasonable. If a page was any longer, there was a chance that the page would be so long that Google would truncate the page and wouldn’t index the entire page. These days, Google will index more than 1.5MB and user experience is the main reason for Google to keep the  “100 links” recommendation in their guidelines.

As was described in the previous paragraph, Google does crawl 250 links, even on sites with no incoming links. But is there a limit? We tried the same set-up as the websites described with 250 links on it but instead we used 5,000 links per page. When Googlebot visited that website something  remarkable happened. Googlebot requested the following pages:

• http://example.com/1/
• http://example.com/10/
• http://example.com/100/
• http://example.com/1000/

On every level Google visits, we see the same page requests. It seems like Googlebot doesn’t know how to handle such a large amount of links and tries to solve it as a computer.

Semantic Intelligence

One of the SEO myths used on almost every optimised website are the links placed in heading tags. Recently it was mentioned again as one of the factors of the “Reasonable Surfer patent”. If Google respects semantics, it definitely attaches more value to those “heading” links. We had our doubts and put it to the test. We took a page with 250 links on it and marked some with heading tags. This was done a few levels deep. After a few weeks of waiting nothing pointed in the direction that Googlebot preferred the “heading” links. This doesn’t mean Googlebot doesn’t use semantics in it’s algorithm, it just doesn’t use headings to give links more weight than others.

Crawling JavaScript

Google says it keeps getting better in recognizing and executing JavaScript. Although JavaScript is not a good technique to use if you want to be sure that Google does follow your links, it’s used quite a lot to reach the opposite goal. When used for PageRank sculpting the purpose of using JavaScript links is to make those links only visible for users. If you use this technique for this purpose it’s good to keep yourself updated on what Google can and can’t recognize and execute. To test Googlebot on it’s JavaScript capabilities we took the JavaScript codes as described in “The professional’s guide to PageRank optimization” and put them to the test.  

The only code Googlebot executed and followed during our test was the link in a simple “document.write” line. This doesn’t exclude the possibility that Googlebot is capable of recognizing and executing the more advanced script. It is possible that Google needs an extra trigger (like incoming links) to put more effort into the JavaScript crawling.

Crawling Breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs are a typical element on a webpage specially created for users. Sometimes they are used to support the site structure as well. Last month we encountered some problems where the Googlebot was not able to crawl it’s way up, so we did some tests.

We made a page a few levels deep with some content and links to higher levels on it ( http://example.com/lvl1/lvl2/lvl3/ ). We gave the page some incoming links and waited for Googlebot. Although the deep page itself was visited 3 times by the crawler, the higher pages didn’t get a visit.

To verify this result, we did the same test on an other domain. This time the test page was a few levels deeper in the site structure (http://example.com/lvl1/lvl2/lvl3/lvl4/lvl5/). This time Googlebot did follow some links which referred to pages higher on the site structure. Despite the fact that Googlebot does follow the links, it doesn’t seem to be a good method to support a site structure. After a few weeks Google still didn’t crawl all the higher pages. It looks like Googlebot rather crawls deeper into the site structure then higher pages.

Takeaways

In short, the lesson learned is that one can influence the crawl rate with a sitemap. This doesn’t mean that you should always upload a sitemap for your websites. You only want to increase the crawl rate if the bulk of your crawled pages get indexed. It takes longer for a crawler to return to an “F”-levelled page than to return to an indexed page. So if most of your pages get crawled, but dropped from the index you might want to consider getting more incoming links before using a sitemap. Best thing to do is to monitor for every page when Googlebot last visited it. With this method you can always identify problems in your site structure.

The amount of links isn’t limited to 250 links (even if you have no incoming links) although 5000 seems too much. We haven’t found the exact limit yet, but if we do, we will give you an update.

Links in heading tags for crawl purpose seems to be a waste of time. Though you can use them for usability purposes, because you’re used to it or because WordPress does it anyway and maybe if you’re lucky it’s still a ranking factor.

Another conclusion we can make is that the Googlebot isn’t very good in crawling breadcrumbs. So don’t use them for site structure purposes. Google just doesn’t crawl up as good as it crawls down. In contrast to breadcrumbs, you can use JavaScript for site sculpting purposes. Googlebot isn’t top of the bill if we’re talking about recognizing and executing JavaScript links. Remember to keep yourself updated on this subject, but for now you definitely can use some “advanced” JavaScript to do sculpting.

A last result that came up while performing research on the crawl process was the influence of the URL length. A short URL gets crawled earlier than long URL’s, therefore always consider the need for indexation and the need to be crawled if you choose your URL.

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The Web has provided numerous opportunities for businesses including the ability to have global reach. But with that opportunity comes many challenges such as marketing on a global scale. To learn more about global marketing, WebProNews caught up with Anne Kennedy of Beyond Ink and Joblr and Kristjan Mar Hauksson of Nordic eMarketing.

As Kennedy points out, a big SEO challenge is language. However, she believes the biggest challenge is enculturation in matters such as finding the right keyword set for a different country. This could be a problem since it may not translate directly. For instance, soccer cleats in the U.S. are called football boots in the UK and something completely different in France.

It’s also important to think about these cultural matters in regards to content, link building, graphic design, and more. Although localization and enculturation are the most important areas, Kennedy says understanding the language barrier is the first step in getting these areas right.

Although Nordic eMarketing is based in Iceland, Mar Hauksson says it has found ways to market its products in a multilingual environment. He also points out that the company understands the impact of culture and realizes that not everyone speaks and uses English.

“When you understand that, you have a much bigger market that you can market towards,” says Mar Hauksson.

At the time of the recording of this interview, Google had recently made the move to stop censoring its search results on Google.cn and was redirecting visitors to Google.com.hk, which it does not censor. While some developments have occurred since that time, it is far from being over. Just last week, Google reported that its operations in China were partially blocked and that Chinese officials were allegedly reviewing its application to operate in the country.

Today, the company released this statement, “We are very pleased that the government has renewed our ICP license and we look forward to continuing to provide web search and local products to our users in China.”

Both Kennedy and Mar Hauksson believe it is important to pay attention to the Google/China situation from both a SEO and marketing standpoint.

Kennedy also offers some tips for doing social media globally. Just as understanding culture is critical to SEO, it is also critical to social media. She says marketers need to be aware of what social networks are popular in each country and how the people use and interact with them.

“Social media, by its very definition, depends on the nature of the society where it’s doing business,” explains Kennedy.

Are you embracing marketing on a global level?

According to Eric Enge of Stone Temple Consulting, one of the greatest challenges with local search is the data. The reason for this issue is due to the fact that there are many errors and inconsistencies. For example, people fail to update their data after mergers, acquisitions, change of brand name, and more, which results in duplicate and bad data.

Fortunately, Enge shares tips for cleaning up the data. First of all, he suggests going to the search engines. Companies should get listed with the engines and go through a validation process. Once users are validated, the engines are more confident that they have the right data.

Secondly, he suggests going to major data aggregators such as InfoUSA, Acxiom, and Localeze. These aggregators provide data to many sites, which the search engines crawl. As a result, it is very important that they have correct and updated data.

Lastly, Enge advises users to go to major portals such as SuperPages, Yelp, YellowPages. Once your business is correctly listed in all these places, your data problem will likely be solved.

Incidentally, Eric Enge co-authored a book entitled, The Art of SEO: Mastering Search Engine Optimization. He says he delves deeply into topics surrounding local search in the book. For more information on the book, visit here.

A couple of weeks ago I had this interesting question from Arlene Crespo from lifeplanweb.com.

I have been blogging since November of 2009 and I really enjoy writing especially about my experiences with life.

My problem is that my age works against me, If people see how old I am which is in my fifty’s they will be turn off. Most of the bloggers are young people in their twenty’s thirty’s forty’s.

What’s one to do when your at this age?

I thought this was an interesting question and one that might generate some good discussion so I’d like to hear your opinion on it. But before I do – let me share a few thoughts:

I’ve not really run into this question before and as a blogger still in my 30’s have not had to face it personally – so I can only really speak from my own personal experience as a blog reader but when I arrive on a blog by someone who is a little more ‘mature’ than myself I don’t think I’m any more likely to read, if anything it could make me think that the person is a little more experienced.

I’m a big believer in trying to use the situation that you’re in to your advantage and to try to turn perceived problems into opportunities – so if I was in this situation I’d probably be wanting to almost use my age as a way to market and brand myself rather than hiding it.

I’d be exploring trying to position myself as someone who has experience in my field, who has faced the challenges that others might not have faced and as someone who can coach and mentor a less experienced person.

That approach may not work in every niche but it’s probably where I’d be starting.

What Do You Think?

• Do you think age matters (on either end of the spectrum)?
• Could being a little older be used as an advantage?
• Have you used your age in some way in marketing yourself (whether you’re younger or older)?

PS: as I’ve written this post I realize I have been asked the question before, but by young bloggers who have asked if they should reveal their age out of fear of not being taken seriously.

I know of a number of bloggers who are still teens who’ve chosen not to reveal their age for this reason – but also have seen a few who have used their youthfulness to their advantage as a blogger by shouting from the hilltops that they’re young. I guess it can work both ways but I’d love to hear from both younger and older bloggers on their experiences with this.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

Does A Bloggers Age Matter?

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Have you found your SEO efforts for Google and Bing to be similar or different?  According to Janet Driscoll Miller of Search Mojo, there are both similarities and differences when doing SEO for Google and Bing. She adds that Bing has many opportunities over Google but that it also has its share of challenges.

On the similarity side, one example is that the same sitemap can work in both Google and Bing. One example of a difference between the two is that with Google Shopping, it’s a free download; Bing Shopping on the other hand, is paid only.

In regards to on-page factors, Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz did an extensive study and found that, ironically, the on-page changes users make really do not boost positions in either Google or Bing. Instead, both engines place more weight on exact match domains and the variety of domains that users have inbound links from.

For Bing specifically, Driscoll Miller says a good rule of thumb is to have many inbound links coming from a variety of domains, as opposed to having lots of links coming from a single domain. Bing’s Webmaster Tools, which we are told will be getting a revamp soon, have a tool that places value on inbound links. This helps SEOs understand what type of links Bing values the most.

Although some people still only concentrate on Google, Driscoll Miller advises people to begin thinking about Bing.

“I think a lot of people have been somewhat ignoring Bing and probably shouldn’t, because it really does have some value, “ she says.

What are your SEO challenges for Google and Bing?