Around here, we call it “The Scallion.” It’s a play on The Onion, but slightly less clever. Every month I gather together the news that I’ve found around the web about SEO, the search engines, and the internet in general. I put it all in small, easy-to-digest niblets that I send around in a newsletter to the whole company – web designers, writers, account managers, etc – so that they can keep up without having to spend hours reading the same articles over and over.

This month, I’m sharing it with you.

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As the competition for first page listings, web traffic and business leads keeps getting tougher, optimizers are always looking for new ways to get inbound links and authority and credibility for their clients’ sites.

The fact that results from search queries now increasingly include real time search results , it’s becoming imperative for us to craft strategies above and beyond the traditional link-building methods.

While making sure that the fundamentals like custom Title tags, compelling descriptions, high quality content and user friendly interfaces remain the cornerstone of our work, we can successfully use some strategies to boost the presence of our sites.

• Publishing targeted blog posts, interacting with the viewers and syndicating blog via feeds.
• Making sure Google Maps and Bing Local listings are verified and updated with the latest media rich information about the site.
• Finding Local directories to add sites and create a presence within a smaller, more focussed geographic area.
• Using Twitter and Facebook to build a brand following for your site, thus proving the popularity of your site to the search engines.
• Using e-PRs , articles and press releases to target specific key phrases through latest updates.
• Using Video especially YouTube to build a strong presence for your site.

These strategies will bring definite advantages to our sites, helping us get an edge over competition in the search engine rankings and potentially bring in high quality web traffic and business leads for our clients.

Google released the news yesterday that they had reached an agreement with MySpace, and now MySpace will be available in their real-time search results. I find this interesting, since MySpace is a dying social network by most accounts, but what I really find interesting is that Facebook still isn’t being included. Why do you suppose that is?

Well, I think it’s because Google is a Bitter Betty.

Yep. I said it.

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