With so many media companies, it can be difficult to get your news in the top search engine news searches. Dana Todd of Newsforce tells WebProNews how companies should create a long-term strategy instead of focusing on each press release or news item separately. It also helps to use social media and distribution tactics. Get more on this and the latest SEMPO updates in the Dana Todd interview from SES San Jose.

When talking about search engine optimization, one immediately associates the practices are leveraged toward the traditional realms of web search. Many are predicting, however, that the “next big thing” in search may be the acknowledgment that users are spending less time in front of PCs, and are instead utilizing mobile devices to search and surf the web.

There are estimates floating around that put mobile users somewhere around the neighborhood of 300 million by 2010, give or take a year or two. While the prediction-based statistics may not be necessarily exact, the rising trend in mobile usage is impossible to deny.

So, as mobile users begin to depend on their devices for search, the onus then shifts squarely to webmasters and SEOs to not only gear online content to not only rank well within the sphere of traditional web search, but also to focus on streamlining page design to rank in mobile search as well.

Mobile SEO, however, may look a little different than current practices. While engines like Google have spiders that crawl the web in order to browse content, sites optimized for mobile still have to submit their pages to the engines to be included within the index.

There is also a stylistic element to consider when optimizing a site for mobile browsing. First of all, not all mobile devices employ the same browser software, so it then becomes imperative to stick to the basics of XHTML, CSS, and SEO best practices in order to ensure the cleanest viewing experience for the mobile user.

Incidentally, WebProNews had the chance to interview Cindy Krum, an SEO analyst from Blue Moon Works. She had a lot of interesting insights on mobile SEO and what the future holds for the platform, as well as elaborating a bit further on the importance of back end design practices.

Looking around, I see more and more of my friends making use of text messaging, mobile e-mail applications, and web browsers on their telephones. This trend is only going to continue, and as it does, optimizing sites for both traditional and mobile search is going to become a top priority.

Technology advances. We can get everything cheaper, lighter, faster and sleeker than was previously possible: even SEO. MoreVisibility’s John Carcutt graced WebProNews with a visit during SES 2006 to speak a bit on small budget SEO.

PPC can yield tremendous returns and can (in turn) drain a significant portion of the budget. Experimenting on keyword techniques for natural search rankings can be time consuming and risky, spelling further expense. Why not lean towards the basics? Content and links seem to ever drive discussion and have proven successful in any circumstance. Yet, as the yin and yang of SEO, content and links depend on each other, each driving forward only while the other thrives. You won’t get links without good content and why create content if no one’s listening?

Carcutt seems to think that the perfect solution to this dilemma is in social communities. Why not participate, allowing relevant user-created content and sharing features on your site?

“[You] need to start building relationships with those communities… you’ve got the social bookmarking… the content repositories… the news submission sites… if you pick one of each of those and start building a relationship in those communities now, it’s going to pay off. It’s going to take time like anything in SEO.”

Additionally, nothing comes without a price… or a word of caution.

“You’ve got to approach this as a community, a participant… an active, welcomed member of the community to make any headway. If you try to game them, they’re going to catch on. There’s nobody better in the world than twenty-something computer geeks at catching deceit.”

Social communities constitute a large portion of our online experience. Participants are real people, empowered by technology to speak their minds… to destroy scams and dirty marketing ploys… to praise great products and services… essentially to make or break your business. Social communities are a force to tap… and to fear, therefore respect.

However frightening the frontier can appear, as an honest participant, nothing but success can come of the venture.

The contention out there over SEO copy writing is astounding. With good cause, writers and SEMs alike are exchanging scuffles over the topic on a regular basis. Even established professionals like Heather Lloyd-Martin face staunch opposition in tactic.

“The most fundamental [strategy] is key phrase research. Learn how to put those key phrases into copy to have it make sense.”

This philosophy, to write write copy with search engines in mind, is the key offender. Bob Bly, the well-known author of “The Copywriter’s Handbook” is a vocal opponent and has even written an article titled “Why I Don’t Believe in SEO Copywriting.”

In this article… as if in response to Heather’s statement, Bly remarks, “When I write copy, [the] audience is the prospect, the potential buyer of the product I am selling. However, with SEO copywriting, you pander to another ‘audience’ - the search engines - and not the reader. And by creating copy that’s optimal for attracting search engines, you are, to some degree, weakening that copy’s power to sell. You dilute its strength because you are worrying about two audiences - the reader and the engines - instead of focusing every word on the customer.”

It would seem that Mr. Bly is, understandably, concerned about preserving the power of words… that by “pandering” to a spider, this is somehow compromised. Perhaps he’s correct. The argument is certainly strong. Yet let us consider Heather’s defense of such.

“SEO copywriting is still copywriting. It’s not changing the concepts of regular, direct response copy writing. What you’re doing is adding those key phrases in to make your copy more specific. You might not get to be as flowery as you’d get to be in a print catalog or you might not be able to describe things in fifty words and expect that page is going to position well. SEO copywriting is controlling the controllable on your website…. but to be able to walk that line between writing good content but making sure that you have keywords in there.”

Sounds innocent enough. Who’s to say that a careful craftsman couldn’t weave a poetic “compromise?” There’s certainly wisdom to be spread about in both camps… and that’s not even to consider other varying opinion.S

PageZero’s Mona Elesseily is arguably the preeminent authority on the Yahoo! search marketing platform and has even written a book on the subject, “The Unauthorized Yahoo! Search Marketing Handbook.” The last time we met, we’d just been given the scoop on Panama, Yahoo!’s new platform.

Mona pointed out obvious improvement, such as a redesigned (much more intuitive) interface, convergence of feature sets (geo-targetting, etc) into one application and improved metrics.

After having had a couple more months of testing, she now spoke with even more enthusiasm for Panama’s evolution from the previous system.

“The forecasting tools which were incorporated into Panama are excellent. They’re very granular, they give you a lot of information. Specifically, the tool will show you the percentage of missed clicks. If you bid a dollar, and the dollar got you 25 % of the traffic, the tool will tell you, ‘You’re missing out on 75% of the traffic, you may want to increase your bid.’”

Once again, touting campaign groups and monitoring additions, Mona points out that Panama also allows for rapid campaign deployment.

“Fast Ad Activation puts ads up on the entire network… in about five minutes.”

Currently, AdWords won’t run ads on the entire advertising network until a lengthy approval process has been satisfied… giving Panama advantage in this arena.

Once Yahoo! is out of the migration process and new advertisers are allowed to employ Panama, we’ll be waiting anxiously. Perhaps the delay will give Mona time to draft a new book?

Perhaps “linkbait” is just a buzzword? At SES alone, we probably heard it muttered a million and one times. Chris Boggs, Search Strategist for Avenue A | Razorfish points out that “linkbait has been kinda beaten to death as a topic recently… but it’s very important.”

For the three people who’ve never heard of this SEO tactic, Boggs describes it as “primarily the idea of generating content with the ulterior motive of driving links in a natural manner to [a] particular page.”

Sounds familiar, eh? “Build it and they will come.” Perhaps it’s that simple?

Maybe.

Since “linkbait” can mean far more than plain, old, quality content, things get a bit complex.

Darron Rowse (of Problogger) states, “It is actually a difficult term to be definitive about as it covers a lot of different practices ranging from running awards or competitions, through to writing attacking posts on high profile bloggers in the hope of them biting back and linking to you, through to providing other bloggers or site owners with tools (with embedded links back to your own site) that they can put on their blogs… In reality the term ‘linkbaiting’ is a new term for something that webmasters have been doing for many years.”

Then there’s the connotation of the term “bait.” It sounds a bit malicious, misleading, misinforming perhaps? Certainly, there are poor uses of this tactic in the wild, but isn’t that the case with anything?

Boggs argues that the “build it and they will come” mentality is a bit flawed.

“[There are] purists out there who feel that LB should be purely that… and that it has to be worthy to link to… when in fact you really do have to go out and do a little bit of link building to generate the knowledge that the link exists.”

Regardless of how sweet the bait is, it’ll take some other bait to get folks to notice.