This wasn’t quite an all-search, all-the-time study session, though. Cutts and Mike McDonald spent a little while talking about college basketball at the beginning, and by the end of the talk, had both expressed their appreciation of Star Wars.

As for what happened in between, Cutts fielded questions individuals posed via Twitter. One question related to local business center quality, and Cutts indicated that members of his team are working on it and steady improvements can be expected.

Another inquiry touched on the idea of meta tags at the bottom of a page, and Cutts responded, “Normally, your meta tags need to go in the head section of the HTML. That’s definitely the preferred way to do it.” Otherwise, random people can leave metatags in the comments.

Then one more question addressed up the importance of backlinks for SEO. Cutts said, “They don’t hurt. . . . I definitely recommend having good page content, as well, but backlinks can certainly help with your search rankings.”

Mastaler is the president of Alliance-Link, and with her connections to Fortune 500 companies, the Search Engine Strategies Conference, Search Engine Land, and Search Engine Guide, can pretty well be counted upon to have current info.  So, as Mastaler stated, link building tactics that involve content – think whitepapers and similar things – have been popular recently.

Social media has also become hot.  Mastaler noted that there’s much more involved than just using Digg, and cited Twitter as a great place to try things.  One Utah-based cough syrup company followed some doctors, nurses, and pharmacists on the micro-blogging site, for example, and then got its name spread all over the Web when they followed it back.

You can try to establish a presence on Facebook for added exposure, too.

Just don’t give up entirely on link building approaches that cost money, even if the recession continues.  Mastaler said, “Good link building is more an investment of time,” but she feels good copywriters and some directories are worth a little cash.

The company went around to 6 different U.S. cities and surveyed 150 Web users. The 3 continuing themes from their research were:

1.    Information overload
2.    Text overload
3.    Impersonal experience

As Larry explains, the average Web user does not care how many million results the search engines return. Even though it means a lot to the search engines, the average user doesn’t even look past the first page.

The same idea is true with text overload. It takes a lot of work for the user to sort through all the text. As users, we want relevant information and want it quickly. The study also found that we desire a personal experience as we search. Larry explains that since we use the engine every day, it should know our habits.

Yahoo is working to respond to this study and to users search needs. One of the approaches the company is taking to answer this dilemma is with Yahoo SearchMonkey. The open platform is a developer tool that essentially gives Yahoo more structured data in order for the company to deliver better results. A few specific examples include ratings for restaurants, phone numbers, and street addresses.

Yahoo Search BOSS is another approach the company is taking and at SMX West, announced a few features and updates to the model. One feature allows access to SearchMonkey structured data through BOSS API. Search BOSS provides a 3-tier pricing structure and offers up to 10,000 search queries per day to all developers for free. The fee changes will not take effect until late Q2 of this year, but Yahoo wanted to give developers an advance notice.

Yahoo also encourages marketers to embrace blended/universal search to help better meet the searchers needs.