The more that people use Google Maps, the more important optimizing for landing pages becomes. First, you have to discover what you want most from your business and as an extension your website. If it’s about allowing people to sign up for a service, then have that be a staple of your optimization.

In conclusion it’s important to note that not all businesses have Place Pages. You can of course notify Google, but that doesn’t gurantee anything. The best you can do is keep up with your SEO, and always be mindful of where your content is being used, or could potentially be used.

I know that it’s frustrating but if you’ve made it to the top of Yahoo, or any other search engine then you know the head aches involved. Before it’s required you might want to get ahead of the curve and start optimizing for Bing now. Before Yahoo becomes the past.

The first thing you’ll want to check is keyword ranking. Just because certain keywords are ranking well for you in Yahoo, doesn’t necessarily mean they will in Bing. So get back on the research wagon and discovering the keywords you need to improve upon.

As a precautionary measure try discovering other ways to boost traffic. Invest a bit more time in the social media market, or perhaps even invest some money into traditional advertising.

Just like any other major change like this, you can never be too over prepared. If you think of something that will potentially work then act on it. You’d rather try and fail than get to the change and not have anything ready for the potential outcome.

This drama caused many people to get into an uproar and change everything around on their site. Fast forward to today and not much as been made about that fiasco. Now, we have an entirely different problem on our hands. Luckily for Google this concerns their rival — Bing.

While people were in an uproar over Google’s change to no-follow, people are upset at Bing for not even adhering to the no-follow tag. Because at this present moment, they’re being indexed. This is of course making all you PR sculpters cringe, as having no-follow links indexed defeats their entire purpose.

Luckily, Microsoft looks to be addressing the problem. Here’s an official statement from one of Bing’s program managers:

This is a known issue we are working quickly to resolve. If you have pages you would like permanently removed from our index, please send me a mail to bwmc@microsoft.com with your domain name and “MSNBot ignoring robots tags” in the subject line. Please also include the URLs in the body of the message. You may use an * wildcard for any directories such as:

http:example.com/ wrongdirectory/*

Normally, I would request that you fill out a content removal request, however, since this is a problem on our side, I’ll do the leg work for you.

So there you have it. The problem is being looked into, so you don’t have to go scrambling about trying to fix anything. Hopefully, Microsoft has enough people on their team to fix this in a timely matter. If you feel as though you can’t wait, just shoot them an email and you’ll get your quick fix.

I find that many people who have sites that begin to tank should begin looking in one place — links. As you’re updating content it’s easy to lose track of your links. Whether it’s a link campaign that you started to boost awareness, and drive up page rank. Or you started utilizing a lot of intra-site links and haven’t been doing so lately. Links are one of the most important facets of your site, but many times you just naturally begin to forget about them. Try and drive the inbound links to your site up, and start to link to relative intra-site content whenever possible. More times then not this can solve your problem.

I stated earlier that the reason your traffic has gone down might not even be your fault. It’s very much possible that it’s someone else fault. And by someone else I mean competition. The word itself can do so many things to different people. Some are driven by competition, and love to see someone try and come around their block. Others become apprehensive, and tuck back into their corner. You really don’t have to be either. Just take a look at their site and do some analytic work on it. You could find that what they’re trending for their site is taking some of your traffic away. If so, put your creative hat on and get to work. Sometimes you’ll find that competition will break you out of the mold you’ve been in. Which can then lead to even greater numbers than you had before.

Whatever the reason for a drop in traffic, just don’t panic. Worrying doesn’t stimulated anything productive. Being aware, on the ball, and creative is how you want to approach the situation. Many times when your site drops and you change things you’ll find it performing better than ever. Just try not and lose any sleep over it..

Sundar Pichai, VP Product Management, made this statement in the official announcement post,

“Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010. Because we’re already talking to partners about the project, and we’ll soon be working with the open source community, we wanted to share our vision now so everyone understands what we are trying to achieve.

Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We’re designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don’t have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.”

The interesting take away from the announcement, is how much the world of search is going to change with Google Chrome OS. Already, the internet has been taken over by the search engine. Now, our OS’s could potentially be dominated by the idea of search. I’ll leave you to ponder as to whether that’s a positive or negative.

Either way, as website owners and operators it’s vital to plan ahead and perhaps think of ways to take advantage of the potential change that Google Chrome OS will provide. For a good start, check out this article on Wired’s website.

Some advice given by Cutts in the video that is invaluable is to ease your site into the change. Maybe only change a certain section of your site, and then monitor its progress.

Cutts explains how you can setup a ‘preview’ of how your site will look with the CMS, “For example, if your CMS means that your layout has to change, you can mock that up,” he continues. “You can try to make it so you change your HTML so that it looks like it would look like from your content management system. And then make sure that your rankings don’t change. They shouldn’t change very much at all, but you know, if you change a whole bunch of stuff on your page, that can affect how Google scores it.”

So, with my advice with a little help from Matt Cutts you should be ready to take a step forward. Just be sure that the step your taking is in the right direction.

Google looks to be changing the rules yet again, with their impending change of how Google will crawl no-follow links. Meaning they’re going to start penalizing for them. This is going to be a major pain for some experts, who rely on no-follow links for clients. For those of you who use them, you know what I speak of.

Generally, no-follow links are used as a way to funnel search results to a particular link. If a page has a ton of no-follow links, and only a few others then the webmaster wants visitors to click those links.

Google doesn’t like that too much.

The no-follow strategy is mostly used by companies that are trying to sell particular products, hence the reason why so many SEO experts rely some on no-follow.

So, how many of you utilize no-follow in your strategy? What’s your reaction to the news of Google making this change?

I’ve mentioned before that I’m a shining optimist, and the situation is no different here. This algorithm change, which is targeting Black Hat SEO can only be good for site owners, and marketers. Unless you do use Black Hat tactics, then you’re just SOL.

Of course, as with any change to Google there could potentially be unforeseen problems. Maybe the algorithm reads your site incorrectly, grouping it in with the Black Hat sites. I’m not saying it will, but it’s always good to be prepared.

I’ll be keeping an eye on this as it develops. As always, feel free to drop me an email or discuss this topic in the forums.

If you listen to the SEO experts around the internet, then you’ll find that most are starting to see the shift happening in the world of SEO. Looking into the past of SEO, it used to be a very dog-eat-dog system. It was a battle to try and obtain top results in certain keyword phrases. Bruce Clay, an expert in the field of SEO actually made the statement, “Ranking Is Dead”

Matt Cutts, followed up on the statement. He didn’t completely agree that ranking is dead but that it’s less important than it once was.

So, if ranking is going to be falling off in terms of importance what’s going to take its place. Matt Cutts emphasizes that localization, and personalization are the future of SEO. What does that really mean in the grand scheme of things, and what can you do to stay ahead of the curve?

Universal search is now becoming more and more important. Having quality content, in terms of images and videos are becoming power players in getting your site noticed.

As we go into the future of SEO, I believe we can look to social networking for increasing page views. If localization, and personalization are going to be the key factors of SEO in the future, then I see no way other than social networking for this to take off.

I think the two nouns you could use in a description for social networking is localization, and customization. Social Networking is about branching out, and letting people become a part of your community. Whether that’s through a Facebook profile, or a portal to your blog is up to you. I think that’s what makes Social Networking a bright future for improving SEO. It broadens the landscape of what can be considered smart ‘SEO Practices’.

It’s not a great idea to give up on keyword ranking at the moment. It is definitely a smart idea to start investing a large amount of your time in social networking. If you’re annoyed by places like Facebook, MySpace, then there are other more professional options out there to take advantage of.

Having a great website definitely means a lot, but not if no one ever sees it, in this case it becomes “useless greatness.” As soon as people begin to view this “greatness” of a site, then it becomes of some use. So what can you do to get traffic to your site? Well a great and what I believe to be the BEST way to get traffic to your site would be organic traffic.

Why is this the best?

Well for one it’s FREE, and if you can manage to get on the first page of results for a popular keyword you can potentially get thousands of daily visitors all without paying a cent. Isn’t that great?

In all reality it is, but it’s a tough process to get yourself on the first page that requires a lot of search engine optimization. This is why I made this post breaking down the top 10 factors of search engine optimization.

1. Title and Meta tag – include the desired keyword in the title and meta tags of your website
or blog.

2. H1 tag – create a H1 tag and make sure to include the keyword in the
H1 tag as well.

3. Domain and URL – include the keyword in the domain and or URL of your website or blog – i.e
yourkeyword.com, yoursite.com/yourkeyword.

4. Body Text – keyword use in the body text of a page plays a major roles as well, the more
you have the keyword on the body of a page, the better that page will be ranked
for that keyword, however be sure not to over do it, or else it will have negative
consequences.

5. Link popularity - the link popularity or amount of incoming links that are relevant to your site
play a part in how you will rank as well.

6. Relevance – Quality of incoming links and how relevant the page is to your keyword.

7. Age of URL – new domains and or URL’s are not ranked as well as older domains and older
URL’s.

8. Weight/Authority – incoming links with authority or “weight,” such as sites with .gov or .edu
can give you a great ranking.

9. Anchor text - the describable text on a link also known as “anchor text” is a major player
in the SEO game. Make sure your incoming links are anchor text with your
keywords.

10. Quality Content - last but not least quality content. The actual text is not what’s ranked by the spider, It’s the consequences of having quality content that gives you better rankings. Providing quality
content ensures return visits, keeping traffic coming back. Not only this
but other webmasters that come across your site will find your site to be
worthwhile, and will naturally link to you. Thus giving your site a boost in
ranks.

If your looking to gain free, quality traffic, then optimizing your site for search engines like Google is the way to go. The top 10 factors above will help you get there, however search engines constantly change their algorithms (the factors that determine how they rank sites) and it’s important to keep up to date with all of them.

Currently these are the top 10 techniques, if used correctly and applied efficiently will get you the ranking you desire for your specific search term or keyword in Goggle’s SERP’s (search engine results.)