For marketers and businesses today, real-time search offers a plethora of opportunities to enhance online visibility. Here are three steps on how to use real time search to help in your online marketing efforts.

• What’s Hot Right Now: Find out what users are searching for online and which latest topics and trends are being discussed at this very minute. Here are a few tools which will help find out the latest, hot topics:
  • Google Trends is a free tool which is very useful in finding out the hottest topics and hottest searches on Google.
  • Site Volume is a free tool which allows you to compare the buzz around keyword phrases on various social media channels.
  • Delicious lets you check out the kind of content which is generating a great deal of buzz across the social web.

• Create content which is compatible with Real-Time search: Timing is key to for getting the most mileage out of the real time search results. Create content which is relevant to the top searches, topics and trends, and is optimized for the latest search terms.

  For the hospitality industry, a good strategy would be to center content around Hot topics and/or Hot searches via:

  • Events: local events/seasonal events
  • Seasonal Offers and Promotions
  • News in the area
  • New attractions in the area

• Post content on the right Real-Time channels
  • Tweets and Facebook fan page updates: Content from social sites appears fastest in search results. It’s very easy to post Tweets and Facebook updates, so both must be a big part of the real time SEO strategy.
  • Blog posts: Blogging offers an avenue to help content rank well because there is an opportunity to write meatier content on the Hot Topics or Hot Searches.
  • Optimized Press Releases: By optimizing press releases and through the right submissions,  a marketer can ensure that their content pulls up high on the search engine rankings.
  • Website: Use your website to post fresh content which speaks to the latest topics and addresses the latest searches.

A screen shot of Google trends: a very useful tool in determining the Hot Topics and Hot Searches of the day.

Real-time search results has huge impact on search engine results. Savvy marketers should leverage real-time search and should include time sensitive content on social channels.

When we analyze keyword research, we’re not only looking at words, phrases, or questions. We need to really analyze what the client is searching for. This goes beyond the obvious product or service. Not until we truly understand user’s needs, will we know how to fill them.
When people search on the internet, they are typically looking for the following:

• Confidence
• Reassurance
• Verification
• Easy to access
• Consistent

All of the above points are inter-related and linked to each other.  When users come to your site, you have to inspire confidence/reassurance in them to want to purchase the product/service that you are promoting.  The way to do this is to grant users easy access to your site, be consistent with your messaging and information, and allow for simple verification.  For example, make sure to have your local business information consistent on all listings and channels. If there are inconsistencies within your listings and website, this will definitely lack of trust and hurt your conversion over all.

In conclusion, review your site and put yourself in the users’ shoes. Ensure that your site inspires confidence and reassurance.  Ensure that your site is easy to access and consistent.  Look beyond the search query and really focus on the needs of the consumer.

————————————————————————–
Contributed by: Zulema Romero, Milestone Internet Marketing

Real time search has been causing real time spam as well. Let’s see what the big players in the search are doing to make real time search useful.
Body – Danny Sullivan moderates the session and speakers on the panel are Sean Suchter, Ivan Davtchev, and Dylan Casey.

First up is Sean Suchter from Bing Social Search who states some of the obvious challenges namely keeping up with speed, making sense of massive content and relevance of search. Most often the results from twitter are timely but not accurate and often opinionated, reactive and not to the context/relevance.

Most of the incidents get real time response from platforms like twitter over traditional news sources. So to rise above the noise, there is a lot to do as search gets more social.
Such as quality, trust, popularity and timeliness. Some of the new things to consider are:

• people retweeting what you said, sharing good links           
• Trust worthy people sharing your links and tweets. The search engines are determining how important you are.
• Number of people retweeting what you said

Real-time relevance needs data mining to filter and rank based on history. Spamming communities can be highly visible and they are keeping a strict watch on this to provide most relevant information

Next up Ivan Davtchev:
What is Real time search? It’s about showing the most relevant up to date content for a topic. Yahoo recently established partnership with twitter.
Some of the challenges stated in Real time search were:

• Real time indexing- has to be done fast
• Query analysis- determining which query real time search has to show up for
• Raking of fresh content: How to find proper anchor text.

How do you know a query is really hot?
They figure it out based on emerging events and news stories (natural disasters, sports political news). He talks about Google trend being a good indicator of how a popular a query is. It works well for head queries but not as much for tail query. So standard approach is not ideal.

Some of the algorithms metric are internal. Yahoo Time Sense for example is an internal tool which plays a key role.

How is this different & better?
They have Language modeling- it means collection of all known words and query log.
Why language modeling? It allows you to ask questions and tells whether the search is prominent and if the data of past search matches to it…then it marks it as relevant to real time search.

Real time practices to avoid:

• Do not create content with multiple bussing terms
• Do not abuse shortening services for spam links
• Do not go over board with twitter #hash tags

Yahoo is removing real time spam. So watch out!

Not the least, up next was Dylan Casey:
What is real-time, why real time is important? All social media tools and channels have made everyone a publisher. As publishing barrier gets less competitive, the need for speed and relevancy goes up. People have begun to use content differently.

Why the explosion of information and why now?

• need for more information, quick information and real time information and relevant information
• Influencing factor of email Vs instant messaging, generating user experience through instant results have become the trend.

Tool to find out what people are talking about- www.Google.com/trends

They introduced real time search in dec 2009. They will be adding new providers such as facebook, myspace and google buzz. In order leverage the technology they use for ranking documents Google has come up with something new.  They look at the number of followers. They look at author quality.

Conclusion: Some of the key take aways here are: Marketers need to be more prudent in what they want to market. Beware of spamming as most search engines are filtering them out. Lastly write often, find something you are passionate about, pay attention to the mechanics of SEO but don’t overdo it.

————————————————————————–
Contributed by: Bhuvana Krishnan, Milestone Internet Marketing

The panel was moderated by Danny Sullivan and the speakers in the panel were those who specialize in providing real time search results. 
Gerry Campbell: CEO, Collecta
Rishab Aiyer Ghosh: CoFounder & VP, Topsy
Ken Moss:  CEO & co-founder, CrowdEye
Tobias Peggs: GM, OneRiot

First up was Tobias Peggs, GM of OneRiot. He throws light on user behavior that looks for information, which are fresh and relevant. OneRiot Differentiates itself from how twitter works. Platforms like twitter is highly used but with a lot of information being surfaced at a given time. The traditional search engines struggles to provide relevant information and fresh results from various sources. The fashion in which oneriot works is, it crawls all the links which people share on various social platform such as digg, twitter,blogs etc and gives importance to socially relevant filtered content which people will find more informative.

Also he talks about monetizing real-time search on the web with ad space selling. Oneriot is used as a platform for promoting real time search results with real time ads by providing good ads that match to the search from the real time web

Next up was Ken Moss from CrowdEye. He says Twitter is a big deal but chaotic. He emphasizes on the need for good real time search results. His version of traditional search is
Comprehensive – But a Firehose
Fresh – but in seconds!
Relevant – needs new Capabilities
Nice user interface – Unique

Crowdeye uses sophisticated technology to index information on twitter,retweet to help users find what is important to them in real time along with statistical data on the popularity of search which occurred for a given topic at various intervals.

The new perspective that crowdeye brings on to the table are:

• By what people where talking in terms of real story
• Help find the most relevant tweets
• Topics from most popular links, helps explore results
• Finally help putting nicely in a great UI (User Interface)

Additional they also offer

• Filtered results and Helps sort story by time and relevance
• Can categorize based on positive and negative sentiments
• Creating customized home page

Next up is Rishab Aiyer Gosh from Topsy. He states the model of web search is changing. It’s no longer a network of documents but a network of people. Such as writing a website or contributing to a blog. Live web is a network of people. To help rank this content- Topsy comes into place.

They offer a time window in web search. They also provide relevant image search and puts them in the order of the time such as hour, day, and month for a given topic. Images are indexed based on real time search only.

Lastly, Gerry Campbel spoke about Collecta. The team delivers a generational leap in speed, scale and relevance. All of these from information, navigation and transactional standpoint. Value of information has become very crucial. Collecta filters information based on stories, comments, updates, photos and videos for a given search query.

Conclusion: It was interesting to see some of the upcoming providers of real time search and information they offer.

————————————————————————–
Contributed by: Bhuvana Krishnan, Milestone Internet Marketing

1. Beware of Duplicate content of any kind on your website or Search Engines will drop your site from search engine results. Be particularly aware of duplicate content in Title tags.
2. SEO Guides: The below guides can be helpful as you develop your site:
   • Bing SEO Guide
   • Rick DeJarnette’s www.seoblogging.net
   • Google SEO Guide  
3. More about Blogs:
   • Frequency in blog posts in irrelevant if you don’t have any followers
   • There is no importance in the length of blog posts. The post should be as long as it needs to be to get the point across.
   • Blogs are typically found for long tail keyword phrases, targeting the blogs more for readers than the search engines. Therefore your blog is not likely to rank high for those competitive keywords.
   • Optimal time to post: Late evening PST – 11:30pm – 12:30am so the post gets picked up in the morning for London, NY, etc
   • For lengthy blog posts, submit these posts in parts, by day. For example, Part 1 today, part 2 tomorrow.
   • Lots of headings, diagrams, photos, etc will make your blog post more likely to rank higher than just a text article
4. Foreign Language on your website
   • Ensure you include the foreign language sites or pages in the correct Webmasters for that country or language you want that site/page to show up for.
   • If you want to rank in that country, get the domain extension for that country. relevant .com
     • Second best – sub-domain – set up in webmasters, but doesn’t help with other/native search engines for that country
   • Do not just get the English content translated
     • Redo the keyword research for that language then base the content on those new keyword phrases.
     • Host the domain in the country you want to rank in
     • Get local links
     • Get translated by a location-based translator is recommended
   • Get a country code top level domain
5. Ensure that you verify your site with Bing webmaster tools. Though Bing denies it, some research has shown that it will do good things for your site in Bing
6. Remove the Wildcard DNS from your domain name.
7. Put up videos on Youtube & website
   • Youtube is #2 Search Engine in the U.S.
   • Put video on website and do a video sitemap OR Embed your youtube video on your site and optimize that page’s content.

Many of these tips and tricks provided by Danny Sullivan, Greg Boser, Vanessa Fox, Todd Friesen, Aaron Wall, and Jill Whalen will help further optimize your website.

Sources:
Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land
Greg Boser, President and CEO, 3 Dog Media
Bruce Clay, President, Bruce Clay, Inc.
Vanessa Fox, Contributing Editor, Search Engine Land
Todd Friesen, VP of Search, Position Technologies
Aaron Wall, Author, SEO Book
Jill Whalen, Founder and CEO, High Rankings

————————————————————————–
Contributed by: Benu Aggarwal, Nichole Cupps, Milestone Internet Marketing

So here are some questions that were discussed in the session. Let´s go over them.

Question: Is it a problem if my whole site is in secure https:// format?
Answer: Matt: No, secure websites like paypal are being indexed by the search engines and they show up in search results.

Question: Is there a way to hide the date in Google search results for blog posts? Example:

Answer: Matt: Users like to see the date, so Google does not let you remove it. The date is inferred from when the post was first indexed, or from the date on the post itself.

Question: Should we be sculpting our Page Rank? What´s the best way to do it?
Answer: Matt: Adding no follows isn´t a good use of your time. Spend time optimizing your website architecture. Page rank dissipates as you pass through more pages. Put content that will make money close to the root / home of the website. Instead of sculpting page rank, spend that time creating new good content .
Arnab: All of the so-called micro-optimizations don´t really help. Arnab concurs with Matt.

Question from Danny: If already have great content and optimized website architecture, does blocking links with nofollow or another method help your page rank?
Answer Matt: No, blocking some links doesn´t increase the page rank flow. Google makes its own assumptions about where to pass link juice, even if you are trying to block links. Google wants to see what people see and focus on relevant links. Don´t get obsessed with PageRank.
Danny: Why not remove the page rank feature if people are just getting obsessed with it?
Matt: It´s not removed because regular people use it to determine how reputable a page is.

Question: What´s up with Google & domain authority with big sites like Wikipedia? A blank Wikipedia page ranks higher than my website.
Answer: Matt: Big sites aren´t always going to out-rank small ones. Wikipedia does a good job of SEO & has authority, so that´s why they rank well.
Arnab: If your website has great content & relevant links, then it is likely to rank higher.

Question: If Bing makes an algorithm shift, will that affect Yahoo immediately?
Answer: Arnab: Yes. Bing & Yahoo search results will be the same. Yahoo will innovate on the experience but core 10 links will be the same as Bing results.

Question: Is it beneficial to use CSS to keep your content at the top of the page?
Answer: Matt: It´s not a huge thing for Google. Google crawls a lot more of the page than they used to. You don´t want to bury your content after 5 pages of code, but if your content is good, you don´t need to worry about CSS usage much.
Arnab: At Yahoo it´s not a really important either

In Conclusion, Matt mentioned that Google Caffeine will be launching in the next couple of months as anticipated. The panel discussion didn´t change a lot of what we know about SEO – content is still king.

————————————————————————–
Contributed by: Bhuvana Krishnan, Michelle Pate, Milestone Internet Marketing

• Gay men spend 14 hours a week on the Internet. Lesbians spend 11 hours a week
• 39% of gay men respond to ads on LGBT blogs
• LGBT users generally have one the largest amounts of disposable income. Therefore, consumption consist of discretionary items, like vacations
• Although 4-10% of all Internet users self-identify as LGBT, 90% of this market segment are heavy Internet users

For example, a case study was shown how the LGBT portion of an online travel agency (OTA) capitalized on this market segment when Sweden legalized gay marriage in 2009. The OTA optimized PPC landing pages, keywords in content and ad copies, display advertising on gay-related websites, and their social media profiles for keywords like "gay Sweden" or "gay Stockholm." During that time, the OTA ranked the first for those keywords, and provided them a high ROI for gay travel. Conclusion: for the LGBT market segment, hoteliers need to optimize campaigns, display ads, ad groups, and socializing with gay specific keywords and promotions. A good starting point for research is news sources, like pride parades or the progression of gay marriage.
Meanwhile, the African-American and Hispanic market segments are also lucrative segments:

• Hispanics are the fastest growing market segment in terms of Internet usage, following the pattern of growth amongst the US population
• More than half of Hispanic Internet users defined English as their primary language
• Multimedia and travel are among the top 5 reasons for Hispanics to use the Internet
• African-American users tend to be older than the average user, and will social through discussion forums.
• Younger African-American Internet users tend to use mobile devices more often than computers, and are drawn to products associated to retail and music

A case study was shown to display how an alcohol company´s partnership with a music venue used mobile strategies to draw in attendance to a music performance. The advertiser did display ads, which were point-of-sales widgets, on local radio sites. The widgets also offered opt-in capabilities where the user entered a phone number. If the user did not purchase tickets at point-of-sale, the company then used the users’ phone number to send a reminder text to purchase tickets. In 8 weeks, the company collected 1,133,510 opt-ins.

A challenge may be hotel brands may fear alienating other market segments by catering to any of these 3 market segments. However, a case study was presented about the airline industry. A major airline company recently became one of the first airline companies to first introduce gay travel packages, and has since then dominated the LGBT market. Conclusion: Hoteliers do not need to fear alienation – in fact, being the first to target underserved market segments whose Internet usage are promising can, in the long run, provide a consistent ROI.

Event: Search Marketing Expo – SMX West, March 2-4, 2010
Session: Paid Search Bullseye! Reaching and Closing Your Ultimate Customer
Speakers:
Bill Carter, Partner, Fuse Marketing
Graham Mudd, Vice President Search & Media, comScore, Inc
Thomas Roth, President, Community Marketing, Inc.

Conclusion: It goes without saying that all marketing campaigns need to cater to a specific market segment. But how? By understanding the statistics on each market segment’s usage of Internet – whether it being display, PPC, search, mobile – hoteliers obtain a better understanding of where to go and how to connect with a given market. Use the previously mentioned statistics as a starting point for ad copies, keywords, and product placement. Each creatively campaign must hone in on the target market’s purchasing behavior, which in turn, can leverage the hotelier’s market share.

————————————————————————–
Contributed by: Nelson Toriano, Milestone Internet Marketing

What are sitelinks?

• Sitelinks help users navigate your site.
• Sitelinks can be managed through Google Webmasters, where you can select what sitelinks you want to activate or pause.
• Google analyzes the link structure of your site to find shortcuts that will help save users time.
• 2-line Sitelinks are for the most authoritative sites for a particular query. (Those links under the primary links in a search result)



• 1-line Sitelinks are the less authoritative sites.
• Show links to pages deeper in the site

What are breadcrumbs?

• Replaces the green URL for a result with a site hierarchy that shows where the result fits
• Each level of the hierarchy is a clickable link
• Must have a clear site hierarchy & visit-able link, breadcrumbs on your site breadcrumbs to show

How can you use sitelinks in PPC Ads?

• New feature of Adwords allow u to attract more users & move them further down the purchase funnel by providing add links to content deeper within your sites.
• Campaign level settings – up to 10 links can be provided, only 4 will show at any given time
• Seasonal/limited time promotions can use ad sitelinks to alert users to timely offers when they search for your brand on google.com
• User segmentation ad sitelinks can help you segment your users before they ever reach your site
• Brand segmentation allows you to highlight sub-brands to leverage and segment your core brand to promote these sub-brands.



• MVP´s – Most Valuable Pages – ad sitelinks allow you to direct traffic.
• Clear calls to action – if u r directing users to pgs w/ actionable content, make those actions clear in the ad text

Tips & Tricks when using Sitelinks:

• Briefer is Better: users are more likely to click on short, clear links than longer, more descriptive links. The links with less than 15 characters tend to outperform those links that use the full character limit.
• Use landing page language: prominently display the language from your link on the associated landing page so users are more likely to stay.
• Provide unique ID´s to all sitelinks to enable you to track
• Turn off sitelinks through webmaster tools for 90 days – reset the clock every 90 days
• If you have less than 3 unblocked sitelinks in your webmasters, sitelinks will not display in search results at all.

Benefits with Sitelinks:

• Visually – click-thru rate increase w/ sitelinks
• Could be used to push competitors further down on page

Problems with Sitelinks:

• No separate reporting on sitelink performance
• No information or tracking is provided on how frequently sitelinks get triggered
• Pushes natural search results down which is problematic if u rank poorly.
• Click costs get assigned to keywords generating impressions in the usual manner, not based on sitelinks
• Clicks on sitelinks is a small percent of total traffic to triggering groups
• Most go to headings, especially since sitelinks don´t always show

Jerry Dischler, Vanessa Fox, and Ariel Sumeruk have outlined the various uses of sitelinks as well as how to utilize sitelinks to make it easier for users to navigate your site without ever entering.

Sources:
Jerry Dischler, Senior Product Manager, Google Inc.
Vanessa Fox, Contributing Editor, Search Engine Land
Ariel Sumeruk, Head Business Inteligence, Clicks2Customers

————————————————————————–
Contributed by: Nichole Cupps, Milestone Internet Marketing

Steps to claiming your local business listing in Google:

1. Search for your business in Google Maps (unless you are a new hotel, chances are you have been indexed by Google already).
2. Click the title of your listing to get to the details section.
3. Under the directions you’ll see a link to add or edit your business.
4. Choose a validation option and then you are free to customize your listing. It won’t be validated until you enter the pin number provided by Google via phone or postcard.

Note: You must have a Google Gmail account to verify your hotel’s listing.

These simple steps will allow your business to generate more impressions and be listed for more specific keyword queries, not just geo-targeted searches. Make sure to complete all of the sections including the descriptions, hours, photos, categories, and coupons.

Coupons are a great way to differentiate your listing from others as you see in the image above. Once you’ve complete the validation, now you can learn Important Factors for Local Search Ranking on the Milestone Blog.

————————————————————–
Contributed by: Brad Brewer, Business Development Manager, Central US

We analyze a few of these new features and tools.

1. Say Goodbye To Duplicate Content Issues On Multiple Product Pages

   What: Google’s new feature, Parameter Control, lets you list up to 15 parameters for Google’s search bots to ignore.

   Why: Benefits
   Can improve your site’s crawl efficiency
   Gives you better display URLs

   Is an excellent way to control duplicate content on your site – Telling Google that these pages contain the same content will allow them to index only one version in their search results. For example, if you specify that the parameter session id should be ignored, Google will consider these URLs to be the same page.

   How:
   Log into your Google Webmaster Tools account. Once there under the Dashboard click the Site Configuration tab. Then choose Settings and Parameter Handling option is available to you. For each parameter, select the option you want and save it.

   Please Note: Google treats these requests as suggestions rather than directives.
   Image/ screenshot to embed in the blog post

   

2. New Tool To View And Perfect Your Rich Snippets

   What: Rich Snippets Testing Tool

   Why: You can now preview what your snippets will look like in search results and make sure you have all your code in order. No more shooting in the dark. Also, if your site doesn’t have rich snippets yet this tool makes it much easier to add them
   
   How:
   [A] This tool shows you a live preview of a URL’s existing rich snippets and
   [B] It also shows you the rich snippet code that a site has in place.

   

   To add snippets: Check out the search results and find an example of the additional information that you want your site to have available. Put that URL into this tool and check out the code that the site is using. Take that code, edit it to reflect the facts about your business, and then just add it to your own page’s code.

3. Google’s New DoubleClick Ad Exchange – PPC On Steroids

   What: Google’s Content Network (GCN) is upgrading with their new DoubleClick Ad Exchange. The Ad Exchange is an advertising system for display ads that integrates with the GCN and your AdWords account.

   Why: In addition to running your ads on the millions of sites available across the GCN, you can now also build display ads yourself and then pick and choose where they go. Deliver a compelling display ad and make it completely relevant to what the user is looking at. You can specify exactly which Web site you want your ad to display on.

   How: Google has a very detailed Display Ads 101 tutorial that will help you on your way.

   Example: Place an ad of a new wine on a travel webpage giving tips on a Napa Wine Tour.

   

4. What Does Your Google Map Listing Have to Do With Your PPC Campaign ?

   What: Local Business Ad Extensions in your AdWords ads. This is an extra line at the bottom of your AdWords ad that displays your business’ street address and tells searchers that you’re a local business.

   Why: It is too early to tell whether this will increase your ad’s CTR (click through rate) but we think that this icon will soon be a popular indicator of a local result. The additional icon plus the fact that your ad would be one line longer both help your ad stand out from the other competition in the local results.

   How: Go into your Local Business Center account and link your Local Business Center account to your AdWords account. This will allow the addresses to be dynamically inserted into your text ads depending on the search query. If you don’t have a Google Local Business Center listing, AdWords provides an option to manually enter your address into your listing. Now, your ad can appear on Google Maps. A further option is being able to upload a custom icon that will appear on Google Maps.

   

   References: www.searchenginenews.com
   Link: http://www.searchenginenews.com/se-news/content/search-engine-strategy-and-optimization-updates-for-october-2009#2

————————————————————————–
Contributed by: Aditi Karandikar, Milestone Internet Marketing