Search Engine Optimization Tips Blog

The offensive image of the First Lady Michelle Obama showed back up on Google’s search index, and the internet is in an uproar. The image ranked high for search pages, prompting Google to buy ads to explain the reason for the picture popping back up after its removal last week.

Google had originally removed the offensive image of the First Lady under the excuse that the website which was hosting the image had violated the company’s guidelines and was selling malware to its visitors. Unfortunately,  the same image could be viewed through other sites. Google had to do something to deal with all the flack they were getting over the Michelle Obama picture as well as other offensive images.

There now appears an ad on the Google site termed ‘Offensive Search Results’ which can lead searchers to http://www.google.com/resultsinfo.html. The search engine company is using the site is used  to apologize to users who end up having an unpleasant search experience with Google.

The page explains in detail the company’s policy, rules and regulations regarding offensive content, making the excuse to offended users that:

disturbing or offensive content that may sometimes be displayed on search results comes out of the internet or innocuous queries but the views expressed or images displayed are in no way endorsed by the company.

Google representatives say results displayed by the search engine are a direct reflection of the content that is present on the internet. Since site ranks by Google use complex mathematical algorithms, the ideals and preferences of the company’s staff don’t impact  results thrown up on the Search page.

In 2006, Google faced a similar situation when George Bush’s page ranked first for the search query ‘miserable failure.’ It was eventually taken down completely, but Ms Obama is not being so lucky about her unpleasant pic.

We used to call it viral marketing – we said a blog post, a Twitter Tweet or a Digg went ‘viral’. With the upsurge of the meme, however, is viral gone for good?

According to whatis.techtarget.com,  meme (pronounced ‘meem’) is:

A meme is an idea that is passed on from one human generation to another. It’s the cultural equivalent of a gene, the basic element of biological inheritance. The term was coined in 1976 by Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene. Dawkins speculated that human beings have an adaptive mechanism that other species don’t have. In addition to genetic inheritance with its possibilities and limitations, humans, said Dawkins, can pass their ideas from one generation to the next, allowing them to surmount challenges more flexibly and more quickly than through the longer process of genetic adaptation and selection.

Examples of memes might include the idea of God; the importance of the individual as opposed to group importance; the belief that the environment can to some extent be controlled; or that technologies can create an electronically interconnected world community.

Today, the word is sometimes used to describe ideas deemed to be of passing value. Dawkins himself described such short-lived ideas as memes that would have a short life in the meme pool. Meme is an abbreviated form of the Greek word “mimeme,” which means “something imitated.”

In internet speak, a meme is something that captures the public’s notice, and is passed laterally rather than in generational format.

The most renowned meme of 2009 was probably entertainer Kanye West’s hijacking of the stage during young country star Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech at the MTV VMA awards.

According to one account:

Taylor was just beginning her acceptance speech when Kanye crashed the stage, snatching the microphone from a startled Swift and proclaiming his dissatisfaction.

“Yo Taylor, I’m really happy for you, I’ll let you finish, but Beyonce has one of the best videos of all time. One of the best videos of all time!”

Cameras cut away from the stage to pan over an astonished audience; Beyonce looked aghast and the crowd booed.

The moment quickly shot to meme status, as the video was played and replayed – but it didn’t stop there. Within hours spoofs were being don, with Kanye’s face superimposed over images dissing every famous person imaginable from the President of the United States to Einstein  saying “I’m really happy for you, I’m gonna let you finish, but –”

The best meme of 2009, and the launch of a new era for ‘viral marketing’ – it brings back memories of teh old Burma Shave signs that became an American icon, and live on as a true meme with even shows today using signs on posts with scraps of verse culminating in a punch line for added effect.

Want to go viral? make a meme!

Chasing the almighty Tweet? How do you build a following? Here’s five steps to exponentially growing your Twitter follower list.

1. Make sure you have a photo up. No-one likes following a weird google-eyed abstract design. Have an interesting bio posted.

2. Do NOT ‘private setting’ your Tweets. Let folks see what you are taljking about – you’ll get more followers if they can ‘preview’.

3. Interlink. Link your Twitter account to LinkedIn and Facebook and your blog or email signature. This keeps the juice flowing. The more people you attract, the more will ultimately land on your Tweet, and follow you on Twitter.

4. Target reciprocators. These people have almost equal large amounts of followers compared to the people they follow. Their mantra is, “You follow me, I’ll follow you”.

5. Tweet around 4 pm EST every Friday, if possible. Apparently,  Dan Zarrella (internet marketing scientist and author of “The Science of Retweeting”) spent nine months analyzing roughly 5 million tweets and 40 million retweets.

This lead to the institution of #followfriday, which some swear by and others find boring.

Do pay attention to hash marks and shortening your urls for more space within your 140 characters. Above all, keep your tweets real time, vital and interesting to your prospective followers.

Everyone knows about keyword research and the long tail. You have to think creatively to find all the people who are looking for you!

The first step to good keyword research is knowing how to operate Google’s Keyword tools. You can make a list of words you want to target, then plug them in in different combination and the tool will offer you newer ideas and various related terms.

You can expand on this by brainstorming and checking out the competition. See what unique combinations they’ve come up with, and develop some content of your own.

Next look at the search engines top buzzwords over a period of a few months to track trends and evergreen subjects. Borrow some keywords and combine them with your own. Go back to the Google keyword tool and see if any new combinations pop up.

Go look at forums and blogs in your niche and pay close attention to what types of people are searching for your product or service and how they talk about it. You can often pick up on ways people converse online and translate that into how they are likely to search.

Diversify. Is ‘baby’ or ‘infant’ better? Use both, create two pages to develop the option on both sides. Above all, don’t forget the long tail!

If you are the average internet user, social media is being pushed on you at every turn.

As the need to go more social amplifies, Google’s focus is on consolidating various account profiles into one Google Profile. Now, Google Profiles can now be used as OpenID, meaning users can sign into any site that accepts OpenID simply by using the appropriate Google Profile domain.

OpenID, despite the obvious value behind their platform, simply didn’t take off the way it was hoped, and has still to break into mainstream usage. It’s apparently just not public knowledge that people can use various accounts  as OpenIDs; in fact a lot of the internet users out there don’t even know what OpenID is. Can the action of Google backing open ID with their own Google profiles change this? Most say no.

Google is trying their best to get regular Gmail addys used as formal internet ID, which may be convenient but raises many issues of privacy and security.

Individually, the best bet is to gruop your online profiles and connect them yourself, using Facebook, Twitter and other networks to help drive traffic to eachother in conjunction with your websites and blogs. Worry about branding instead of you own personal one click access – that’s really what social networking is all about.

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