I was in a meeting the other day with a company who was looking to retain our services. As we got deeper into the discussion, I learned that they were comparing us to other companies, some domestic and some off-shore. That’s fine and is an every day occurrence within our business.

What I found surprising was that several of the competitors were recommending techniques that we would unequivocally consider to be black hat SEO and making promises that were unrealistic. Their logic apparently was to take illicit measures that they felt would boost a client’s rankings in Google, even at the expense of damaging the credibility of their domain. Personally, I don’t think these businesses did an adequate job of explaining the risks involved, but rather sold the upside potential that these tactics may deliver.

I do not pretend to personally understand Google’s algorithm, but I am confident that the brainpower behind it is sufficient to continue to weed out techniques that are considered non-best practices, even if it doesn’t always happen overnight.

SEO should be an ongoing initiative within your organization. Shortcuts are not the answer. Don’t allow your site’s viability to be jeopardized by tactics that are very likely to backfire in the long run.

As the occurrence of Universal & Blended Search results become more frequent for a larger variety of queries, it’s imperative that  business owners and marketing managers craft content creation strategies above and beyond traditional website content. For those sites whose content / industry lends itself to frequent breaking news, updates, and time-sensitive occurrences, presence within real-time search could be particularly beneficial. Following are four tips for improving your real-time search optimization strategy:

1. Blogging. Publish frequent, keyword-rich blog posts. Build a readership. Syndicate your blog via feeds.
2. Use Twitter. Tweet regularly, utilizing keywords that people are looking for. Keep an eye on building your follower base with highly relevant folks on Twitter, so that your tweets garner more authority. Think of your followers almost as you would inbound linkers – demonstrate the quality of your content to the search engines via the quality and relevance of your followers.
3. Press Releases. Distribute well-optimized online press releases. Use keywords, links, and any available multimedia collateral (images, video embeds, etc.), to make the release as robust and content-rich as possible.
4. Local Listings. Don’t forget about local search. Visit the Google Local Business Center to learn more about adding real-time updates to your Google Maps Place Page(s) www.google.com/lbc.

Real-time content is exploding across the Internet, but given its time-sensitivity, its reach is at once both impactful and fleeting. The benefits of creating and ranking for relevant real-time content are clear in that they present your company to people at the very moment of need and urgency. At the same time, maintaining a real-time research optimization strategy takes consistent maintenance and care; first, because it can be difficult to create content on a regular basis and second, because those difficulties are compounded by the challenge of creating content of value to readers. Those companies that do this well have a definite leg-up on their competition relative to the amount of real estate they will be able to garner in the SERPs and the potential for quality leads and business they will be able to generate though that presence.

PageRank is something that many within the search engine marketing and optimization industry are familiar with. PageRank reflects Google’s view of the importance of web pages. Pages perceived as important receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear toward the top of the search results. 
 
Years ago, the “nofollow” attribute was introduced, which enabled webmasters the ability to tell search engines to not follow a specific link from a page.  This attribute essentially tells Google and other search engine spiders to ignore the link and not transfer any PageRank to the page it links to. This can even be used internally on websites to tell the search engines to not transfer PageRank to interior pages. This led to what is known as “PageRank sculpting” where webmasters started to manipulate how credit flows throughout their site.  With PageRank sculpting, webmasters could prevent losing valuable credit on links to unimportant pages and the credit that would have been given to those pages could be redistributed, providing the other links to more important page (those without the nofollow attribute) with more credit.  PageRank sculpting is done in theory to achieve higher rankings for internal pages of a website by not wasting credit on less important pages.

However in 2009, Google stated that using nofollow attributes will no longer allow you to redistribute credit.  Instead, if you use the nofollow attribute, let’s say on 5 links on your homepage, the credit for those 5 links will disappear. The credit that those 5 links would have received without the nofollow attribute will no longer be distributed to other links on this page. 

Since this is the case, it forces webmasters to think about the number and value of links they have on any given page.  If you have too many links on a page, and some of them are nofollowed, you’re essentially throwing away credit.  For search engines and users, you should ensure that the links you have, particularly on your homepage, are to valuable interior pages.  There may be times when you do want to include the nofollow attribute, such as for log-in pages, shopping cart pages, etc.  After all, there is no value in having these pages rank in the search results.  

Here is a link to a post on Matt Cutt’s perspective on the nofollow attribute and PageRank sculpting.  In general, it’s recommended to let PageRank flow throughout the site.  Focus on creating a site worthy of garnering quality links, and an architecture that is friendly for search engines and users.