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We’re living in an increasingly open and revealing world where people are eager to tell you where they are, where they’ve been, and where they’re going. Not everyone is so eager, but location-sharing is a rising trend that is not to be ignored. Naturally, the phenomenon will have a growing impact on search.

There is still plenty of room for conversation about what location means to search.  Tell us what you think.

Remember when the industry was still trying to make sense of how social media and search fit together? It’s now fitting together in a variety of ways, and now we’re at a similar point with location and search.  

Google Has Its Own Significant Amount of Location Sharers

At the Web 2.0 Expo this week, Google Product Manager Steve Lee revealed some interesting info about Google Latitude, the company’s location-sharing service, which has been around since long before location-sharing became such a huge trend. Foursquare – the location-sharing service you hear about most these days, has a million users. Latitude has 3 million active users, and this year it’s grown 30% per month each month so far.

MG Siegler at TechCrunch says Lee hinted that Latitude would soon have a check-in component, something that has made services like Foursquare so popular, and of great use to local businesses. He also said that Latitude has taken some time to gain ground because of iPhone’s lack of the ability to run services in the background (so there isn’t a Latitude iPhone app), but the iPhone OS will have that ability, and Android usage is on the rise (apparently BlackBerry has been big for the service as well). Over 10% of All Android users are using Latitude.

Location as a Search Signal

Google has been very open about how much emphasis it is placing on mobile, and mobile and location-sharing go to together like corn flakes and milk. Smartphone usage will continue to grow. Therefore location-sharing will continue to grow. Android usage in particular is growing rapdily.

Diana Pouliot, Director of Mobile Advertising at Google recently said a third of all Google searches via the mobile web pertain to some aspect of the searcher’s local environment. The company has also been quoted as saying it thinks of location as a "hugely important signal."

With Google’s newly redesigned SERPs, location-based searches will increase, or rather filtering searches by location will. With the "nearby" option more visible, it stands to reason more people will use it. At this point, I’m not seeing real-time location-based info here, but that may change in the future. Google will continue making tweaks and adding features, and having real-time info here may begin to make sense.

 

Of course you have the Updates option as well, where you get the real-time info. There’s not a "nearby" sub-option under this option at this point, but with Twitter enabling location info, Facebook launching such a feature soon, and of course Google’s own Buzz, it would also make sense for that sub-option to appear here soon. Don’t be surprised if it does.

According to Siegler, Google has been working "heavily" on location history with regard to Latitude, with updates to this feature expected in the coming weeks. "This will allow people who run Latitude in the background to get interesting information and data about where they’ve been," he says.

Facebook Will Likely Have Location Info This Month

According to AdAge, Facebook will be launching its location-sharing feature as early as this month. McDonalds is already building a campaign around it, and others are waiting to do the same.

Users will be able to share their location in status updates, the report says. With Facebook taking over the web in general, this will likely have huge implications, but for search specifically, it may play a significant role as well. Google of course has its real-time search, which includes publicly accessible status updates from Facebook.

With Google’s new SERPs, this feature is highlighted to a much greater extent. Before, users would generally only see real-time results for newsy queries that were seeing a great deal of current updates. Now, for any query, a user can simply go to the updates option, readily visible from the left panel, and see the results.

Wrapping Up

It remains to be seen just how important location will truly be. Despite its popularity and the rushing of companies and services to take advantage of the technology, it still freaks a lot of people out. Not everyone is going to share their info, or at least willingly. For this reason, there may always be a large part of the market MIA for any location-based campaigns. However, for search, as long as there is a substantial amount of location-related data out there (and it appears that this will only grow rapidly from here on out), local businesses stand to benefit, and so do consumers looking for location-based relevance.

It’s still unclear just how location-sharing is going to impact search exactly, and just how search marketers will specifically be able to take advantage as far as results go, but all signs point to new opportunities for targeting customers on a very relevant level – where they are, where they have been, and where they are going.

Either way, it might be a good idea to start looking for ways to reach consumers through their location-sharing habits. Without the benefit of search, there are still tremendous opportunities. As it gets more integrated into search, you’ll be ahead of the game.

Are you currently using or planning location-based strategies in your marketing efforts? Comment here.

YouTube still claims to be the second largest search engine in the world. Just think about that for a minute. If you produce online video and it’s not on YouTube, you’re probably missing out on a great deal of potential viewers. If you’re not producing video at all, you’re missing out a lot of searches.

Do you consider YouTube important to search marketing? Let us know.

However, just uploading content to YouTube is not going to be enough. Like with any other form of search engine, content needs to be optimized to be found. At SXSW in Austin back in March, WebProNews spoke with Margaret Gould Stewart, who leads YouTube’s user experience team. She talked about some reasons a lot of content producers are missing out on some tremendous opportunities when they use the world’s most popular online video site.

"When you’re building a sustained audience, you have to continually create great content that connects with your audience," says Stewart. "I think the secondary part is understanding your audience – understanding who you want to reach, and proactively cultivating a relationship with the people in your audience. And on YouTube that means not just creating great content and uploading it to the site, but actively building your subscriber base, so that you can be in direct and regular interaction and conversation with those people."

"We find that video producers who are really active in the conversation, whether it’s comments or uploading ‘how this video was made’- you know, kind of the behind-the-scenes – people are really fascinated by that stuff, and we see some our most successful partners really having that, again, kind of ongoing conversation – not an arm’s length relationship to the audience, but very engaged," she adds.

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"We sometimes see content producers not investing enough time in attaching great meta data to their content, because like I said, YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world, and we all know that for Google, it’s important to think seriously about search engine optimization, because you can have the great content, and ideally the cream will float to the top, but there’s definitely things you can do to help yourself along, right?"

"Good clear, direct titling of your content, putting the right kinds of tags…because the fact is initially when content goes viral, people may discover it through search engines, or embed it in blogs, but then it reaches that really exciting word-of-mouth status, where I just may mention it to you person-to-person, and then what most people do is just go to YouTube.com and they search for it," she continues. "So if you’re not indexed well in the search engine because you haven’t attached great meta data to your content, you’re going to miss out on that audience."

"The other thing that is really important is enabling embedding," notes Stewart. "It’s probably the number one most important thing, because what we see in videos that become very popular, very quickly and take on that kind of life of its own, a lot of that initial traffic in the first 48 hours happens actually off-site."

Note: This actually plays to a point I made about Twitter embeds as well.

If you want more success from your online video endeavors, read 35 Ways to Improve Your Online Video Performance, and Tips For Ranking Higher On and With YouTube, which features an interview with YouTube Product Manager Matt Liu. If real-time, live video is your thing, check out 8 Tips for Real-Time Video Blogging.

By the way, YouTube is renting movies now, and while it’s not exactly taking over Netflix at this point, I would expect this to grow significantly and get more people spending more time at YouTube, where there is a YouTube search box very close by, and relevant related video suggestions served to viewers constantly.

Is YouTube a significant part of your marketing strategy? Comment here.

Last year, we saw the emergence of the technology PubSubHubbub, which provides real-time notifications to subscribers of content when there is new content or updates being made. There has recently been talk about Google developing a system that would use this technology it its indexing process.

Do you want your content indexed instantly? Share your thoughts.

In fact, Google’s Matt Cutts spoke with WebProNews about this, among other things:

"Maybe some small site, you might only find a chance to crawl its pages once a week, but if that site is blogging like every 20 minutes, boom , you hit the submit button, and the search engines can find out about it," explained Cutts.

"Now the tension is that more spammers would use this as well, so you can’t just say, ‘I’m gonna index everything that everybody pushes to me.’ So finding the right balance there is tricky, but the potential is really, really exciting," he said.

"You can definitely imagine the reputable blogs getting very fast updates – the ones that we think are trustworthy, and then over time, maybe ramping that up, so that more and more people have the ability to do…just like, instant indexing," he says.

And here we see another way Google may end up looking at the trust factor, with regards to ranking.

Can We Learn from How Google Does Real-Time Search?

Liz Gannes at GigaOm recapped a few things Google senior product manager Dylan Casey said at SMX last month:

Casey said perhaps the most complex project in real time is to determine when to trigger the appearance of real-time results in search results. "We have huge internal debates on: Is this a good answer to this question, or are we just creating a tool for low-quality content?" he said.

Casey spent some effort justifying Google paying to include Twitter’s real-time firehose of tweets, saying it was an intensive technical integration on both sides, and that tweets are a fundamentally different form of communication due to the restrictions of their form. For example, Google has developed a ‘complex system’ for removing users’ public tweets that are later deleted or marked private.

Earlier this year, Amit Singhal, who has led development of real-time search at Google talked about how Google ranks tweets. According to him, Google ranks tweets by followers to an extent, but it’s not just about how many followers you get. It’s about how reputable those followers are.

Singhal likens the system to the well-known Google system of link popularity. Getting good links from reputable sources helps your content in Google, so having followers with that same kind of authority theoretically helps your tweets rank in Google’s real-time search.

"One user following another in social media is analogous to one page linking to another on the Web. Both are a form of recommendation," Singhal says. "As high-quality pages link to another page on the Web, the quality of the linked-to page goes up. Likewise, in social media, as established users follow another user, the quality of the followed user goes up as well."

Now Google’s current real-time search product is separate from the whole PubSubHubbub-based system that isn’t in place yet, but Matt’s comments about blogs being trustworthy, indicates to me that trust is going to be key in being able to push content to Google’s index in real-time. So, I wonder if a similar strategy to how Google ranks its current real-time and Twitter results will be employed in determining this kind of trust.

Does This Mean If You’re Not Trusted You Won’t Get Indexed?

"PuSH wouldn’t likely replace crawling, in fact a crawl would be needed to discover PuSH feeds to subscribe to, but the real-time format would be used to augment Google’s existing index," says Marshall Kirkpatrick, who spoke in a session on the real-time web at SXSW, which also included Google’s Brett Slatkin, one of the guys responsible for PuSH (he’s in the following video explaining the technology in simple terms).

Lots of sites out there already have PuSH technology in place. For example, Wordpress and Typepad blogs have the ability to "PuSH" their content. That’s a lot of content itself. A lot of user-generated content, and that means the potential for spam is huge, which is why the trust factor is so important.

If PuSh is to be heavily utilized by the search engines, and you want your content indexed as quickly as possible, you’re going to want to do what you can to build community trust and a solid reputation. One more reason to engage in meticulous online reputation management, put out great content, and engage with the community.

Do you want to see Google index the web in real-time? Discuss here.

The significance of longtail keywords can be exemplified by thinking about the following two people:

Bill is a cafeteria worker who spends his spare time fishing and has heard that his favorite TV shows will look even better on on this new-fangled technology called “HDTV”. He might as well upgrade from his 20” to something a little larger while he’s at it his friends tell him (though they don’t know much more about it than he does). He sits at his computer and enters “hdtv” into the Google search box.

Steve also works in a cafeteria but is a bit more tech-savy. He has and uses a Facebook account, watches videos on YouTube and looks up information on Google when he’s looking for an answer to one of his questions. He too is interested in HDTV but decides to check out a few review sites first before making the leap. He reads a great review on CNET and likes the specs of the “Panasonic Viera TC-P50G10” and decides to look around for pricing. He heads back to Google and searches for “panasonic viera tc-p50g10” or perhaps even “buy panasonic viera tc-p50g10 online”.

The difference between these two? Other than the fact that one has a dismal likelihood of conversion and the other a high likelihood – the difficulty in attaining top rankings for the two phrases is very different as well. Now, I’m not saying there isn’t a place for going after the generic, high-traffic phrases but ignoring the higher converting, less-work-per-conversion phrases that are easier to attain rankings for – well – that just doesn’t make good business sense does it?

So – how do you rank for the longtail?

We all understand that the factors of SEO are the factors of SEO. Just like any other phrases – your ability to rank is quite simply based on a combination of page strength and relevancy (yes there are tons of signals Google uses but they essentially break down to these two points). To affect these areas we use a combination of onsite optimization and link building. Sounds easy so far? Perfect. So let’s take a look first at onsite optimization.

Optimizing your site for the longtail

I can’t possibly cover the different technologies and how to make sure your site is crawlable. Let’s just say – the first step is to make sure that the crawlers can get to your internal pages and that strength passes down. If the crawlers can’t get through to the internal pages then you’ve got bigger problems than tweaking your content and building some links. Contact a developer immediately and get that sorted out first – then continue reading.

Once you know that the crawlers are getting through and strength is passing we move on to the actual optimization. The first thing one wants to look at it how to push the items with the highest ROI potential up in the hierarchy of your site. Let’s use Amazon as an example of how that should be done (they know a thing or two about ranking for products).

Amazon uses one of my personal favorite tactics in that they automate the process but it’s not necessary. You probably don’t have the same number of products so you can likely do manually what they have to automate but let’s look at what they’re doing and you can apply the strategy as you see fit.

If I was Amazon and I wanted to rank my site for longtail phrases I’d want to rank for the phrases that had the highest search volume and highest chances of conversions. I’d have to apply global rules to a massive site (you don’t have to – you can likely do things on a case-by-case basis but I’m sure we can all agree – Amazon cannot). So to keep the most profitable phrases high in the hierarchy but still not ignore the other longtail phrases they have created a hierarchy that puts the top product categories one hop from the homepage (Laptops & Netbooks For Example) and on that page they have links to all the major brands and uses but my favorite tactic is that they have the bestsellers. This information is easily created from their database and insures that the more popular products are two hops from the homepage and linked to with the brand and model number. At the time of this writing they have a link to the “ASUS Eee PC Seashell 1005PE-MU17-BK 10.1-Inch…”. If I search “asus eee pc 1005pe-m” who do you think shows up first? Amazon.

So step one – make sure you’re linking to the product pages with the brand and model number of the item and also put the more important items higher in the hierarchy of your site. Now this doesn’t mean cram all your products on the page. You have to apply the same principles to links with onsite as you do with offsite optimization. A page has a vote. It you have a page with 10 products listed on it – each product gets 1/10 of the weight passed to it. If the page has 500 products listed on it – well, you get my point. Figure out what matters and focus there.

Of course – you don’t want to ignore the other potential phrases. You’ll notice that as well as linking to the top products in each category they link to sub pages with brands, specs, etc. This is why they rank so well for so many phrases. Well – that’s part one.

Once you’ve got the internal linking sorted out you need to follow that up with some onsite relevancy. Here we’re referring to optimized titles, descriptions, H1 tags, content, etc. I’m going to have to leave a full breakdown of onsite optimization for another article but I can discuss some of the differences you’ll encounter with longtail optimization with ecommerce sites.

With “traditional” optimization we visit a page and adjust the relevant aspects (titles, content, etc.) manually. With large ecommerce sites we need to come up with rules that apply site wide. Developing titles, descriptions and content for each and every page one-by-one is likely not an option. If you look at Amazon again you’ll see that they automate the process by using the brand, model and categories in the title, description, keywords and H1 tag. Easily automated. Through their use of automated elements (“Customers bought with …”, specs, descriptions, reviews, etc.) they are also able to insure that that the brand and model number appear on the page.

Now that works well for Amazon. They have millions of links and huge site strength. But what if you don’t have that behind you. They can build a page, put it on their site and rank. You may need to invest some of your time in link building.

Link building for longtail optimization

There are two primary aspects of link building that one needs to address when we’re looking at longtail optimization. The first is to the homepage for site strength and the other is to specific internal pages. The reason that we’ll want to link to specific internal pages is that like it or not, you’re not as strong as Amazon and so you need to build links to compete where they do not.

I’ll leave the discussion of how to build links to other articles (you know – one of the 800,000 written on the subject) however we will discuss the purpose of the links and thus you’ll understand the pattern of the link building.

The homepage links are in place to simply build overall site strength and should be geared to your generic, homepage phrases – it’s the internal links that are specifically geared to brands and models. So we’ll focus on those links in this article.

How to build links to internal pages

Building links to internal pages is virtually identical to homepage. True you can’t use directories but that’s about the only link building tactic that doesn’t apply. There are two points that you’re going to want to direct links to:

1 – the category/brand main page.

The first point you’re going to want to direct links at is the main category page and the main sub-category points of the ecommerce site. You’ll want to direct these links in with anchor text that suits the brand and/or category subject. Let’s use Amazon as an example again.

For the purpose of longtail optimization – the links we’d direct to http://www.amazon.com/Netbooks-Computers/b?ie=UTF8&node=679517011 would primarily be geared to strengthening the page. Oh I’d use anchor text geared at “netbooks” and the link but the main point is to make that page stronger and in turn – the pages it links to. These links will also get the page spidered more.

What this will do is make the links to the brands stronger but most important – the links to the top sellers stronger and more quickly picked up. This is why they rank for new products in a matter of hours.

The individual brand and usage pages are the same from this perspective./ You’ll want to optimize the pages and you’ll want to focus the links for long term gain but the short term purpose is to pass strength to the product pages.

2 – the product pages.

On top of building links to pages one level up (as we’ve just discussed) you’ll also want to build links to the individual product pages. Amazon can build a page, link to it and have it rank – you probably cannot. For products and models you know will stand the test of time – building links can be a long term strategy but not my favorite (due mainly to the fact that it’s not exciting). Personally I like building links to “Coming soon” product pages and getting them spidered before there’s any competition and then adding in the product the day it launches giving you a one-up over your competitors in both timing and strength. Heck, you might even win out over Amazon for a while.

Don’t overdo it in the link building. You’ve got a lot of products. Unless you know a specific product is going to be HUGE you’ll want to just build a few links and move on. You’ve got a lot of products to cover.

Moving forward

Obviously I can’t cover all the various aspects of ranking for the longtail in a single1800 word article and in fact, if I turned this into a 180 page book I’d still not be able to cover all the variables but my hope is that I’ve given you food for thought in the tactics and timing you’ll find helpful in moving forward and ranking your website for the longtail phrases that convert so well and for which you can rank so quickly if you do it right.

Has it ever occurred to you that you may have keywords on your site that are misleading to search engines? Or that you need to take a look at all of the keywords you are trying to rank for, and think about the different meanings and contexts that those could be taken in that are unrelated to your actual product, and then eliminate other seemingly unrelated words that to a search engine could be misconstrued as an indication of one of those other contexts?

At SMX West last week, WebProNews sat down with Bruce Clay of Internet Marketing firm Bruce Clay, Inc. who made some interesting points about understanding searcher behavior, intent-based search, and how that should affect keyword research.

Note: We talked to Bruce about quite a few search-related topics, but this subject is focused on more toward the end of the video (about 20 minutes in).

Clay talks about Google delivering more personalization in search results, taking into consideration things like how prior queries influence future queries. "Ranking is going to be less of a measurement," he says. "We’re going to be focused on more the traffic."

"When I decide I’m selling a hammer, I have to actively go out of my way not to have certain things appear in my site, because the search engines could be confused about what I’m talking about….I don’t mean the Armand Hammer Art Museum at UCLA. I don’t mean a bowling ball…you know, the things that show up for hammer are all over the board," says Clay.

"One of the things that I think is important, and that we’ve been working on is how do we actually do keyword research without knowing the behavioral aspects our personas that are actually going for our product? You have to understand personas now a little bit better – what kinds of things are they likely to search on, in sequence – before they type in hammer…so if they’re on an arts and crafts site, and then they type in hammer, I ought to understand that behavior in sequence, so that I can better do my keyword research and determine how I’m gonna put the words on my page. I don’t see a lot of people even thinking that way."

Personalized search is nothing new. Google’s been personalizing search results for some time, based on various indicators, and it appears that Google is looking for more ways to deliver users a personalized experience (whether they want that or not).

Between personalized search and other sources of information infiltrating search results pages, traditional SEO is becoming harder to accomplish, and Bruce says, even ineffective. That’s why it may become increasingly important to focus on relevant elements of the SERP for queries you hope to be found for.