Have you noticed that your Google results page is a little different than it was a few months ago? The changes aren’t that obvious, but they’re significant, and they can help you get the information you need quicker and easier. The key to it all is the “Show Options” link right above the top search result. Click on that, and a whole menu of options opens up in the left column of the search page. You can refine your searches based on how recent they are, whether you want only pages you’ve visited before, only pages you haven’t visited before, more shopping sites, fewer shopping sites, and many other options.

If you’re trying to refine a search, but you’re not exactly sure how to refine it, you can click on the “Wonder Wheel” option. This generates a graphic representation of search results that show up as spokes coming off a hub that contains your search terms. If one of the spokes looks interesting or relevant, you can click it and it will generate its own little Wonder Wheel. The Wonder Wheel has actually been around for almost a year now. I admit I never saw it until recently.

These changes to Google results pages are more evolutionary than revolutionary, but they are generating some excitement, as you can see if you search Twitter for “new Google results design.” For researchers in particular, these tools make finding stuff out quicker, easier, and more efficient.

If you sell stuff all over the world, or if what you sell is a service like consulting, then why in the world would you care about being listed on the local versions of the big search engines? The better question is, why not? It is easy and free to sign up with Google Local, Yahoo! Local, and Bing Local (though Yahoo! has an optional enhanced service that costs $9.95 per month). And you never know where your next big order or contract might come from. There are probably local businesses that would prefer to work with a local consultant or service provider compared to a remote one.

The process for signing up is similar for Google Local, Yahoo! Local, and Bing Local, though Yahoo! Local is a little more picky about what you have to have on your site and in your application in order to be accepted.
Google Local has the advantage of being the most popular search engine, and Bing has the distinction of having local search refinement that is very good. With a Yahoo! enhanced listing, you get reports detailing how many times your listing showed up and how many times people clicked on it. You could sign up for all three of these within half an hour, and Bing and Google allow you to post photos, coupons, and other goodies with your listing. This is one of the best half-hour investments you could make to benefit your business, and ignoring this could be to your competitor’s advantage.

Video used to elicit a “meh” reaction from SEO experts, because search engines ignored them. But now that search engines are learning to index videos, and since videos are rapidly increasing in popularity due to the increasing availability of broadband, you ignore video content at your own peril. Right now, the HTML surrounding your video, as well as the video’s URL, filename, title, and meta data are extremely important in getting that video to help you with your SEO goals. Character recognition, speech recognition, and image recognition are expected to mature technologically enough that someday the video content itself will be indexable. But for now, we have to deal with these SEO basics of title, keyword, URL, and meta data optimization.

Google is now attaching captions to videos, and they’ve done some already. If there are captions for a video you own, you can download, edit, and upload them, adding another layer of SEO onto your video content, because Google indexes the caption files. There’s a backlog of old videos that YouTube is working on, but you can request auto-generated captions for videos you already put on YouTube if they haven’t been generated yet. This could be a whole new dimension of video SEO, and you might as well get a jump on it. Take a look at the three screen shots for some idea of what to expect.

Maybe you think that having your business on the web (solely or mostly) transcends the local business world, but that’s not the case at all. Even if you’re online only, there’s no reason not to list your business on local business listings. You never know who could be wanting your exact service – they might be only a few blocks away. It’s easy and free to sign up with most local business listings and it doesn’t take more than 10 or 15 minutes. Three you should consider signing up for are Yelp, Yahoo! Local, and Bing Local.

Yelp has not only listings for local businesses but also reviews. You may have to prime the pump a little at first by getting a friend or two to write positive reviews of your business, and you will have much more credibility if you also rate local businesses. But as the positive reviews add up, your business’s local profile can be raised significantly.

With Yahoo! Local, you have to be a local business, and there are both basic and enhanced listings. The enhanced listings cost $9.95 per month and get you a much more detailed listing.

Signing up for Bing Local is easy and quick, and Bing’s local search refinements are known to be good, so you definitely don’t want to miss out on signing up on Bing Local.

Considering how easy and quick it is to become part of these local business directories, there’s no reason for you not to sign up.

Press release services for SEO can be contracted out, or you can do it yourself on any number of free and paid press release distribution sites. Online public relations can be an important part of off-page optimization, and it can bring more traffic to your site. There are a number of free press release sites with Google PageRank of 5 or better, which can get you a lot of return for your time if you write the press release well. Many of these sites have paid upgrades that can get your press releases wider exposure and less on-page competition from ads.

Press releases can’t just be this week’s version of “Gosh, Wow, Look how Awesome We Are.” They should be newsworthy and pertain to one topic only. They should be written in a tone appropriate for your industry’s readers, and they should be optimized for keywords in the title, tags, image filenames, and URL if you’re allowed to customize it. Your press release should ideally contain links to your home page, a product page, and a blog post to give readers a comprehensive view of your business.

Some press releases contain embedded video these days. If it’s high quality and relevant, then it’s worth including. If you don’t add video, then add images if you can. If they’re given relevant titles, then people can find them using image searches, providing one more route back to your site.

Will your efforts at writing and submitting articles about your website’s line of expertise to article directories be rewarded? In general, yes, but there are a few Dos and Don’ts to keep in mind:

• Do concentrate your efforts on the top article directories, which are currently Ezinearticles, GoArticles, and eHow
• Do write coherent, readable, high quality articles that actually tell the reader something they don’t know
• Do follow the site’s editorial guidelines. Some are more stringent than others, but whatever they are, follow them
• Do link to your articles from your Facebook account
• Do post a Tweet with a link when you have a new article published
• Don’t send the same article out to a bunch of article directories. Duplicate content isn’t your friend when it comes to SERP results
• Don’t bother with sites that say they’ll submit your article to “hundreds” of articles directories. You won’t get much, if anything, from the effort.

A stable of good, original articles on top article sites can actually bring you more site traffic than if you had those articles on your own website (at least at first). For budget conscious webmasters, articles on articles directories are a form of free advertising. The “bio” and “resource” boxes article sites provide usually allow links to your website. Take advantage of any legitimate opportunities an articles site offers to link to your website.

When I started out, I thought that it was really cool when someone linked to my site. It was like an unexpected vote of confidence, and it made me feel all righteous for awhile. Little did I know that those inbound links were essential to my site building PageRank and traffic levels. Inbound links aren’t just pennies from heaven. They’re a big part of your site’s ranking in the search engines. And if they come from sites that themselves have a high PageRank or a high position in the SERPs, they’re worth even more.

Link building isn’t something you should just write at the bottom of your list to do later. It is something that you should work into your schedule preferably every day. There’s no substitute for great content, and for politely and genuinely asking good sites if they will link to your homepage or to some other page on your site. Devote half an hour to it every day and see what a huge difference it makes.

Some of the “Don’ts” for link building include the use of paid linking schemes. C’mon! Your site’s better than that. A thousand crappy links that you paid hard-earned money for aren’t worth anything and in fact could get you penalized or banned from search engines. But the main “Don’t” for link building is this: Don’t neglect it. Your site is too important to languish in the bottom of the search engine pile. Inbound links from quality sites are a testament to that.

You’re probably sick of hearing it, but it’s true: you need good, original, relevant content on your website to move up the search engine rankings, and you need to update your site on a regular basis. Whether you write the content in-house or outsource it, keep in mind how people behave when surfing the web. Your text should be broken up into digestible chunks, given plenty of white space around it, and supplemented with pleasing graphics.

Other good web content tips include using short lists whenever possible, using relevant anchor text for your links, and avoid obnoxiously flashing graphics. Check out the screen shot from part of a page off Ars Technica website to see a good example of how a website should read.

Because keeping a website updated with new content is so important, many webmasters choose to outsource this job in order to be able to concentrate on other aspects of the business. Hiring a freelancer can work well as long as you make your requirements clear and have good communication back and forth with the freelancer.

The takeaway from all this is that content creation isn’t just a sideline, but an integral part of your SEO plan. So if you’re not prepared to regularly create good content and don’t have a staff member who can devote the time it requires, then you should really consider outsourcing. With good, fresh, relevant content, your site’s PageRank and position in the search engine results will steadily increase.

There are several levels of research on your competitors that you can do effectively on your own. The first level of research is simply getting a pen and some paper and “crawling” the site yourself while making notes on structure, anchor text, and navigation. This is a way to get fresh ideas about your own site’s navigation, anchor text, and structure.
If you want to dig a little deeper, look at the html source for a competitor’s page. Usually ctrl+u will get you this information, or it will be under the “Tools” menu. Look for well-made title tags, H1, H2, and H3 headers, and a regular smattering of nofollow tags. These are signs that they know their SEO.

You can download a free back link analyzer like the one from SEObook. Using this, you can analyze, say, the top hundred back links by PageRank and Alexa Rank. All you have to do is load them into a spreadsheet and order them that way. This lets you see where their best links are from. If there are bunches of back links from one domain, the competitor probably owns that domain. Figure out where your best bets are for finding your own back links, and start asking. You’ll probably get at least a few good back links this way.

In early 2009 Google started giving more weight to brands when it came to search engine results. Quite naturally, a lot of people predicted doom for organic search results. Fortunately, any damage to unique, high-quality non-”brand” content appears to be minimal so far. The ones who have suffered have mostly been those with thin affiliate sites – sites that have very little actual content but push affiliate programs.

Google’s goal in doing this was to keep the first SERP from being dominated by low-content sites. It is easy to see how some people would fear that SEO suddenly wouldn’t matter anymore, if you were going to search on, say, boots and have a first results page dominated by Uggs, Kenneth Cole, Kate Spade, and Tod’s. This wouldn’t do you much good if you wanted work boots.

But what seems to have happened is that there is more of an eclectic mix on the first SERP with searches on broad keywords, like health insurance. You can see in the three screen shots that the first results page has a mix of sponsored sites, big brands, informational pages, news results, and book results. The sky hasn’t fallen yet, but those who run hundreds of thin affiliate sites may want to be looking over their shoulders.