Back in May of 2009, Google launched Search Options, which is the side panel that lets you apply filters and view search results in different ways. This might not seem like a big deal to a lot of people, but Google actually put in quite a few long years into the development of this technology. The concept surfaced in 2001 and was later unveiled in May of 2007 as universal search. Fast forward two years, and today we have very enhanced and beefed up search options available at only a few mouse clicks away.

So you may be wondering what can you do with the new search options. The simple answer: a lot! The better question to ask would be what can’t you do with the new search options. The more important question to ask yourself – assuming you’re a site owner interested in increasing organic search traffic – is how can I enhance my SEO to capitalize on these new features. Let’s look at a few of the new features and then I’ll offer some suggestions on how to take advantage of them.

The search options available are as follows: All results, videos, news, blogs, books, forums, reviews.

Additionally, you can add these filters to the first six: Any time, recent results, past hour, past 24 hours, past week, past year, specific date range.

On top of that, you can then filter your view: Standard view, related searches, wonder wheel, and timeline.

The last filter allows you to change your view even further: Standard results, images from the page, fewer shopping sites, more shopping sites, and more text.

So now that we’ve broken down the search options and defined each filter, let’s talk about some SEO tips. Here are a few things that you can do to make the most of the new search options in Google.

Videos: Creating and uploading a videos in YouTube and embedding them in your web pages will increase your chances of pulling up in the video results.

On video sites, such as YouTube, be sure to put the URL of your web page into the description. People as well as spiders will be able to travel from the YouTube video page to your web page. Both activities influence your web pages rankings.

Blogs: Creating and maintaining a blog, and publishing unique and high quality content related to your brand, business, products, and services can help you increase your chances gaining top ranks when users filter and show blog results only.

Don’t discount the possibility of running multiple blogs. The cost and time invested into maintaining blogs is much less than most people believe. Also, I recommend running blogs using multiple platforms. For example, you should have a blog on self-hosted WordPress, WordPress.com, Blogger.com, and LiveJournal. Lastly, I suggest that each blog appear independent and seperate from the others.

The most successful blogs are blogs that grow off the reader’s activity and contributions. Try to write content in a way that captures attention and makes readers feel compelled to take an action. The desireable actions you seek are backlinks, comments, and social network sharing. These are all activities that influence how well your blog post ranks for keyword phrases in search. Also, content can be carefully shaped and molded in a way to attract the attention of people as well as search engines. And that leads to my next tip.

Reviews: Adjusting your writing style can influence your chances of ranking in the reviews only section. Google looks for common writen trends that typically reflect written reviews, such as product reviews. Spend some time studying the content on some of the pages found in the search results and adapt some of their style into yours.

Index Frequency: You should constantly monitor how quickly new content gets indexed from your site. If content gets indexed within a few minutes of publishing, then you should take advantage of that and publish more content. I recommend publishing new content immediately after the most recent content has been indexed. In other words, everytime web crawlers come back to your site, you should have new content ready to be crawled for indexing. Doing so will increase your chances of pulling up in after the past hour, past 24 hours, and past week filter has been applied.

Another obvious reason why I recommend posting new content as frequently as possible is because doing so places your mark in hundreds and in many cases thousands of search result pages. A great pioneer in this strategy is Chris Pirillo. He has multiple blogs, forums, and sites, each being updated almost hourly. Secondly, these updates aren’t done just by hired or team writers. Most of the updates are user generated content. Chris Pirillo’s earns revenue by displaying contextual advertisements off the content created by community members within his network.

Adjusting how you do things and puting yourself more in-line, and in the same direction as Google, can make a significant difference in the amount of organic search traffic your site receives. Just being aware and perceptive of how Google presents information to users via their search results alone can help a lot. And with these new search options available, instantly there is a new resource of traffic that you can be tapping into.

In this article we’re going to help answer the question: What is ALLINTITLE search. As you may know,  in my last article I explained about advanced and basic search operators in Google. I then explained how understanding these operators can help you have a better understanding of SEO. In this article we’re going to further this lesson by showing you some specific examples of search engine optimization and how these efforts are visible in the search results.

Most programs such as WordPress automatically generate dynamic HTML pages, so unfortunately, many bloggers don’t understand the elements that make up a web page. It’s very important for bloggers to know and understand HTML. If you don’t know HTML, don’t worry, it’s very simple to learn. But again, it is something that you should totally learn.

Doing so, quite honestly, will give you a huge boost towards understanding SEO. That said, one of the first elements we’ll look at is the HTML <title> tag.

Here is a basic example:

<html>
<head>
<title>The Title of Your Webpage</title>
</head>
<body>
<p>Your content goes here.</p>
</body>
</html>

In my previous article, I exaplained about the ALLINTITLE search operator. The ALLINTITLE operator is just that, it looks for the keywords you’re searching for all in the title of a webpage and only returns results that match. Earlier last week, I wrote an article titled, SEO Tools For The iPhone. The source code in my dymanic HTML file had matching HTML <title> tag.

It looks like this:

<title>SEO Tools For The iPhone</title>

If you do an ALLINTITLE search for [seo tools for the iphone] you’ll see that the article I wrote is ranked #1 in Google. In fact, the search is so specific, Google only returns 5 results total. One of the results was created by Gerald after submitting the article into Mixx. So with that said, you can probably now see the importance of creating excellent web page titles. Here is a screen shot:

If you’re a blogger, the HTML <title> tags are created automatically and mirror your post title. So you’re probably wondering what does this mean for SEO? Well, not many people use advanced search operators such as the ALLINTITLE search. So it’s important that your content rank well for the keywords you target. the HTML <title> tag holds weight towards keyword ranking.

Repeating the same search in Google without the ALLINTITLE operator, you’ll see that the same article still ranks #1. Only difference is that instead of ranking #1 out of five listings, it ranks #1 out of 5 million. There are other elements in this article hold some SEO weight and assist in the overall success of the article ranking #1 in Google. Here is a screen shot:

Stick around for my next article and I’ll discuss them in further detail. In the mean time, now that you know about the ALLINTITLE search operator, can you guess what the ALLINURL and the ALLINBODY operators do? My next article will show you how these elements enhance your optimization further. Also, I may touch on article writing and keyword density. If you should have any questions, feel free to use the contact form below.

If you’re looking to get some excellent search engine marketing tips, there’s obviously quite a few sites online that provide them. One site in particular has captured my attention. Recently, I discovered a search engine marketing company in Houston called, Search Engine Marketing Group.

The company was formed in 2006 by Gerald Weber, who happens to be an avid reader of SeoHosting.com Blog. The company started out as a web design business; However, when the needs for professional search engine marketing and optimization services increased over time, Gerald and his team adapted to the demands of business.

Quickly the group grew to be one of the leading search engine marketing companies in the city of Houston. Consequently – and in addition to providing some of the most top notch and professional search engine marketing services in their city - their group also sports one of the hottest blogs covering the topic of search engine marketing and SEO tips.

I discovered the blog recently after getting a trackback notification on a previous article I published on SeoHosting.com. It seems that Gerald had some opinions that differed from mine and he felt compelled to share them on their company blog. It’s a good thing that he did though, otherwise who knows how long it would have been before I would have discovered the site.

That said, if you’re looking for some excellent and practical tips on search engine marketing, I would definitely recommend checking out Gerald’s SEM/SEO blog. A lot of hard work goes into the articles being published and as always, the information and education is totally free.

Some of the more recent tips include information on how to reduce StumbleUpon message spam, how to become a Digg power user, and how to make WordPress more secure. Be sure to check the blog out and connect with them by subscribing their RSS feed.

So many people are concerned with how well their sites and pages rank in the search engines. Time and time again, I get questions sent to me via email and instant message asking the same thing. “Garry, can you please take a look at my site and tell me if it is search engine friendly?” or, “Garry, how come my site doesn’t rank for the keywords I want?” or, “Garry, where do I start with learning more about search engine optimization?”

With the obvious demand for a better understanding of search engines, how to rank in them and how to market your content in them, here is a search engine checklist that I believe you’ll find helpful. It is a simple Yes/No checklist. The more questions that you can answer yes, the more you’re on your way to search engine traffic bliss! Drop a comment with your scores if you’d like.

Simple Search Engine Checklist:

1. Are you creating content that your readers are interested in?
2. Does your content contain focused keyword phrases?
3. Are you optimizing your pages with three to five keyword phrases?
4. Do most of your important keywords appear above the top fold?
5. Are your keywords hyperlinked?
6. Do your graphics on your post contain focused and relevant keywords?
7. Does your post title contain focused keywords?
8. Does your post URL contain focused keywords?
9. Can search engines and people easily find your content from the home page?
10. Do people link back to your home page and individual pages?
11. Are you using basic HTML coding (e.g. H1, h2, h3, Bold, Alt text, etc.)

If you can answer “Yes” to all these questions then you should have a healthy site for users as well as search engines. Feel free to drop a comment and also I’d love it if you’d share this post with your readers on your own site as it can do nothing but help.

I have often speculated whether or not having your content submitted or bookmarked into social networks and bookmarking sites could improve your site SEO. I know for a fact that you can for sure increase traffic to the individual pages and sections of your site that have been submitted or bookmarked. However, in doing so, does it actually help your site become more search engine friendly?

It would be silly of me to claim that I am truly an SEO expert. I am honestly not. I have much more experience in search engine marketing rather than search engine optimization. For those who don’t know, indeed, there is a huge difference between the two. A search engine optimization expert is one who specializes totally in making a web site truly a search engine magnet. A search engine marketing expert, in my opinion, is an individual who specializes in writing content for the exclusive purpose of ranking well in the search engines for certain targeted keywords or phrases.

With that being said, I consider myself to be more on the lines of a search engine marketing expert over being a search engine optimization expert. While I am not totally discounting out that I indeed have SEO skills, I just know that for there are many other people who have a higher level of SEO skills than myself. Also another thing to consider is the fact that I feel that SEO is slightly over-rated. What I mean by that is I think people tend to over-complicate the simplicity of having a search engine friendly web site.

On the matter of discussing whether social networks and bookmarking sites can indeed enhance your web stie SEO, I’d say that they do. I don’t believe that they have a very large impact on your web site SEO, but I do believe that there is a slight improvement. With that said though, the improvements or enhancements if you will, are not what you might expect. The elements that I believe are enhanced stems a little deeper than the default answer most people would assume to be increased backlinks.

While it is true, submitting your site, sections and individual web pages will help increase the number of backlinks, it is also true that many of these claimed popular social networks and bookmarking sites use the NOFOLLOW tag on external links. For those who don’t know what the NOFOLLOW tag is, this is a tag added to a hyperlink that disallows a search engine (commonly Google) from passing through the link to the destination site. In other words, when an external link has the NOFOLLOW attribute assigned, credit for that backlink is not given. Most all social networks and bookmarking sites use the NOFOLLOW attribute.

So as I mentioned, backlinks really isn’t something I would bank on. But still, I do believe that SEO can be enhanced with submitting into the social networks. For me, in addition to having SEM qualities, I too consider myself to be an “Out of the box” thinker. I tend to look at cause and effect a lot. I tend to observe end user patterns and behaviors. More so, I consider what people do when they find things of interest within the social networks. While most people would assume that the traffic and SEO is received from the submission into these networks, I more believe that it is what the community does after they find the content within these networks.

I have a personal blog of my own. Many of you reading this already know this. One of the most common things I do on my blog is share information with my readers. At the moment, I have around 1200 subscribers who read my blog daily. When I find something interesting on the Internet, my gut reaction is to share this information with my readers. By sharing excellent and rich quality information with my readers that helps my blog continue to grow. So, when I find something cool in the social networkings or bookmarking sites, I typically end up writing a blog post about my findings and provide my readers with a direct link to the source of information I found.

So you see, while the process of having your content listed in social networks and bookmarking sites might not technically help your SEO, in many ways it does. If your content is listed or submitted, then there is a very good chance that people who find it will end up writing a post about it on their blog or web site. When a publisher or blogger does that, the results are huge for your SEO. Backlinks indeed are very powerful and backlinks are totally needed to compete with higher competitive words in Google as well as other search engines. The more backlinks you have to your web site, sections within your web site and individual web pages within your web site, the better your SEO is for sure.  So consider this, next time you discover that someone has submitted one of your web pages or blog posts into a social network.

Google and other search engines factor in that many sites online today are produced and published by people who don’t have all that much experience with the Internet, optimizing for search engines, HTML and things of that nature. Over the years, technology has made it possible for anyone with any skill level to create a web page, web site or even a blog. Quite honestly, things are much easier today for people who want to have a web site compared to say 5 to 10 years ago.

While there are quite a few people who are indeed SEO gurus, it seems also that there are sites created by very entry level Internet publishers. With the entry level publishers I have actually seen many times that their pages and posts rank very well in the search engines but also go completely against the grain of what most all experienced SEOs would advice or even put into their own practice.

Some times a great SEO strategy is to just do nothing. This might sound silly, but really, search engines have no choice but to compensate for mistakes in HTML and other forms of coding. Furthermore, search engines have to compensate for spelling and other forms of grammar errors. What I mean to say by doing nothing, is really more less in your site building. While I’ll admit, it indeed is important to have a search engine friendly web site or blog, I often question how effective it is for an individual publisher to invest tons of time and money into making sure that every single element in SEO strategy is performed.

If search engines such as Google were to hold to true to the common SEO techniques that many of the more experienced professionals use, then the result be that these search engines would have a very low volume of listings in their index. Search engines have to assume that there is a large percentage of publishers who are not expert coders and programmers. Otherwise, their index of data would be very very low.

What does that mean for you? Granted, if you are reading this, it is very likely that you are pretty keen on search engines or at a minimum have at least a basic understanding of search engines, how they work and possibly how to get listed in them. SEO professionals really tend to complicate things. This always puzzles me as I can see time and time again situations where non-SEO’ed sites get ranked very well in the search engines.

Amazingly, the sites that I see that do very well are sites that are authored or owned by people who don’t even know what the term search engine optimization means. These level of publishers just focus on what is important to them and their visit visitors and that is the content.

If you are conscious of your SEO and how well your web site and individual pages rank in the search engines, I would suggest that you focus more on your writing. The content within a page has the highest potential to be SEO’ed rather than the actual coding of the page. Google is very forgiven on design and coding efforts. Google is in it for the content and their bots do a pretty decent job at finding content. If it was any other way, then Google and other search engines would have a very difficult time archiving informaiton for their database.

So really, in my opinion, one of the best SEO strategies starts with the content you write. From there you can or should worry about proper coding, HTML, tagging and things like that. The foundation of everything you do online starts with the content. If you don’t have good content on your pages to work from, then you have really no hope with a successful organic search engine ranking campaign.