So what is search engine trust?
For the purpose of keeping things simple, I would identify a site’s trust by 3 different simple criteria:

• Website Age – (most importantly the first time it was indexed)
• Total # of backlinks and the overall age of those links
• Total “trustscore” of other backlinks (How many .edu’s, .gov’s, high ACTUAL PR links, etc.)

Most trust criteria revolve around some dependence on age, which is actually a pretty good signal of quality. From things folks at Google have said in the past, the trustbox (or sandbox if you must) was the unintentional effect of some other filters that were implemented. Realizing that age was a great signal all the way around to defend against the overdependency on links, they’ve went buckwild with age variables ever since.

So this explains why new sites are taking longer to show up in search. Blogs are effected too but not as severely, being very well optimized and by nature putting out fresh content into the index, often daily.

Two or three years ago:
SEO = Content + high PR links

Created: a micro-economy of link buying solely for google rankings

Now
SEO = Crusty trusted domain + content

Will create: use your imagination.

So now an overdependance on trust will create new distortions. Go read the rest of his lengthy post. Its a keeper.

From this basic data, a high ranking for any given query in Google is worth roughly four times that of a visible AdWord link for the same query. Stated another way –

You have to show four PPC links to create click-through opportunities equal to one organic ranking.

Imagine you were trying to decide where to spend your online marketing budget – do you spend 100% of it on a PPC campaign (arguably predictable, more measurable, and guaranteed) or do you balance it with alternative SEO expenditures to create organic results.

Imagine though you could create tens of thousands of unique key phrases that rank organically high. Could you achieve the same in a PPC campaing? Probably not, and if you could, what would be the true cost of such a plan?

Blogs tend to create tremendous visibility in the long-tail by helping authors focus on specific subjects for each post. Indeed, they are one of the best solutions to creating organic visbility. And for every way that your blog posts can be found (and are found), they are roughly four times more valuable than PPC equivalents.

Read more at Blogging for Organic Visibily vs PPC Campaigns

A key aspect of long tail success is piggy backing on the hits. Hits are not going away. But they are not the only game in town anymore. Chris uses examples from Amazon showing how they use analysis of buying patterns to recommend other books or songs you may like.

IF YOU LIKE BRITNEY, YOU’LL LOVE…Just as lower prices can entice consumers down the Long Tail, recommendation engines drive them to obscure content they might not find otherwise.

What does this have to do with business blogging?

A key maxim of Internet marketing is to tap into what people are already searching for. Let the “MSM” or “mainstream media” generate the awareness and inquiries. That is their forte. The business blogger can find out what is hot related to their field by monitoring an alert created in Google News. If you can tie into a general news item all the better.

See, you have a secret weapon. While other SEO’s are sweating over optimizing static pages for past historical high volume keywords you are in instant karma mode. Read the news that morning, write a post in your blog about it and the relevancy to your business. Be sure to title the post using the same keywords that would bring up the original article.

Wham! By afternoon you post is intercepting the same keyword searches.

Even better, use HitTail to monitor the long tail search traffic this post generated and use its suggestions for another round.

Free organic traffic, at your beck and call.

Well we all shine on
Like the moon and the stars and the sun

John Lennon

The days of passive Internet use for basic information and day-to-day research have been eclipsed by an active Web that can be used to drive traffic, build awareness and establish credibility.

Mastering the intricacies of this new generation of the Web, and the even more detailed intricacies of search engines, are critical elements for creating, maintaining and growing your presence online.

The key to overcoming this terribly difficult process is effective search engine optimization (SEO).

Having your company or service atop the search engine rankings of Google or Yahoo! is akin to being the first plumber listed in the phonebook—your site will be visited most often, when users are in greatest need of information and their interest is highest.

There currently exists a unique confluence of PR, advertising and marketing efforts all seeking to reach an already-engaged audience via organic (i.e. natural) search.

With the wider-than-ever reach of the Internet growing broader by the second, the Web is the undisputed future of these industries.

Because of this, no amount of coverage garnered through traditional PR, or attention generated by marketing and advertising, can compensate for a company lacking visibility on-line.

This visibility is determined by how well a site is ranked when consumers turn to a search engine and begin a search with the intent of finding products, services or information provided by your organization.

The good news is small business now have the means to compete effectively against the mega corporations by selecting their niche and using blogs and HitTail to gather those page 1 organic search engine results (SERP).

A Dutch eye tracking study reveals that searchers looking for something to buy read search results differently than people looking for information.

According to De Vos & Jansen Market Research and Search Engine Mediabureau Checkit the study proves that buyers view more search results and are more brand orientated than information searchers.

The main conclusions are:

1. Consumers view a search result for 1.1 second.
2. 98% look at the organic search results.
   
3. 96% look at the top (three) sponsored search results.
4. 31% look at the sponsored search results on the right.
5. Buyers view more search results (10) and take more time to view the results (11.4 seconds). They also focus on familiar brand names.
6. Information searchers view fewer search results (8) and spend less time on each listing (9.4 seconds). They pay more attention to contents than to brand names.

The authors argue that it is important to gain a high position in the organic (i.e. regular) search results as these results are viewed longest and most often by consumers.

According to this study searchers will click on search engine listings if they include elements like known, reliable brands, descriptions of interesting website features, price indications, and references to the variety of products on the site.

The survey was based on responses from 50 respondents, who looked at search results from Google, MSN, European Lycos, and the Dutch search sites Ilse, and Kobala.

The respondents were searching for five popular e-commerce products: a loan for a renovation, a second-hand car, a car insurance, an airplane ticket to New York and a Philips mp3 player. Half of the respondents were given queries aimed at finding information about these products. The other half were searching for the same product but with the intention to buy.

Search Engine Marketing recommendations

1. Make sure your website has a high position in the search results. Your website will then be noticed and the contents of the search result will be regarded as relevant and topical.
2. Try to gain a high position in the organic search results because these results are viewed longest and most often by consumers.
3. Use the following elements: known, reliable brand,- and website names, descriptions of interesting website features, mentioning price indications, repeating keywords and mentioning the variety of products on a website. These elements are reasons why consumers will click on a link.
4. Do not use capital letters, blatant advertisement and exclamation marks for they are experienced as annoying.

My previous posts suggests ways to get high organic SERPs(search engine results pages):

The Secret to better organic search results

The Blogger’s SEO Manifesto

Google is a powerful company through arbitrage. They arbitrate which sites are found on which terms, and this is power. It’s the oil of the information age. It determines who gets what business. They are the ultimate middleman, taking their cut. It’s almost as good as the Credit Card business who gets their 3% on every transaction, then payments against interest. And it’s quite a bit better than protection rackets.

To live in the world of SEO means getting one over on this middleman. But they need you to get one over on them. They just want to make sure that those doing it are not intentionally trying to do so, thereby gaming the system, and unintentionally insulting the power broker. If everyone can game the system, the system is ruined. Gaming the system is a matter of getting the right sort of visitor traffic (potentially qualified customers) without paying for it.

Therefore, if you wish to get your traffic for free, you must game the system without overtly doing so. You must be a good neighbor, respectful of the system, and still win at the edges. No one will begrudge you staying in business through your own hard work, so long as that hard work doesn’t cut into their interests. And if your hard work happens to result in getting more potentially qualified visitors to your website without paying for it, you win. If you produce truly quality content, that the power brokers actually NEED to keep the system stable, then everyone wins.

There is no product to let you live in this edgy moral high ground. No product, that is until HitTail. OK, this diatribe on the state of search instantly deteriorated into self-promotion. But people need to know that if you don’t get your traffic for free, then you have to pay for it. And all the paths leading to getting your traffic for free are full of pitfalls laid by big media companies, designed to make you pay anyway. So, you either need a pre-existing reputation to leverage, or you have to reach escape velocity on your own. Reaching escape velocity can be an expensive proposition if you pay for the fuel (advertising). But you can also take the slow and steady tortoise route, and reach orbit through a relentless series of strong platforms (blog posts). Some of the blog post topics are chosen with HitTail. Others are chosen as a result of your own strategies.

But in the end, you reach where you want to go. You’ve built an effective long tail marketing strategy, with one post standing on the back of the next. It’s turtles all the way down.

That is the penultimate endorsement of the blogging approach I have been advocating for a while. Now the exact next steps are clear. Thanks Mike.

You are using a blog? Yes.

If not, why put yourself at a disadvantage when most small business sites can easily be accommodated by a blog-centric web site. Not only can the static pages be easily updated or expanded but the Google stickiness of a blog is right there.

I recommend WordPress for many reasons (especially the abundance of plug-ins) but today’s topic will apply to any toolset you use.

What is the secret weapon? Let me point you to HitTail. This is a free service that applies the Long Tail concepts developed by Cris Anderson, the editor of Wired Magazine. His revelation is absolutely brilliant and seems to apply to more industries all the time. Basically, Internet niche markets are now profitable to reach and thousands of niches total a bigger market than the market previously only met by hits (products with huge volume sales). Companies finding success with this model are Amazon with millions of titles versus 300,000 for Barnes & Nobles storefronts. Shelf space is no longer the constraint. Netflix is another vs Blockbuster. This is a very disruptive strategy.

Well Mike Levin at Conners Communication, being the technical whiz he is, ran with that concept and came up with the Holy Grail of organic search.

In a nutshell, the long tail of search terms, the ones bringing only a few visitors each, can in total contain more traffic volume than the “hit” term that every webmaster in your market segment is striving to score with. Rather then focus on that very competitive game, Mike suggests going after the long tail terms. Neat idea but how do you do it in practice.

That is what the HitTail service solves. It provides a REAL time look at term that are being used to find you site now. Using proprietary algorithms it suggest terms that would be good to blog about. The idea is to capture more of the traffic for that term by writing about it more. Since these are long tail terms there is not much competition, so with a little effort you will dominate that term. Repeat for next term and so on.

Brilliant. Now you have guidance on what to write about to attract more of your target audience. Since you are providing targeted fresh content Google rewards you with more traffic.

The world is a nice place after all.