The Future of Search has arrived. Or at least it’s arriving, according to a Google webinar held in late July.

Brian and I sort of attended. “The Future of Search” isn’t a bad name to put on the webinar, although to be honest, the material was really more about economy-driven changes to search behavior and new search tools than about some grand Metropolis-style vision of super-intelligent digital entities surfing for electronic nirvana.

We had a bunch of distractions but here’s my $.02 summary.

• consumers are using search a lot more to get better deals and coupons ‘cuz they’re poor and/or jobless
• the future of search is more intelligent web traffic, and consumers spending more time surfing (probably whilst underwear-clad and jobless)
• users are now using 2-3 keywords in their searches rather than 1, realizing that this results in more relevant results

In addition, Google has 3 new webtoys for our enjoyment:

Searchbased Keyword Tool: a cool new keyword research tool that suggests keywords and keyphrases based on the content on your site. Nice idea.

From Google’s help page on the “sktool”: “The main difference between the Search-based Keyword Tool and the Keyword Tool currently in AdWords is that the former generates keyword ideas based on your website, and identifies those currently not being used in your AdWords account. Additionally, the Search-based Keyword Tool provides more detailed data for each keyword, such as category information, suggested bid that may place the ad in the top three spots of a search results page, and ad/search share. Both tools, however, offer the option of browsing all keywords across all categories.

“You may also notice that some of the data (like such as the monthly search volume) may vary slightly between the two tools, which is due to different methods of calculation at this time.”

Website Optimizer: for super-intense conversion analysis of high-traffic pages.

With this thing, you make a zillion versions of the target page, playing with variables like calls to action, graphics, headlines, design, whatever, each at unique URLs. Website Optimizer randomly displays different versions to users. These URLs could be bookmarked by users, so after your experiment finishes, you want to keep these URLs valid. A WO “experiment” with 3 page variations will typically need around 300 conversions before drawing any conclusions.

and lastly, Google Insights for Search.

“With Google Insights for Search, you can compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, time frames and properties. Useful for comparing different keyphrases over different regions and timeframes.”

You can hear a full recording of the Google webinar online. It does require a password, but just contact us and we’d be happy to share it with you. (We don’t want to get in trouble in case the Future of Search is copyrighted etc.) Enjoy!

I Was Trying to Change a WordPress Permalink…

Changing a WordPress Permalink should be easier after your post is already published.

The problem: in WordPress, the Permalink doesn’t change after the post has been cast out upon the wild and wooly waves of the WWW. On the post editing screen, you’ll see the WordPress permalink listed under the headline of your post, and to the right of that is a delightful hyperlink labeled “Edit.” Hit it, and you can type in a new WordPress Permalink to make your heart sing.

As any of you familiar with search engine optimization know, that WordPress Permalink isn’t just for looks. A well-designed WordPress Permalink helps draw search engine traffic to your site. And traffic means business.

Unfortunately, that new WordPress Permalink doesn’t work. It’s totally useless after the post has been published. There’s nothing to tell you that. Just the hard reality that you can sit there, refreshing your blog, and the damned post URL — aka WordPress Permalink — is obdurate and unchanging.

How to Change That Stubborn WordPress Permalink

The secret trick to fixing that ugly Permalink, my WordPress pals, is to edit the title of your post. This gets WordPress to throw out the old URL and use the new URL you entered into the WordPress Permalink “Edit” dialog. If you don’t want to change the WordPress post title, edit the title to something different, save, and then revert it to the original title you wanted.

When Not to Change That Stubborn WordPress Permalink

Of course, if you’ve already got a bunch of pingbacks and incoming links to your post, changing the WordPress Permalink is inadvisable. All that incoming traffic will go 404, costing you traffic. You might, however, want to change it anyhow as long as you 301 redirect the incoming hits to your shiny new and improved WordPress Permalink.

Search Engine Optimization for Small Business Is a Necessity, Not a Luxury

Search marketing and search engine optimization for small business may sound like another fancy-pants way of fleecing you of scarce marketing dollars, especially if your small business is encountering tight budgets and increased competition in this harsh economic climate. In fact, we at Get Page One are 100% certain that some of the “search engine optimization for small business” pitches you see are 100% scams.

However, we also believe that quality search engine optimization (SEO) can make a huge difference to medium-sized and small businesses with customers who use the internet to find products and services. I.e., nearly everybody.

And the co-founder of our humble SEO company, Brian Rutledge, will be talking about search engine optimization for small business at the SEM for SMB conference in Austin, TX. More on that later!

What Search Engine Optimization for Small Business Can Do

We run into a lot of medium-sized and small business owners who don’t see the need for search engine optimization. “We don’t sell anything on the web,” they say. “We don’t get business from our website.” “We don’t sell technology.” “Our customers don’t use the web much.” “Our customers know how to find us.” “Our web designer is already doing SEO.” “We saw an ad for guaranteed search engine optimization that costs $50 a month.” “We don’t have a website.” And of course, our favorite: “We don’t have the budget.”

This blog isn’t a sales blog. I’m not writing this to sell you our services; I blog to share SEO knowledge and to chat about funny things in this digital life of ours. But still, I feel I have to address all of these common excuses. My disclaimer: it’s okay if you don’t choose us for your small business’ search engine optimization provider. We’re cool with that. But we like people to understand what search engine optimization is all about. We’re little internet marketing evangelists. The more people understand SEO, the easier our job becomes.

“We don’t sell anything on the web.”

The majority of our clients don’t sell anything on their websites. But they do sell products or services. And people find products and services on the web.

“We don’t get business from our website. Our customers know how to find us.”

This is a popular one. Some businesses do build a website solely as a service to their existing customers, like a digital sign that points people to an address or phone number. Of course, this begs the question: Do you want business from your website? Can your website do more than just shunt people to a phone number? Do you know how many customers are currently visiting your website or how many are non-repeat visitors? (Yes, this information is easy to see and free to track.) Are your competitors getting business from their websites? Do you want more business?

Some small businesses actually don’t want more business. My mechanic routinely turns people away. He’s happy with his current volume of customers. Good for him. If he came to us looking for search engine optimization for small business, we’d tell him we couldn’t help him.

“We don’t sell technology.”

Do you sell a product or service that people don’t search for on the web? Are you sure?

There are still some things that people don’t shop for on the web. People usually don’t look for a grocery store or a gas station on the web. They assign more value to proximity, and aren’t concerned about differentiators.

Not that search engine optimization for small business can’t help such entities. Gas stations and grocery stores usually belong to chains that have elaborate websites with a variety of customer loyalty and marketing projects going at all times. If they don’t, they might benefit from a strong web presence that emphasizes what separates them from the big boys. And that web presence probably needs search engine optimization for small business.

“Our customers don’t use the web much.”

Usually this comes from small businesses whose customers aren’t young or well-heeled. Do you know what the web usage statistics are for the elderly and the less affluent? Do you really know your demographics? Do you know the web traffic statistics for your website? Do you want more affluent customers in the 18-45 demographic?

“Our web designer is already doing SEO.”

We love in-house web designers. Many of them are experts at what they do, and partner with us smoothly in the implementation of good search engine optimization for small business.

But keep in mind that your web designer probably already has a full plate keeping the site running and up to date. She probably does some graphic design and IT work for you, too, right? (You know she does.) And with all these different priorities, do you think search engine optimization for small business is at the top of her daily to-do list?

And if your web designer happens to be untrained in search engine optimization, do you think she’ll say, “Hey, boss, I’m not sure what kind of file hierarchy to use for SEO” or spend hours restructuring the current site for better searchability? Would she seek out additional training when you’re already running her ragged? Probably not.

Good SEO needs constant maintenance and refinement, especially since it requires dogged, meticulous reverse-engineering to figure out the best techniques. You see, the search engines don’t tell us what search engine optimization processes work the best. We have to figure it out ourselves through grueling trial and error. But with experience and determination, it’s possible. To us, search engine optimization for small business isn’t a hobby; it’s a calling.

“We don’t have a website.”

Do you want a website? Do your customers ask about your website? Do your competitors have websites?

At Get Page One, we’ve developed a high-powered content management system (CMS) with our own SEO and useability enhancements. Because we’ve already built the software system, we can perform strategic website development at a fraction of the cost of boutique web design firms. For our bigger clients, we sometimes build their entire website at no cost because it makes it easier for us to do our job of search engine optimization.

“We don’t have the budget.”

People think SEO is expensive because it’s new and has its own weird acronym. Not true.

We’re pretty proud of the value proposition we offer to search engine optimization for small business clients. Simply put, we’re not high-priced consultants, and our SEO work can pay for itself in new business several times over.

In fact, we proposed to one client that we’d give them free SEO services in exchange for a percentage of the new profits they were getting from their increased web traffic. They turned us down politely. They knew they were earning too much from the new business we were bringing in.

“We saw an ad for guaranteed search engine optimization that costs $50 a month.”

This one makes us grieve. SEO scams like this give all a bad name to all search engine optimization for small business. They prey on people who don’t fully understand what good SEO involves. At best, they’ll take your money doing superficial things that don’t actually affect your search engine ranking. At worst, they’ll sell you unnecessary services and pull dirty tricks that will get your website banned from Google, Yahoo and MSN.

SEM for SMB Conference! Get Page One Co-Founder to Speak on Search Engine Optimization for Small Business

Our co-founder, Brian Rutledge, a leader in the use of search-engine-approved “white hat” SEO techniques, will be speaking at the SEM for SMB conference, July 16-17, 2008, which was organized specifically to help guide small business owners through the confusing maze of SEO, SEM, and PPC. It’ll take place at the downtown Austin Hilton.

“Search engine marketing for small businesses” is more than just a buzzphrase,” Brian says. “If your small business has a website, then you should be aware of SEO basics. If you are willing to learn some fundamentals of search marketing, the entry costs are very low in comparison with the potential gains. In today’s competitive markets, if you’re not doing SEO, you’re losing money.” Rutledge will also address some of the shady SEO practices that small businesses need to watch out for.

So if you’ll be in Austin this summer, check out this presentation on search engine optimization for small business. It should be a great networking event and Brian’s a lively and informative speaker.

Barack’s Not a Muslim

You may have seen recent news about the Barack Muslim rumor. As a result of this and other smears, Obama has set up an “internet war room.” Rather than a place for Matthew Broderick and War Games, this internet war room is actually the site for a different kind of gamesmanship – the gamesmanship of reputation management.

You see, internet marketing isn’t just for blind-sided businesses and celebrities dogged by smarmy rumors. Even presidential candidates are susceptible to the powerful (and frankly, ridiculous) waves of hearsay that often stir the murky waters of the internet. In Obama’s case, he’s been plagued by false claims that he’s a terrorist, a Muslim, and simply unpatriotic. Apparently he isn’t fit for the Oval Office because he didn’t wear an American flag on his lapel for a few debates. That’s where American politics has sunk. If only the Founding Fathers could see us now. Poor Barack.

Muslim communities should be pitied as well. Despite what you may have heard, the Koran is not a manual of suicide bombing techniques, and there are many fine, peaceful Islamic communities around the world. Judging all Muslims based on Al Qaeda is like judging all Christians based on David Koresh and Jim Jones. The Barack Muslim rumor is not only false but racist.

In any case, Obama’s internet war room has been established to practice reputation management on the Barack Muslim rumor and other blather — a sub-field of the search engine optimization that we do every day.

A Free Offer to the Barack Muslim Rumor War Room – And to You

We’ve been pretty darned successful with reputation management and search engine optimization. You can see some of the numbers on our homepage. So we think we have a compelling offer for the Barack Muslim rumor folks:

Please contact us for a free SEO analysis and assessment of your reputation management needs.

But the raw truth is that this offer isn’t just for presidential candidates. If you’ve got questions about SEO and/or reputation management, you can contact us too. For free. Not a bad deal, huh?

Barack Blast-Off

Barack Muslim rumor news articles indicate that the presidential hopeful’s reputation management section will be staffed by a “crack team of cybernauts.” We at Get Page One find this description particularly amusing.

Time for me to put on my internet helmet and enter the cockpit of my netsurf ship. The tubes are calling.

Austin Pizza: Where are the major chains in Google SERPs?

“Austin Pizza“. It seems fairly logical that at some time in the last few years, someone, anyone, working for Pizza Hut, Dominos or Mr. Gatti’s would have said, “hey, what happens when someone searches for pizza in their city?” Because, frankly, nothing happens, and that amazes me.

I could understand, I guess, that pizza executives might not see the value of the interwebs. For that matter, they might not even use the internet to look for things like pizza. After all, isn’t the internet just something the “kids” play around on. You know, college kids killing time between classes or late at night instead of studying … and what is the target demographic of these pizza companies? Oh, wait …

Where are Pizza Company Ad Agencies?

What I don’t understand – what I can’t grasp – is where are their ad agencies? The main goal of an ad agency, if I’m not mistaken, is to sell more product. I realize they are working on brand awareness, etc. (I happily await your flames , but if I own a pizza company, I want my agency to sell more pizza. Speaking as someone who searches for everything from his BlackBerry, the first pizza company to show up in my SERPs is the one that gets my call.

It just boils down to, once again, advertising agencies not understanding search. (Just one more example of how little understanding they have of search: I can’t even Google up the current agency representing Pizza Hut. If one were representing Pizza Hut, seems one would want the whole world to know about it.)

Google Loves Pizza

Google loves pizza. In fact, Google loves anything that is relevant to keyphrases its users are looking for. Google wants these companies to show up in the SERPs. Dominos, Pizza Hut and Mr. Gatti’s are all really, really relevant results for someone looking for pizza in Austin. So, since Google loves pizza and relevant results, why is it so hard to Google up some pizza at 3 am?

Pizza Chains and Google Organic Ranking

Well, Dominos achieves the amazing feat of hiding all its pizza stores from Google by having a store locator that requires you to type your address, city and state into a form and click “find”. They provide no crawlable means of discovering any of their zillion stores. Pizza Hut uses the same strategy to keep Google at bay. Papa John’s, ditto. (Did someone have a fire sale on this interface?)

Mr. Gatti’s, smallest entity in our sample, has, believe it or not, a crawlable store locator, yet they still manage to thwart ol’ Googlebot. How? Well, they have bad URL’s, code, text, H tag selections, meta tags (for a unique location, meta name=”description” content=”Gatti’s Pizza” / and meta name=”keywords” content=”pizza, restaurant”), page content… etc.

In fact, the only thing these pizza chains aren’t doing to keep Google out is forbidding access in their robots.txt file. They aren’t, are they?

Submit Business Locations to Google Local

I’ll play my own devil’s advocate here for a minute. Maybe the user experience, design or GUI is more important that organic search. Maybe they don’t want to build a crawlable directory of store locations for fear that a user might actually find it on Google.

Maybe these things are important. Maybe arguments such as “that person would never have become a customer if they hadn’t been able to Google your less than ideal locator page” should just be put aside. What then?

Well, there’s an extremely simple solution to these arguments. Google Local.

It’s incredibly easy to submit your business to Google Local. I submitted ours in 10 minutes. I submitted an excel spreadsheet with a listing of a client’s 500 locations in less than an hour. In fact, I’m guessing an agency could have an intern submit every Pizza Hut location in the world in less than a day. So, in less than a day (and the month it takes for the submitted locations to show up in Google Local), Pizza Hut could begin showing up for every variation of “city”+pizza. This would tap into a HUGE long tail keyphrase list and translate directly into increased sales of pizza … for the cost of an intern’s day. There is no excuse.

What’s that? You’re not interested in long tail, only high-volume keyphrases? Don’t get me started on the lack of SEO for pizza coupons.

Yahoo Voice Search for Mobile: oneSearch

Watch out Google mobile, Yahoo is gunning for the mobile search space with it’s second release of Yahoo voice search for mobile, dubbed “oneSearch“, and bloggers are all a-twitter, so to speak. The idea of voice search for mobile is definitely a good one. All mobile devices are hard to type on (yes, I know yours isn’t, whatever and voice recognition technology could eliminate the need, or at least diminish the need, to type on Lilliputian keyboards.

Yahoo oneSearch for Mobile Powered by vlingo Voice Recognition

Like any good internet company, Yahoo didn’t develop the voice search technology, they’re just “renting” it from vlingo. vlingo specializes in voice recognition for mobile phones. From the vlingo about us, “With vlingo access to your mobile internet applications is no longer held hostage by twelve tiny keys.” That sounds pretty cool, though my BlackBerry Curve has WAY more than twelve keys.

Yahoo Voice Search for BlackBerry

Yahoo voice search for mobile is really now just Yahoo voice search for BlackBerry. It’s avaliable for download directly to your BlackBerry from m.yahoo.com/voice. It took me three trys with timeouts, then a long, slow wait while the download bar crept s l o w l y across my screen. Then the download failed and I had to start over. Hopefully you’ll have better luck.

Voice Search on My BlackBerry: First Impression

Well, as I just mentioned, installation left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth. Especially since I’ve downloaded every Google mobile application for the BlackBerry and never had a single problem.

Ok…gotta’ be honest here. I’m still trying to download Yahoo oneSearch. BBIAB.

Back 10 minutes later. Whew. Once it downloaded, installation was seamless, and I found the Yahoo oneSearch program icon in my applications folder just where it belongs. A click launched the program and we’re off.

Performing a Voice Search on My BlackBerry

Actually performing a Yahoo voice search is really easy. You simply hold down the “green phone” button, the same button you’d use to dial, and say your search term. Be sure not to let up the button until you’re through saying the search term. It takes longer to process the voice search than I would think…not to perform the search, just to figure out what you’re saying. It did a decent job of deciphering what I said when I searched for yellow lab, but it just couldn’t figure out search engine optimization, Austin, TX. It kept putting in Boston instead of Austin. To be fair, I am from Texas, maybe they don’t have southern drawl filters yet.

After oneSearch (hopefully) figures out what you said, it then performs the search and serves you Yahoo search results as fast as my poor little Edge BlackBerry can serve them up.

Yahoo Voice Search Review Summary

To sum up the review, Yahoo voice search is hard to download, but easy to use. Hopefully they’ll fix that download issue. There are a couple lingering questions I haven’t resolved yet, the biggest being the Yahoo oneSearch download page says to disable WiFi in your phone if it’s supported. Why wouldn’t Yahoo voice search work over WiFi? That seems downright strange. All in all it seems to be a pretty tight application. If Yahoo and Google can keep providing apps that make search on a mobile easier, we’ll be doing SEO for mobile websites soon! I know, some people probably already are, but I brought up the topic of SEO for mobile at OMMA Hollywood to a bunch of mobile industry leaders. The room got really quiet

I guess, all things considered, the worse thing about Yahoo voice search is that the queries go to Yahoo.