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I very nearly titled this article “The Truth About Keywords in Title Tags.” I didn’t because I’m no longer sure that anyone has all of it. If you’re ready to rethink one of the most basic things you’ve ever learned about SEO, and stop simply reacting to Google, keep reading.

First, let me give credit where it’s due. I just finished reading a post by Michael Martinez in which he digs more deeply into this so-called basic topic than anyone I’ve seen. Martinez’s contrarian views, eloquently expressed and supported, can make any reader rethink a cherished position. If he’s right, then the way most of us do our page titles or title tags is – well, not wrong, exactly, but a little misguided.

We all know how you’re supposed to write title tags, right? Start by doing some keyword research for your topic, build a title using those keywords, then lather, rinse, repeat. Make sure you repeat those keywords at appropriate intervals throughout your article. Voila! Your keyword magic will get you a spot in the SERPs, right where searchers can find you.

Martinez questions this approach – even as he blatantly uses it in the very same post. He titled his entry “How to Write Title Tags for SEO” and uses that phrase periodically throughout the piece. Clearly, this classic technique delivers traffic and rankings. Martinez does not say that it doesn’t work; rather, he maintains that it’s too basic.

“Real search engine optimization doesn’t care about a SINGLE keyword,” Martinez explains. Your page of content should rank first for far more keywords than you can fit in the title tag. If you can only get to the first page of Google for one to three expressions, according to Martinez, your SEO sucks.

Martinez wants us, as SEOs, to use our imaginations a lot more than we do when we’re simply trying to optimize page titles and links. “If you’re sitting there bored to tears because all your boss wants you to do is put his favorite keywords in your page titles, you can slip one past him by optimizing those same pages for other keywords AT THE SAME TIME,” he all but whispers conspiratorially.

He then invites us to join in on the conspiracy by writing posts on our blogs with titles that start with “What I Think About…” or even “If I May Intrude On Your Thoughts For a Moment…” and then add the topic at the end. If you’re hardcore enough to actually try this, he also wants you to not check your keyword tools before adding that topic. Some will see no reason to try this scary, seemingly pointless exercise. Why not stick with winning titles like “How To…” and “Ten Ways to…” and so on? Come on, Martinez does that right in the article in which he preaches rebellion! Why should we do it if he doesn’t?

Next: How to Stand Out in a Crowd
 

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Early last week, Google began using a new algorithm to help it combat webspam from black hat SEOs. Dubbed Penguin, it aims to eliminate from the search engine’s listings websites that engage in certain shady practices. But how well does it work?

Google webspam guru Matt Cutts explained the rationale behind Penguin in a post on the Google Webmaster Central blog. He noted that “We see all sorts of webspam techniques every day, from keyword stuffing to link schemes that attempt to propel sites higher in rankings.” Penguin “represents another improvement in our efforts to reduce webspam and promote high quality content.” It’s supposed to decrease the rankings of sites that violate Google’s terms of service.

Cutts gave two examples of websites whose ranks he expected to see drop after Penguin. One displayed egregious keyword stuffing. The crime committed by the other site seemed a little more subtle, until you tried to read its text. It showed a poorly-written piece about exercise, with links about loans randomly scattered throughout the text. The text of the article clearly did not relate at all to the links.

The Penguin algorithm, though going live for all languages at the same time, was expected to have less of an impact than Panda. Cutts noted that Panda’s initial version affected about 12 percent of all queries to some degree; Penguin was supposed to affect only a little over three percent of all English queries. In languages with more heavily-spammed sites, Cutts wrote, Penguin could be expected to affect more queries – five percent of Polish queries, for example.

If you’ve been doing SEO for a few years, you’re probably scratching your head right now. Granted, this is just one of a number of techniques Penguin is penalizing, but really – keyword stuffing? That practice is so old, it predates Google, and no good SEO does it anymore! Is Google only now going after these black hat approaches? As Danny Sullivan observed, “It’s not, even though the blog post might give some newcomers that impression…Rather, what’s really happening is that Google is rolling out better ways that it hopes to detect such abuses.”

One reason Google hopes to do better at fighting this kind of webspam is that, unfortunately, it’s not hard to find websites for which it still works. This discourages white hat SEOs from building the kinds of great websites that Google wants searchers to find. Why go to all the work of building an excellent website (so the thinking goes) when some other site can outrank you just by spending a few hours and a little money on techniques that break Google’s Terms of Service?

In fact, Google seems to have finally gotten the message that SEO is not, in and of itself, a bad thing. If you read Cutts’s blog post, he very clearly describes – and encourages — all the good things that white hat SEOs do for websites. These blessings include making it more crawlable, translating “jargon” into words that normal searchers would use, improving usability, creating great content, improving speed, and so on. It’s not the first time that Google has endorsed white hat SEO, but since it sometimes seems as if the search engine is at war with SEOs in general (as opposed to black hat SEOs in particular), it’s good to see it in black and white.

Next: How Well Does Penguin Work?
 

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Could Facebook’s cash machine be slowing down? That’s one possible conclusion observers can draw from the paperwork the company recently filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. While it’s not likely to slow down investors, it’s not the best news to get so close to the social media giant’s IPO.

According to a quick item from David Angotti for Search Engine Land, Facebook reported that its net income fell 12 percent in the first quarter of 2012. Looking at the previous quarter’s total revenues, the latest quarter saw total revenues fall six percent, to $1.06 billion. That may not be cause for serious concern, however – especially when you consider that the previous quarter included the holiday shopping season, and Facebook makes its money from ads. Indeed, the company itself noted that the downturn was due to “seasonal trends.” Compare Facebook’s revenues to the year-ago quarter, and you see growth of 45 percent.

While those numbers should hearten investors, digging a little deeper reveals some cause for concern. As Angotti noted, “acquisition and operating expenses are rapidly rising.” Some of that can be attributed to the explosive growth in Facebook’s membership. The L.A. Times reported that Facebook is up to 901 million monthly active users as of the end of March. That represents more than 50 million new users in just three months.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but that many new users means Facebook needs to keep building on its infrastructure to make it scale properly: new machines, new software, and more skilled employees, in both technical and non-technical areas, to keep everything running smoothly. In fact, operating expenses have risen enough to make accountants put out whatever may be left of their hair after this tax season. Looking at the year-over-year figures, operating costs went from $343 million for the first quarter of 2011 to $677 million last quarter. That’s nearly double the expenses in just one short year!

But these aren’t the only new expenses facing the social media site. Last year, Facebook’s total acquisition costs came in at $68 million. Just this quarter, the company agreed to purchase Instagram, a relatively new but wildly popular photo sharing app, for $1 billion ($300 million in cash plus 23 million shares of stock). Facebook also spent $550 million acquiring rights to a patent portfolio from Microsoft. Observers expect the company to use these patents to help defend itself from a Yahoo lawsuit.

The messy legal situation could complicate matters. As the Wall Street Journal explains, Yahoo accused Facebook last month of violating 10 Yahoo patents covering online advertising and communications. The patents Facebook bought from Microsoft, according to WSJ’s unnamed source, “relate to fundamental Internet technologies, including email, instant messaging, Web browsing, Web search, online advertising, mobile technology and e-commerce.” In addition to the patents purchased from Microsoft (which the software giant originally got from AOL), Facebook has also recently bought 750 patents from IBM, and gone on the attack by countersuing Yahoo.

Next: Should Potential Facebook Investors Worry?
 

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If you’ve never heard of the triangle of trust before, keep reading. It’s an easy way for you to get tons of traffic, top search positions, and more sales.

The phrase “triangle of trust” was first coined by the famous (and to some, infamous) Frank Kern.  For those that don’t know, Frank got in fairly early to the whole Internet thing, but thanks to the boneheaded actions of someone he had zero control over, got noticed by the FTC.

When I say “got noticed,” what I really mean is that they showed up at his door and basically demanded that he give them literally every single penny and valuable possession he had, or else they were going to arrest him for running a pyramid scheme.

Now most people would have given up. Instead, ol’ Frank went on to create websites in a bunch of niche markets. He didn’t spend much on them, and did nearly zero advertising, but ended up making even more than he was “pre-FTC nightmare.”

He currently makes about half of his total online income from teaching others how to do what he did, and seriously, some of his stuff is deep. He gets into buyer psychology in ways that no one else does. He’s also an all-around great guy, and I recommend that you check him out.

Anyway, all of that was a long way of saying that Frank Kern is wrong about the “triangle of trust.”

Now you may be wondering why I would pump the guy up in one breath just to call him wrong in the next. Well, there’s a reason. Let me explain.

Frank calls it the “triangle of trust” when you create a video (spot one on the triangle), post it to your blog (spot two), and then send an email to your list saying little more than “check out this video I just posted to the blog” (which is spot three).

The reason he calls that the “triangle of trust” is that, even to this day, most people who run real blogs don’t put sales messages of any kind on their blogs.  Further, people generally prefer video over written content. I don’t fall into that second category, but the overwhelming majority of the English-speaking population does. So, when you send a short email like that, telling people to watch a video on a blog, they do.

He uses that as a way of building up trust, readership in his email list, and getting people used to clicking on the links in email he sends out. It’s pretty darn smart, and it works like crazy.

He’s still wrong though.

Next: The Triangle of Trust on Steroids
 

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Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and current Google CEO (and co-founder) Larry Page are investing part of their considerable fortunes into a search operation of a very different sort. Named Planetary Resources, the new company hopes to find something worth mining on our solar system’s asteroids.

The press release from Planetary Resources includes an impressive list of investors and advisors. In addition to Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, film maker James Cameron (of Avatar fame) is involved; so is Ross Perot, Jr., son of the former presidential candidate and chairman of The Perot Group. Peter H. Diamandis, one of the leading lights behind the Ansari X-Prize competition encouraging non-governmental  space flight, is also part of this venture. So is Eric Anderson, an aerospace engineer and philanthropist long involved in a variety of efforts encouraging commercial spaceflight, including the X-Prize.

You’ll also find veterans of the US space program involved, such as former NASA Mars mission manager Chris Lewicki and planetary scientist Tom Jones, who is also a veteran NASA astronaut. Microsoft’s former Chief Software Architect, Charles Simonyi, is involved as well – which should come as no surprise, since he’s been to space twice already.

The company will hold a news conference on Tuesday, April 24, at 10:30 AM PDT in the Charles Simonyi Space Gallery of the Museum of Flight in Seattle. Planetary Resources says that it “will overlay two critical sectors – space exploration and natural resources – to add trillions of dollars to the global GDP. This innovative start-up will create a new industry and a new definition of ‘natural resources.’” Judging from statements made by some of Planetary Resources’ advisors and board members in different contexts, this new industry could be nothing short of asteroid mining.

Is this more than just pie in the sky? That’s hard to say. The Wall Street Journal cited a study completed in March by NASA scientists that examined the feasibility of asteroid mining. It concluded that, “for a cost of $2.6 billion, humans could use robotic spacecraft to capture a 500-ton asteroid seven meters in diameter and bring it into orbit around the moon so that it could be explored and mined.” That’s a longer-term goal than most companies envision, however: the flight itself would take six to 10 years, and NASA believed that we’d be able to do this by about 2025. Oh, and that $2.6 billion price tag? It doesn’t include the cost of actually extracting anything from the asteroid.

The WSJ noted that Louis Friedman, a former NASA aerospace engineer who was involved in the study, notes that Planetary Resources faces certain obstacles if they plan to use this approach. First of all, getting started alone would take “hundreds of millions of dollars” and the company would “need to find a lower cost way to access space.” But the bigger problem, once you get the asteroid where you want it, is getting mining supplies up to it, and mined resources down from it. It may not be a big deal to do this from the moon, but if you plan to use the resources on Earth, you need to deal with going into and leaving Earth’s gravity well – and that’s expensive.

Friedman concluded that the materials obtained from asteroid mining in this fashion would only be useful in space. On the other hand, there’s much to be learned scientifically just from making the attempt, and members of Planetary Resources’ board are not strangers to organizations dedicated to science. Simonyi, for example, contributed $100 million to the Institute for Advanced Study, an organization dedicated to “fostering fundamental research that advances our understanding of the world.” And on a lighter note, one of Google’s more famous April Fool’s jokes had them setting up an office on the moon, and accepting applications for engineers and other workers at the soon-to-be-built campus. Maybe Planetary Resources really does intend to use the resources they gain from asteroid mining in space – to help create our first space colonies. 

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In the old days, black hat SEOs bought links from other websites to manipulate the signals seen by Google. The practice got them to the top of the SERPs – until the Panda updates. Now, some SEOs are buying “likes” and positive reviews instead. What does this mean for the future of search?

Trond Lyngbo wrote a long and thought-provoking piece for Search Engine Land on this very topic, and I highly recommend it to anyone who cares about their clients and their online reputation. If you worked as an SEO back in the early days of the field, of course, you can almost predict what’s coming – which only makes his points ring all the truer. If you didn’t, come with me on a short trip back in time.

Before Google came on the scene, getting to the top of a search engine ranking often involved keyword stuffing and other practices considered shady or frowned upon today. Google introduced the idea of links to a website from other sites counting as “votes” for that site. Thanks to Google’s algorithm, websites with more links thus rose to the top of its rankings. Simultaneously, many users found Google’s results to be better and more relevant than those of the other search engines.

SEOs figured out that they could game Google’s algorithm by getting lots of links to their websites. Not surprisingly, where there is supply and demand, a market came into existence, and it wasn’t long before SEOs and businesses could buy and sell links for the purpose of ranking high in Google. Google spotted and penalized some, but the others just got sneakier in response, building more complex backlinking schemes. Sure, this broke Google’s Terms of Service, but black hat SEOs didn’t care, and Google found it difficult to catch and punish them – until Panda, at least. “Google permitted spammy link building for far too long, before cracking down hard,” Lyngbo noted.

Google started using social search signals – the likes, positive reviews, +1s, and so forth – at least partially to counteract the link spam it’s been fighting all these  years. A website with lots of good links but relatively few likes, or vice versa, would seem inconsistent to Google’s algorithm. For black hat SEOs, though, there’s a way around that now: buying likes and positive reviews.

Lyngbo displayed images of ads for those selling these social signals. “I will give you 100 FB like and 200 guarantee Google plus Unique Votes from Different Accounts…for $5.” “I will write 10 Amazing 5 Star Positive GOOGLE Places Reviews…for $5.” “I will post 1 excellent 5 star review for your business item on TripAdvisor for $5.” And don’t get me started on how many Twitter and Google+ followers you can get for $5. Frequently coming from China and India, the Boston Globe reported that many of these accounts look too real to be machine-generated. And if they’re real enough to fool a human, they’re real enough to fool Google.

Next: Buying Social Signals: the Ethical Issues
 

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Blekko, the little hash tag search engine that could, will likely see four times the traffic at the end of this month that it saw at the start of January. While still a drop in the bucket compared to Google, that’s amazing growth for one short quarter. So what are the secrets of its success?

By Blekko’s own analytics, the number of unique IPs it saw went from 1.58 million  in December to 5.33 million as of the beginning of this week. Looking at their chart, the biggest spikes seem to have happened between December and January, when the search engine nearly doubled its traffic, and between March and April, when it went from 3.71 million unique visitors to 5.33 million unique visitors so far this month. Matt McGee notes that this represents a 337 percent rise in visitors just in this year – and April isn’t over yet.

The year-over-year numbers are similarly impressive. McGee compared March 2011 to March of this year, and found a 645 percent spike in Blekko’s traffic. The search engine’s blog shows charts from Compete and Hitwise that demonstrate the same trend. McGee checked in with comScore just to see if all of the major web ranking companies agree. “Although the numbers are different, the trend is pretty much exactly the same – a dramatic rise in traffic beginning in January, 2012,” he observed.

So what’s the secret? Well, it doesn’t hurt that Blekko received a $30 million investment from Russian search company Yandex back in September 2011. Blekko parlayed that money into improving its infrastructure. Search Engine Land quoted Blekko CEO Rich Skrenta at the time as saying that “We have doubled the server count (to 1500 servers), as well as doubling the RAM and SSD on every box. This allows us to have a larger index, as well as giving us more query serving capacity.”

The investment also gave the little search engine resources to put into improving its algorithm. Indeed, the January spike in traffic neatly coincides with an announcement Blekko made shortly before Christmas concerning a major upgrade. Users would benefit from the addition of 500 regular slashtags, a large index and improved long-tail results. They’d also get to compare search results from Blekko, Bing, and Google just by using the /monte slashtag. You can read Blekko’s blog post for the details.

Skrenta also notes dissatisfaction with Google as one of the reasons for his search engine’s increasing popularity. But it may be more like dissatisfaction with both major search engines. Brafton News noted that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said, back in October at the Web 2.0 Summit, that search users should give Bing a try, since Google and Bing search results are the same about 70 percent of the time. This implies that users who want a different search experience will need to seek out other, smaller search engines, such as Blekko and DuckDuckGo.

I’ve reviewed Blekko and noted that its approach is very different from the major search engines. The slashtags may be slightly less intuitive than what you’re used to from Google. Despite this minor learning curve for new users, Blekko’s slashtags do offer the kind of precision and control for your results that’s hard to achieve with other search engines.

Another factor contributing to Blekko’s growing popularity may be the death of Yahoo Site Explorer. This valuable free tool for SEOs closed up shop in November of 2011. Blekko, however, offers its own assortment of SEO tools, as detailed by Vanessa Fox. Skrenta notes that SEOs have been “all over” these tools. If you’re still in mourning for YSE – or even if you’re not – you might consider trying these free tools to see if they work with the way you like to do things.

Skrenta also pointed to distribution partnerships as a reason for his search engine’s increasing popularity. Just under a month ago, for instance, Nicole Perlroth wrote a Blekko blog post that unveiled a deal with Lavasoft. This deal made Blekko the default search engine for users of Lavasoft’s security software, and allowed it to “use Lavasoft’s software to signal whether a site in its search results is trustworthy or not, using a red or green symbol,” according to Perlroth. It works well with Blekko’s efforts to position itself as “the spam-free search engine,” too, which is its motto.

Finally, Blekko representatives have been showing up at lots of trade shows and conferences, increasing its visibility and perhaps encouraging it to stick in users’ minds when they’re ready to search. McGee noted Blekko’s presence at “shows like SXSW, Blogworld Expo and our own SMX West conference to many librarian-focused events like the American Library Association Midwinter Meeting and the Internet Librarian Association.”

Behind all of these points, however, remains one fact: for a small but growing number of people, Blekko () offers a viable alternative for at least some of their Internet searches. If you’ve been unhappy with Bing and Google, or wonder if there are alternatives that might do the job better, perhaps it’s time to consider giving Blekko a try.

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