Talking to PR agencies about search engine optimisation (SEO) can make you feel like Noah before the flood.

Building on the recent debate around PR owning SEO, I look at how agencies who fail to embrace search will ultimately fail.

Cast your mind back to 2007-8 and the buzzwords in PR and marketing then around social media. Agencies scrambled to recruit what some mistakenly called a ‘guru’ (often a fresh graduate) who understood the platforms, if perhaps not the principles and nuances of marketing.

Since then, savvy and ambitious PR agencies realised they needed proven digital expertise and either bought in talent or skilled up their own executives on the ways of social media. Social media is now a healthy component of UK PR practice and providing high levels of fee income for PR agencies.

via SEOs will slaughter careless PR agencies | Econsultancy.

Bing has been reinvented, offering enhanced search results that tap into the power of social media. Microsoft has done this by pulling people out of search results and putting them in their place: A right-hand social column that will eventually include Facebook, Twitter, Google+ Quora and LinkedIn integration, as well as people who may know something about your most recent Bing query. It even offers a way to ask questions on your favorite social network, directly through Bing.

via Bing Reinvents Social Search and Discovery.

Ever wonder how Google Search works? Google has put out a video answering just that, cramming what would likely be a ten-hour video into a more broad 8-minute “table of contents.” Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s web spam team, outlines the inner machinations of the search giant, including a comparison of their old crawling method (a slow, inefficient way to discover new content) and their new(er) method that breaks the web into chunks, allowing incremental (and therefore quicker) discovery and page ranking. If you have a question of your own or want to learn more about how Google works, you can jump into their Webmaster Forums or check out the Google Webmaster YouTube channel.

via Google’s head of web spam team broadly outlines how its search works | The Verge.

Sagar Kamdar is a Group Product Manager for Google Search. Sagar is responsible for Google’s authorship and social initiatives in search. Prior to joining Google, Sagar was a Director responsible for Analytics products at Oracle. Sagar has a BS degree in EE from Cornell University.

Key Points from Interview with Sagar Kamdar

This interview transcript is from the March 13th, 2012 conversation I had with Sagar Kamdar, who heads up the authorship program at Google. This provided some simple, straightforward clarity on how it works, and some of the various scenarios for implementation. Here are some of the key points from the interview:

via Rel=Author Defined with Google’s Sagar Kamdar.

Google’s relationship with links has changed over the last 15 years – it started out as a love affair but nowadays the Facebook status would probably read: “It’s Complicated”. I think Google are beginning to suffer from trust issues, brought about by well over a decade of the SEO community manipulating the link graph. In this post I’m going to lay out how I think Authorship, and Google+ are one of the ways that Google are trying to remedy this situation.I’ll move on to what that means we should be thinking about doing differently in the future, and am sharing a free link-building tool you can all try out to experiment with these ideas. The tool will allow you to see who is linking to you rather than where is linking to you, and will provide you with social profiles for these authors, as well as details of where else they write.

via How Authorship and Google+ Will Change Linkbuilding | SEOmoz.

For the average writer, marketer or content producer, AuthorRank presents a great opportunity for personal branding, but also makes us individually responsible for the quality of work we produce. Evaluating the quality of content is Google’s job, and moving into the future it’s clear Google seeks to evaluate the substantive quality of authors. By understanding AuthorRank now, authors can establish themselves and their aggregated body of work as worthy of being ranked.

via Why AuthorRank Matters & How to Leverage It [Infographic].

Adds link rel=”standout”/”syndication-source”/”canonical” meta data to the <head> of your posts as per Google News guidlines.

via WordPress › Google Standout « WordPress Plugins.

See also : http://googlenewsblog.blogspot.com/2011/09/recognizing-publishers-standout-content.html

Although many businesses don’t know it, keywords and text are valuable for more than just Google results pages. The same logic that applies to the importance of SEO content also applies to social networks such as YouTube, Twitter, and LinkedIn. After all, these social networks have a search function similar to that of Google. In other words, think of these social networks as simply a different search engine, but just on a slightly smaller scale.

via Utilizing SEO Keywords to Optimize your Social Media Accounts | HigherVisibility.

Don’t misunderstand me, having the right SEO tools doesn’t mean that your website will automatically rank higher on Google. To do so, you must have a good SEO strategy and implement it correctly.

via 10 Free SEO Tools to Check Your Site and Backlinks | SEO and Web Design China Blog.