or in the universal search results of Google Web Search.

Your store can also use product feeds to send listings to resellers and affiliates who in turn will sell your goods for you or refer people to your website. This is where it gets tricky for SEO. Search engines like original, high quality content. If you put all of your product descriptions into a product feed and every store selling your stuff uses the same exact words,

• Sites with more authority can outrank you for your own products.
• Search engines may only display one seller because they don’t like showing duplicate content.

What does Google’s Panda update have to do with product descriptions? Panda is about quality. If your website has the same product descriptions as everyone else it is hardly a high-quality experience. If Google decides you offer low quality it could put you into the panda den and drop all of your website rankings.

What can you do?

Smart affiliate sellers enjoy taking advantage of generic product descriptions. They find good products to sell where everyone uses the same descriptions. Then they write all new product descriptions. Because their content is unique these affiliates easily rank well, earn lots of traffic and rake in the commissions.

Be like the smart affiliates and write your own SEO optimized content. You should still place quality product descriptions, categories, tags and other information into your product feed. Just don’t use the same descriptions in your feed as you use on your website. I realize this is going to be a pain for many of you. Writing a second set of product descriptions is a lot of work. Your product feed is part of your shopping cart CMS. You can find all sorts of reasons not to do this. Unfortunately the bottom line is this, Google and Bing want original content. If you are a serious competitor your have to give it to them.

Robots.txt

Make certain that the search engines can visit and index your website. The blocking of search engines occurs more often than you may think. Developers disallow all spiders on the beta site then forget to change over the robot.txt file when the new website goes live.

Robots Meta Tag

Make sure any noindex Meta Robots tags have been removed, except those which should be in place for SEO or security reasons.

<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW”>

Run a Crawl

The only way to view your whole website the same way that search engines do is to crawl it. Two tools that do this are Xenu Link Sleuth and Screaming Frog.

Check for Broken Links

Sometimes the switch from development or beta site to live site does not go as planned. Use the crawl that you ran to check for broken links.

HTTP Headers

After launch all your pages should return a 200 File Found server response code. Use your crawl data to confirm this.

Analytics & Webmaster Tools Code

Check that your analytics and webmaster tools code is in place and working. Your website should be registered with Google and Bing. I’d also register with Yahoo Site Explorer until they officially shut down. You can register with Yandex too.

XML Sitemaps

If your website uses XML sitemaps, verify them in Bing and Google webmaster tools.

301 Redirects

When redesigning a website an SEO best practice is to reuse as many URLs as you can. Of course this is not always possible. Be sure old URLs 301 redirect to their replacements. This will help the search engines index your new website and transfer ranking authority from off-site links. It provides a better user experience for visitors from off-site links too.

Not every page has a one-to-one replacement. If the category for a depreciated page exists, 301 redirect to the new site’s category page. Otherwise a 404 is permissible.

Check for 302 Redirects

A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect. Search engines know to forward ranking authority through a 301 redirect from the old page to the new page. The other type of redirects is a 302 or temporary redirect. Search engines will not pass authority through a 302 redirect; it’s like a brick wall, so it should never be used.

Check 404s for External Links

After you make certain your 301 redirects are in place and working, check the 404 ages for external links using a tool like Open Site Explorer. Ranking strength is passed from site to site via links. Recycle unused ranking strength by pointing them to SEO keyword hub pages that can use a boost.

Page Speed

Page speed, how long it takes pages to appear in the browser and finish loading, is both a usability and an SEO factor. Check your website’s page loading speed. Pages should load quickly, within a couple seconds.

I am only listing a thin slice of SEO here. I assume you will cover bigger SEO opportunities like site architecture and important keyword targeting during the website visioning, design and build/copy writing phases and that your will conduct ongoing search engine optimization after launch.

What’s on your after launch SEO checklist?

This is the introduction to a series about how online newspapers and magazines can use Twitter for SEO and achieve greater visibility in the process.

Twitter is an SEO signal. Google and Bing have told us so. Through observation we know that Tweets can have dramatic effect and make webpages rank for competitive queries. It’s as if when there are enough tweets with the correct combination of words and a link, the search engines assign related search queries as trending and put the top rankings in play. We have seen rankings fade away once the tweeted links stop and we have seen new high rankings stick after the tweets stop. Here is what I think is happening when rankings change because of Twitter.

• If a search query deserves freshness, that is frequent updates to the rankings because new content is frequently added to the web, then the search engines will recognize the tweeted story as trending and lift its rankings. After the tweets stop the rankings will drop as new content takes its spot.
• Search engine query results that do not change often can be influenced by Twitter too. If there are enough tweeted links the target webpage can earn high rankings. If the webpage gets enough links from other websites during this period of popularity, then the high ranking can become permanent. Otherwise, after the page’s popularity wanes the ranks will return to what they were before.

Social media as ranking signals are new to the search engines. Google and Bing are developing new and better ways of discovering messages and links and of quantifying them. As they do, undoubtedly the influence of social media on search engine rankings will get stronger.

So how do we use Twitter to increase our keyword rankings?

Let’s begin with some Twitter SEO theory.

Search engines (Google and Bing) measure influence on Twitter in mentions and links.

• The more people who write about a brand the better.
• The more people who link to a document the better.
• The more influential the people who write about a brand the better.
• The more influential the people who link to a document the better.

Notice that your own popularity or influence is not on that list. Popularity is a critical tool for leveraging many other people and influential Twitter members to retweet your post, mention your brand or link to your webpage. However, no matter how much trust and authority you have with Twitter, Google or Bing, your post is only one among billions.

Look at the image below. What happens when you tweet a link to your friends? Do they share it with their friends? Do your friends’ friends share your link with their friends?

People retweet and share links because they trust the person sending the message AND the message content compels them to share. Having more friends helps. It’s a numbers game after all. But, your message or tweet must stand out from the normal discourse. To have any chance at going viral it has to be irreplaceable, exhilarating, hilarious, violent or whatever it is that makes people not want, but need to pass it on. Look at this slightly different picture.

I am a social media and SEO consultant. If I tweet to friends in my profession they see it. If my colleagues share my tweet most of the search marketing community sees it. If enough search marketers retweet then a whole slew of marketing professionals will read my words. Should they share it, in turn, my message ought to go well and truly viral. I like to use this example because it is easy to see how the audience expands in number and scope of interest. As a newspaper or magazine your transitions are unlikely to be so clean, but the effect is the same. Here is an example.

Having influential friends can provide the same effect as having lots of friends on Twitter.

A retweet or link from an influential member or celebrity can make your message go viral. Keep in mind, your content had better be great because influential Twitter members see lots of worthy messages. They cannot repost them all so they will filter anything that isn’t good enough or does not come from a close enough relationship.

Your followers are your fulcrum. Your relationship with them gives you the leverage to access a dramatically larger number of people. It all comes down to four things.

1. Get many followers.
2. Get influential followers.
3. Make great tweets.
4. Tweet about great content.

To keep up on this series follow our RSS Feed and follow @TomSchmitz on Twitter.

This list is Google AdWords Keyword Tool centric. That’s because I tend to work on SEO with large enterprise clients that use AdWords. It is important to remember that the Google keyword database is designed for AdWords
and PPC traffic. It's a limited set of words based on paid search, not organic search. Look at other keyword research tools like SEM Rush and WordStream and Keyword Discovery and WordTracker. Pay attention to the search queries that stand out. Just because Google does not corroborate
does not mean you should eliminate it.

Depending on the industry, market or niche this can take between a full day and a week. It involves a lot of data gathering and analysis.

Compare this to your own SEO keyword research strategy? Does anything stand out? Do you think something is missing?

I start with competition research.

• What words and phrases do obvious or known competitors target? –> Add to the brainstorm list
• What are their ranking strength metrics (links, authority, etc.)
• What do they rank or get traffic for

Brainstorming possible keywords

• Top of my head
• Looking at competitors
• SEM Rush, Wordstream and other research tools
• Look for alternative sources of relevant words and phrases

Run words through Google Keyword Tool

• Run the brainstorm list through the GKWT
• Download, concatenate and results
• Filter results – remove words that get no traffic or seem irrelevant

Grab the client’s ranking strength metrics (links, authority, etc.)

Guesstimate, among the keywords, based on competition, which words

• The client can rank for immediately
• Are achievable with some work
• Are achievable with above average success
• Are out of reach

Soft-match keywords to the client

• Highest combination of search volume and ability to achieve a top 10 rank
• Convertibility and commercial intent
• Match to the client’s existing content
• Match to possible new relevant content

Review the Top 10 ranking for each keyword to confirm

• Whether or not the client ranks already
• It is really relevant based on the present search results
• The level of competitiveness for each keyword is realistic
• There are no surprises or forgotten competitors

Determine the appropriate content strategy

• Long tail content strategy – Lots of keywords with low search volume and low competition
• High/Mid tail strategy – Select keywords with high search volume and high competition
• Combination strategy

Identify hub pages/SEO target pages and assign keywords to them

• Existing pages
• Pages that will have to be created

Does your website use headings or h-tags for CSS design? It shouldn’t. Instead, reserve h-tags for outlining our document and SEO.

Today the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog published
this:

One way Google’s algorithms determine the context of content on a page is by looking at the page’s
headings. The way semantic markup is used throughout a site, including h1, h2, and h3
tags, helps us to understand the priorities of a site’s content. One should not fret, though, about every single H tag. Using common sense is the way to go.

Google linked to the W3C specification, part of which reads

A heading element briefly describes the topic of the section it introduces. Heading information may be used by user agents, for example, to construct a table
of contents for a document automatically.

Use Headings to Give Your Pages Structure

Headings, also known as h-tags, are the h1, h2, h3, h4, h5 and h6 that you see inside the HTML of many pages. Their purpose is to give structure to a story,
much like an outline gives structure to a report or term paper. If it helps, think if this as your page’s skeleton.

H1 – The page headline. It should contain the main them of the page and most important keyword or keywords. There should be only one.

H2 – Section headlines to describe each section.

H3 – Subsection headlines that break-up sections in an orderly fashion.

Nearly all pages should include an h1. Most pages never go beyond the h3. Just use the outlines that makes sense on your pages and you will be fine.

Headings are Not for Design

Nowhere in the W3C specification does it suggest using headings as design hooks. Unfortunately, many designers persist in using h tags to define how text should
appear. Here is an example from a CSS file.

h1{
font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
font-size: x-large;
font-variant: small-caps;
color: maroon;
}

Every time the designer of this page wants extra-large maroon text with small caps he encloses those words in an h1 tag. The h2 has its own look too, as does
the h3 and h4 and so one. You often find these types of headings in menus and sidebars, outside of the page’s main content.

Using headings for design destroys a page’s outline. It withholds the easiest way for you to share with search engines what’s important on your page.

Designers have an alternative. They can use class and id tags in their HTML.

<p class="side-nav-header">This is the Page Headline</p>

Your designer can format the appearance of the class side-nav-header in the CSS file…

#side-nav-header{
font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
font-size: medium;
font-variant: small-caps;
color: #008000;
}

…and use it anywhere on the page as often as necessary without messing up the pages h-tag outline.

1. Good headings or h-tags create a story structure or outline.
2. There should be one h1 tag only, the headline or theme of your page.
3. Do not use h-tags to style or design the appearance of text.
4. Do not use headings in navigation or sidebars.
5. Tell your designers to never use h-tags in CSS files. Instruct them to use custom class and id tags instead.

Since
the Google Panda update, aka Farmer update, I've received numerous queries asking what constitutes quality content. The actual questions are pretty diverse:

• What is good content? What is poor content?
• What makes one article better than another?
• Is link bait the same as good content?
• Does how I launch an article affect its quality?
• Give me a formula for making stories go viral?

I've always gotten questions like these. The difference is that, because of Panda, now everyone wants more precise answers. They want consultants to pin down
quality once and for all.

I've struggled with this. It's like throwing darts in an earthquake. I can teach you the rules. I can show you the proper stance. What I cannot do is stop the
ground shaking beneath your feet. Quality varies depending on your audience, your popularity and where you publish.

But, you did not come here for excuses. You want an answer. Alright then, I think I can help with the assistance Mr. Analogy.

Online, Content Is Like Golf

Yep, there is my gem of wisdom. Content is like golf. Before you head for the exit let me explain.

Popularity affects the perception of quality. When written by a beloved author an article will more likely be perceived as having higher quality than the exact
same story if written by a lesser known or unknown person. That perception of quality influences or determines the number of tweets, links and mentions the article
receives, which in turn influences whatever quality score search engines chose to give to the content. So, we can say,

Watching Seth Godin publish a blog post is like watching Phil
Mickelson golf a par 5 hole.

In golf each hole is different. Some are par three, some are par four and a few are par five. In theory a par player should average three swings on a par three,
four swings on a par four and five swings on a par five. If you have watched an LPGA or PGA tournament, though, you know that professional players are
more likely to make birdies on the par fives than on the par threes and fours.
That is because they can hit the ball farther than most down the long fairways, and with a high level of accuracy. The pros have an edge.

Now that we have established the fact that it is far easier for Neil Gaiman to get respect from Google and Bing!
than it is for you or me, let's use golf to score content.

Bogey == Low Quality Content

In golf a bogey means that it took an extra swing above par to drop the ball in the hole. If your article titled How to Skateboard begins with, Step
1 – Buy a skateboard, chances are you're writing low quality content. If you are writing just to achieve a word count you're writing low quality content. If
you are not an expert and do no research chances are you're writing low quality content.

In golf you can also make a double bogey or two shots over par. In this situation a double bogey is wretched, foul content.

Par == Average Quality Content

In golf, making par is to take the allotted number of swings to pocket a shot and no more. When I write Average Quality what I really mean is the majority
of all web content. A bell curve is a good way to picture this. Everything above the mean is above average quality. Everything below the mean is below average quality.

Within a normal distribution all content that possesses a quality score within one standard deviation of the mean or average is considered par or average quality
content. For the record, I am not saying that quality in web content follows a normal distribution. I am only suggesting that this makes it easier to imagine what
par quality content is and that most content is of average quality. Just because another site has lower quality content than yours does not make theirs below average.

A well written article that receives no links or only a few is par quality. A brief article on a respected site might be scored as having average quality. An
incredible article on a site with little authority may fall into the par quality range too.

Ultimately quality is determined by a quantitative score assigned to a document by the search engine. Parts of the scoring formula can include the number of
words, natural language recognition algorithms, links from other websites, Facebook mentions, Twitter links and anything else that can get turned into a number.

So, if you are worried that the search engines think your content is low quality or if you wonder why the search engines do not reward your excellently written
articles more and higher rankings, chances are good that a quantitative assessment of your documents falls within the wide-middle of the bell curve.

Birdie == Above Average Content

A birdie is one shot below par. That's good, but what makes this content above average? It can be many things. Earlier I wrote Watching
Seth Godin publish a blog post is like watching Phil Mickelson
golf a par 5 hole. While most of Seth's post are brief 200 word thought explosions, almost everything Seth writes will rank for something. As a website his
blog gets an incredible amount of trust and authority from Google and Bing!. He has thousands of RSS subscribers. His posts regularly receive between 600 tweets
and 1,500 tweets. Seth's link acquisition rate is faster than my pulse. This is why Google thinks Seth Godin's daily blurb is better than this long, well thought-out
article that you are reading now.

In web publishing terms, above average content is usually content that gets noticed.

•  Remarkable Content – Well written content worth a few links and tweets among friends. (While I'm putting this here, remarkable content on an average
  site is more likely to be considered as average quality content by a search engine.)
•  Link Bait – Lots of links, tweets and likes among your extended circle of influence. When an article becomes link bait it becomes above average because
  people are sharing it. That tells the search engines that it's worthwhile.

Birdie content is High Quality Content.

Eagle == Way Above Average Content

Eagle content is viral content. By viral I mean that its popularity takes on a life of its own. It's like when a country hit crosses over into Hot 100 dance
singles. You cannot plan nor prepare for it. Great golfers rarely make eagles, two shots less than par. When they do luck is always involved.

Any content can become eagle content or way above average quality. It does not have to be the best researched, best written, most trusted writing either. Yes,
skilled writing and a popular website can make going viral easier, still, the transformation from popular to out of the ballpark viral is out of any one person's
hands.

Rebecca Black's Friday is eagle content.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9u9-AdPAOy0

1. The desire to be user friendly.
2. Trying to send SEO link juice to too many pages.

The Desire to be User Friendly

You want visitors to find what they are seeking. That's good, however, overzealous
internal linking can lead to both SEO and usability problems.

From a usability perspective too many choices will lead to decision paralysis.
Instead of taking the time to look through your menus to find what they want your
visitors will get frustrated and abandon your site. In truth, people will click
on links as long as they believe that they are on a clear and direct path toward
their goal.

• 'How
  We Decide' And The Paralysis Of Analysis
• Testing the Three-Click Rule
• 
  10 unexpected online user behaviors to look out for

In your analytics package or using a tool like
Crazy Egg, look at the links people DO NOT
click on. If nobody clicks on a link what does it accomplish? What good does it
do for your visitors?

Trying To Send SEO Link Juice to Too Many Pages

One of the first precepts of SEO I learned is that every page of content strengthens
your SEO. If you have studied long tail theory you understand the power of content
to capture high quality visitors by optimizing for many different queries, especially
specific searches that trade off low volume for less ranking competition and high
visitor relevance. In a typical scenario you might publish a new article or page.
Next you choose to give it an SEO boost by cross linking pages to it and sending
your article extra link juice or PageRank. The danger here is that you can cannibalize
ranking authority from important pages, especially if you cross link to too many
pages.

Overzealous cross linking occurs from the desire to increase page authority.
A better strategy, especially for long tail content, is to increase domain authority
and flow PageRank through your site naturally. When you treat too many pages like
they are high value SEO targets you dilute the ranking strength of your entire website.
I am not saying do not cross link. Anyone familiar with hub pages understands the
value of cross linking. What I do advise is be disciplined and select your hub pages
thoughtfully.

• 
  How Google's Rankings Algorithm Has Changed Over Time
• 
  SEO copy writing's secret weapon: Hub pages

Lead With Internal Link Discipline

The first step in SEOing a new website is to develop your content and topics.
The second step is to organize your content into categories or topic silos. At this
point don't think about keywords. Only after you have laid out your website should
you research, select and assign keywords to pages.

Here is a classic SEO website architecture. Click on the image to view a

two category version.

Within the category the topic is broad at the top, close to the home page, then
becomes more specific as you go deeper into the silo. Pay careful attention to the
internal linking structure.

1. Every page links to the home page.
2. Every page links to every category level page. This is your main navigation.
3. Sub-category pages link to other sub-categories within the same category
   only.
4. Sub-category pages link to their own topic pages only.
5. Topic pages link to sub-category pages within the same category only.
6. Topic pages link to their own article pages only.
7. Article pages link to each sub-category page within the same category only.
8. Article pages link to each topic page within its own sub-category.
9. Article pages link to other article pages within the same topic.

This classic SEO internal linking architecture works especially well for brochure
or sales pages. You can be more disciplined with your internal linking too. Here
is a strict internal linking scheme. Click on the image to see the

two category version.

And if you want to be more disciplined yet, do not link articles to each other.

Cross linking for SEO

After you set-up your website's internal linking structure you can begin to think
about cross links. Cross links boost the SEO value of a page by sending it PageRank
from outside its place in the internal linking structure.

Here are three reasons cross linking makes sense:

1. Give an SEO boost to new content.
2. Create hub pages.
3. Pass PageRank from pages with lots of external links to key SEO targets
   without external links.

Give an SEO Boost to New Content

You can get search engines to index new content more quickly by linking to it
from high value pages like your home or category pages. Cross linking can also provide
a PageRank or link juice boost to a page to help it rank better. If you've worked
on a blog this will be familiar to you. Cross links can give new content time to
earn its own links and authority. Be certain to remove cross links as material becomes
older and you cross link to new content.

On a blog links to new articles usually appear on the home page, the article's
category page and in tag pages. Links may also appear throughout the blog in the
sidebar, often under the heading Recent Articles or Recent Stories. As new content
gets introduced the home page link is pushed down further on the page then eventually
disappears. The same happens on category and tag pages. Eventually the only way
to click through to the story is through the archive links on its category and tag
pages. Blogs work like a conveyor belt, constantly giving the most internal link
juice to the newest content and removing it from older articles.

Create Hub Pages

Hub pages are important SEO keyword targets in your website, often deeper content.
The home page and the category pages are natural hub pages. This is why every page
links to them in the internal linking structure. Before you create a hub page it
is important to be ruthless. Does the page really deserve to become a hub? If successful,
what value will it bring? Remember, every time you cross link outside of the link
architecture you steal PageRank from other pages that would otherwise receive that
link juice. Each link also messes with your carefully crafted top-down flow of PageRank.

Once you decide that a web page is also a worthwhile hub page, begin by linking
to it from within the articles of main content of pages with similar or related
topics. Link using anchor text that contains the hub pages most important keyword
target. If you must, add links from other pages, but do so gradually and thoughtfully.
If you think that every page on your website ought to link to your new hub page,
perhaps it should become a new category page or sub-category page.

Pass PageRank from Pages with Lots of External Links to Key SEO Targets without
External Links

What's the use of creating great link bait if you cannot spread the link juice
around? A well optimized website has lots of pages with external links. These boost
the domain authority of your site and help all pages to rank better. But PageRank
is a renewable resource. Once a web page uses PageRank for itself it can pass some
of it along. If you have a page with lots of external links it makes sense to target
some of the PageRank at other SEO targets. Again, be disciplined. Only link to high
value SEO targets and only link to a few pages. If you link to too many URLs you
will exceed the amount of external link juice the page can transfer and siphon-off
internal link juice.

Be ruthlessly disciplined with your internal linking. Do not attempt to make
every page a high-value SEO lander. You will be well on your way to increasing the
search engine optimization of your entire website.

SEO: Not a Project Milestone

Within a project, reaching a milestone means you finished an important and related group of tasks.  Too often businesses isolate SEO as a separate project milestone, usually close to the end. Their project plan might look like this:

1. Brainstorm
2. Design
3. Content
4. SEO
5. Publish

Or worse, it might look like:

1. Brainstorm
2. Design
3. Content
4. Publish
5. SEO

Don’t do this! Don’t put search engine optimization in a box. That’s how bad things happen.

• In the example above, the people who work on the the brainstorm, design, content and publish aspects will come to perceive the SEO team as the enemy, the voice that criticizes all of their work and tosses wrenches into their gears, not as collaborators.
• You will not get the results you wanted or could have had.

Here is another example, a request very similar to one I recently received.

XYZ is launching a new widget. Please send ## keywords for them to track.

In this example the widget could be anything…a new website or page, a series of blog articles, a product feed, a Google Places; anything else one might optimize. The point is that their widget is launching before XYZ’s Internet Marketing Company or SEO strategist ever sees it.  Whatever the widget is

• No keywords were selected
• Text was not optimized for search engine optimization
• No one checked for technical issues or search spider compatibility
• No one checked for SEO specific errors like duplicate content
• No one checked to see if the new stuff will remove or compete with SEO optimization targets already in place

How can a business track SEO results if no search engine optimization was performed?

Include and Implement SEO the Right Way

Use search engine optimization throughout your project, no matter how large or small. Let’s say you are building a new website:

1. Identify the purpose and general goals of the website ->
   Identify the search queries people use to find the products and services you deliver
2. Choose the pages that will be on the website -> Select target keywords and assign each to a page
3. Site architecture -> Identify SEO content silos and internal link guidelines
4. Web page template design -> Make sure templates contain SEO signals, place them  where they belong and avoid negative SEO signals like cloaking
5. Content plan -> Long tail keyword selection, internal link support for SEO target pages, expanding SEO content silos, link building plan via link worthy content
6. Copywriting -> Optimize copy for target keywords
7. Image selection -> Assign image alt text
8. Web server and Content Management System selection and set-up -> Optimize for technical SEO signals like speed and lower-case URLs
9. Public Relations and Promotion – Link building and external link anchor text

Every milestone of every web based project can benefit from SEO research, planning or implementation. Give your project plan or outline to your SEO agency, consultant or strategist well before kick-off. Ask him or her to recommend what SEO tasks should accompany or come before each project milestone. You will enhance collaboration, avoid surprises and achieve better results.

Usually the people who write these notes do not know their words are being posted to the event wall. I often delete these posts off of the wall and that is the end of it. On occasion though, someone else, who is also unfamiliar with the finer workings of Facebook, will accuse me of censoring or deleting a post because it was unfavorable. This leads to an uncomfortable situation where I must explain the circumstances and win back people’s trust.

Culture dictates that most notes will be negative responses. That will not change. Therefore, Facebook should not automatically post RSVP notes to event walls. Give the event organizer the option to select Facebook’s behavior — yes, post to the wall or no, do not post. Give invitees the choice whether or not their note should appear on the Facebook event wall when they submit their RSVP.

Until Facebook makes this change a lot of events will continue to look like less popular than they really are.

When Sergey and Brin created Google they invented PageRank, a way to measure authority based on the quantity and quality of external links.

1. The more websites that link to your web page the more authoritative your web page is.
2. Web pages with more links from other websites can pass along more authority through their outbound links than pages with fewer inbound links.

Combined with page content and the words in external links, PageRank let Google to create the most accurate search engine rankings anyone had ever seen. The logic was sound. Links come from web content creators. As more content creators decide that a page is valuable the page should earn more links. It  worked and before anyone could coin the term search engine optimization people were asking for, trading, injecting and buying links.

Fast forward to 2010. Content creators and their links continue to play the dominant role in search ranking authority; however; too many people are adept at acquiring links without earning them and manipulating search engine rankings. To combat this Google seeks new and robust ranking signals that will be less sensitive to falsification. One way to prevent fake influence is to increase sample size, which is where social media comes in.

When we discuss social media as a ranking signal we really mean user generated content. Each minute, hour and day web surfers make more Twitter tweets and Facebook posts than all of the articles or pages published by site administrators or editors. If backlinks are the Earth, as pictured below, then user generated content is Jupiter. That's a lot of content.

Such immense volume makes user generated content and social media difficult to manipulate. For example, you or I can Tweet about Shelby Autos all we want. We can even get everyone we know and everyone they know to tweet too but the number of brand mentions we create will pale in comparison to the daily tweets about Toyota or Ford. Google and Bing are counting on this. They are scouring through tweets, wall posts, reviews, forums, blog comments — places once considered SEO wastelands — to find brand mentions, names, links and other content to quantify and toss into their ranking algorithms.

Where is this going? Look at the picture of the planets again. If the Earth is links and Jupiter is social media, how does the future for links as a ranking signal look? I'd say that the writing is in the stars.