Computer and Internet

And that's how you gain ownership of an idea - by writing about it & developing the topic & expanding on tangents, etc. The more you're associated with it, the more likely you are to get referenced in association with it. Being able to measure your social networks, obviously matters a lot to knowing how far your ideas can spread; having a friend like you tells me that I can reach readers of Blog-tips-tricks.blogspot.com & thus potentially gain links from them for ideas I own.

Of course, on that particular idea I'd be an oaf not to mention this post by Lee Dodd, where he shared the same distribution idea, albeit with some different tactics, way ahead of me. So that's an idea whose ownership I think we might be sharing, if I can get Lee to agree to that.

What is Universal Search & how can bloggers use Universal Search for multiple listings?

Universal Search is something that search engines have been implementing for several months now & it's the blending of non-traditional items into search. The most prevalent right now seem to be video results (especially from Youtube, for those of you interested in Search Engine Reputation Management) & maps results.

Depending on the query, Google Base products (i.e., for ecommerce queries) also show up & we're seeing Google News a fair bit too.

Search isn't just about the ten blue links anymore & it's increasingly becoming a question of how many places on the page can you occupy using results from other mediums that the search engines blend into the results. Whereas a lot of this used to be seen/done mostly by reputation management pros, it's increasingly happening for competitive commercial queries too.

For bloggers, the best ways into Universal Search are getting into Google News as well as ranking for local results. You might take BrandCurve/Marketing Blurb & submit them as businesses to the search engines' local listings areas. Then, to get ranked, I suggest you see this local search engine ranking factors survey compiled by David Mihm, featuring the opinions & experience of himself, another 18 local SEO experts & yours truly.

Notice also that David put in the work to organize that, come up with questions, contact & assemble the answers of 19 other pros besides himself & then design a nice layout for it. He definitely has a large ownership stake in the 'local SEO ranking factors' topic now.

For those also hawking products through their blogs, Google Base might be an interesting avenue to pursue, though I personally don't know as much as I should, unfortunately.

Can you give any recommendations for how bloggers can experiment with SEO?

Absolutely. Set up a variety of blogs on Blogger & monetize them really aggressively. Adsense & affiliate ads with obvious tracking codes should fill the page. You'll see that Google probably asks you to enter a captcha for every new post you want to create. They've tied aggressive monetization to spammers & are using that to help filter out splogs (spam blogs). You can then take that idea & avoid monetizing with ads/affililiate ads until you've really built up a big audience; your site will take longer to get trusted otherwise.

Generally, to experiment, what you want to do is create dummy sites on nonsense keywods (like agrleowibm) & have them be identical in all but one respect. Then see how the search engines react & you know how they treat that factor.

What is footprinting & blog security?

Footprinting is the practice of figuring out the visible traits of similar websites. By similar websites, I mean those that have the same CMS usually, though crackers (malicious hackers) will footprint security loopholes not-CMS dependant. A well known footprint is "Powered by Wordpress" - search for that in Google & you get a bunch of wordpress blogs. Spammers do that to find blogs to spam links on.

The relation this has to blog security is that a lot of CMS updates are done to void security loopholes. Wordpress 2.3 is more secure than Wordpress 2.2, 2.5 is better than 2.3 and so on. If your site gets footprinted as being on an older version with known security problems, crackers can attack it & inject links, etc. How do you think college websites & social media sites rank for "Buy Viagra"? They got cracked & spammers added pages & links to them.

For the person getting their site broken into though, rankings will typically suffer. I like to refer people to my friend Hamlet Batista's posts on the relation between the two: SEO & Internet Security & protect yourself from a DDOS attack. (Again, note how he owns the topic in my mind).

I also need to give credit where it's due - my friend XMCP introduced me to footprinting with his post A 10 Minute Trick to Cut Blog Spam (by Eliminating Footprints).

Could you give a short schedule of what bloggers should do each day to boost SEO for their blogs (this can include beginner, intermediate and/or advanced SEO techniques - whatever you think bloggers should make sure they do everyday that's SEO related)?

Beginners: Read, read & read some more. Eventually you'll find who the leading authorities are in a field because all the second level and C-list authorities are referencing them. Don't restrict your reading to them, but try & read them at least a few times a week & mix in b- & c-listers who write original material & make you think.

While recently client work has made me cut back, I was reading 15 - 20 hours a week on SEO for a very long time. Luckily, I'm at the point where a lot of material isn't new to me anymore so that reduction isn't entirely a loss - some of it is no longer useful to me. And I've been reading consistently for 2 + years now. Not 15-20 hours a week since the start, but I was reading at least 5 - 10 a week starting out.

People who say you can succeed with only a half hour of work a day are lying. It takes long hours of hard effort & the first thing you need to do is feed your brain with quality reading, because otherwise you won't be able to think of your own ideas to share on your blog.

If you have nothing original to share, it's going to be harder to get people to promote you. Not impossible mind you, given how much crap people promote just because they're friendly with the crap-producer.

I would commit a minimum 5 - 10 hours a week to reading in your niche if you're serious. Sure, I call myself "bookworm seo" ... but then again this reading list has been a critical element in allowing me to have the early successes I have had. How many bloggers two years in are speaking at major industry trade shows like SMX West & SMX Advanced?

The next point is to build relationships. In your day-to-day business life, consider who you're closest to & what those people do for you that makes them special.

My friend Jon, for example, will jump to my defense when we play soccer & someone pulls a dirty move on me. Considering he's ~180 - 200 lbs, most people get that I'm not a good person to play nasty with. And I really appreciate that. Online, if you see a friend being slandered, etc., they will appreciate & remember those names in the comments who came to their defense.

I've had people say nasty things about me online ... & rather than being defended, more stupid people jumped on the bandwagon. I did notice though when the blog's owner - who I know - edited the post to reference my point-of-view. I wasn't too happy that he allowed the tripe to be published to begin with, but it was nice to see he was at least giving me a chance to defend myself.

Just to be clear, I'm all for constructive criticism & friends/people who respect you will actively give you that feedback. Giving it to others is another way to build a relationship. Be sure to criticize actions/ideas & never people, though, or your constructive criticism will be taken as an insult.

Of course, you won't find people flaming friends nor find something to criticize every day amongst the people you want to build relationships with. So you'll want to consider other ways of building relationships online.

I absolutely love forums & social networking sites for meeting new people & making acquaintances ... but IM is the best for building & developing those relationships once they're formed. If you can spend an hour/2 a day reading feeds & collecting links to your favourite posts for submission to social news sites, you'll quickly build a lot of relationships. I would also focus on niche community sites rather than go to Digg. This can be the same time you're reading as part of the weekly 5-10 hours.

My friend Shana Albert of Social Desire got Darren Rowse's attention by submitting his stuff regularly to different social media sites. I know that Maki of Dosh Dosh Internet Marketing has done the same with many folks, although he's spent time going the mass-social-media route with building up a power profile on Digg, StumbleUpon, etc.

Finally, as to being advanced, go through the archives of these sites and read some more:

• Blue Hat SEO
• Slightly Shady SEO
• Nicky Cakes
• Rogue Domainer
• Oooff
• Nop
• Diorex
• Dink
• Search Engine People
• Gray Wolf's SEO Blog

Schedules all depend on how quickly you want to be succesful & how succesful you want to be. "Working smart" just means using tools to be more efficient & making relationships with others so that they lend a hand where it's needed. The rest is all about putting in the hours.

What resources & tools do you recommend to help bloggers learn more about SEO?

I make no secret of the fact that I'm a huge fan of SEOmoz. Their Pro membership lets you ask them questions you'd have to pay $1000/hour to ask otherwise, plus you get their guides & unlimited use of their tools. How can anybody not see the value in that, for $50 a month or $400 a year?? I know them personally from having met them at shows & been to their offices ... not only will you get expert advice, but it's an opportunity to help build friendships with some of the most genuine, friendly people around.

As far as plugins go, I'm happy to announce the release of my first SEO tools this week & particularly the 'Internal Link Building' plugin which automatically links given plugins to pages that you define on your blog (or pages outside your blog, for such purposes as frequently cited sources).

Essentially, your blog ends up interlinking like Wikipedia - so you can rank like it too!

Also, what's particularly unique about this plugin is that it has post-level override capability. So if I set the phrase "seo consulting" to always link to my seo services & consulting page, then my whole blog will always link to it when I use that phrase.

But suppose I want to link to my friend Michael's SEO consulting page within a post. I can set the words "SEO consulting" to link to him.

Note: I give credit for the idea to Jim Boykin's Internet Marketing Ninjas. They have some similar tool, apparently & that's what inspired me. He wasn't the first, but he took ownership of the idea to my mind by being the first to present it with the Wikipedia angle. Of course, if you want access to Jim's tool and program, you need a few thousand dollars, while I'm releasing mine for free as soon as I get the download tracking figured out.

Gab Goldenberg provides SEO consulting services including 1 on 1 consultations, as well as PPC management to bloggers & mid-size companies that understand the value of search marketing. Some clients include this Montreal youth hostel & this dental seminars cruise provider.