Google makes socializing on the web faster than ever.

The only thing constant about search engine optimization is change. You must adapt if you want to stay on top. Social, news and bookmarking sites and services have changed the game. If you’re still living in 1998 as far as your SEO, get over it. Adapt or you’ll find yourself disappearing from the search results.

In the good old days, Seinfeld was still new in prime time and getting high rankings in the search engines involved tweaking the title and meta tags on your web pages and joining link farms to get thousands of backlinks. You’d submit your site or page, sit back, wait and do some more tweaking in a few days or weeks after the spiders had crawled and indexed.

This is 2008 and things have definitely changed.

Spidering is almost immediate in Google these days. Posts to your blog or web site can show up in a few hours. In 1998, few had heard of blogging and hardly anyone was doing it. Now, the combination of a quality blog and Google’s high speed indexing can be a potent combination for good rankings.

If you don’t have a blog, get one now. You’re missing out on an opportunity to contribute great content to the web as well as gain quality links and reputation, which lead to good rankings.

There’s more to getting good rankings than just posting to your blog, however. You’ve got to leverage social media and bookmarking to really be effective. This means joining social networking sites like StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit and so forth (See my post S E O 101 - Social Media Optimization).

Once you’ve registered with the various social bookmarking sites, you need to get the word out about your blog posts. It would help to have social network friends to help you with submitting your posts to the different properties. Doing it yourself is generally considered poor taste.

In addition, Michael Campbell over at Internet Marketing Secrets suggests this recipe for success:

1. Post to your blog. Be sure your post title is targeted to your keyword phrase.
2. Submit an excerpt from the post to sites like Digg and Propeller.
3. Bookmark the excerpt pages on Reddit, Stumbleupon and del.icio.us
4. Ping the bookmark RSS feeds using a service like Pingomatic.

Be sure your excerpts include your targeted search phrase.

Michael’s strategy basically creates a funnel that drills back down to your original post. When you post to your blog, that designates you as the originator of the content. Submitting excerpts not only gets your content (though in the form of a keyword rich snippet) into the likes of Digg and Propeller for immediate traffic, but those individual excerpt pages can then be bookmarked in StumbleUpon or del.icio.us, where traffic lasts longer (Note that del.icio.us results are being tested in Yahoo serps, another bonus). These bookmark sites generate RSS feeds that you can feed into automated feed updating services. All of these are spread out across the web very quickly due to Google’s high speed indexing and are made available for sharing, resulting in widespread visibility that leads back to your original post.

Again, it would be best to follow these steps from accounts other than your own. If you have a work account or a family or friend’s account that you can use, I’d go that route. Tooting your own horn is just plain inappropriate in the eyes of the social networks. Guess I’m just a stickler for proper social etiquette!

Combine Michael’s suggestion with your regular social networking (getting friends and fans to plug you in the social networks) and you’ve got a pretty powerful one-two punch, circa 2008.

So, ditch the link farms and get your blogging and social networking skills in order. Create good, quality content and share it. Being social is as fast as, well, Google these days!

Getting votes in Digg is more like getting backlinks these days, thanks to a recent algorithm change.

The recent revolt over at Digg over the social site’s algorithm change brings me to one conclusion:

Welcome to my world.

What got the Diggers so upset is a change to how stories are ranked, primarily by influential Diggers who continually rank well. What frequently happens is that these Diggers have friends who automatically “dig” their articles to help push them to the top (Hey, we all do it. Some of us just have a lot more friends).

Digg apparently decided that this was cheating and started giving less credit to folks who repeatedly promote the same Diggers. This means these influential Diggers have to get a lot more votes from a lot more people, including a wider variety of folks.

Thus, all votes are not created equal.

As an SEO, I’ve been dealing with this for years. Votes from all sites are definitely not equal. I’ve had to diversify my pool of votes from other web sites every time a search algorithm changes. Link farms, Adsense pages and even links from once respected directories have all gone by the wayside as far as backlink votes. I have to search for and find ways to receive quality votes from a variety of sites in the form of links.

I’m not taking a side with either Digg or the upset Diggers, just pointing out that SEOs, who Diggers tend to scorn, share your pain.

Now, take an aspirin and adapt.

The folks over at Website Magazine, a terrific publication covering online marketing and SEO that happens to be free (Subscribe here), are offering free publicity for your site in the form of a Who’s Who Directory.

If you haven’t visited the magazine’s web site, head over to http://www.websitemagazine.com/index.htm to see what they’ve got to offer. While you’re there, click on the “Who’s Who” tab at the top of the page. if you scroll down you’ll see the directory listing that you can get in on.

Signing up is free and simple. They allow you to post information on your company site, including a 120×120 image, personal profiles, company photos and, as of this writing, a clean link back to your site (no link condom). And, you can add additional companies if you like.

Here’s what my listing looks like:

Naturally, once you set up your account, you’ll see options for purchasing CPC advertising, but the basic directory listing is free, just like the magazine.

Networking and a free listing in one directory. You can’t beat it, so head on over and check it out.

Promote your brand with your head, not your gut.

I always recommend that folks optimizing their web sites take great care to not confuse the name of their company with what the searchers are actually trying to find, which is frequently the brand. Unless you are someone like Coca-Cola or your name is the same as your product and brand, you should generally leave your company name out of the title tag of your pages. If you absolutely must have it there, put it at the end.

But, the Coca-Cola brand brings up an interesting issue. Coca-Cola, the brand, includes Coca-Cola, the product, as well as a lot of other soft drinks, but the umbrella of “Coca-Cola” covers them all. In this case, the brand includes the name of an individual product and, as you know, their marketing works quite well.

But, if you’re not Coca-Cola, this might lead to problems with the brand message.

A local case in point involves the tourism bureau in charge of promoting the Palm Springs area where I live. The Palm Springs Desert Resort Communities Convention and Visitors Authority not only has a ridiculously long name, but it is in the unique and very difficult position of promoting a tourist destination that involves several cities, not just the city of Palm Springs. Included in the “desert resorts” are Palm Springs, Cathedral City, Rancho Mirage, Palm Desert, La Quinta, Indian Wells, Desert Hot Springs and Indio.

For full disclosure, I worked for the CVA for a year as their web site marketing manager before I went into search engine optimization and Internet marketing full-time. At that time, the name of the organization was just The Palm Springs Desert Resorts Convention and Visitors Authority. Still too long, but politics, which I’ll get to in a moment, led to the addition of the “Communities” to the already impossible to remember name.

In this case, the brand “Palm Springs” includes the city of Palm Springs and the other desert cities (the products) mentioned above and works as an “umbrella” brand much like Coca-Cola does with its various products.

The “Palm Springs” brand is known worldwide. Just about anywhere you go, if you mention “Palm Springs” you’ll get immediate recognition. I live in Rancho Mirage, right in the middle of the valley, but when I talk to folks from other parts of the country or the world who have never been here, I have to explain that it’s in the Palm Springs area. Then they get it.

Most tourists think of the whole valley as “Palm Springs” no matter where they are staying while visiting our desert.

Heck, I’ve even had that reaction locally. I was about 50 miles away and stopped at a gas station for directions. I told the attendant I was trying to get back to Rancho Mirage and got a glassy stare. The attendant had never heard of it. I tossed Palm Springs into the conversation and he immediately recognized it and gave me the directions I needed.

A few months ago, I noticed that the former domain for the CVA, PalmSpringsUSA.com was being redirected to a new domain, GiveInToTheDesert.com. My SEO senses kicked in immediately. I thought, this is a mistake. They are taking the brand, Palm Springs, out of the domain and replacing it with “desert.”

What desert? Las Vegas? The Sahara? A lot of people don’t even know Palm Springs is in the desert. Some get it confused with Palm Beach, Florida or just think it’s a tropical resort somewhere with beaches. All they know is that the name is magic and it’s got to be a fabulous place to visit.

A check for “Palm Springs” in Google as I write this reveals that the site still ranks well, but the click attraction is diminished. After all, “Palm Springs” is no longer in the URL. Instead, the URL that appears in search results is the almost unreadable giveintothedesert.com. This could also affect anchor text in backlinks, and changing domain names is always a bit risky.

The local paper, The Desert Sun, reports that the slogan that prompted the domain change - “Give in to the Desert: Palm Springs Desert Resorts” - flopped for 2007, bringing in only 67% of the targeted room bookings.

Part of the problem the CVA has with branding “Palm Springs” is that the other cities sometimes have a hard time differentiating the brand from the city, feeling that too much attention is being given to Palm Springs, the city. The CVA’s job is to promote the entire valley. The “Palm Springs” brand is their most powerful tool. Unfortunately, politics gets in the way and when it does, the “me, too” mindset hurts the brand. Pushing the brand to the back burner in this slogan affected the message and the web site.

Just imagine if Squirt, Mr. Pibb and Sprite insisted that “Coca-Cola” be pushed back in or even removed from the company branding!

Things go better with…Squirt?

Uh, I don’t think so…

Mercifully, a new slogan, “Palm Springs, California - An Oasis of Desert Resorts” has been selected. Putting the brand back out front can only help. From an SEO point of view, if they put the brand back in the domain name, that would be a gift from heaven, too. In addition to that powerful just-asking-to-be-clicked-on brand in the domain, backlinks to the web site would again include those always desired keyword anchor links that are sorely lacking with the current domain name.

Kudos to the CVA for putting the brand back at the front of the message.

Moral of the story? Understand your brand. It can be totally different from a product or a name. Don’t be sentimental and try to shoehorn something that won’t sell as well in place of the brand. If the brand is what sells, sell it! Sell it in your online and offline promotions and on your web site. Put it in your title, meta tags and body content. Something as simple as having a top selling brand that attracts clicks in your domain can do wonders for sales, marketing, click through rates and rankings!

In other words, use your head, not your gut, with your branding decisions.

Absolute URLs can keep visitors and spiders out of trouble.

I have this ongoing discussion with the development team of one of my clients. They insist on using relative URLs on their numerous development servers. Naturally, I tell them that those can lead to trouble when the pages go live and, of course, they do.

What is the difference between an absolute URL and a relative URL? For newbies out there, a relative URL points to links on a server in a local manner like this - a href=”contact.html” - where you just point to the page link like you are right there working on the server.

An absolute URL includes the actual domain name - a href=”http://www.sampledomain/contact.html” - as though it is being pointed to from elsewhere.

The problem that can occur is most pronounced with e-commerce sites that have some pages that begin with https: rather than http: because the https pages are secure. All of the links within the secure pages must be absolute or what can happen is this. Let’s say you click on a link to a secure, https: page but decide you want to go back to where you were. If the link on the https: page that goes back to where you were is a relative URL (doesn’t include the domain information in the link) you’ll wind up on what appears to be the same page you came from, but if you look at the URL, it will now be an https: URL.

So, what’s the problem? The problem is that Google and the other search engines can see that single page as two identical pages - one https: and the other http: - and consider them duplicate content. Worse, if the spiders have access to that https: page through even a single misplaced link, they can follow those relative links, potentially indexing a duplicate https: version of your entire web site.

Here’s an example. Take a look at the following Google search for “https” that I ran:

Notice that the URL for SourceForge.net that came up in this search is an https URL - https://sourceforge.net?

A search in Google for “sourceforge” brings up their site without the https:

As I write this article, they’ve got two URLs showing up as identical pages with identical content. In fact, if you click around on the https version, it appears the entire site has been spidered as https, too. That means that in the eyes of most search engines, they’ve got two identical web sites indexed.

Most of us don’t want that to happen.

If the spiders follow the relative links on a secure (https) page, you’re off to do damage control.

My client has had this problem more than once. All it takes is one secure page created with relative links on it to go live.

Absolute links are the best solution to the problem. Make sure that each and every link on your secure (https) pages is absolute. That way once a visitor goes into secure pages, when they leave they are directed out of the secure area and onto non-secure pages.

Naturally, you should block the secure areas of your site from the spiders through robots.txt. Adding no index, no follow meta tags to your secure pages would be added insurance that those pages won’t get indexed or followed.

What about the multiple development servers I mentioned? Using absolute URLs could become a nightmare with those.

One possible solution is the base href tag. The development team could add the following to their standard meta tags:

The code above would be for their live server. If they have a development server, instead of http://www.sampledomain.com as the base, it might be something like http://sampledomain.dev.
Now, as long as appropriate paths are included with all relative links, every page with this code included in the head section will consider http://sampledomain.com to be the “base” from which to point relative links (in the case of the live server).

One downside to using the base href tag is that your team will have to come up with linking conventions and stick to them. For instance, using the base tag above, you’ll have to make sure that your internal links to pages, files, images, stylesheets and so forth all start with a “/” and that the URLs specify the full path to the file.

So, using the base tag above, you’ll need your relative links to be like this:

a href=”/contact.html”

If you add the “/” to the end of the domain in the base tag (http://www.sampledomain.com/), then you can link like this:

a href=”contact.html”

Just take care while setting it up and run tests using something like Xenu LinkSleuth to check for problems. Of course, links to and from secure pages should still always be absolute.

In a nutshell, absolute links can keep your secure pages secure and your other pages, well, not secure. The base href tag can help you avoid broken links from relative URLs and, as you know, broken links are bad news for SEO.

Now, if I can just get the development team on board…