SEMRush Trends

SEMRush Trends Chart- I decided to start with this one because this is one of my favorite tools to see at a glance value of and power of a site. If you have a SEM Rush account, this little gem is kind of hidden on the main screen. The only way to reach it is to click on a tiny text link in the left sidebar that reads ‘<yoursite.com (more)>’, which rests on top of the little graph in SEMRush main screen. The really cool thing about this tool is that you can add  in 5 compeititors and select  metrics in a  little drop down – you can view yourself and competitiors on metrics like number of keywords you and they rank for, SE Traffic Price (great metric that gives you an estimation of how much your keyword rankings would be worth if you where paying for them  in Google Adwords), as well as a bunch of adwords related metrics.

How I Use It: What I look for in this graph is what has happened over time. Is there a sudden drop in the number of keywords in organic rankings or a sudden increase? The disadvantage of this tool is that it gives you no clickable data beyond you have the chart, you cannot drill down. You’re not able to see the actual historical keywords a  site used to ranked for. I don’t lose too much sleep over this because this is a great at a glance tool where I can throw in 5 competitors and see super quickly along several metrics how they stack up against each over time in organic and in Adwords. After this, I usually move to our proprietary, super competitive tool and I can really roll up my sleeves but this tool is awesome for seeing a nice thumbnail when just starting a competitive analysis.

SpyFu Kombat

Spyfu Kombat - Spyfu Kombat is, on the face of it, similar to SEMRush Trends but also very different because you do get to dig into phrases  that you and you competitors rank for;  in fact, Kombat does some crazy parsing, so you can see what just one or both of your competitors rank for but you don’t as well as phrases all sites inputted rank for. You can then click on any of the parts of the bubble in the in the graph and you can see the parsed keyword data for that competitor, instead of having to do any wheeling and dealing to do this parsing in excel. I love easy. Spyfu will also give you a chart with competitive data. The big difference between this chart and SEMRush Trends is that SEMRush trends gives you everything a site ranks for in the top 20 and SpyFu gives you a chart for everything that ranks in the top 50. Also,  SEMRush trends gives you more metrics to look using the historical chart then Spy Fu does.

How I Use It: I grab the data from the keywords that all the sites rank for and this is a super quick way to get an idea of how long the long tail is in a space. I also use this as just one way to identify keywords that competitors use but a client site may not.

Open Site Explorer TLD Distribution

SEOMoz Opensite Explorer TLD Distribution – I really like this tool for detecting the volume of not so great backlinks that a given site may have. The disadvantage of this tool is that it does not give you competitive data, unless you manually run sites though nor does it give historical data, unless you run it twice and store it locally. Nevertheless, it is one of those good quick tools, when you want to get a thumbnail view of overall site trust.

How I Use It – I know I mentioned the obvious way to use this tool is as a quick way to get an idea of the the trust of a site but I did not mention that this tools is also great for when you’re doing international SEO, you can explore how many backlinks that a site have actually come from the country TLD that the website targets. This is good to know since, links from the country related TLD and .coms, .net’s, and .org’s tend to weigh more, and this tools helps you sort through that.

Wordle Cloud

Wordle Cloud - I love creating tag clouds of pretty much anything. I usually use a free tool called wordle to create them. Wordle gives you a great big text box that you can fill with any type of list item. You then hit submit and magic, you have a tag cloud with tons of formatting options, so you don’t kill the look of whatever document you’d be pasting this information into.

How I Use It: I can write a whole post about information you can throw into wordle and see what appears more then something else. One of the ways that I like to use this tool that is my favorite is to view anchor text distributions. There are a bunch of ways that you can grab anchor text data, what ever you do, the trick is to grab as much of it as possible. Also, make sure that you’re very sensitive to if you’re grabbing page level or domain level anchor text data. I prefer page level but that’s your call.

A Word of Caution About Data Visualizing Tools

Just like averages can hide information, so can data visualizing tools. All of these tools are just a couple weapons in our arsenal – I’m picturing a ninja way with a million different awesome ninja weapons of SEO. These tools are great for providing general insights into which you can drill down into, if something looks shiny in them. These tools by no means provide a complete solution. I tend to use these tools more as inital exploratory tools rather then the answer to live, the universe, and everything. At the heart of the matter is that you absolutely must look at the same data in different ways because it will tell you different things. Especially with SEO, there is no out of the box tool suite solution that answers every SEO question that you’ve ever had about life. There are lots of tools, so paid and some freebies that give you little snippets at the whole picture and data visualization tools are little piece of that puzzle.

Have a great Friday everyone

Jim examined the May 6, 2011 Google Webmaster blog post written by Amit Singhal offering guidance on creating high-quality websites in the new Panda world. Jim specifically pointed to four guidance questions Amit said Google is now asking when it algorithmically reviews site content as indicative of a bigger plan:

• Is this article written by an expert or enthusiast who knows the topic well, or is it more shallow in nature?
• How much quality control is done on content?
• Is the site a recognized authority on its topic?
• Is the content mass-produced by or outsourced to a large number of creators, or spread across a large network of sites, so that individual pages or sites don’t get as much attention or care?

The aggregation of these questions reminded Jim of a Google patent application for something they called Agent Rank. Jim suggested to better understand what Google likely had in mind, we needed to substitute the word “writer” for the word “agent” and reread paragraphs 0026 through 0029 of the document (he provided the rewrite). He speculated that the real intent was that individual authors, and the online reputations they earn, were going to become ranking factors in webpage content assessment.

A mere one month later Google posted an article in their Webmaster blog titled Authorship markup and web search, where they first officially defined support for associating authors to content. I posted an article about creating your digital footprint on Search Engine Land in August. But the story keeps evolving, and it’s time for an update.

Digital Identity

The whole deal hinges on you, the author, having a digital identity that can be associated with content you’ve written on the Web. More to the point, the only digital identity that counts here is the one you create with Google Profiles. There are several implications to this reliance on Google Profile data:

• You can rest assured that Bing (and their organic search index proxy, Yahoo!), will not use this methodology for the same purposes (especially since there are Google-owned patents involved). Whether or not that matters is another discussion.
• Google is going to leverage this webmaster-provided data feed advantage for authors as yet another means to build up Google+, their upstart, competing product to the Web’s social network behemoth Facebook. This matters to Google because they cannot readily crawl Facebook data, at least not the password-protected content (unlike Bing, to whom Facebook has given deep data integration into their index).

From Google’s perspective, the deepening of the data for author/content relationships and the content’s assessed quality in their index surely gives them yet another potential ranking factor to use in determining the PageRank of a content page. Google’s required reliance on a completed, data-rich Google Profile and the profile’s interconnection with their Google+ product benefits their efforts in competing with Facebook. Google thirsts for evermore data, and for us as authors to get the potential benefit of possibly ranking better for our good content (which Google also loves), we have to play their game.

With authorship markup, your Google Profile is your digital identity base. You’ll use your profile to both link out to your online content and create links back to from that online content. That closed loop, when done right, is intended to ensure you and only you are identified as the content’s author. And once that circuit is established, Google will likely use that data to help establish a form of author rank for your content.

The quality of your past content will affect your author reputation ranking, and your author reputation ranking will affect the ranking of your published online content – including future posts.

Making the connections

Once you have created your Google Profile, you need to add specific data to it for use for authorship markup. In the profile’s About page, there is a section called Other profiles for adding labels and URLs linking to your author profiles on other sites where you publish work. This assumes, of course, that the sites to which you contribute have such a page in their site structure. Many do, but not all. Note that you can also connect your Google Profile with your accounts in other major content contribution sites, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and several others (while editing the Other profiles content, use the Manage connected accounts link for that).

In cases where there is no author bio page on a particular site, you can link to that site in the profile’s Contributor to section. Creating these links out to your published online content is step 1. While working in your Google Profile, take note of its unique URL (it ends with a unique, long number). You’ll need that URL in a moment.

Lastly, please note that you also need to post a clear headshot photo of yourself in your Google Profile. No cartoons, animals, plants, inanimate objects, abstract art, or other miscellaneous body parts are allowed. Google is specific and very serious about this! Why? Because Google displays thumbnail photos of authors whom they trust as authoritative in their SERPs, and they don’t want any shenanigans from us pranksters!

Once the Google Profile is completed, you need to go to the content sites where you are published to close the loop back to your Google Profile. Here’s where things can get tricky. There are now multiple ways to do this, depending upon the architecture of the site, how much access you have to edit a page, etc. Let’s go over your options:

Author bio pages

If the site on which you publish has an About Me page (or in the case of a multi-contributor blog, a dedicated author bio page for each individual contributor), add a link to your Google Profile with the rel=”me” attribute using “Google+” as anchor text to that page. For example:

<a href="{YourGoogleProfileURL}" rel="me">Google+</a>

I have seen the Google documentation change over time on whether or not you need to end the anchor text with the + character. Their current docs no longer mention this (it looks like they’ve loosened up the requirements a bit), but the final step in this whole markup process, completing Google’s authorship markup participation form (referenced later in this post), still addresses this issue, so I’m sticking with it.

Using the rel=me attribute is an easy way to close the profile loop as long as every piece of content you publish on that site includes a link to this bio page using the rel=author attribute. Let’s cover that detail next.

Content pages which you can edit

From each page containing content you authored, you need a link containing the attribute rel=”author”. You can either link to your author bio page on the same site or you can link directly to your Google Profile (if there is no author bio page available).

Google suggests the easiest way to do this is to add a linked Google+ image to the content page. Perhaps it’s easiest because Google will write the link source code for you (as long as you know the URL for your Google Profile). Go to the Google Profile Button page, paste the URL for your profile in the text box provided, select the size of the image you want to display (the image source is remote on Google servers), and copy the resulting code into your page. Voila!

I’m not sure how much easier this technique is over creating a plain text link, but of course, displaying a nice  image helps Google promote the Google+ product. They like that.

Alternatively, if you want something more subdued, you can use a plain link to get the same effect. Here is an example of the code Google suggests you use for a direct link to your Google Profile:

<a href="{YourGoogleProfileURL}?rel=author">Your Name</a>

Note that rel=author is not an anchor tag attribute, but instead is a URL parameter. It appears to work either way.

If your site does have that author bio page discussed earlier, simply link to that with the rel=author attribute:

<a href="{YourSameSiteAuthorBioURL}" rel="author">Your Name</a>

Content pages you can’t directly edit

Sometimes you simply don’t have access to the page on which your content appears. Google has recently anticipated that situation and offers yet another solution. As long as the content page has your name and a link with your email address on it, simply go into your Google Profile, click Edit Profile, and then add the URL of that site to the Contribute to section. Then you also need to add the email address used in your post in the Work Email section of your Google Profile. Google will send you an email with a link to verify you own that address. Click the enclosed link to verify your identity.

Google offers additional information on this process. Check out their Author information in search results and their Authorship pages for more information. I also found the rel=author post on Yoast helpful.

Confirm your work

OK, so you got this far – congratulations! But now you need to test this closed loop to ensure Google recognizes the work you’ve done (and to verify you’ve done it right!). Go to the Google Rich Snippets Testing Tool. Paste the URL of a content page in the text box and then click Preview. Hopefully you’ll see a line in green text stating that the authorship markup is verified. Check to see whether or not it makes a difference if your rel=me links have anchor text that end with the + character. Be sure to run this verification test for content page URLs on all of the sites you’ve added to your Google Profile. If you see an error message in red text, review the message carefully to find where the break in the loop is occurring so you can fix it.

Lastly, once everything is verified as working, let Google know you’re onboard with the process by submitting your data to their Authorship request form.

So how’d you do?

Once you have your Google profile updated, edited pages posted and everything verified, check to see how you’re doing. Google has recently introduced a new tool in the Labs section of their Webmaster Tools to measure your author markup traffic. Called Author Stats, the tool shows analytics-style search traffic statistics on your authorship marked up pages. Note that it is a Labs tool, so that means it’s functionally a beta tool, and the data it reports may not be perfectly accurate (if it even exists). Plus the tool may not last. But it might. Simply put, your mileage may vary. But give it a look, anyway.

Keep in mind that merely participating in the effort on your part does not mean Google will immediately start putting your mug in their SERPs when a blue link to your content is shown. The process, just initiated in mid-2011, is still in a slow roll-out phase. But getting the work done on your end now means you’re ready for when Google does expand the program to include more authors in the program.

And given that displaying a headshot photo of the author, linked to that author’s profile in Google, to a SERP result will likely engender more trust in that particular link (especially if the searcher is familiar with the author), Google has high incentive to expand this program sooner rather than later. So take the effort to set the ball up on the tee now so Google can take its swing when it’s ready to do so.

The worst that can happen is nothing. But if you are a serious content developer or an influential person in your niche, your reputation can positively influence traffic to your sites, and when Google sees that, it’ll likely have a positive influence on your content’s page rank. There are no promises, of course, but it’s certainly a good bet.

Would you like to be in popular journalists’ contact books? Would you like to have the list of influential reporters to share your important news next time you have any? Would you like to be cited in popular (both print and online) media outlets? If so, be sure to bookmark the following tools and tips.

Note: While the focus of this article is primarily on building media and PR contacts using social media, you are never limited to one use only. Feel free to apply these tips to find local bloggers, representatives of huge educational institutions, editors, etc – anyone who could be happy to grant you with a well-deserved (and highly valuable!) link in exchange for your timely or useful content.

Twitter: Finding Journalists by Company

Twitter is highly breaking-news-oriented and therefore Journalists love it.

In a study of “j-tweeters”, Lasorsa et al. (2011) found that journalists express opinions more freely on Twitter, write more often about their lives and their jobs, engage in direct conversations with users, and share user-generated content.

Here’s the best way to find journalists on Twitter: bio search. Most professional journalists mention the name of the newspaper or magazine they work for in the bio section, so all you need is to search Twitter bios by that name.

Twiangulate is a great tool for that. It supports some common boolean operators that help make your search more targeted towards your industry:

• Both words should be present in the bio: hot & dog (in our case this can be “Name of the newspaper” & “Topic of expertise”)
• One of the words should be present in the bio: hot | dog
• All bios with one word but NOT with the other one: hot !dog
• Exact match: “hot dog”

Twitter: Finding Local Journalists

Another highly useful Twitter bio search tool is LocaFollow that lets you combine a few relevant search queries (for example, location and a word in a bio).

Thus it can be a great source of local journalists on Twitter. The search results are also highly informative: you can see how long each journalist tweets, how many followers he/she has, what his/her latest tweet was and how old that last tweet is:

How cool is that?

LinkedIn: Getting Introduced

LinkedIn is the most popular and the fastest-growing social network populated by journalists because it provides the easiest and most reliable way for reporters to connect with sources.

LinkedIn is thus highly effective when it comes to both discovering and building new media contacts.

It’s best feature: the ability to ask your current contact to introduce you to another member he/she is directly connected with.

LinkedIn built-in search is perfect for finding “2nd degree”* contacts at any company (*”2nd degree” means you have a common direct contact who can introduce you).

1. The left-hand sidebar panel lets you filter results by company
2. The top panel lets you sort search results by relationship level:

Besides, you can subscribe to regular updates to be alerted of new members of the media company (to be one of the very first social media contacts of the newcomer: the earlier you connect, the better you remember!)

My Web Career is an awesome tool for discovering and visualizing your current connections at a media company you are interested in. Just look through your contacts’ current companies – the connection is visualized through the line color and thickness:

• Red Links means current position
• Blue Links means previous positions
• Link Thickness visualizes time at company.

And here’s my network connection to Google:

Conclusion: First Contact

1. Follow the Journalists: journalists often post questions or polls for upcoming story content. The more you get involved and help them, the better you know each other! Creating a separate Twitter list to have all your media contacts in one place as well as follow them more effectively (through a separate column in Tweetdeck, for example) is another essential step to strengthening your relationships.

2. Touching Base? Offer to be useful. There’s no way to build effective business connections by asking for a link (or to be cited) just outright. Start from offering something before asking for anything.

Good luck!

Some of the more popular antics I’ve seen work include:

Give this picture a caption: A user posts a photo and asks their connections to come up with an appropriate (or sometimes not so appropriate) quote for the photo. This encourages people to interact, laugh, poke fun at or simply get the creative juices flowing.

Quirky quotes about everyday events: Not too long ago I posted up about what a great surprise it always seems to be to find money in the washing machine or dryer. The number of responses was amazing. This is apparently something a lot of people can relate to and shared their thoughts about.

What if scenarios: Again, asking connections to get their creative juices flowing to help finish a thought or vision.

I know, you’re saying, “that’s great Melissa, but how does that make me money?”

As evidenced by the popularity of Pinterest, people want to get to know the people behind the businesses they interact with. They want to relate to your passions and see what similarities you share.  A transaction is nothing more the a few people having a conversation and closing the deal is the period at the end of the sentence.  It allows consumers to get a sense about the people behind the company and what they value.  That is why social media works for business.

Brands have personality – your business has a personality, flash it baby!

Some people shy away from social media because they feel it’s too invasive. “Who cares what I eat for dinner?” is the most common complaint. The reality is, people DO CARE. Maybe not every night, but certainly if you’re to experimenting in the kitchen and enjoy it, share it! You will be pleasantly surprised by how many people react to such a simple task and how much that humanizes you, making you appear more open to do business with.

My favorite phrase is “Be personable without being overly personal.” The more you share the little things about you, the higher the likelihood people will “buy in” to you, your brand and your business.

Learn more about Pintrest:

• Pinterest: A Beginner’s Guide to the Hot New Social Network
• To Pinterest, A Love Letter
• Why More Men Should Join Pinterest
• 6 Ways to Use Pinterest to Grow Your Community
• How to Use Pinterest for Local SEO

Do you use Pinterest?  What have you discovered?

Some folks dismissed Siri as a mere party trick feature. Others, including some in the search engine optimization (SEO) community, declared it to be the death knell of SEO. I think the truth is somewhere in the middle. Given this blog is not about party tricks, let’s examine what the advent of Siri means to web search and SEO.

What does Siri do?

First, though, a little background. Siri, a third-party technology acquired by Apple in 2010, requires either an active WiFi or 3G data connection to work. Why? Because the iPhone itself does not power Siri’s responses. The behind-the-scenes horsepower for interpreting speech and returning the desired results or requested action comes from major server resources owned by Apple. The iPhone is merely an intermediary. And in fact, so is Siri. More on that in a moment.

What Siri can do (at least as of this writing) is interesting. It can perform the following tasks for you:

• Place telephone and FaceTime calls
• Play music (as long as you have the song in your music library)
• Send outgoing and read incoming texts
• Send email
• Check your calendar
• Set up meetings
• Set reminders
• Set alarms
• Set timers
• Look up information from contacts
• Use Find My Friends
• Create a note
• Ask for the time in a different location
• Ask for a location of a place (shows a static Google Map with Yelp ratings)
• Ask for driving directions, even showing traffic data (shows an interactive Google Map)
• Ask for a stock closing price (uses Yahoo!)
• Ask about the weather (uses Yahoo!)
• Search the web (uses Google by default; Bing, Yahoo! and Wikipedia results can be requested)
• Ask specific questions (such as math, measurement conversion, currency exchange and much more; uses Wolfram|Alpha)
• Make a wise crack (ask it to “open the pod bay doors” – repeatedly!)

Note, however, that while it can perform tasks using some built-in apps, it can’t simply open any specific app, even those built in to IOS 5! As a result, it can’t perform tasks such as sending tweets on Twitter, reading posts in Facebook, and the like. Siri supports several languages, but only partially. As of today, it understands US English, UK English, Australian English, French and German (but not Spanish!). But, more interestingly, it cannot look for any businesses outside of the US, and for people inside the US, you must be configured for US English only. This limitation also applies to maps and traffic queries as well.

The bottom line is that Siri is popular now and, by all appearances, will continue to be so. Its functionality will likely to continue to grow as well, and all of this will contribute to the fast growth of the mobile search platform.

So what’s the big deal about SEO?

Many bloggers and industry pundits have decried that SEO (or at least local SEO) is now dead, thanks to Siri. To that I say, “Balderdash” (I would say something stronger, but this is a professional blog). Why am I dismissive of these industry Nostradamuses ? Read on.

Part of Siri’s user popularity is due to the fact that it (usually) provides direct answers rather than a list of links containing answers (although open ended questions leading to search engine queries still provide the standard 10 blue links). The value of direct answers has not been lost on the search engines themselves. Long before Siri was released in IOS 5, both Bing and Google created Instant Answers in their search engine results pages (SERPs). But in Bing and Google, you still have the rest of the SERP to examine.

Not so with Siri results. If you ask Siri, “What is the stock price of Apple?”, Siri gives you one closing bell answer. “What’s the weather for tonight?” You get one forecast. You can even ask “How do you calculate the circumference of a circle?” and get one answer. Truth be told, you really don’t need a full SERP for these types of queries.

But what if you ask Siri an open ended question, such as “What is the best local sushi restaurant?” The resulting restaurant listings (or those concerning any local business) come from Yelp. And if you ask, “How do you drive there?”, that result comes from Google Maps. And asking, “How do you drive a stick shift?” results in a standard Google mobile SERP. You can even tell Siri to “Search Bing for ‘How do you drive a stick shift’” to see a Bing mobile SERP.

The argument for the death of SEO is that Apple is filtering the results for you. You don’t get to choose which answer is best – Apple does that for you. But go back and review the last half-dozen tasks Siri can perform from the earlier list (excepting the wise cracks). The information provided by Siri comes from known Internet data feeds. It’s true that Apple has selected which data feeds to use to provide you with the direct answer. But these feeds include modern targets of online business optimization via SEO.

Local SEO is important, and Yelp is King (for today)

For those who erroneously believe that SEO in 2012 is limited to keywords in <title> tags and submitting links to directories, yeah, I can see why they are panicking. But rest assured, professional SEO now goes far beyond basic, on-page elements. It also covers consistently used business profile data across local search venues, a targeted social media presence, and more.

Of course, having an optimized business profile in Yelp is more important than ever. To get directions to a place from Siri, the place has to be listed in Yelp. But it goes beyond that. If you ask for the closest sushi restaurant, you’ll get Yelp data sorted by distance from your location. But if you ask Siri to find the best sushi restaurant, Siri uses Yelp ratings as the sort factor. If you’re not actively monitoring and managing your Yelp business listing (among other local search venues), you are likely already ceding business to your local competitors.

Developing a comprehensive Google Places profile is important as well. If someone uses Siri to search for your information about your business, your comprehensive Google Places profile will likely be at the top of the SERP. Your accurate business address will enable Google Maps to send people to your door.

And frankly, keyword optimization remains an important SEO factor with Siri searches, as getting in the top 10 listing in a Google SERP will still be important when SERPs are shown (especially when above the “fold” really means positions 1 or 2) . Besides, human speech requests are now search queries, and that opens potential new keyword opportunities. As proof of concept, try using Siri to search for an open ended informational web search and phrase it in multiple ways. You’ll likely find that each request produces different SERP results (I saw this in my testing). Spoken words are still query keywords, and keywords (and their order) still matter in search. Think about which keywords you target, especially in the long tail. Casual speech is typically not as well-formed or formal as written text, and you want to be discoverable for as many possible relevant queries as possible.

What else in Siri matters for search marketing?

The Pay Per Click (PPC) story is still being written as we speak. In my testing, I noted that it was pretty hard to get Siri to show a SERP with PPC ads. Anytime you wanted information about products or services for sale, local businesses, or the like, you got ad-free Yelp results rather than Google SERPs. This diminishes the impact of buying search ads to help drive business, at least on mobile devices. If you work at it, you can get Siri to generate SERPs with PPC ads on the top (not on the side, however), but it was harder than I expected it to be.

Technically, if Google decides that Siri queries are costing it money by not showing SERPs with the full complement of PPC ads in response to popular queries, it could easily decide to block queries from the Apple user agent that runs Siri. At that point, Apple would need to decide whether it can afford to have Google block all iPhone users from accessing its deep, massive search index (including maps) that it depends on now. Then again, can Google strategically afford to abandon providing search services to such a fast-growing market segment as the iPhone? Something’s gotta give.

Some have suggested that Apple will simply become a search engine itself. These folks claim Apple could buy Yelp and other data feeds in order to stop relying on third-party data sources. I frankly find that idea to be absurd. The notion that Apple could become a search engine is simply unfounded. Even if Apple could buy Yelp or some equivalent data sources, such an acquisition does not a search engine make. Apple has no algorithm for ranking content (the Yelp data feed does that for them, as do search engine queries, and the remaining data feeds are single response feeds). Relevance is key to successful search results, and Apple has no known relevance algorithm for ranking content pages, not to mention a search crawler and an indexing engine.

Besides, Apple has always staked its flag in the ground of providing the best possible user experience. Losing access to the Google index and simply relying on secondary or tertiary data feed for Siri searches will certainly degrade the iPhone user experience and disappoint its users to no end. And if Android was the smartphone you needed to buy to access Google data, the potential loss of marketshare threat to the iPhone platform would be even more real for Apple than it is already. On the other hand, Google has to be careful about cavalierly blocking the iPhone platform due to anti-trust concerns. It’s all a big mess.

In the end, we’ll get some sort of agreement to work this out. But in the meantime, we as SEOs and webmasters need to do smart optimization for our online business presences. We need to increase investment in local SEO (not only in Yelp, but Google Places and others – who knows which data feed Apple will adopt next when they expand the Siri functionality?). We also need to continue to develop mobile-friendly websites. And lastly, we need to work on keyword targeting that specifically addresses spoken-word, long tail terms.

Long Live SEO

Is SEO a waste of time, money and effort, now that Siri is here? No. Mobile is indeed becoming a dominant platform for Internet searches. But as you saw in the Siri task list above, Apple is not curating the data feeds it uses, nor are they mysteriously sourced. We know from where they are getting their data.

Ultimately, Siri is not a search engine. It’s just another search interface. SEO can and will adapt to the challenges posed by Siri and all mobile searches just as it always has in the ever-changing search landscape. This work has become even more important when building a discoverable brand on the web, especially when you use interface agents like Siri. SEO is not dead – far from it. In fact, it’s now more important than ever to being found on the web, regardless of the user interface used to search.