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Tom, it might be the same way that Acrobat Reader ranks first for the query [click here] even though those those words don't appear anywhere on the page or in the source code. In my results, I see only two out of the first 10 results that have anything to do with "click here". The rest are there because of anchor text or other factors. Think of how many web pages you see that talk about "To get Acrobat Reader, Click Here" with the Click Here hyperlinked to the download page. The search engines take that as a clue that the destination is about "Click Here". It's the same way that George Bush's bio page ranked for Miserable Failure, and how many other "Google Bombs" took place (though some are now no longer working). You might take a look at Open Site Explorer and the anchor text on the incoming links to see some off-site factors for the ranking in question.

Of note, you can also customize your built-in internal Google site search: http://www.google.com/sitesearch/ "Customize search box and results using XML"

I bet the ranch on user behavior in 2005. I think that links are still valuable.  However, I think that data from social sites, domain queries, domain mentions and visitor behavior are becoming more important.  With that growing importance in these other metrics, links should be a depreciating asset. If google uses links and on-page signals to rank a website - those can all be manipulated by webmasters and SEOs.    That means that SEOs can "own google".  However, once most of google's signal is coming from these "invisible metrics" then google takes back control.

I've done a lot of work on both researching how my competitors are received on social media (especially on Twitter) and hope I can provide some personal insight to help. We've been able to granularly develop a fan base for a brand I represent, but larger competitors have a naturally easier time engaging their social media following and then converting them towards their social media campaigns they run. For me, I have found a lot of leverage developing relationships with video bloggers as they have a prominent role in my market. By creating these relationships we are able to genuinely reach the video blogger's audience and run campaigns by ourselves that run simultaneously or in conjunction when video reviews come out. A large part has been understanding where conversations are being held and how to get their attention. In terms of social media, I've started to test a mix of online strategies such as retargeting ads mixed in with social media efforts which has brought in more sales then per se strictly focusing on social media. Being brought on to do in-house social media for a few brands, I would say its a mixed strategy, not just focusing on growth in your fan bases and engagement isn't enough. My initial objective when I started the in-house work was to induce conversation where now it is on growing sales and brand awareness. It involves product pitches, PR, marketing, advertising, guest blogging, etc., etc. with social media helping to tie together and fill in gaps that has helped to generate the sales. As others said, it is about goals- very specific goals for what you are trying to do. My mistake at the beginning was growing "conversation" and "engagement", which is not really a goal. Generating sales for Product A through blog coverage for the spring has brought in tangible and quantifiable terms. The latter has continued to bring in better success both in terms of sales and growing social media channels. While I do believe social media is a long term commitment and serves a place in directly growing sales, I believe a mixture of different online practices with social media tied in is a better bet.

Thank you very much Ryan That is so..... helpful, thanks Catherine

1. I believe the website shall be of the same niche specific industry as of my site for which i am doing link exchange.  I will not like to exchange links with any websites which do have good site or ranks etc but not of my niche industry to ensure quality get maintained. 2. I am new thus i will be doing link exchange direct not 3 or 4 ways since that must be complicated to search and practice. Do you think it shall be good enough to start link exchange or any other suggestion to it ? Also i want to know in start is it ok if i place a website link in my directory and then invite the owner to check and add my link back in exchange or i shall email them talk to them then shall proceed to link exchange. And my other question is Google Panda update against link exchange or its still worth for link exchanged to good sites for SEO and traffic reasons ? Regards! Anand

Thanks everyone for your responses. I can see that it is best to simply use www.blockandcompany.com/blog versus www.blog.blockandcompany.com. In checking again with the company that runs my site, I was told there are problems running a site based on Coldfusion (which my site runs) and Wordpress (with is PHP based). I guess they don't play well in the same environment so that is why they are recommending hosting the blog on a different server and using a subdomain. Looks like I'm stuck doing it this way.

I have a couple of friends who started on blogspot and when their blogs became successful moved them to a new domain.  I think that they did the right thing because they will be running those blogs for years into the future. They moved all of their content but made very obvious annoucement on every page of the old blog about the move and made links to help visitors get there easily.

As David points out the meta keywords tag is ignored by every search engine that matters. If you poke around the SEOmoz tools you'll notice they recommend getting rid of them, only to prevent your competition from sniffing out your keywords (they still can, but they have to put more effort into it). Post tags, in a wordpress context, is more a way of organizing your content for the benefit of your human readers, not the engine crawlers. A lot of blogs will use a tag cloud to show topics that are often covered, provide a cool visual element to the page, and to help their readers browse to stuff they want to read. There is a potential to hurt your SEO with these tags. If you're on wordpress I recommend the SEO all in one pack plugin. Using this you can mark your tag pages (and author pages) as NOINDEX to prevent any possible duplicate content penalties.

Hi Ryan Thanks for this we are building backlinks for the url but we do have some blogs that point the category and we had a bunch of external links to categories that were on on every page of the site so have changed this now to internal links to see if this helps. thanks again Tracy

Yeap that looks right, I was just about to post some more information, thanks.

You pages are setting 'nosnippet' in the META robots tag, meaning the search engines are instructed to not display a description for the page and to suppress the cache link. Remove that setting and you should see a difference after Google updates your page in the index. Remember that Google will crawl and index your site based on its own schedule so you will have to be a little patient.