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Though the "site:" operator can teach you a lot about how Google indexes your website, there are some things that it doesn't show you. For example, the "site:" operator doesn't show you: What your SERP description will look like Which pages of your website are most important Often people see their search results from a "site:" operator and panic because the snippet or description that shows up underneath their URL is part of their navigation or something else that looks icky and not click-worthy. Don't despair! The snippet that shows up when you use a "site:" operator query is rarely the same as the description that shows up for an actual keyword query. Perform some keyword searches yourself and you'll see the difference. The other mistake people make is thinking that the order of the pages listed when you use the "site:" operator in the SERP shows the order of importance of those pages. While Google does tend to show the home page of a site before the other pages, the rest of the list isn't sorted in any particular order of importance. So be careful about drawing any conclusions based on that.

"Find Out How Much Traffic a Website Gets: 3 Ways Compared"

Local Search Tools For the SMB and Professional Category: Local Search - Mike - 6:00 am I have been using two "new" local search tools of late and have been impressed with both of them. The Local Search Toolkit from seOverflow has recently been released from beta and upgraded to work with the many changes that occurred recently in Google Places. The tool provides competitive information for a range of information for the top 7 listings in a given geo search. It will provide both URLs and totals for each of the following: Site Title Tag, Categories, Citations, Reviews , Number of Photos, Number of Videos, whether the listing is Owner Verified and the listings Distance to City Center. It's free and provides a wealth of information. It's useful for determining which reviews sites are most prevalent in which industries and which citations sources are the most prominent. Another tool that I often use is the Whitespark Local Citation Finder. The free version has been around for a while and is also useful in finding citations for either keyword phrases, your own site or those of a competitor. They just released the Local Citation Finder Pro version. The Pro Version is $20/mo and normally I do not write about products that charge a fee but it has a new feature that I am finding incredibly useful (they provided me with a free subscription). Local Citations Pro now offers the ability compare the specific citations between any number of  searches and or business listings. So for example you can examine your business listing and the citations for the listing that is tops in your category and against the citations for a series of search pharse. The information is offered up both visually and via a spread sheet file: Pro users also get these other features: Compare Citations Easily determine which citations your competitors have that you're missing. Sort by Value Sort your results by SEOmoz Domain Authority and Majestic SEO ACRank. Get Results in Minutes

"Springfield College saw a 26 percent drop in enrollment over the past two decades, from 2,844 to 2,114, but recently managed to stabilize its numbers and even saw an increase this year, to 2,228 according to Stuart Jones, the school's vice president for enrollment management. Among other tactics, the school used targeted digital marketing to recruit a subset of students it believed was likely to attend, he said."

You can excel in all marketing channels individually, yet never achieve overall optimal marketing health. Everyone needs to understand that online promotions should work in sync with each other, not independently. By aligning all your promotional efforts in all channels, you are increasing your chances of marketing success.

Rel="author" and Rel="publisher" are the solution Google is adopting in order to better control, within other things, the spam pollution of the SERPs. If you are a blogger, you will be incentivized in marking your content with Author and link it to your G+ Profile, and as a Site, you are incentivized to create your G+ Business page and to promote it with a badge on you site that has the rel="publisher" in its code. Trusted seeds are not anymore only sites, but can be also persons (i.e.: Rand or Danny Sullivan) or social facets of an entity… so, the closer I am in the Social Graph to those persons//entity the more trusted I am to Google eyes. As we can see, Google is not trying to rely only on the link graph, as it is quite easy to game, but it is not simply adding the social signals to the link graph, because they too can be gamed. What Google is doing is creating and refining a new graph that see cooperating Link graph, Social graph and Trust graph and which is possibly harder to game. Because it can be gamed still, but - hopefully - needing so many efforts that it may become not-viable as a practice. Wake up SEOs, the new Google is here As a conclusion, let me borrow what Larry Page wrote on Google+ (bold is mine): Our ultimate ambition is to transform the overall Google experience […] because we understand what you want and can deliver it instantly. This means baking identity and sharing into all of our products so that we build a real relationship with our users. Sharing on the web will be like sharing in real life across all your stuff. You'll have better, more relevant search results and ads. Think about it this way … last quarter, we've shipped the +, and now we're going to ship the Google part. I think that it says it all and what we have lived a year now is explained clearly by the Larry Page words. What can we do as SEOs? Evolve, because SEO is not dieing, but SEOs can if they don't assume that winter - oops - the