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Nitin Mangtani, Lead Product Manager at Google presented a sponsored session on converting your visitors to customers, specifically through the use of internal site searches.

According to a report on search engine results from Forrester Research: "on the keywords for which Google offers video results, any given video in the index stands about a 50 times better chance of appearing on the first page of results than any given text page in the index." Not only is video invaluable to getting your web presence better exposure in search engines, but video is the most compelling way to tell your story and inspire potential visitors.

A couple insights to future Google additions to their ranking algorithm: brands as noise filters and relationship awareness. Exciting stuff....

If you ask Matt Cutts what big SEO changes are coming up he will tell you "make great content" and so on...never wanting to reveal the weaknesses of their search algorithms. Eric Schmidt, on the other hand, is frequently talking to media and investors with intent of pushing Google's agendas and all the exciting stuff that is coming out. In the last 6 months Mr. Schmidt has made a couple quotes that smart SEOs should incorporate into their optimization strategies - one on brands [15], and another on word relationships [16

Bounce rate has these attributes: 1) It is really hard to misunderstand. It measures the number of people who landed on your site and refused to give you even one single click! 2) It is available in most web analytics tools, including our own Google Analytics. 3) It is quick and easy to use. Bounce rate will help you understand where and how to make changes on your website in under an hour.

Great tips from Google on reducing your website bounce rates

A great starter guide for SEO - if you want to start learning, this guide is a great start.

Our Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide covers around a dozen common areas that webmasters might consider optimizing. We felt that these areas (like improving title and description meta tags, URL structure, site navigation, content creation, anchor text, and more) would apply to webmasters of all experience levels and sites of all sizes and types. Throughout the guide, we also worked in many illustrations, pitfalls to avoid, and links to other resources that help expand our explanation of the topics. We plan on updating the guide at regular intervals with new optimization suggestions and to keep the technical advice current.

This is a great explanation of how you can start, run, and grow a business for free - with a good web strategy...

But in our evolving Web 2.0 world and with Google leading the way, the rules have changed: You can get something for nothing--and for entrepreneurs, that something can have a significant impact on their businesses. Today, the web is full of free tools to help entrepreneurs start, run and grow their businesses for next to nothing. It'll just cost you some time and an internet connection.

We've been saying this for years... Even "local" businesses need a web strategy.. Does yours?

In these stats lies a big - but fleeting - opportunity: serving local businesses by helping them use online well. By this, I don't mean doing what local newspapers have been doing: trying to sell them display or directory ads, just as they did in papers but in a new medium. Instead, I mean redefining what it means to help them succeed online. This might mean helping them place ads smartly on Google with good SEO (see Fred Wilson's tweet out of our New Business Models for News Summit at CUNY). It might mean finding was to help local businesses interact more meaningfully with their own communities.

Great local SEO tip

This is a Showcase Lawn Map on the web site of WiseGrass, a small lawncare service provider in central Pennsylvania. It's an embedded Google Map with user-created content for each of the showcase lawns. Here's a list of reasons why this is great:

You typically have to create some number of social interactions to leave the trail of signals of quality to make Google want to trust a site enough to put it in front of a large traffic stream, especially if you are starting a brand new site and are trying to operate within Google's guidelines. As Bob Massa says "search engines follow people."

There are two points in this post that I want to emphasize... First off SEO is an ongoing process. There isn't a magic trick that pushes your site to the top of rankings. It takes work.. Rinse & Repeat. Analyze & Tweak. Secondly there is a great point that if you hire an SEO expert you will get your site in front of the thousand other relevant people in your niche. This is very hard and takes a lot of work. So, you should create Outposts. Creating outposts is part of a content marketing strategy where you distribute your content among various networks to build up multiple sources of traffic... Great quote from Bob Massa explains it perfect!

Let's say you're a butcher, a baker or a candlestick maker. You want to get up to speed on the social media activity in your market, as fast as you can. Or perhaps you want to sell things to candlestick makers online, or you're a journalist writing a story about blogging butchers, or maybe you've got some kind of weird baking fetish or academic interest. Is there any way to ramp up your knowledge of these fields, fast, other than the "Google and wander" method? We think there is. Below you'll find step-by-step instructions, with screen shots, for the process we use when we want to get smart about a new field in a hurry.

Great rundown of social media and new media success in 2008

2008 was a newsworthy - albeit, topsy-turvy - year for marketers and researchers. Importantly, social media evolved from experimental sideline to a mainstream attraction. Twitter saw huge growth rates, Barack Obama rewrote the rules of digital marketing, and user-engagement, and "service is marketing" Zappos.com re-wrote new rules for building brands and rewiring e-commerce. Facebook trended upward, MySpace held steady, and reputation-broker Wikipedia continued marching to the top of Google search results.

That is disturbing!

In the end you will realize, as I did, Google AdSense is just the beginning of your online income. Once you expand your horizons, you can make serious strides toward expanding your bottom line.

Think local. Depending upon who you listen to, somewhere between 20% and 40% of all searches have a local component-a place name, or some other inferred geographic qualifier. So, what's your catchment area, what are the towns, villages, locations, urban areas, landmarks, counties, states, and even countries that you're looking to serve? Add those to your list too

Keyword optimization is the simgle most important aspect of reaching the top of the search engine results. It's amazingly simple to do, but so many people miss the most important concepts.

Sometimes organic search seems straight forward, type in a keyword and returned is a list of 10 recommended websites. Of course, getting to the top isn't so simple, but the notion that once you arrive at the top, traffic will ensue is a hypothesis hard to deny. Local search results don't play into this scheme. They have variables such as size of the map, and definition of a region's center that combine with trust, a citation, or sometimes what I call "sureness factors" to determine what businesses should be recommended.

What I liked about this was that they created a REAL, content-rich website to market each of their products.