Google is moving personalized search to the next level by allowing searchers to “star” an item just like they are able to in Google Reader. When they make the same search at a later date, the starred items will appear at the top of the SERPs for easy collection. Call it a search engine results page bookmarker. That’s effectively what it is.

But will it send you more traffic? It depends. On what? On the number of people who “star” your website and return to it often. I highly doubt it will increase your unique visitors.

There’s no doubt this feature will help searchers, but what will it do for search engine optimizers? If no one uses it there will be no change, but I wouldn’t count on no one using it. I think there will be quite a few people who will star their favorite websites for specific searches that they make often. The question is, how will that behavior affect SEO.

It could affect it in a number of ways:

1. More traffic overall, but no difference in unique visitors. In this scenario you’ll end up with more repeat visitors. That’s not bad, particularly if you sell more and get a higher conversion rate.
2. Lower bounce rate. This will only happen if the above scenario works out in your favor.
3. Less overall traffic, but more targeted traffic. If someone stars your website then they are really interested in what you have to offer. Personalization could lead to your website getting a lower ranking for particular high value search queries because other sites that have been starred take precedence for some users. You’ll just to have reach those users in different ways.
4. No real change. Let’s face it, some sites just won’t get starred.

Are there any ways you can think of that starred items may affect your search engine rankings? Do you see this as a good thing?

It’s important to understand how Google (and other search engines) understand a search query so that you can better design your web pages to meet the demands of search and help yourself get found by those who may be looking for your product or service. This Wired article goes into great detail about Google’s algorithm, its history and where it is right now.

One of the simplest explanations I’ve seen of how Google figures out synonyms and therefore meaning from search queries is this paragraph:

“We discovered a nifty thing very early on,” Singhal says. “People change words in their queries. So someone would say, ‘pictures of dogs,’ and then they’d say, ‘pictures of puppies.’ So that told us that maybe ‘dogs’ and ‘puppies’ were interchangeable. We also learned that when you boil water, it’s hot water. We were relearning semantics from humans, and that was a great advance.”

That makes sense. Isn’t that how babies learn to talk?

Of course, it’s much more complicated than that, but you get the picture. Google had to learn what people mean by their search queries by observing the changes they made to queries when they didn’t find what they were looking for. Eventually, if this keeps up, Google will be able to give you more of what you want even faster. And that’s kind of the goal.

The Wired article is a good read if you really want to understand Google’s search algorithm. And if you are a small business person trying to market your business on the Internet, it’s an essential thing to learn.

If you’ve been on the Web since the beginning then you likely remember a lot about Yahoo!’s history. You know how it started as a Web directory and was one of the first really prominent websites that allowed users to find websites they like. Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin tried to sell Yahoo! their back link technology, called BackRub back then, but Yahoo! refused to buy it. So Page and Brin started Google instead.

Yahoo! was late to the search game, but purchased important technology including Alta Vista, Overture and others, that would get them into the search engine game early in the 21st century. The company branched out into other areas as well.

But, as you know, Yahoo! just couldn’t keep up with Google. Then they started experiencing internal problems. Since the new CEO, Carol Bartz, has taken the helm, Yahoo! has been selling assets left and right. And they accepted an offer from Microsoft to enter an agreement that many people think is going to be bad for consumers. One of those people is Michael Martinez.

Martinez sounds a rather grim death knell for Yahoo! I tend to agree. I think this could be the beginning of the end for Yahoo! The question is, if he’s right then what does that really mean for small businesses who want to make the most of their online marketing efforts?

Google rose to prominence on its own strengths. Facebook too. But Bing has largely sought to increase its share of the search market through strategic partnerships – first with Yahoo!, which hasn’t exactly panned out yet, and now, with Facebook.

This will be an interesting partnership if it ever sees the light of day. Google owns YouTube, which is in the top 5 most trafficked websites. Bing and Facebook, of course, will still be wholly owned enterprises so their relationship will be more of a partnership, but Facebook is the second most trafficked website online. Bing falls in somewhere in the top 10. Are you starting to see what’s going on?

If Bing powers all of Facebook’s searches then that will likely increase its share of search. Will it be enough to compete with Google?

That’s a question that remains to be answered. My first response is likely not, but if Bing gets significant enough of an increase in searches from its relationship with Facebook then it could at least make a little bit of a jump on Google. The big question is, how much?

Google has two keyword research tools (actually three, but I won’t count the Google AdWords internal toolbar) and you should be aware of how to use them.

The first tool is the Google AdWords External Toolbar. This is essentially the Google AdWords internal toolbar except that you don’t have to be logged into your Google AdWords account to use it. It’s a great tool if you are just doing cursory research that you don’t think you are going to use right away or you don’t have a Google AdWords account and want to do some keyword research.

You can generate ideas in one of two ways – using descriptive words and phrases or by associating them with a website. If you are generating a keyword list for a specific website that have already built then be sure to check the box for Website content.

Next, enter some keywords in the box and check “Use synonyms”. You can also filter your keywords to exclude unwanted words that you don’t want to target. For instance, if you are searching for keywords related to “widgets” but don’t want anything related to “red widgets” then you can exclude the keyword “red” or the phrase “red widgets”.

After clicking the box to generate keywords, you’ll see your keyword list pop up with the following columns:

• Advertiser Competition
• Local Search Volume (month specific)
• Global Monthly Search Volume

The match type will also be set to broad. You can change it to exact, phrase, or negative. I recommend starting with broad and you can narrow it down as you do more research. You can also expand the columns that are displayed, but if you aren’t planning to do any PPC advertising then the other columns won’t help you much.

You can use this list to see which of your keywords are the most popular from month to month and to judge what your competition for those keywords is. It’s a good tool to use.

Google’s Search-based keyword tool is slightly different. With this tool you can actually get more specific in your research initiatives. Since the data is based on actual searches rather than broad research data it should be more accurate, but that doesn’t mean it will benefit everyone. This tool is a great tool if you already have a website built and you want to expand your list of keywords for specific pages on your site.

The search-based keyword tool allows you to compare keywords generated for a specific web page on your site and the keywords in your Google AdWords account. If you are currently running a PPC campaign then you can find new keywords to target. It is a great tool for showing where you might be missing opportunities.

I challenge you to learn more about these to keyword research tools. Use them when the time is right.

I said right here that social search was just around the corner and that it would likely go well beyond what any of us could imagine. Evidently that’s not good enough.

John Battelle, who needs no kudos from me, isn’t impressed with the new Google Social Search. The problem, he says, is that it doesn’t leverage Facebook. And he asks a good question: Why not?

I agree. You can’t build a social search engine without getting in deep with Facebook. I think Google may have rolled this one out too soon. Do you? Or is there another reason they decided to introduce social search without the largest social media company in the world? Any ideas?

comScore reports that global search grew by 46% in 2009. There are several interesting things about this data, but one that I found very interesting is the China-U.S. duality. China, with billions more in population is way behind the U.S. in number of searches AND grew by 9% less year over year from December 2008 to December 2009. I’d be curious to know how China fares one year from now.

Still, 46% growth in one year? That’s pretty significant growth. In the U.S., that growth is 22%. Still not bad.

I’d like to see these figures on a local or state level within the U.S. I think it would be interesting to see whether people in urban areas or rural areas are searching more. Just a guess, urban populations search more but rural areas areas are growing faster. Just a guess.

Of course, data like this means nothing in a vacuum. What this is really saying is that search engine revenue is going up, but it also is saying there is a lot of potential here for businesses to reach their markets, both through organic search and paid search. Are you fretting a bad economy? Don’t be. People are searching and their spending money online. The question is, what are you doing about it?

OK, it’s a trick question. But not really. If you’ve been wondering how Google ranks your tweets in real-time search then there is an interview with a Googler than shed some light on the subject. Amit Singhal says that ranking tweets in real-time search is a lot like PageRank. So I’m looking forward to the day when we’ll all be discussing our TweetRank scores with verve and passion.

It’s interesting that the comparison between ranking tweets and PageRank has been made because PageRank has been likened to a popularity contest, but that’s not accurate. It’s about quality more than anything and ranking tweets is the same. Google appears to be interested in the number of followers a person has and how connected socially – quality – those followers are.

Singhal says it this way:

“You earn reputation, and then you give reputation. If lots of people follow you, and then you follow someone–then even though this [new person] does not have lots of followers,” his tweet is deemed valuable because his followers are themselves followed widely, Singhal says. It is “definitely, definitely” more than a popularity contest, he adds.

So this is incentive then to get on the A-list and be followed by the top bloggers. Rather than simply going for huge numbers of followers, try to find the right followers for you, quality followers with lots of well-connected followers themselves.

I guess that’s a little like PageRank. What do you think?

Every year I see tons of predictions about the future of the Internet. Heck, I recently published a set of my own. They mostly had to do with social media, although one of them was about the integration of social media with search and how small businesses will start to “get it”.

Yesterday, John Battelle published his predictions for 2010. I found them to be rather interesting, to say the least.

Particularly interesting was his prediction regarding the deterioration of search results. In his own words:

But we are in the midst of a significant transition in search – as I’ve recently written, we are asking far more complicated questions of search, ones that search is simply not set up to answer.

I think this may be true for many people, but for a lot of small business owners who are just figuring out the power of the Web as a marketing tool, they’re just not that far along yet. So the question for small business owners who are attempting to get found in those search results is, what does that mean for my business?

At this point, I’d say not much. But by the end of the year it may be clear just how far search results have deteriorated. Based on what I’ve read, many veteran searchers are getting disgruntled with search. That may be because, as John Battelle points out, they’re asking more complicated questions. I think the answer lies in my prediction about the integration of search and social media. I think 2010 could very well be the year that search “goes social” in far more meaningful ways than we can now imagine.

A few days ago we mentioned a rumor that Google may purchase Yelp. Evidently, it was just a rumor. It’s not going to happen after all.

Whether it ever was going to happen or not is another matter, but on the Internet rumors seem to fly faster than fruit at a food fight. It seems that Frank Reed and I may share the same healthy level of skepticism.

The problem with these kinds of rumors is that repeating them does nothing for anyone. If they are true it is best to just let them happen and discuss the ramifications afterward. If they aren’t true then no one is any the worse for the wear. Still, it’s worth considering what might happen to local search if Google did get its hands on a hot property like Yelp. Do you think local search would survive or would it change drastically or do you really care?