First, understand what Google has to say about Freshness:

Different searches have different freshness needs. This algorithmic improvement is designed to better understand how to differentiate between these kinds of searches and the level of freshness you need, and make sure you get the most up to the minute answers.

According to Amit Singhal, the blog post’s author, the following types of searches will be impacted:

• Recent events or hot topics (occupy oakland protests, nba lockout)
• Regularly recurring events (presidential election, exxon earnings, etc)
• Frequent updates (best sir cameras, subaru impreza reviews)

As consultants and managers of 35 lead-generating and ecommerce websites, we’re guessing nearly all of our clients will be impacted only by the third group, frequent updates.

Of course, all we can do is speculate the impact until after the update, when we’re able to test what Freshness rewards and punishes, but in the mean time here’s what we’re recommending to our clients.

Content Is Still King

Focus blog posts and site updates to terms you think will be affected by Freshess (see above). Ensure that each page of new content is optimized for one primary target term and 2 or 3 long tail variations.

Push your fresh content to your social media channels (Try SocialToaster.com to recruit “ambassadors” to do it for you).

Figure out a way to stimulate or better use User Generated Content. One of our clients is posting Amazon product reviews on their site, for example.

Reviews!

We know that Google pays attention to consumer reviews. Just check your Google Places page and note how Google pulls in reviews from InsderPages, Yelp, and others.

We can read into Amit Singhal’s post that search phrases like “best sir cameras” and “subaru impreza reviews” will be impacted by Freshness. Where do you rank for similar terms in your industry? If you’re getting a lot of your traffic from these phrases, prepare to promote these terms with more SEO content and links.

Update your HTML and make reviews and testimonials more identifiable to Google. Google likes reviews to be in Microformat coding. Read more in Google Help.

If your products are in Google Product Search (a.k.a. Google Shopping), beef up your positive reviews.

Respond quickly and positively to all negative reviews, no matter on what site they appear.

Google+

We’ve been watching client Google+ stats in webmaster tools, and haven’t seen much to work with — no hard evidence of this impacting search results, other than Google telling you which sites in search results your friends have +1’d. Nonetheless, we believe that Google considers social media content fresh, especially their own.

Just by the fact that Google is giving us data showing “search impact” of Google+, we’re playing it safe and encouraging our clients to use the Google+ button and collect more +1’s.

If you haven’t yet, set up a Google+ Business Page page and work it like your other channels. (HootSuite.com can help you push one update to multiple channels).

The more you tell Google about yourself, the more information they have to work with.

Video

Optimize your YouTube.com channel and video for your Freshness terms. Promote your videos to page one of Google search results. Don’t know how? Hire an SEO. (like us!)

News
We wonder if the Freshness Update is the beginning of the end for Google News. Will news results be more integrated or relocated on the search result page? To be sure, Google is constantly optimizing the layout and design of their search results page.

If Google wants to know what’s hot, what’s current, and what’s news, then by all means give it them. Our hunch is that press releases will remain a difficult way to get more than a temporary lift (note: they’re still good for link building).

Google will most likely instead continue to favor news stories from major and local news outlets. The example search results Mr. Singhall mentioned in his post are from MSN, Aljazeera, The Guardian, and the LA Times. In addition, we’ve found that with our SRM clients, content from major news outlets is much harder to displace off page one of Google searches.

Do what you can to include your target Freshness keywords in titles and content of all online press coverage.

Help I Can’t Do All This Myself!!

Hope this helps you to stay minty fresh. Call Eric to see if we can help: (866) 446-1972.

Further Reading

• Search Metrics predicts that winners will be news, broadcasting and brand sites
• Internet Retailer discusses potential impact on eCommerce sites
• Search Engine Watch recommends 4 Types of Timely Content for Google’s “Fresh” Update
• Inc explains Forget Facebook: 4 Reasons Your Company Needs a Google+ Page

Here’s the video and Powerpoint of the seminar. If you want to learn how we can apply these best practices to your business, give us a call.

Powerpoint

Watch this short video (4:20) to learn how you can boost search rankings with internal links. A text transcription is below.

Internal Links Video Transcription

Hi everybody, this Dan Kaplan, co-founder of periscopeup

This short tutorial is about how do you use internal links to improve the rankings of search engines positions.

First I am going to describe what an internal link is, and then give you a process by which you can test to see if changes you are making are improving your search engine rank positions.

Definition of Internal Links

Let’s take a quick look at one of our client websites, www.dddsigns.com. Let me say this tutorial presumes you have already optimized your pages. In this case, this interior page, the gallery page, is already optimized for the long-tail keyword term “outdoor business signs.” You can see that i have the keyword phrase in my title tag, in my header tag, and in first hundred words of the content. So this pages is already optimized for this term, “outdoor business signs.”

Now what is a good optimize internal link? Let’s go to our home page now and take a look. You’ll see two instances where we have created a link to the internal gallery page which have been optimized and “outdoor business signs” is in the text of the link that directs users to the page that is optimized for “outdoor business signs.”

Now, there are a couple of things here to note. First, the home page is very important page. So, we’re telling the search engines that a link from an important page to the internal page means it too must have some importance. Secondly, by optimizing by the link in this way, we’re saying that this destination page really is about this term. These are the things that help the search engines know what are the site about and will help raise us up in the search engine ranking positions.

Now, how do we know what links we have already internally? A great little tool that you can use as the Google webmaster tool. It can found at www.google.com/webmasters. If you login into dashboard and go the internal links section, there is a little tool here that tells you which pages have the most internal links directed to them. You can also do a search for individual pages. You notice that our internal gallery page (optimized for “outdoor business signs”) has quiet a lot of internal links already pointing to it. If I click in further, I will see all the individual pages that link to the gallery page. This is a way how we can analyze our side and figure out what internal links we have and which pages we should be adding more internal links to.

Internal Link Process

So, for the second part of this tutorial, I said I will show you a little process that we use to test the changes you’re making to internal links, to see the impact on your website’s search rankings.

• The first step is to list all the pages and the target keywords for your website.
• Second, using the Google webmaster tool, take a look at how many good internal link these pages have and which one should be optimized.
• Third, we recommend increasing the the number of optimized internal links to just one of these pages.
• Fourth, wait until the search engines re-index your site.
• Fifth, take a look to see if that had a positive impact — if you went up or down in search engine results for that target keyword.

If you did increase your ranking, you can repeat the process with another keyword term for another page, or if you went down, then you should revert back, undoing your changes and then try something else.

Conclusion

It’s quite simple, but just takes time. The proof is in the pudding. You can see here that our search engine position for DDD Signs, on the term “outdoor business signs,” and as you can see, we are consistently staying on page one of Google and Bing for that term.

I hope this was helpful for everybody, if you would like a free consultation on your website, please feel free to give us a call at 866-446-1972.

When optimizing a local business website, there’s a few additional things we do to ensure the site will do well. Our checklist for local SEO is below.

We define local search as either a search with the town name (“seo baltimore”) or any search that returns a pin map with local results.

Our checklist for local search engine optimization

Please note, we do these items in addition to our regular SEO checklist.

On page local optimization

• City & state in title tag
• Address in footer
• hCard microformat on contact us page

Off page local optimization

Create a neighborhood (geographic or thematic) with links and citations about your website.

• Links & Citations
  • Chamber of Commerce
  • Local Business Directories (search your city+directory)
  • Dominate Yelp
  • Other Websites in/about your city
  • Links from local businesses, clients, organizations, schools, speakers, etc.
  • Reviews. Start with happy customers, partners, and vendors.
• Review current listings for accuracy: phone, address, links, etc.
• Include your best search terms in the company name and description fields of your Google Maps account.

One note, with Google’s release of Caffeine, we’ve been reading more and more about the importance of citations (references to your business even if a link is not) included.

More information on Local Search Optimization

• http://smallbiztrends.com/2010/01/seo-trends-to-watch-for-in-2010.html
• http://searchenginewatch.com/3627073