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

A client recently asked us what we recommend when launching a website. From an SEO standpoint, we at periscopeUP do a LOT to ensure the search engines are properly indexing a site, including quality control on the site using our SEO checklist, and webdesign checklist, submitting the site, XML sitemaps, webmaster accounts, and redirecting the old pages to the new in case people have linked to them or bookmarked them, Google Places, and of course, links, links, links.

But this isn’t what the client was asking!

She was interested in knowing what she could do herself, from a PR perspective, to get the word out.  The website launch plan below will help you increase visibility and get some SEO lift.

Website Launch Checklist

1. Plan your tasks for one month prior and one month after launch

• Define your target audience and strategy
• Setup monitoring tools to listen to mentions of your company (google alerts, for example)
• List all your contacts, blog followers & blogger friends, email list, media contacts, social media fiends, etc
• Schedule tasks
• Write up all the features and benefits of your new site, to help users understand what improved and why they should visit. Remember that a feature is what a product or service does, a benefit is how it improves your life
• Provide easy ways of contacting you in every communication
• If applicable, document the roadmap of what’s to come (new site features, etc)
• Know how to optimize your links! Our video on internal links holds true for external links too

2. Drop some hints to your audience a month prior to launch, to let them know it’s coming.

3. Syndicate an optimized press release that includes a good description of why you’re the best and what’s new about your site / services.

• Pitchengine.com
• PRrweb.com
• One of the hundreds of free PR sites
• Notify local & industry press outlets / contacts individually

4. Email the world (don’t forget mom!)

• Send an email announcement to your loyal followers / clients / mom / social media followers
• Be sure to list new features of the site and give a reason to visit

5. Attack social media channels

• The key is asking everyone you know to post on their accounts and give them good (short) content to do it
• Notify Facebook & Twitter followers & followers of your clients / friends / mom
• Update LinkedIn followers and groups you & friends belong to
• Check out Social Toaster

6. Blog, comment & participate in forums

• Write about your new site on your site, prior to, during, and after launch
• Comment on industry blogs, forums, etc, showing off your great new site and asking for feedback

7. Ask for feedback

• Collect and disseminate feedback a month after launch to share the good & stay top of mind

8. Track the impact of your efforts

We hope this checklist was helpful. Please comment below and let us know if we forgot anything!

Date: October 20, 2009
Time: 7:30 am to 12 noon
Place: Sheraton Baltimore North, 903 Dulaney Valley Road Towson, MD 21204
Phone: 410.321.7400
Price: $65

Click here to register.

Event Description: Panel discussion from an expert panel of top Baltimore Executives in Search Engine Optimization, Offline Marketing, Online Social Media, Web Development, Internet Marketing and how to tie this all together. Attendees will  have the opportunity to discuss and interact with presenters in a Q & A session.

Here’s a flyer with more information (pdf).

There are 35.3 million moms online with children under the age of 18 — a number projected to reach 36.9 million by 2012.

• There are only about 40 million moms, total, with children that age, across the U.S.

• Of the 36.2 million women actively participating in the blogosphere weekly as either publishers or readers, 46% — or just over 16.5 million — have children at home.

• 67% of moms online look for help making a purchasing decision.

• 78% of moms who blog review products.

Here’s the article on mommy bloggers.

I interpret this move as Google’s way of making sure bloggers are open about what links and content (for things like product reviews) they were paid to include.

This will surely have wide ranging implications on the SEO of blogs and how marketing agencies will use bloggers to promote their clients’ products and services.

My only hope is that Google will clearly clarify what they define as a paid link. For example, if a blogger recieves a tee-shirt for blogging about a product, are links they include considered “paid” ?

I also wonder how will Google determine if a link was paid?

1. He targets the masses, not the influentials. As people with high page ranks come to realize their outbound links have become something people will pay for, link building is becoming a market rather than the free exchange it was in Web 1.0. Guy tells you how he gets followers, and Twitter can work to get attention for un-famous people too.
2. Twitter allows you to reach huge numbers of people who are willing to help you in exchange for your help, rather than for money. Maybe this is because of the kind of people on Twitter, or maybe it’s because Twitter is new.
3. You can search Twitter and see what people are saying about you so you can respond. It’s more centralized than trying to track and reply to comments on the entire blogosphere.
4. He gives examples of how you can use old fashioned marketing techniques like discounts or incentives.
5. He tells you how to make it easy to spread your tweats with tools like Twitterfeed. I use this and a similar tool on this blog called Tweet This, which allows you to tweet my Word Press posts. Try it below.