He posted this one about becoming an authority by building quality content and sharing properly:

“You being an authority means you’re an expert. You rank better,” says Forrester. “You get more traffic.That just leads to better business success for you, which is what you want.”

“The first thing is, you need to focus on fundamentals here,” he says. “What we’re really talking about is the quality you have – the quality of content you build and the quality of sharing you do socially. Those are really two critically important points.”

He gives an example of “how to build quality content” using eBay.

“Let me give you two scenarios,” he continues. “One: you’re going to sell a cordless drill on eBay, and you’re just going to take the standard information, images and such. Now, the second example, we’re going to sell the same product – the same cordless drill – but we’re actually going to take videos of that cordless drill in use. We’re going to show that cordless drill in its packaging, in its wrapper, in every way possible. We are going to amplify it. Lots of extra pictures. We’re going to do this all on our own. We’re going to write up descriptions. We’re going to put all of that together.”

“It’s pretty clear to see here by these descriptions that we’re going to have a standard view of an item for sale, and a really deep, rich, immersive view of an item for sale,” says Forrester.

The second version, he says, is the “quality”.

“That is what people are looking for to answer their questions,” he continues. “So when that comes to you content, you have to think of it in terms of, ‘Have I answered all of the questions this searcher has? Have I done it to a depth that satisfies them?’ If you can do that, you need to move on to the next step, which is sharing properly.”

“You get out there, and you’re sharing things on Facebook, or you’re putting it on Twitter. Any of the social media spaces that you like and you frequent, you’re putting this stuff out there.”

He says that before you submit this stuff, you have to ask yourself: Will my tweet or my post bring quality to my followers or my friends?

“That is a critical step,” he emphasizes. “They want you to bring them quality. They need you to bring them quality. You need to bring them quality. If you don’t bring them quality, they’re going to stop following you. If you bring them good quality links either to your content or to related content, they will continually engage with you. They will share you. They will like you. They will amplify that for you. That amplification – that signals that you’re becoming an authority socially.”

“Pull all of that together,” he says. “Now you’re starting to see things as the search engine sees it.

More on Forrester’s thoughts about search and social from a presentation he gave at BlogWorld in November can be found here.

Put more simply, “Bing Central gives you a hub to manage everything you do with Bing.”

That statement actually brings me to a whole separate point about Bing that I’ve been meaning to bring up in an article since I sat in on Bing’s Duane Forrester’s session at BlogWorld last week, so I’m just going to talk about it here.

In his discussion about search and social, he talked about search engines having trouble connecting your various web IDs together as you as a person. For example, I am Chris Crum. That’s my name, and it’s my identity on services like Google or Facebook, but on a lot of other services I use ccrum237 or other things.

In the Q&A portion of the session, I mentioned that Google Profiles allow you to connect these various accounts to you as a person. You can include these various links to your different accounts, and let Google know that these things are you.

I asked why Bing doesn’t allow for something like this, particularly since who you are is becoming such an important signal on the web, and many people have various accounts with different non-identifiable user names all over the web.

His response in a nutshell was that this isn’t one of the things users say they want. Bing asks what features users would like to see implemented, and they try to implement them as such, when feasible.

Another difference between Microsoft (which owns Bing obviously) and Google are the philosophies around their products. He referenced recent comments by Eric Schmidt, saying that Google is all one product. Microsoft, on the other hand is comprised of all kinds of different products, and that’s the way they view it. Google’s view (at least by my understanding) is that its various products are more like features of one greater product (which is actually how I’ve tended to look at it myself, which is why I consider Google+ to really be a lot bigger than people typically tend to view it as).

Forrester talked about how they could use things like Windows Live ID, but then there are potential legal issues that could come about when trying to use that stuff.

So, basically, what I took away from this conversation is that Google should theoretically be better at figuring out who you are (across the services you use). Granted, Forrester did not say that, but considering Google’s push for authorship markup, and the fact that that is tied to your Google profile, I’d say including more links to your various profiles around the web is a good way to give Google a better idea about who you are as a web personality, which could very well send signals about your credibility on certain topics, and show your various connections on the web.

Here’s an interview WebProNews did with Forrester at BlogWorld:

Your audience may forget what you posted yesterday, but search engines don’t.

While Forrester also discusses ways to be an authority with social media and what to consider when optimizing for search, the relationship between search and social media was his main thrust. Because of the immediacy of today’s communication methods, as well as the speed at which these social media posts are indexed into search engines, timeliness in your work matters.

Trying to catch the tail of something that was popular/trending two days ago means your late and the impact of your quality content could be missed. Beyond that, however, Forrester provides some information on how social media influences the search industry. He mentions the fact that Facebook content is showing up in search engines, well, Bing, thanks to the Facebook/Bing partnership. To further his point, Forrester mentions people delay making purchasing decisions until someone from their social media circle — friends, family — offers their opinion.

Thanks to the search industry’s embrace of social media, instead of waiting on a Twitter/Facebook update, if a potential customer finds a social media review when conducting a search for the product of interest, leverage has occurred. Granted, if the person searching doesn’t trust the review they find, then your product will probably miss out. That being said, it’s important to get that social content out, and keep the search engines in mind when doing so.

From Forrester’s perspective, social media in search engine results help the trust quotient because of the personal nature of social media. Essentially, if you have people bragging about your product or the content surrounding it on Facebook and these posts show up in Bing’s results, there’s a good chance people will be more apt to trust your brand/product/content.

Another point Forrester mentions is also important, although, you might think it’s common knowledge. But then again, if he’s talking about it to conference attendees, maybe it’s not: Make sure you add a link to when you tweet, and/or, post something useful. If people can’t navigate to the item/content they are enjoying, you have failed to convert. Miserably.

From here, Forrester discussed the sheer amount of content available from the social industry, and seeing it on “paper” is truly staggering. According to his research:

• 25 billion tweets sent on Twitter in 2010
• 35 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute
• 3,000 photos uploaded to Flickr every hour
• 30 billion posts/month Facebook

Yeah, that’s a lot of content, which plays into the previous session’s discussion of how hard it is for cream to rise. The problem is, there’s a lot of cream out there. With such an obscene amount of content from the social industry, leveraging it through search is an important feature, otherwise, many of these gems would be lost forever.

As you can see, search is still a very important aspect of the overall marketing approach, even when social media is your target. Don’t forget about the people actively looking for products related to your focus.

Google’s Matt Cutts and Bing’s Duane Forrester will participate in the “Movember” initiative designed to raise awareness for men’s health. On the Bing Search Blog, Forrester writes:

It’s 2011, we’re an advanced, tech-savvy industry and we’ve just discovered a way to mix moustaches, money and your statements!

To be fair, we’ll actually be trying to simply not end up looking like a couple of teenagers trying to snag a dance on Friday night at the high school gym…

Here’s the official description for Movember:

Movember is the month formerly known as November, where men and women across the globe join together to raise awareness and funds for men’s health issues. Men grow a Mo (moustache) for 30 days to become a walking, talking billboards, for our men’s health causes – specifically cancers affecting men.

Men who support Movember, called Mo Bros, start by registering at Movember.com. Mo Bros start Movember 1st clean-shaven, then grow and groom their Mo, for the rest of the month, raising money along the way. Women who support Movember, called Mo Sistas, also start by registering at Movember.com. Mo Sistas champion the Mo by supporting their Mo Bros, organizing events, leading a team and spreading the important message of men’s health.

Hopefully, in addition to spreading the men’s health message, we’ll see some sweet pictures of the Google and Bing webmaster poster boys.

Will you participate?

Should +1s and Facebook “likes” be used as significant ranking signals by search engines? Share your thoughts here.

In a recent article, we asked if Google’s +1 button is the new PageRank. As Google uses the data from the button as a ranking signal, +1′s will no doubt be coveted more and more by any site owner looking for increased search visibility and traffic.

As discussed in that article, just as you’ve seen plenty trying to boost their PageRank through black hat tactics, it seems highly likely that these same people will try to exploit the +1 button. Google’s main weapon agains this appears to be tying the +1s to your actual identity, by using a strict profile naming policy.

Google wants to know who is doing this +1ing, which should help cut down on abuse.

Bing’s Duane Forrester wrote a blog post this week talking about a similar topic in the realm of abusing the social signals that search engines use to try and determine what results to show users. Forrester’s focus was on the concept of the “like” farm – basically the social equivalent of the link farm.

Amazingly, though, people think this approach works,” says Forrester. ”The rationale being that social signals matter to search, they can ramp up the volume of the ‘like’ signal in Facebook, causing a related boost in rankings.  The logic may seem fine, but when you recall that we can see sudden explosions of links as spammy, it’s easy to understand how we can see sudden explosions of likes as spammy as well.  To be fair, there’s more to it than that.”

“Anyone could suddenly ‘go viral’ and accumulate a lot of likes very quickly, so we look beyond just like/time to find patterns,” he explains. “And if there is one thing a search engine is good at, it’s seeing patterns online.  Like farms tend to be built around a core network of accounts.  You pay someone to like your site, content or whatever, and they go out across their network and like you.  It’s artificial and we know it.  Organic likes rarely follow obvious patterns.  In fact, if there’s a pattern to organic liking, it’s one built around chaos.  Like farms, however, no matter their size, end up looking obvious by comparison.  In the image below, you can see what an accumulation of likes look like to us when graphed.”

He shares the following graph depicting like activity with the red dots representing a like’s origin and the blue dots representing friends liking the same item. He says the differences between like farm activity and organic activity are “very obvious”.

“In most cases, if we spot like farm activity, we simply ignore the signal,” says Forrester.  “Again, you may have paid for a service which is bringing you no value in boosting your search results. This also points out why it is so important that you manage your social media program.  At the very least, if you are outsourcing the management of your social program, you need to keep an eye on things.  Short cuts can add up eroding any value you were trying to achieve.”

I’m not going to sit here and tell you that it is impossible to game the search engines using social media. Black hatters will always look for (and probably find) new ways to exploit the system for their gain, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy.

Interestingly, a report out from BrightEdge finds that about half of the largest 10,000 sites on the web don’t even display any kind of social sharing link or buttons at all. This is very surprising. As one WebProNews reader commented, “I find that unbelievable! The search engines have flat out admitted that social signals are a ranking factors. Why would a site owner not want to include social share buttons? Let your readers do some of the heavy lifting and get your content promoted in their social networks!”

I would strongly advise making the buttons accessible. Just have the content to give users a reason to click them. Then maybe you won’t have to worry about trying to game the system.

Do you think Google and Bing can keep social button abuse at bay? Tell us what you think.

1 – because they alert us to your website when its new, or to new content
2 – because they are a vote of confidence in your site – quality websites tend to link to other quality websites
3 – because those links can send you direct traffic
4 – because over time, they can help establish a footprint that points to your authority on a topic (think guest blogging)

The main point from the post is pretty much: links are not everything when it comes to ranking in search engines. Nothing new there. Still, it never hurts to listen to the policies as they’re explained by the search engines themselves.

On how many links you need, Forrester says, “Not as many as you may think.  Again, as with so many other areas of search optimization, there’s no exact number here.  On popular phrases with lots of query volume, to rank well will require more links from trusted, quality websites to boost your rankings.  Less popular phrases can often require many less links pointed at your site to see the same lift in rankings.  This is where a targeted link building approach can pay off for you.”

The take-aways of the post, Forrester says, are: don’t buy links, great content builds links, prove to users you’re a trusted authority (and links will follow), and social media can help grow links.

Here’s where Bing gives its advice for link building.

The Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO) published its first survey of in-house SEM compensation. They found healthy salaries for SEM pros, but the six-figure salaries ranging from $100,000 to $200,000 remain out of reach for newbies.

WebProNews chatted with Duane Forrester, co-chair of SEMPO