Here is a commonly asked question:

Do I need an indexing tool or software like Traffic Bug to get my website indexed by the Search Engines?

In the Thirty Day Challenge, a popular internet marketing course , a tool called Traffic Bug is recommended to facilitate fast indexing of webpages. Traffic Bug claims to do many things, but basically is aimed to automate a host of activities internet marketers want to perform, like social bookmarking, article submission, rss submissions and more. It does so by submitting your articles and information to a wide array of social networks and directories automatically and cuts out the time needed to create individual profiles and perform manual submissions for each website.

While the Traffic Bug website claims to build your website back links on autopilot, which has been a hotly debated promise in itself, the Thirty Day Challenge Team lead by Ed Dale encourages the use of traffic bug simply as an ‘Indexing Tool’.

The theory is, if you make enough noise on a number of websites, you will get noticed quickly and Google & co will index your website fast.

But really, do we need a solution like Traffic Bug just to get our websites indexed? Do we need a sophisticated automation tool that sends out our content to a massive array of websites, just to get noticed by Google? And do we need to pay for a tool like this?

Do we need all this noise, just to get a page indexed?

Answer: NO

Saying otherwise is a ‘Bastion Of Bullshit’. Sorry Ed Dale.

It’s really dead easy to get indexed and found by Google if you have a brand new website. You can cough and your site will get found. All it really takes is a one decent link pointing to your website from a place that is already indexed and that gets crawled regularly.  In half the time it takes to enter your information into a tool like traffic bug, you could have placed a link on the web which would have done the same job with a great deal more elegance, without having to get close to the grey area of spam – which a tool like Traffic Bug is easily abused for.

So why does Internet Millionaire and Internet Marketing Guru Ed Dale and his loyal 30DC crew promote Traffic Bug as an indexing tool?

I have NO IDEA.

And I have no idea why they endorse Traffic Bug despite an obvious trail of legitimate misgivings around the service. All I know that it makes them look foolish and it definitely helps confuse internet marketing beginners.

There a dozens and dozens of better, cheaper and faster ways to get indexed than Traffic Bug (here are a few great ones), save yourself the time, money and the risk of getting your site noticed in negative ways. You don’t need ‘special tools’ to get your webpages indexed.

The incredible pace at which Search is evolving is phenomenal. Google has been enabling Google Social Search by default for those that are logged in to Google. Previously it was optional to try it through google labs, but now when you search on Google.com and you are logged into your google account, you will notice social search results at the bottom of the page. I noticed it wasn’t working on google.co.uk yet, but that can be far behind.

How does Google Social Search impact search engine marketing?

While it’s still early to tell here are some initial impressions:

1) Google is competing with facebook and utilizing the social web in a very clever way

2) Social Search is another opportunity for ordinary people, social media mavens, experts and marketers to influence who ever they can connect with.

3) In search engine optimisation world, it is evident that:

Saying you are #1 in google is not what it used to be….

Now that search results pages are becoming increasingly varied depending on who is searching, where they are searching, what they have searched before and what their social connections have voted on, it is harder to talk about static search positions and near impossible to track reliable rankings for webpages.

Organic search ranking positions outside the top 3 are more and more liable to be replaced by richer search results coming from video search, news results, blog results, image results and social circle results.

4) The value of creating high quality content is more lucrative than ever. With search results being influenced by your social network and by social media activity in general, crappy content will sink to the bottom and hopefully great content will float to the top more reliably than before.

5) Marketing and promoting without a presence on relevant social networks is not to be advised. Find out where your customers are online and be a participant there!

6) People with huge networks and followings just gained a lot of potential influence… too much influence?

The top trending topics at the moment are of course about the Haiti tragedy that has been unfolding in the past few days. This disaster hasn’t stopped hardcore spammers from seeing opportunities to make money off all the attention the disaster is getting. What we are seeing is the dark side of Social Media and Real-Time search results.

Spam at the speed of thought

It’s very hard to prevent and police the spam with the technologies that now operate the searchengines and social sites. If we want instant updates, we also live with the danger that some will take advantage of it. If you search for certain haiti related terms, there are some malware sites ranking incredibly high. Some links on sites like twitter go to sites that will try to trick you out of money. How low can you go? Even well meaning people can have a negative effect. A Facebook post in my stream ‘said 3 million dead’, which is a gross overstatement and can induce stress by it self. Our collective emotional response to such traumas will amplify uncertainty, but on the long term, as we become used to it, something even worse might happen: we might actually become dull to events like these.

The better question is what we can do to somewhat improve the matter

There is one thing I can think of that addresses the issue of shortened links that are often used to conceal destinations with inappropriate intentions. Link shortening services should start crawling the destinations of these links and checking for the most common forms of spam and risk factors in real time. Link previews aren’t good enough.

The other way to counter spammers making use of trends is to actively employ people to monitor the real time results so we can much quicker get rid of bad links and bad websites. That shouldn’t be impossible to do since the amount of trending topics are within a manageable range.

So it’s January 2010 and that means that Google Caffeine – an under-the-hood replacement of the google search engine – is due to be released. Or is it already live? I’ve been keeping a close eye on it and I wouldn’t be surprised if it is already live given some fluctuations I have seen occurring.

Although Caffeine shouldn’t affect search rankings a great deal in most cases there are definitely some things all website owners should want to pay attention to:

1) More than ever, Google will favor sites that are speedy.
Slow sites are prone to drop out of favour. Google is obsessed with speed and rightfully so, because the faster their searchengine works, the more money they make. They also want to serve websites that are fast themselves, because low performing websites impair their performance as well.

2) Keep your content fresh.
A site’s age has been an interesting dimension to search engine optimizers. We know that Google values content that is time tested and older content is seen as more trustworthy. Google has had a habit of favoring older domains and content over newer domains and content. I think that will still be the case but the dynamics have changed. And that is great because new domains have been at an unfair disadvantage in getting search rankings and secondly because certain phrases that served up outdated content are a detriment to searchers. For instance when looking for reviews of services, old reviews often pop-up with inaccurate information (try googling “Aweber vs Getresponse”, both companies have been through many changes rendering old but prominent reviews outdated).

It’s still a huge benefit to have an old domain that has been consistent over the years, but now it’s becoming increasingly important to keep the content fresh as well. I think smarter website owners that have content that has been around for years will consider adding blogs or other dynamic features to their website. On the other hand, new sites have more of an opportunity to jump past older pages that aren’t fresh.

3) It’s still about the links…but
We know that a large part of getting good search results is by getting links pointing to our webpages. The type of links going to your site are being judged more than ever. I think we’re seeing that low quality links are becoming less valuable, conversely, high quality links are more than ever will make or break your search rankings. I’ll write about what makes determines the quality of a link in another blog post.
The good news it is harder than ever to win good search positions by applying spammy tactics. The SEO companies relying on lower quality link building will need to up their game. The aimed effect is that the cream will rise to the top.

To recap, the focus for 2010 for website owners of all varieties should be on quality, site performance and freshness of content.

Let’s run through some of the major innovations Google Search has implemented recently. The results are quite stunning.

Real Time Results on Steroids

Google Real Time Search for Lebron James Screencap

Below we see a query for NBA basketball player Lebron James. You can mimic this search result by clicking ‘show options’ and clicking ‘Latest’. This search gives us up to the minute results. In fact, even faster than that. Note how a twitter message that was posted 24 seconds ago is at the top of the page. That’s how fast Google is now ready to index content.

Universal Search Example and it’s impact

The following screen shows us how rich Search pages have become. Again we searched for Lebron James through the ordinary search box. We see news results, followed by 3 normal listings, followed by image results. This pretty much will appear above the fold (the space you’ll see without having to scroll down. Below are more standard listings – these are below the fold. Now more than ever, being listed lower than the #4 slot is close to meaningless for most searches. You need to be in that top 3 slot above the fold. Of course, with all the new types of content being featured, it makes sense to position yourself in those slots too. Publishing video and optimizing your images could get you a short cut to the first search results page.

Real Time Results come in various forms

Searching a sports team can bring up live scores.

Google’s auto suggest becomes smarter
Auto suggest brings up a dropdown box that tries to guess what you’re searching for. Further evidence that Google will try to figure out your intention before you even type it. Here we see instant weather forecasts being shown.

Google Suggests Gives Weather Forecast

Real Time Streaming Results And Reputation Management Horror

Here we see both the real time streaming feature at work on an ordinary search page (we queried ‘Tiger Woods’) and also the horror of having to manage your reputation in today’s world. It’s really hard to hide or manage the public’s opinion. And twitter gets a nice boost because their potential audience has grown since people don’t even have to see twitter to see what people are saying on their network. How’s that for advertising.

Tiger Woods is living Social Media Now

When creating websites and and webpages there are two sources you need to design for. The first one is obviously your target audience, the actual person that will be gaining value through your website. To write for your prospects, your visitors, your potential client, you need to be able to deliver value to them. In essence, you need to know what they want and need.

The other source you need to keep in mind is the Search Engines, namely, Google. The search engines determine how your webpages are going to rank. The better you rank, the more traffic you will receive from these search engines. While search engines are not your only sources of traffic, they are in most cases the most important. So what we really want to know is how to rank well. And the best starting place for that is by asking the question: What does Google want so see?

So let’s get under the skin of google.

Google’s profitability depends on people using their search engine. Everything is thus geared toward obtaining and attaining searchers. To do that they must ensure that searching on Google gives the best possible experience. One way to provide that is to rank websites based on their relevancy in relation to what a person is looking for. Google has made their name by serving highly relevant webpages. This is a win for Google, because this encourages people to keep using their engine and the time spent using their search engine. The more people that use Google, the more money making opportunities to have.

So relevancy is key. Google has been getting increasingly good at judging what is relevant. One area that is in rapid development is the ability to provide relevant search results based on the persons location. In the future Google is only going to get better at judging other factors, like a searchers intention, and take advantage of the huge amount of user data that they have collected. You see, if the search engine knows your attention is to buy something, rather than research something, it would rather serve up review sites and shopping sites than how-to sites and photo galleries.

So relevance depends on a users intention. This is an important key to understanding on how to develop your site. What is the intention of the person looking on your page? Is it to buy, is it to learn or is it to have fun? If you can peg down the intention of the user, you can much more easily get that person to act since you know how to organize the information and design toward that purpose. Often when a page is not performing well, the design and content isn’t conducive to satisfying a searchers intention. Worser still, a poorly designed page typically does not do well in getting a visitor to take the action you are desiring them to take.

If you do not know the intention of the visitor, you can’t cater to it and you will have trouble motivating a visitor to take the action you want them to take. A well designed page capitalizes on a visitors frame of mind and makes it incredibly easy to achieve the right action. It can happen that way because you have designed the page for a specific visitor who is in a specific frame of mind.  And if you nail this you are also meeting Google’s wish of serving highly relevant pages!

Google actually can tell how well your page is performing. If it sees that visitors are coming to a page on your site and immediately leaving the site without having visited another page on your site, it will deduce that your page is not relevant or not valuable. This is also referred to as a the ‘bounce rate’. Do you think they will reward your page or drop your page down if people area leaving your site as quick as they are going?

The other important factor that Google loves is a matter of performance. Perhaps your site has great information, but if it needs a long time to load, it’s poorly designed or displays bugs or broken links of any kind, its performance will drop. Google loves fast sites because people love a good user experience. The average time visitors are willing to wait is incredibly short.

To recap: We’ve discussed a few qualities Google loves to see when they rank webpages. They love to see a site that is highly relevant and valuable to what a person is looking for – it needs to satisfy the users intention, they want it to load fast and provide a good user experience.

Action steps:

Review the pages on your site and ask yourself how you can improve relevancy, value, usability and loading times. Need more data? Dig in to your sites logs and analytics data. Find out where people are exiting your site, what they are searching for that leads them to your site and what they look for once they are on your site. You will find that you do not even have to read any hard core ‘Search Engine Optimization’ tricks in order to improve your sites rankings.