By now you know you need to focus on authority, your own, as well as relationships with other authorities. But what are the best strategies for developing authority?

From an SEO perspective, building authority only works if you have some sort of web presence for people to capitalize on. For the purposes of this column, it’s assumed that you have a blog, a social media presence, or both. Actually, you want to have both, because blogging and social media can reinforce each other in powerful ways:

Search engines try to measure personal (or organizational) authority the way people do. Your ability to obtain real links, fans, likes, +1s, or shares will be driven by that perception. In other words, don’t go buying likes, +1s, links, shares, or whatever.

In this column, the words “authority” and “influencer” will be used somewhat interchangeably. People or organizations that are seen as authoritative generally have a significant amount of influence on others.

Behave Yourself!
The first set of considerations relate to how you’re perceived. These are an important part of the process.

Gain Trust
You can’t be thought of as an authority if you aren’t trusted. Of course, it is possible to be trusted by one group of people, and not others. For example, Ann Coulter is trusted by right wing Republicans, but not by Democrats.

Be Consistent
If you establish a strong position on something, think long and hard before changing it. While there are times when you should change such a position, if you frequently flip flop on the positions you take, then you’ll have problems. People need to know, in general, what to expect from you.

Show Expertise and Value
If you have no value to bring to the conversation, then the authority will not follow, regardless of whatever else you do. In fact, you need to be providing value on an ongoing basis, not just once.

Be Natural and Authentic
Being natural and authentic makes being consistent easier to do. Having to remember what position you took on something when it isn’t your true opinion is asking for trouble. People can sniff out when you aren’t being true to yourself.

Solve Problems for Others
It’s great to show expertise, but if no one is actually helped, who cares? Look beyond demonstrating your skills.

Go out of your way to help people with a need. Show that you solve real problems. It’s great PR.

Help Promote Others
As you gain more exposure, make sure to give back. Promote the works of others. Link to them, tweet them, introduce them to people, and share their content.

Promoting the content of recognized authorities is a double win. It’s very likely to provide value to your audience (they are perceived an authorities for a reason), and it helps you build a relationship with them.

Be Social
Socializing is a great tool. Hanging out with people and being likable counts for a lot! This is a great way to build trust, and get introductions that are helpful to you. Besides which it’s fun!

Be Seen!
Focus on how you can help build up your authority in your industry. The key is to be seen. The following ideas may seem pretty basic, but they work.

Go to Industry Conferences
This is a great way to meet people. There’s no better way to build a relationship than face to face. Go watch current industry authorities speak at conferences like SES.

Sit in the front row and go up and introduce yourself when the session is over. Make sure you have something interesting to say that will capture their attention.

Speak at Industry Conferences
Pitch yourself as a speaker at industry conferences. If you have no prior speaking track record, pitch a case study or new real world data. Conference organizers love real world examples and data.

If you can’t do either of those, come up with something truly unique and fresh. A pitch arguing that you will cover an old topic better than an established speaker isn’t likely to work.

Write for Industry Journals
The strategy here is similar to pitching yourself as a speaker. Bring something really new and different to the table, that is quantitative in nature. Hard facts and figures are more likely to get you in the door.

One alternative strategy that will work too, is to get a current authority to recommend you. Expect to start with a single article, not a column. Once you get one really good article under your belt, you’re on your way.

Meet People Face to Face
This is an expansion of the “attend conferences” concept. There are other places where you can meet people, and influencers as well. For example, local meetups or even social gatherings.

Use your network to help you get invites. Whatever you do, don’t crash anyone’s private social events unless invited!

Get an Introduction
Get introduced to an influencer by someone in your network. If you don’t have a current connection via your network, work on expanding it! Personal introductions from a person trusted by the influencer are gold.

Make sure you bring something of interest to the conversation when you end up meeting an influencer, be it by email, phone, or face to face. Face to face is first choice because it’s more personal, with a second choice of phone, then email, but accept whatever is more comfortable for them.

Wrap Up
Yes, this is real work, and you have to allow time for it to unfold. But, in today’s hyper competitive world of search, this investment is essential.

Today’s publishers face a serious challenge: differentiate or die. You’re competing with way too many people, regardless of your market. Developing authority is a way to stand out – to people and search engines alike.

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Google’s AdWords Keyword Tool has been experiencing some substantial and ongoing issues over the past week. Complaints have arisen from marketers using the service that the results are showing zero search volume when performing exact match requests.

Issues with the popular Google service were first reported on Thanksgiving. It seems that the zero results aren’t showing in all searches but are for a random selection of search results. Preliminary tests performed reported zero search volumes for both global and local searches, even when the country location was changed.

It seems that most head and middle-tail related keyword searched are being affected. It is premature to state if long-tail phrase searches have been affected as well due to the normally low search results associated with these types of phrases.

The issue doesn’t seem to follow any particular keyword or industry type, or to match any definable criteria making it difficult to analyze the results being given.

Although the numbers may be incorrect and/or non-existent, the data is of some value. If you do manage to get results, you can use comparative analysis to make use of the limited data.

For instance, if you perform a search for [apples] that yields 6,000 results, and a search for [bananas] that yields 3000 results, you can be relatively assured that twice as many people are searching for one over the other assuming all else is equal such as significant ranking report runs and other automated queries for one phrase over the other, etc.

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Salesforce has launched a new product for enterprises designed to analyse social media conversations and comments on the web and direct them to the relevant professionals in an organisation.

Social Workflow draws on the capabilities Salesforce acquired through the purchase of Radian6 in March.

Radian6′s social media monitoring technology can analyse 150 million social media sources on the web, Tim Barker, Salesforce EMEA’s marketing vice president, told V3.

Businesses can then apply sophisticated analysis and rules to the data, which will automatically route social content to the relevant people to allow them to respond quickly, Barker added.

“It essentially gives marketers a modern marketing platform. It could quickly analyse 100,000 tweets and direct particular ones to the relevant people in a business,” he said.

Social Workflow is available now in a limited release and will be generally available next year at $1,200 per deployment per month.

Salesforce made the announcement to coincide with the company’s Cloudforce event taking place in New York on Wednesday.

Salesforce said at the event that Radian6 is now generally available starting at $600 per deployment per month.

The firm added that it will continue Radian6′s relationships with text and analytics firms OpenAmplify, Klout and OpenCalais to let customers take advantage of the social media insight that can be generated.

Businesses can use the analytics technology in the Salesforce Social Insights tool to understand customer demographics, influence, geolocation data and sentiment, all from social media data already available on the web.

Salesforce claimed that this level of intelligence allows marketers to understand the impact of a campaign and have the flexibility to respond to customer sentiment and reaction in real time.

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The Silver Lake consortium is one of a number of parties bidding for a minority stake in Yahoo, but their offer has a number of factors that makes them a major contender. The consortium includes Microsoft – that already is working with Yahoo – and an offer for a new CEO with a proven successful track record.

The deadline for bid submissions was end of business yesterday.

“Yahoo appears increasingly less interested in selling itself as a whole. In recent weeks, the company’s directors and advisers have gravitated toward plans that call for an investor or consortium to buy a stake of as much as 20 percent,” the New York Times reported.

The Silver Lake consortium also includes venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. Marc Andreesesn has been discussed as a possible CEO since Carol Bartz was fired. As a three year board member, he knows the executives. As the co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz he knows a good investment and has great contacts in the online space – other boards he sits on include eBay, Hewlett-Packard, and Facebook.

But it is as co-author of Mosaic – the first major browser – and the co-founder of Netscape that really makes his possible leadership of Yahoo a solid decision. Andreessen is also, more importantly, a software engineer who is well-known for his successful evangelism of Mosaic in its infancy. Yahoo needs a leader that can get the public excited about Yahoo again.

Many people would have first found Yahoo with a Netscape browser – early users could have accessed “Jerry and Dave’s Guide to the World Wide Web” with their Mosaic browser. Mosaic became Netscape because the University of Illinois, where Andreessen and Eric Bina worked National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and developed the graphical browser, didn’t want Andreessen using the name for his commercial venture.

Andreessen has been suggested for the position by a number of stockholders, but had been hesitant possibly because of his close friendship with Jerry Yang – current CEO and co-founder of Yahoo, the Wall Street Journal reported.

“In meetings with Yahoo execs, several sources noted that Andreessen was unusually blunt about the problems Yahoo faces and its mistakes in the past. They noted as well his reticence over the amount of work required to make a difference.

“He seemed very negative on the idea of whether anyone had what it took to turn it around,’ said one exec.”

Obviously, he’s changed his mind.

Other interesting bidders include Alibaba – Yahoo has a 40 percent stake in the company so it would be a way to reclaim that and a perfect way to enter the market outside of Asia – and Thomas H. Lee Partners who are looking to acquire just the U.S. operations.

THL “is hoping to do a leveraged buyout of Yahoo’s U.S. business – which could be worth $5 billion to $6 billion – and draw on its experience running other media assets such as Nielsen Co, Clear Channel and Univision to turn around the ailing company,” Reuters reported.

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In what is being called the third installment of their “off-season spring cleaning series”, Google announced more products are being terminated or integrated in to other products.

“Overall, our aim is to build a simpler, more intuitive, truly beautiful Google user experience.” From some of the moves, that beauty must be in the eyes of holders of Google+ accounts and supporters of HTML5.

Knol, Google’s version of Wikipedia, has had problems, both technical and in gaining traction. Interestingly, they have passed the project along to Annotum, an open source platform developed with Solvitor and Crowd Favorite using WordPress – not Blogger, Google’s own blogging software.

“Knol will work as usual until April 30, 2012, and you can download your knols to a file and/or migrate them to WordPress.com. From May 1 through October 1, 2012, knols will no longer be viewable, but can be downloaded and exported. After that time, Knol content will no longer be accessible.”

Gears, which Google halted support for last March, will no longer be available for download sometime in December. Instead there will be support for HTML5 to include offline capabilities.

Friend Connect, Google’s social networking widget platform, is also another product to be shelved. The company is “retiring the service for all non-Blogger sites on March 1, 2012. We encourage affected sites to create a Google+ page and place a Google+ badge on their site so they can bring their community of followers to Google+ and use new features like Circles and Hangouts to keep in touch.”

Guess the sign in processes and connections made through the widgets are not as important as driving people to Google+. The Social Web blog associated with Friend Connect had closed in September, a good indication the products it discussed were to be closed as well.

Google Wave, which has not been supported for more than a year, will be read only on January 31, 2012 and closed completely April 30. “You’ll be able to continue exporting individual waves using the existing PDF export feature until the Google Wave service is turned off.”

Last year, Marissa Mayer, vice president of location and local services, called Wave one of Google’s top three mistakes.

Other products being closed include Google Search Timeline, Google Bookmarks Lists, and Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal. 2011 has been a year of numerous shutdowns for Google. With about six weeks left in the year, these should be the last, unless Google plans on closing Christmas.

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Optify has launched new landing pages and one-click social sharing features, designed to help marketers improve campaign tracking and ROI. Marketers are able to create customized or template landing pages, hosted either on Optify or their own domain, without the help of IT or a designer. They can then share, track, and measure across a number of social networks.

“Despite all the buzz around all of these online channels, CMOs still view social media primarily as an acquisition vehicle. Business people want to know is this creating value for the business,” CEO Brian Goffman told Search Engine Watch. With these additional features, Optify hopes their all-in-one suite can help marketers pull more campaign data and make it easily digestible for others in their organizations.

They aim to answer the questions marketers struggle with in managing paid, social, and organic campaigns: are people finding the company, are they converting, are we best measuring our social traffic, and what is our digital marketing ROI?

“There is a move to go to real-time web, but it’s evaded a lot of companies. Search has been massively changed with real-time info, both with what’s ranking and the type of data served up, all on every device. Our marketers are trying to live in this kind of world and we’re building software to help them,” Goffman explained.

Optimized Landing Page Design and SEO

There are five types of landing pages available: Multipurpose, Image, Form Only, Promotional Content, or Video. Additional landing pages in the works include Facebook and mobile.

Landing page options include adding images, updating alt text and destination URL, building in Facebook Connect, and more. Forms are simplified, allowing clients to change fields, add confirmation messages, change button text, and customize colors.

Options for SEOs include customizable meta description and analytics code. They can share across multiple social networks and have multiple types of each account.

Users can generate customized reports, showing sources and leads per day, month, week, 3 months, etc. Campaigns are coming next to show more granular detail about which efforts are generating traffic. Landing page templates don’thave an HTML editor, though that feature is also in the works.

Account Levels Bumped Up; New Features Available in Free to Enterprise Editions

The new landing page and one-click social sharing features are available to all Optify account holders, including those using the Free edition. Until this latest update, the Professional edition accommodated 10 users and the Enterprise edition 15; both are going to 50 users to enable companies to deploy across the organization. Companies get discounts when they add more domains.

Other new features in this latest rollout focus on integration. Optify data is now integrated into the Salesforce activity feed and with Chatter. These improvements make it easier for salespeople to see what’s happening in their social channels. Users can manage multiple Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn accounts with a single sign-on; Google+ sharing and support is an expected next step, according to Goffman.

Optify’s Basic Edition is $99/month, Professional is $499/month, and the Enterprise Edition is customizable. Quarterly and annual subscribers receive a discount on their services, while all users get a free 14-day trial.

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Information on how Facebook tracks its users behaviors both on and off site has been released. Most worrisome is that Facebook keeps a running log of the sites a user has visited in the past 90 days.

Facebook Tracking Details Released

The information on how data is tracked was compiled by USA Today, with sources including Facebook representatives Arturo Bejar (Facebook’s engineering director), Gregg Stefancik (Facebook’s engineering manager), Andrew Noyes (Facebook spokesman), and Barry Schnitt (Facebook corporate spokesman).

Facebook’s tracking begins when you visit Facebook for the first time. If you register for an account, you get two cookies: a browser and a session cookie, the first of which allows Facebook to show an alternative message the next time you arrive and the second of which declares which account you’re using. If you don’t register for an account, you’ll only get the browser cookie.

This alone is hardly worrisome; basic session cookies are very common. However, every page that has a Facebook plugin, including a Facebook “like” button, will then manipulate your cookies. Since the cookie stores information on every page that you visit that has a Facebook plugin, and a huge number of pages have such plugins, Facebook is able to keep an accurate log of which sites you’ve visited. This information is stored by Facebook for 90 days.

If you visit a site while not logged in but with the cookie in your browser, your system IP address, screen resolution, operating system, and other basic system information are stored. If you’re logged into your Facebook account at the time that you visit a site that has a plugin, your basic personal information (name, email, friend information, etc.) are also stored.

How the Information Is Used

According to everything Facebook has indicated and all known uses of the data, the company is using the personal information only to get an accurate idea of how plugins are performing, how much the site is used, what browsers are popular, and ways the the social network can improve its appeal.

The issue is in the potential use of the data. Since Facebook has a log of the sites you’ve visited, it can gain unintended insight on a user’s medical conditions, sexual orientation, religious beliefs, political preferences, and much more. Should Facebook then sell that information or use it to the benefit of advertisers, it would – in the minds of many users, including yours truly – constitute a serious breach of privacy.

This would be less concerning if Facebook didn’t have a patent on using the tracked data for just such a purpose. While Facebook corporate spokesperson Barry Schnitt stated, “We patent lots of things, and future products should not be inferred from our patent application,” his statement did little to alleviate user concerns.

How do you feel about the cookie tracking? Do you think Facebook will abuse the tracked data? How should users respond? What government regulation, if any, should be implemented? Leave your thoughts in the comments, below.

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In response to user requests, Google has added a tool that explicitly searches for exactly and only your search term. This verbatim search removes personalized, corrected, suggested, related, and non-inclusive results.

The Verbatim Tool

After conducting any standard search, users can navigate to the left menu on the SERP and choose “More search options” > “Verbatim.” This will direct the user to a new search results page that eliminates several types of results.

On the verbatim page, users will see only results that:

• Include all their search terms.
• Match their exact spelling.
• Use the same tense (e.g., “is” and “was” will be seen as distinct).
• Use the same verb form (e.g., “swimming” and “swim” will be seen as distinct).
• Use the same plural vs singular form (e.g., “hat” and “hats” will be seen as distinct).

This means that pages that would normally be included simply won’t appear. Some pages set for omission in this case would be those that: use alternate forms or tenses; use synonyms; auto-correct spelling; or are personalized based on the history and social connections of the user.

Verbatim search will replace the “+” functionality in search queries. While putting a phrase in quotes (e.g., “this is my query”) will still pull a search for sites that use the exact phrase and spelling, the verbatim search – as noted above – strips down the results to a far greater degree.

Google also noted that they are “applying similar ideas directly to [their] algorithms, such as tuning the accuracy of when our query broadening search improvements trigger.” This likely means that as users choose to use verbatim searches, Google will gain a better understanding of when their suggestions and corrections are effective and times when they should have been avoided.

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The days of traditional website authority building are long gone. So many innovative channels have become available today that on the surface can make the task seem much easier but require hard work, dedication, and a lot of strategy, too.

Website authority is nothing more than quality, as determined by major search engines. Most search engines take into consideration the number of quality inbound links, the age of the domain, the time visitors spend on the site, and hundreds of other factors. SEOMoz has done a great job of testing, analyzing, and figuring out what authority factors may exist – and best practices surrounding site authority.

One important part of building authority is paying attention to and doing your part to influence social metrics. You can do a number of things to help build your website’s authority with social media. Here are a few tips to help you along the way.

Get Real
Becoming an authority in a given industry isn’t something you can fake. Get real! Get passionate! Get creative!

Think about what it takes to develop expertise and become a sought out member in your industry and a sought out company too. This often requires regularly training staff to keep them up-to-date on industry related topics and constantly tapping into the vein of the industry. Use the information you find to help you craft clever content to add to your site and share on social media.

Know Your Audience

Seemingly simple, the task of figuring out your target demographic often isn’t easy. Conduct social listening research, send out customer surveys and conduct additional research. Use this information to help you understand how to craft your messaging through social media for maximum impact.

Also use the information to help you find particularly “nichey” social sites, forums and blogs. Niche social networks often create more meaningful interaction as reported. So look for sites that cater to your demographic and engage with them appropriately.

Share and Share-alike
Use the notion of share and share alike. This growing trend creates the belief that information should be free, readily available, and users should have the ability to share it/use it however they choose.

How does this apply to you? Don’t keep all that industry trade information to yourself. Start developing content and sharing ideas through social channels that address industry insider knowledge, answer industry questions, provides research data, and anything that showcases you and your brand as experts.

Participation is Key
Just because you might tweet out a few posts, have your content shared on Facebook, and get a few +1’s doesn’t mean you’re automatically seen as an expert or building up authority. Developing your brand’s own authority on a specific social networking platform is mandatory. This often involves being recognized by other authoritative users on the platform, having a lot of followers/friends/circle-ers/etc., high engagement levels, and regular interactions.

Eric Enge’s recent Search Engine Watch post, “Social Signals & SEO: Focus on Authority,” discusses the importance of having an authoritative person in your space share your content and also the importance of building your own authority at the social network level.

Grow Your Network
Make an effort to network with others in your industry in an attempt to build your site authority. Interact with them through social media by retweeting their status messages, adding them to Twitter lists, engaging on their Facebook Pages, adding them to your circles on Google+, bookmarking some of their blog posts, and commenting on a few posts too.

The old adage “do unto others” applies here. You’ll slowly see them do the same for your content and messages.

Quality
It may seem tempting to send out 40 tweets in a day and 10 Facebook status updates a week, but quality over quantity is always best. Develop a keen eye for quality and think hard about how your brand will be perceived if you tweet, post, write, or comment.

Offer Your Help

Monitor all the areas where your brand can offer up help to people asking questions or seeking information. Track long tail search terms that are frequently asked questions in your industry – use Google Alerts, Twitter Search, and inboxq.com.

Have FAQs sent to a team e-mail address and respond to them as applicable. You’ll find that many online users will ask questions or ask for help through social media. Be there to help answer their questions and you’ll find that your perceived expertise and authority will only grow over time.

Conclusion
Building your website’s authority requires a well-rounded approach and having a feel for what you should do within the social realm is important. The above tips can help you realize the path you should head down in your journey to becoming an authority online.

Don’t forget the other areas required to build authority, however, which are showcased in the below graphic. All efforts together create a working model for how you can succeed in the authority building game.

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WordPress has made it very easy for small businesses to have a website that is easy to update and maintain, but do you know how to optimize your WordPress site so that it has the best chance of appearing at the top of your customers’ search results?

The process is similar to optimizing any website, but with a WordPress installation you can customize many of your pages’ SEO elements, as well as automating them to cut down on the time it takes to post a new item to your site.

WordPress vs. WordPress.com

Templates

Having your blog hosted at WordPress.com limits the changes you can make to your page template. But more importantly, it restricts your SEO. Having your site hosted on WordPress.com only benefits WordPress.com in terms of backlinks generated.

Make sure that from day one you’re in control by hosting your blog on your own domain. That way you get all the credit for backlinks generated and reap the rewards for strengthening the overall reputation of your domain in the search engines.

SEO Plugins

SEO plugins can be a great way to optimize you site and make blog management much easier.

There are several useful WordPress plugins, so it’s a case of finding the ones that work best for your needs. The ones which stand out for SEO, to name just a couple are:

• All in One SEO
• Broken Link Checker
• SEO Smart Links
• Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARRP)
• Urban Giraffe Redirection

Stay up-to-date and Avoid Malware Google Alerts

WordPress hacking for malware is common. Google now provides alerts on this within Webmaster Tools as it causes big issues to the quality of their results shown to searchers.

Make sure that you stay up-to-date and check those malware reports in Google Webmaster Tools just to make sure everything is safe.

SEO for WordPress

WordPress is naturally very well set up for SEO, in terms of header optimization, title tags, internal/cross-linking, etc. The plugins, such as All in One SEO, will go a long way toward improving this further.

However, WordPress doesn’t do it all for you. You still need to keywords after all!

Plus, you need to make sure you put effort into optimizing URL structure and internal linking, to make sure your blog is as well optimized as possible.

Great Content = Great SEO

In terms of optimizing each page or post within the main body text, there are again several key areas to focus on, such as including target keyword phrases in headlines and the body of the post.

More importantly, make sure you write for users. SEO is important when running a blog – but I would always sacrifice SEO in favor of writing a post that has the potential to generate attention and go viral.

Links are obviously the most important single ranking factor in SEO, so well-optimized content with no links is still likely to be out-ranked by un-optimized great content with lots of links.

You might get some good “freshness” rankings in the short-term – but as with Google’s Panda update, we all know that longer-term quality content will succeed.

Optimization’ at its Best

To really achieve true optimization, your content needs to be great – that’s why the likes of ProBlogger, SEOmoz, etc., will rank for so many long-tail searches. Yes, they use keywords – but more importantly they write great content that attracts thousands of links.

But there are still a few quick wins, too. Use the SEO plugins. Even if you think your site or blog is optimized, look again at its URL structure, the title tags, the use of internal linking, image alt tags, and text formatting.

You could find that, somewhere along the line, you’ve missed that game-changing SEO technique that could take your page from the middle of page two to the top of page one in the search engine results pages.

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