By Duncan Parry, Search Engine Watch, 27th January 2012

After a year’s delay, Microsoft adCenter will start to power the PPC results on Yahoo UK in Q2 of 2012. Discussion of its potential for success aside, here are some useful links and an action plan for preparing UK campaigns.

[Read more →]

By Duncan Parry, Search Engine Watch,  July 20, 2011

Friends. Followers. Contacts. Circles. Social networks can be fun and productive for work or pleasure.

But social networks are also time consuming – more than most of us probably care to admit. With the average person reported to have 130 friends and growing on Facebook alone, the continuous flow of updates from individuals and organizations is overwhelming. From that page you liked on Facebook, to that industry pundit you follow on Twitter, and many others in between, everybody is updating, tweeting, posting, liking, checking in, sharing, +1ing…

Here’s the thing. It’s too much. Admit it. You’re overwhelmed.

I’ve declared a few times on Facebook and Twitter my plans to carry out a cull. A few people or pages get dropped. But…what if that person notices? What if that ex-colleague goes to work somewhere interesting? What if I miss that industry announcement or insider tip? Better not be too harsh, better stay connected.

I’m now on five social networks – four public ones and one closed network for work (Yammer). This week I’ve faced the truth: it’s too much. Time for a cull. But where to start?

Facebook

I know instinctively that Facebook is my personal space – it’s where friends and family share photos and post personal updates. It’s where I go to get away from work – not to blend the personal and professional.

Step one: un-friend work-only contacts and pages. Step two: move them to LinkedIn or Twitter depending on their social media activity; do I want to only keep in contact with them (LinkedIn) or read what they have to say (Twitter)?

Twitter

I maintain several accounts for myself and work, and the work accounts have clear objectives and strategies. My own, I freely admit, doesn’t. It’s a collection of personal and work interests, and I’m a generous follower.

Time for a change. This is the worrying bit – do I follow my instinct, and cull anybody I don’t regularly find useful? Will I miss out? What will happen to my follower volume? Should I care?

I’ve decide to not rush in here – analyzing hundreds of followers and then making bulk changes, whether un-following or adding them to lists, isn’t particularly easy and I’ve yet to find a tool with all the functionality I want to speed this up. Instead, I’m removing accounts I don’t find useful when I see messages from them – cleaning up my Twitter stream as I go.

LinkedIn & Yammer

LinkedIn is the easiest to keep under control – I’m cautious of adding anybody who approaches me (especially recruiters). Yammer, as a B2B network, is even easier to keep relevant – I have 100 percent control over groups and who I follow (OK, so I’m an admin, which helps.)

Google Plus

Now that’s a blank canvas. So how will I avoid repeating the mistakes I’ve drifted into on Facebook and Twitter?

Circles. I’ve immediately setup three – Work, Family & Friends and Acquaintances. I know I’ll add a further one for “Hobbies & Sports” when businesses and organizations have official pages. I might split my work circle up in future – but I’m keeping them small, and have already started consciously ignoring some followers who I don’t want in my circles.

Social Media Relevancy

If I used to be your friend on Facebook, or I no longer mutually follow you on Twitter, sorry. Relevancy has been one of the underpinning characteristics of the biggest success story of digital – search – and the same applies to social media.

Life’s too short, too busy, and too rushed for the irrelevant. For that attitude, I won’t apologize.

By Duncan Parry, Search Engine Watch,  Mar 2, 2011

In January, Google introduced a useful addition to AdWords that potentially makes managing negative keywords across multiple campaigns a lot easier. Maybe it was because January is such a busy time of year, but it’s a feature that seems to have passed by many advertisers. Here’s a recap.

What are Negative Keyword Lists?

Simply put, a central place to store master list(s) of negative keywords and apply them to multiple campaigns. This is an improvement on the old way of doing this in AdWords, when you had to laboriously copy and paste negatives between campaigns – a process which can mean copying 1000s of words for a mature campaign that’s been built out over time.

Accessing Negative Keyword Lists

The lists are easy to access. In AdWords, simply click “Control panel and library” on the left of the screen, and select “Negative keyword lists”.

In the example above, you can see that I’ve already got a list in place of 127 keywords applied to 4 campaigns. You can create multiple lists and apply them to different combinations of campaigns. This is useful if you want to apply a master list of negatives to all campaigns, and another, separate list to only a select few – for example if your product range is limited in some regions, but not everywhere.

Creating new lists is easy – just click the “New negative keyword list button”, name the list and paste in the keywords. Of course you’ll need to spend some time consolidating existing lists across campaigns – more on that later – and then you’ll need to apply them to campaigns. That’s where I am afraid AdWords interface design provides something of an obstacle.

Applying Negative Lists to Campaigns

Using this feature, it feels like Google designed it without thinking through the workflow involved for existing campaigns – i.e. most of their customers. Once you have created lists, there’s no easy way to apply them to multiple campaigns. Instead, you have to go into every single campaign and then apply the lists(s) that are relevant to that campaign.

Here’s the process:

1. Click “All online campaigns” on the menu on the left of your screen
2. Click the campaign to apply the list to
3. Click the “Keywords” tab
4. Scroll to the bottom of this screen
5. Click “Negative Keywords”
6. On the right of the inflated lists that appear, click “Keyword Lists”
7. Click “Add”
8. Click “Add” next to the negative keyword list you want to apply
9. Repeat across multiple lists
10. Click “Save”

Unfortunately, you need to repeat these steps for every campaign – there’s no way at the time of writing to select multiple campaigns and apply the same list(s) to them all at once – which would have been a real time saver. There’s no way to apply them to multiple accounts within the same MCC, either, something that would help with enterprise level accounts like national retailers.

Negative Keyword List Deployment Steps

Interface gripes aside, negative keyword lists are a worthwhile addition to any AdWords campaign. Here’s some steps to follow to get the most out of them:

1)     Download your account via AdWords Editor;

2)     Sort the columns in Excel and delete all of the rows and columns with anything other that negative keywords and the keyword type in them;

3)     Use these to plan the lists you need – I’d suggest a “Whole Account” list of terms you’d never, ever want your ads to appear for, and then any more specific lists you need around those you have in AdGroups or only in some campaigns in the download;

4)     Re-arrange the negatives in the download to populate these lists and save them;

5)     Add any additional terms that spring to mind, or you can find via SQRs or keyword tools;

6)     Save the master list(s) and then start adding them via the procedure above;

7)     Update your campaign build out process to include applying these lists to any new campaigns in future.

Negative keyword lists will no doubt become a standard of AdWords campaign management – hopefully Google will improve the interface over time and add support via AdWords Editor and the API, too.

By Gareth Owen, Search Engine Watch, Mar 16 2011

Depending on who you speak to, search engine optimization (SEO) is either largely influenced or not at all influenced by social media. I’m sure everyone has their own opinions, case studies, and sites that show greater or lesser correlations between their social media engagement levels and their natural search results.

If you were to carry out an investigation into whether social media was a big influencing factor, which metrics would you want to monitor in order to base your insights on more empirical data?

I’ve put together a list of 13 ranking factors below. Feel free to use these and any others you can get your grubby SEO mitts on!

1. Number of Followers (Twitter)

You’ll need your own corporate Twitter feed, which brings its own problems around brand protection and also the potential for dealing with customer service enquiries, but the more followers you have, the more authoritative your Twitter persona and the more value will be associated with your URL (assuming you have remembered to link to it).

2. Quality of Followers (Twitter)

The best followers are the ones with their own communities of followers. The more high value people who follow you, and retweet your stuff, the better.

3. Relevance of Followers (Twitter)

It’s one thing getting followed and retweeted by Stephen Fry with over a million followers, but it’s also important to get the same response from accounts that are more specific to your industry. Someone with “fashion” in their description who retweets your “20 percent off the new spring collection” offer is equally valuable.

4. Number of Retweets (Twitter)

Most likely as a ratio of tweets to retweets — the more your content is reproduced by others the more authoritative it is. Obviously the more followers you have, the more likely you are to be retweeted. However, it isn’t just about retweeting other people’s content or dishing out promotions. It’s about engaging in conversation with people in the industry.

5. Number of Fans (Facebook)

You’ll need to create your own corporate profile on Facebook, which brings the same potential banana skins as a corporate Twitter feed, only multiplied numerous times due to the sheer level of engagement of people on Facebook. However, if you decide to engage with customers and potential customers on Facebook, the total number of likes your page receives will add value to your URL.

6. Number of Comments (Facebook)

A large number of likes, but little engagement, is a sure sign of someone gaming the system. People will tend to like you if you talk to them. Successful Facebook pages include a lot of content written by other people.

7. Number of Views (YouTube)

An obvious one, but any content you upload to YouTube should link to your site in the description, and the more times it is viewed, the more value will be attributed to your video.

8. User Comments (YouTube)

YouTube is also about engaging with other YouTubers and commenting on popular videos. The more you comment, the more link juice is passed back to your profile.

9. References From Independent Profiles (YouTube)

Using YouTube can bring in some really good authority if done brilliantly — if your link from your video passes some value, imagine how much more value would be passed if you could get other people to parody your work and include links to you from their profiles. The prime example remains the Cadbury’s Gorilla, but there are lots of interesting mini-campaigns trying to leverage the above.

10. Title of Video (YouTube)

Any references to your target keywords in the title of the video will help ensure that any authority passed will be relevant to a specific theme. Keywords should also be in the tags and or transcript where possible.

11. Percent of Likes vs. Dislikes (YouTube)

Easy one. The more liked your content is, the more authoritative it is.

12. Positive vs. Negative Brand Mentions (All Social Media)

Use a tool like Radian6, or a free tool, and ensure that you have significantly more positive brand mentions than negative. It won’t be 100 percent accurate as these things don’t pick up on sarcasm. But Google has already made investment in this area in 2011, so it’s well worth monitoring.

13. Number of Social Mentions (All Potential Media)

Total visibility across all social media shows that your content is important to all people and not just a result of a large special offer for Facebook/Twitter users. HowSociable is a simple way of giving yourself a rating here.

By Duncan Parry, Search Engine Watch,  Mar 2, 2011

Many agencies, publishers, and advertisers across Europe have been sent documents by the European Commission (EC) recently, requesting detailed information about the online advertising marketplace — and about search marketing and AdWords in particular.

This is part of an investigation into Google and antitrust. While a response isn’t mandatory, questioning from industry bodies has elicited a response that suggests the commission can, if it wants to, make it compulsory.

I’ve been critical of Google’s market dominance in the past and still firmly believe strong competition in every area of their business is good for the industry and for consumers. But while reading and answering the overlapping questions in the two documents my agency has received, I feel a growing unease that the bureaucrats who will ultimately pass judgment on Google may do more damage than good.

The questions in the documents fall into several broad categories:

• Define the digital services you provide and therefore the marketplace.
• The extent to which campaigns need to differ per country and to what extent that poses barriers.
• Scenarios around when ad spend would be switch away from horizontal PPC ads (i.e. AdWords) to other platforms or ad types.
• A surprising number of questions around how easy it is to port data between AdWords and other platforms, how easy Google make this and if it could be done “by a programmatic tool.”
• Questions about the AdWords API, legal agreements with Google and anyway Google tries to restrict the use of other platforms.
  It’s the questions about porting campaigns and the API that worry me. This isn’t one question but a series, probing for details of current processes, in-house and external tools, and the time and money involved — all asking if Google makes this difficult.

We all know that a copy and paste of a campaign from Google into adCenter or any other ad platform won’t bring the best results — the systems have different campaign options, treat search strings and match types differently, have different consumer user bases, etc.

I wouldn’t want to use a “programmatic tool” to dump campaigns into other system from AdWords.

Do I want to download them, open them, edit them to fit each platform and then quickly upload them? Yes. We all know how to use the various search engine editors and Excel today.

This feels like a line of inquiry a competing ad platform would push hardest — we all know there’s been lobbying. I’m not accusing any one company and I trust the EC has processes in place to prevent bias. I’m just wondering aloud if this is the most useful direction for the commission to proceed in.

What worries me is this is exactly the sort of narrow-minded approach to the market that could lead to a ruling that’s bad for PPC — at an extreme, ordering Google to add a “port” button to copy campaigns to adCenter or other systems — with no reference to the poor performance that may follow. Knowing how to get the best out of different ad platforms is a skill in itself.

Hopefully the detailed answers being written by search experts will steer the commission toward more genuine areas of concern, such as Google’s practice of contacting big advertisers directly without telling their agencies (I saw an example of this the other day, unsolicited by the client) or locking-off top AdWords slots for its own products — and that’s before we talk about DoubleClick or their market share as a whole.

Martin Sorrell never said a truer word when he described Google as a “frenemy.”

This topic will be a slow burning one in Europe — and in all likelihood, by the time the bureaucratic wheels have finished turning, the marketplace will have changed again, anyway.

By Gareth Owen, Search Engine Watch, Feb 16 2011

Alex Cohen yesterday wrote about how paid results are increasingly getting clicks at the expense of organic results in “PPC vs. SEO: Paid Search as Your Organic Competitor.”

Today, we’ll look at some of the changes in how we attribute value in SEO, and how we’re increasingly turning to tactics that were previously considered to be the realm of paid search professionals in order to meet client expectations.

Three trends have led this charge:

1.A clear and continuing drop in the value of major generic keywords in natural search (historic data, Google products, use of search).
2.Renewed interest in exactly how the “halo” effect of optimization works and how ROI can be attributed.
3.Speed of results from good optimization.
Drop in Generic Keywords in Natural Search

This has been driven partly by people and partly by the search engines. Check Google Trends for any number of “high volume” generic keywords (car insurance, televisions, loans, dishwashers, handbags, etc.) and you’ll see a consistent trend over the last five years.

While I wouldn’t necessarily put 100 percent faith in the figures, they would reflect a degree of reality from what I see in client campaigns.

Look at searches for [televisions]:

Aside from drop in volumes, the space attributed to natural search results has been quite drastically cut in a number of areas.

Paid search results consistently give three listings at the top of the page now, with sitelinks and product feed results too. They can even push natural search listings below the fold on some screens.

To further complicate matters, there are now many more “products” (e.g., local business results, shopping feed listings) to compete against. In a world where rankings used to really matter, position three is no longer position three.

Renewed Focus on ‘Halo’ Search Traffic

Anyone who has ever optimized their own website will tell you that building links for a certain keyword (e.g., “hamster cage”) will improve your ranking. But these links, as well as URL and branded links, will also improve the overall authority of your site after you get your first number one ranking, making it easier for your site to rank more easily for other keywords.

Attributing this value, however, is actually quite hard unless you’re starting from scratch.

The upshot has been that keyword ranking reports are getting bigger and bigger in order to more clearly show traffic increases as direct results of specific keyword ranking improvements. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as long as other metrics like the total number of keywords driving traffic are also considered.

This is in turn moving us toward reports that include so much keyword data that merging PPC and SEO reports at keyword level could become much easier.

It has also meant that the keywords being targeted for SEO are bigger in number. Consider making bigger lists of categorized keywords for SEO a part of your strategy.

SEO Techniques Work Much Quicker Than Ever Before

This can be attributed to a number of factors and developments. But the sheer speed of indexing from Google in particular has undoubtedly been a factor.

On the plus side: small keywords can be targeted more easily, as the results of your activities are that much quicker and more transparent than ever before.

All in all, the keyword research and granular focus of PPC is becoming ever more a part of SEO — and this is no bad thing!

By Duncan Parry, Search Engine Watch,  Feb 2, 2011

Following its successful rollout in North America, Microsoft and Yahoo are focusing on rolling out the Search Alliance in Europe, starting with natural search results on Yahoo UK.

This move is largely welcome. With a UK market share of less than 10 percent for Yahoo and MSN, it makes more sense to manage campaigns on one interface. Right now, Yahoo staff are being trained on adCenter in preparation for moving their clients’ campaigns over.

Filling in my agency’s response to the European investigation into Google, I had to list a number of features of the AdWords platform. We all know the depth and breadth of development of AdWords outpaced Yahoo (and Overture) and comparative newcomer Microsoft a long time ago.

But where are the beta trials from Redmond? Where are the new initiatives, the new ideas from engineers that will differentiate the adCenter platform from AdWords, raise the revenue per search Microsoft receives, and grow loyalty with advertisers?

Try as I might, I can’t remember the last “big” change or enhancement on adCenter since Microsoft launched a desktop tool similar to AdWords Editor.

Parallel Races

It’s easy to sit outside a company and poke holes at their strategy. Microsoft has lots of intelligent, hard-working people who are pushing their search efforts forward — sometimes despite other people internally, I suspect.

They’ve built a search engine, created a PPC platform, and started to take the fight to Google (but let’s be honest, Yahoo’s been the main loser and Ask was already fading away).

As Bing introduced new features and received attention, Google seemed to wake out of a slumber and started rolling out new features in search results, continued its relentless development of AdWords and, with increasing speed, the development of its display business through DoubleClick.

So the foundations are firmly in place from Microsoft. They’re gaining traffic from their Yahoo deal and their own activities. Bing keeps adding new features.

But where’s the innovation in adCenter? I’m not talking blog posts, research reports, or tools around-the-edge (which they are often good at); I’m talking hardcore, at-the-center innovation that every advertiser, big or small, will be able to use. Things like Google’s sitelinks — self-service, enhancing search results and, crucially from a revenue per search basis, raising CTRs (and often ROI for advertisers — leading to increased budgets).

Several races are happening in parallel here. Market share is one, but there are others (e.g., innovation in PPC, further exploiting the connection between display and search).

Microsoft and Yahoo have strong experience in display and have done some work in this area — but Google is catching up, fast. They may not have the premium level display inventory Yahoo and Microsoft have access to, but with remarketing in AdWords Google has made the sort of retargeting once considered the preserve of the most well-funded advertisers available to all.

Search marketers are adopting this tactic in droves — but only on Google’s platform or through third parties — not adCenter.

What Could Microsoft Do?

So, if I think Microsoft should be innovating more in PPC, what would I suggest? The obvious example, sitelinks, bears some thinking about.

Sitelinks undoubtedly offer convenient ways for site owners to channel consumers into the right section of a site following a one-word brand search or ambiguous generic. The format and mechanics could be different — sitelinks can be improved in terms of reporting data and control over which links are shown.

Is this copying an idea and developing it further? Yes. After all, Google wasn’t the first PPC engine — they took the idea and added engineering rocket fuel.

Several other areas spring to mind — things Google is already doing, but not always that well: local information in PPC ads, incorporating feeds to enhance PPC ads (more control of which products display for which searches would be a start), and the ability to buy non-premium display inventory via adCenter for retargeting.

There are probably much better ideas out there, not to mention the ones bubbling away in the heads of engineers at Microsoft.

Do I feel Microsoft is distracted by the challenge of onboarding an increased volume of traffic, new advertisers, and training Yahoo!’s staff? Yes.

Do I hope we’ll see a burst of innovation on adCenter afterward? Yes.

But underlying concern is it’ll be too late — Google will have moved ahead in all these races, and there will be new ones opening up that adCenter won’t be equipped to enter. That will be bad for all of us in search — especially those of us in a market where Google already dominates 90 percent of searches.

By Gareth Owen, Search Engine Watch, Jan 19 2011

Two subjects have been prominent in search engine optimization (SEO) over the last month or so: the quality of sites appearing in Google’s results, and the impact of social media links on ranking.

We noticed a couple of fairly major changes on Sunday in rankings for a couple of verticals where the volume of contextual links and number of linking domains were favored.

This is different than the trend we saw in November/December when on-site content, social media visibility, and especially link profile diversity were favored.

Although this is a heavily generalized summary of what we saw, it strongly indicates that while social media links have been increasingly making their presence felt in the SERPs, the engines (in particular Google) may be responding to an increase in “manipulative social activity.”

Perhaps Google has changed how it treats these links since the announcement that social media activity is indeed a ranking factor, (although it’s still unclear how big a portion of the algorithm they occupy).

While a lot of testing and theorizing is occurring in the SEO community regarding the what, why, and how of social media as a ranking factor, there are certain fundamentals of using social media as part of your campaign that aren’t likely to change — some simple dos and don’ts.

There are many factors to take into account when looking at individual social sites; the points below are meant to act as a general guide.

Do:

• Forge real social relationships in your verticals. Having a large number of followers/friends is nice, but it’s the people you have a one-to-one connection with who are more likely retweet, share, and Like your content.
• Pay attention to the numbers you can’t see. With social media it’s easy to get caught up with simple metrics like number of tweets, followers, and friends when assessing the value of an individual’s social profile. You’d be better served examining the entire “profile web” associated with that person. Are their followers also authoritative (who follows the followers)? Are they semantically relevant? How widely are their contributions shared (and by who)?

Don’t:

• Expect a ranking spike every time. But monitor the different conditions under which they occur and note correlations.
• Rely on the big numbers. Again, certain metrics and be misleading. You wouldn’t just look at visible PageRank when prospecting for links.
• Spam! This should go without saying, but doing things like firing out post after post of nothing but promotional material, paying bots for retweets, etc., won’t do much other than alienate both users and search engines alike.

As with regular backlinks, it’s quality and not necessarily quantity that will win the day with social SEO.

It’s also important to note that the more traditional, contextual, anchor text focused link is by no means dead and buried. The mantra for the “future proof” natural search campaign should remain: “create valuable content, share appropriately, and target a wide range of channels.”

By Gareth Owen, Search Engine Watch, Dec 15 2011

It’s that time of year again. SEO bloggers are either looking back at their predictions for 2010 and seeing how right (or wrong) they were, or making entirely new predictions for 2011 — possibly because they were so wrong last year that it wasn’t worth looking back?

I want to focus on just one prediction for 2011 and then go ahead and try to make it happen on behalf of my clients. This seems like a more simple task than coming up with five or 10 predictions, knowing that some of them were made up simply so that I could fill a blog post.

The big news in SEO recently was the revelation that social media signals affect natural search rankings, from interviews with people at both Google and Bing — although no indication was given to how much they affect rankings.

To be fair, if you were a search engine and wanted to know what brands, websites, and general content people wanted to interact with online, where would you go first? It has an added benefit for those who think that the SERPs are a bit spammy (I’m not one of them, for the record).

One way of reducing the number of arguably lower quality websites would be to look at who the popular brands are in the social media space and try to reward them with more authority.

How can SEOs take advantage of what seems to be a clear shift toward sentiment as an extra factor in achieving better rankings?

A growing number of SEO techniques can be undertaken with SEO, and specifically link building, in mind — from PR and advertorials to advertising on relevant industry websites.

In 2011, I expect this to become more closely tied with clients’ overall marketing campaigns. The best way to explain this is with an example:

Client A is a retailer, looking to boost sales of a specific range of camping equipment products. Special offers, promotions, and TV advertising is all planned and will revolve around a creative execution involving a character who will appear in their ads.

The opportunities for SEO here are endless, and need to be part of the initial planning, not an afterthought. For example:

•TV ads to be backed up with a strong PR campaign, aimed at increasing the number of brand and URL links to the client’s site.
•The specialist nature of the goods is such that a blogger outreach campaign can be undertaken, looking for product reviews, advertising opportunities, contextual links, or at least deep links from these relevant sites.
•The ad campaign’s character will have a Facebook and Twitter presence. If it is an engaging campaign, they will get a lot of followers and their profile will have strong social signals, which can then add value when linking back to the site.
•Key influencers for this market on Twitter and Facebook can be contacted and encouraged to review products, follow the main character and will retweet, “Like,” and re-post special offers or product insights.
•A campaign to win a free camping stove can be run as an “online game” (like the “throw the penguin” game, for example) and embedded on blogger sites to increase usage. It can also contain backlinks.
This gives us a “natural” balance between followed and no-followed links, contextual versus brand and URL links, from a variety of highly relevant sources, and also leverages the social media “buzz” metrics as further opportunities.

The point is that SEO, rather than being purely an ongoing process of optimization, will be more influential as part of a campaign-led marketing strategy. In 2011, we’ll need to work with our clients to ensure this happens.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

By Duncan Parry, Search Engine Watch,  Nov 19, 2010

The search industry never stops. From AltaVista to Google, and GoToast to Search Ignite, the fortunes of companies and technologies evolve over time.

I was reminded of this recently when training new hires. They’d never head of names like AltaVista, Excite, Lycos, etc. — companies that defined the search space less than 10 years ago.

So, how do you keep up to date?

Ignore the Noise

It’s important to recognize that there are many, many blogs and articles published about search every day — and many more “experts” on forums and Twitter and in Facebook and LinkedIn groups.

You can ignore most of them. The ability of the search industry to report on, discuss, analyze, argue about, and regurgitate a fact until it has been distorted out of all proportion and attained myth-like status is legendary. There’s a lot of noise — so you need to spend your limited time on sites that are credible and, most importantly, correct.

It’s also important to note that the search engines are no longer search companies — they offer much broader product lines; so you will need to keep up to date on developments in all their products, too, as search is often integrated into them (and paid search revenues pay for them).

Select an RSS Reader

I can’t think of an industry news site that doesn’t have an RSS feed — so choosing a good reader is crucial. There are many available. I use Google Reader to collate and organize feeds by topic in folders as it’s tied to my Google login and easy to use on any computer, iPad, or mobile.

I often use Feedly linked to Google Reader as it offers a slicker interface that feels closer to a magazine. Another bonus of Google Reader is that you can add any URL to it — not just RSS feeds — and Reader will monitor the page for changes and present them as if a feed has updated.

Many sites offer several feeds — follow those most relevant to your area of work and interests; it’s easy to overload yourself with feeds and find you have more than 100 articles to wade through every morning. Pretty soon you’ll find you’re too busy to bother, and end up reading nothing.

Keep an Eye on the Mainstream Press

Sometimes announcements by the search engines receive mainstream coverage — or a story breaks about a negative issue, like the recent Google Street View privacy coverage. Add the technology sections of mainstream sites like the New York Times, USA Today, BBC News, etc., to your reader to ensure you know the stories your clients (and their bosses) are reading over their breakfast.

Digital Overall

To keep any eye on the wider industry I follow a few key sites — Mashable, The Next Web, Robert Scoble, John Battelle’s Search Blog, and Econsultancy, to name a few.

The Search Stalwarts

There are a few search-focused sites that are must-reads. Search Engine Watch and Search Engine Land are the two heavyweights; I receive their newsletters every morning as well as follow their feeds; they provide a summary of the most important search news and topics. Search Engine Roundtable is also important and often have details of new Google tests or rumors with some basis to them as reported on other sites or forums.

There are of course many other digital industry and search sites — the above sites link to good sources as they cover stories, helping you find other sources.

Don’t Forget To Cull

One last piece of advice: don’t forget to delete feeds. Over time, sites change editor, or their focus shifts or their writing declines in quality. So when a site seems to publish nothing of interest, delete it — your time is precious.