For brick & mortar businesses and those that involve face to face customer contact, Google Places (and Yahoo Local and Bing Local) are important sources of traffic. These are the listings that show up next to a map of suitable matches.

Google Places is sporting a new look that also reflects changes in their approach. For example, there’s an increased emphasis on customer reviews. At the same time, Google will no longer re-post reviews from paces like Yelp as it did in the past. Instead, it will be emphasizing reviews from within Google Places itself — with two prominent red Write A Review buttons to encourage that. You can read more about this at Search Engine Land.

Citations are more important now than ever. Citations are mentions of a business, even if they don’t include a link. So in addition to the well-known positive effect of link popularity on your organic listings, non-linked citations can be especially helpful in your local listings.

A few months ago Google released a major algorithm update called the Farmer update or, more officially, the Panda update. (It’s named for it’s major contributor at Google, Navneet Panda.) Our clients have fared very well, but lots of websites have suffered dramatic rankings losses. We wrote about some approaches to deal with that back in May.

Recently Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz released a video on how the Panda Up-date has changed SEO practices “forever”. While that may be overstating it, the video can be very helpful. Here’s a excerpt that we found particularly interesting.

Let’s talk about a few of the specific things that we can be doing as SEOs to help with this new sort of SEO, this broader web content/web strategy portion of SEO.

First off, design and user experience. I know, good SEOs have been preaching design user experience for years because it tends to generate more links, people contribute more content to it, it gets more social signal shares and tweets and all this other sort of good second order effect.

And don’t forget, Google has actually said publicly that even if you have a great site, if you have a bunch of pages that are low quality on that site, they can drag down the rankings of the rest of the site.

Content quality matters a lot. So a lot of time, in the SEO world, people will say, “Well, you have to have good, unique, useful content.” Not enough. Sorry. It’s just not enough. … If you say, “Oh, I have 50,000 pages about 50,000 different motorcycle parts and I am just going to go to Mechanical Turk or I am going to go outsource, and I want a 100 word, two paragraphs about each one of them, just describe what this part is.” You think to yourself, “Hey, I have good unique content.” No, you have content that is going to be penalized by Panda. That is exactly what Panda is designed to do. It is designed to say this is content that someone wrote for SEO purposes just to have good unique content on the page, not content that makes everyone who sees it want to share it and say wow. Right?

If I get to a page about a motorcycle part and I’m like, “God, not only is this well written, it’s kind of funny. It’s humorous. It includes some anecdotes. It’s got some history of this part. It has great photos. Man, I don’t care at all about motorcycle parts, and yet, this is just a darn good page. What a great page. If I were interested, I’d be tweeting about this, I’d share it. I’d send it to my uncle who buys motorcycles. I would love this page.”

That’s what you have to optimize for. It is a totally different thing than optimizing for did I use the keyword at least three times? Did I put it in the title tag? Is it included in there? Is the rest of the content relevant to the keywords? Panda changes this. Changes it quite a bit.

Not so much.

Matt Cutts says Google’s not a huge fan. He says that sites which publish articles from article repositories tend not to be the highest quality sites, and there’s always the risk of duplicate content issues. He says that he would tend to “lean away from it” in preference to developing great content that can attract legitimate links itself, and promoting it with social media.

See Matt discuss article marketing.

At Rank Magic, we sometimes help clients with article marketing if that’s what they want, but we usually recommend they place such articles on their own website first. Then we can apply social media exposure to the original article. Once that’s done, if the client still wants to see if article marketing can help, we can facilitate that.

The key, really, is having content with enough value that people will want to link to it. The social media promotion just helps make more people aware of that content on our client’s website.

In a recent video by Matt Cutts, “The Google Guy”, he answers a question about the top three things an in-house SEO should focus on. They were:

• Improve page speed because the faster your pages download, the more visitor interaction occurs and the more likely a visitor is to convert to a paying customer.
• Make sure internal linking is done well, with appropriate keywords in link text, but not so much that it’s spammy. Also make sure you have no broken links. (We check our client sites monthly for that.)
• Invest time and effort in social media marketing.

It’s the last one I want to focus on here, and if you watch the video, it starts in the middle of Matt’s response, just where he starts to talk about social media marketing. The point is that once you have great content on your site, social media marketing will expose your site to many more people. Links from various social media outlets help your link popularity, people who visit your site as a result might link to it, and all that will help both your search engine rankings and your overall visibility.

Matt mentions some of our favorite social media sites; here’s a list for you to consider:

• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Reddit
• Digg
• Delicious
• StumbeUpon

We have found social media marketing well worth the attention it requires. For example, we make sure to send each new blog post to all of the above social sites, and we’re finding dramatically increased participation as a result, getting comments on our blog posts from all over the world.

Check out Matt’s video advice.

Google introduced its new +1 button today, as part of its foray into social media in response to major email inroads from Facebook. It allows people to click on it to register a vote in favor of a web page or blog post, much the way they can now click a Facebook “like” button.

Google has stated that they will use +1 activity as another one of the many factors they use to rank websites; the more +1 votes you get, the better.

CNet previewed the new button about a month ago, with a prospective overview, and even the Wall Street Journal expressed early interest.

Webmasters are right now scrambling to figure out how to place and use the new +1 button. We hope to have it live on our site and blog soon. When you see it, please click on it so we can evaluate just what it does to rankings and visibility in general.

Google’s recent algorithm update named Panda has caused many websites to lose rankings in a big way. Most deserved it, but not all. Earlier this month, NPR ran a story about a furniture store called One Way Furniture that had been hurt badly by Panda, mainly due to its use of canned product descriptions, which they copied from their manufacturers’ listings.

Apparently Panda identified the duplicate content and downgraded the value of the pages at One Way Furniture. There are some other suspected factors at work in their rankings plummet as well. Now they’re slowly climbing back to their pre-Panda rankings through a lot of effort:

• Removing duplicate content and rewriting product descriptions
• Using the canonical HTML tag to resolve multiple URLs that point to the same page
• Proper use of 301 redirects
• Paying close attention to their page speed
• Constantly building backlinks.
• One of the things they did was to hire some new copywriters to write original product descriptions aimed at being search engine friendly, and not duplicates of manufacturer descriptions.

CEO Mitch Lieberman said

For example, a bar stool that previously used a manufacturer-supplied bullet list of details as its product description now has a five-sentence description that details how it can complement a bar set-up, links to bar accessories and sets the tone by mentioning alcoholic beverages, all of which makes it more SEO-friendly. What we’re seeing now is what is good for customers and what they see on the site is also good for Google.

Another online publication that was badly hurt by Panda, DaniWeb, published a recovery story earlier this month. They cited their own reasons for the hit and what they’ve  been doing to get out of it:

“I guess it also goes without saying that it’s also important to constantly build backlinks, It is entirely possible/plausible that Google’s Panda algorithm hit all of the low quality sites that were just syndicating and linking back to us (with no unique content of their own), ultimately discrediting half of the sites in our backlink portfolio, killing our traffic indirectly. Therefore, it isn’t that we got flagged by Panda’s algorithm, but rather that we just need to work on building up more backlinks.”

Their experience reminds us to be vigilant. Perhaps Google’s page speed factor is more heavily weighted than we thought. And maintaining fresh inbound links from reputable websites is always important.

Matt Cutts (“The Google Guy”) spoke at an industry meeting a few months ago, and as reported by Search Engine Land, there was news in what he had to say. Here are the most important points to note, in our opinion:

• Spam reports now get 4 times as much priority as before in the spam queue at Google. If your competitors are using spammy SEO techniques, it can’t hurt to report them. (Your competitors can report you, too, of course, so remember to avoid black hat SEO tactics yourself.) And if you find really spammy web sites like link farms and MFA sites showing up for your keywords, by all means report them to Google.
• Users are more likely to click on the first link in an article as opposed to a link at the bottom of the article. He suggested you put your most important links at the top of the page. They may not count more for SEO purposes, but will help in driving visitors to click on the links, especially call-to-action links that encourage visitors to buy.
• Google will be looking at why exact domain matches rank so well. For example, if you have a site at www.blue-widgets.com it may rank too well for the keyword phrase blue widgets. Expect the importance of keywords in your domain name to be reduced. We’ve always encouraged different criteria for choosing your domain name.
• When doing Keyword research, start with keywords your customer base is likely to use, and avoid industry jargon. The rule of thumb is called Ask 10 Taxi Drivers (meaning people NOT in the same business as yours).

Let’s say someone writes a scathing indictment of you or your company. Very possibly, anyone searching for your name will find those negative comments. Bad news!

Online reputation management companies work to minimize the impact of those negative reviews (seldom can you get them completely removed) by creating optimized positive content that will show up higher than the negative content. Push it down far enough and few if any people will ever see it.

Of course those concerned with ethical SEO discourage anything you do just for the search engines and that’s not useful to searchers. So will this tactic cause you trouble with the search engines? At Google, apparently not. Recently on NPR’s All Tech Considered, it was remarked that:

Google doesn’t seem to have a problem with the whole game [search suppression]. As the world’s largest search engine, a spokesman there says creating new content to hide negative material is fair play.

Google’s own post on this reinforces that position:

For example, if someone posts a negative review of your business on a restaurant review or consumer complaint site, that site might not be willing to remove the review. If you can’t get the content removed from the original site, you probably won’t be able to completely remove it from Google’s search results, either. Instead, you can try to reduce its visibility in the search results by proactively publishing useful, positive information about yourself or your business. If you can get stuff that you want people to see to outperform the stuff you don’t want them to see, you’ll be able to reduce the amount of harm that that negative or embarrassing content can do to your reputation.

Note that they specify useful information. Don’t just publish optimized garbage and expect it to do well. But if you generate useful content, it shouldn’t get you in trouble with Big G.

Last month, Bing and Yahoo increased their share of total US searches, at the expense of Google.

Google now accounts for 64% of searches, Bing powered search  accounts for 30%. Both Bing and Yahoo are powered by Bing now; Yahoo gets 16% of searches and Bing gets 14%. All the remaining search engines split the remaining 6% of US searches.

Google’s share is down  by 3% last month, Bing’s share is up 6% and Yahoo’s share is up by 5%, continuing the improving trend for the Bing-powered search engines.

We recently wrote about Google’s change to its search algorithm, which had been unoffically nicknamed the Farmer Update. Officially called Panda at Google, it’s dramatically shaken up the businesses of websites that moved up or down its search rankings. Sites whose rankings rose to the top found that their traffic and revenue soared — but the adjustment had an equally devastating effect on those that were dropped.

The Online Publishers Association, a group of content producers comprising many of the Internet’s largest properties (including CNN.com), estimates that the algorithm change shifted $1 billion in annual revenue.

So-called content-farms were hit by the update. Google’s Matt Cutts specifically cited Suite101.com: the rankings of that website have dropped drastically and their search traffic is down 94%. Legitimate websites with valuable content generally gained rankings as a result of the Panda algorithm update.