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I will be attending Search Engine Strategies Conference in Chicago from December 7-11 (at the Hilton Chicago - 720 S. Michigan Ave, Chicago, IL 60605).

On Tuesday I posted a Q&A with Bill Leake , President and CEO, Apogee Search.  Today I’m pleased to interview Matt Van Wagner of Findmefaster.com.

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I will be attending Search Engine Strategies Conference in Chicago from December 7-11 (at the Hilton Chicago - 720 S. Michigan Ave, Chicago, IL 60605).  As a lead-in to the conference I’m pleased to post a few interviews over the course of this week.

The first subject is Bill Leake , President and CEO, Apogee Search.  Bill also serves as the president of the Austin Interactive Marketing Association, and as the chairman of the SEMPO (Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organization) committee.

Bill will be one of the speakers in the session called PR, Social Media and Search, covering how to integrate social media and search into your PR strategy.

It’s worth noting that the questions I’ve posed below not only reflect my relatively nascent knowledge of “search,” but also what I hear a lot of friends, colleagues and clients asking.  Hope you come away with a useful nugget or two.  Comments and additional questions welcomed.

More so than ever we see brands focusing on driving earned social media coverage as a way to help promote a product, service or even advocate for a cause.  For the uninitiated, can you give us the 101 on how social media impacts organic search results?

Google, in a nutshell, likes fresh relevant content (roughly 20% of the algorithm) and old links / offpage (roughly 80% of the algorithm).  Social Media, properly done, can get you both.  Fresh content, saying what you want it to say (contextually and semantically dead-on), linking back to one of your properties.

That being said, most social media folks know boo diddly about how to actually do SEO, and when they get rankings on a truly competitive keyword, it’s usually completely by happenstance.

In many organizations, PR, social media and search are “owned” by different factions within either the marketing or communications teams.  Any recommendations on how these disciplines can be integrated for the greater good?

It can get worse than that. Sometimes search itself is “owned” by multiple parties.  Paid Search / Adwords is often owned by field marketing or demand generation teams, operating tactically at the divisional level, while Natural Search / SEO is often owned by corporate marketing, or even corporate IT.

That being said, IMHO it’s vital that all customer-facing marketing teams coordinate their efforts.  Search & PR are already collaborating more and more, and I expect that ultimately social will be “owned” by the search & PR teams (at least the customer acquisition piece of social), rather than existing as a separate practice area.  Already, we’re finding that more and more of the better social media agencies are actually the social media practice areas of search engine marketing companies.

Can you talk a bit about Facebook in particular? What does it mean (i.e. what is the effect) that it’s a “closed” community in terms of search visibility (versus, for example, Twitter).  And where do you see this going in 2010?

I think Facebook is a sign that not everyone wants to be dependent upon Google for their visibility (and ultimately, their moneymaking).  Just like the Wall Street Journal has much of their content paid subscription only, and just like NewsCorp / Murdoch is talking about pulling much of their content out of Google, some of the major “publishers” (and Facebook is a publisher, in a sense, of user generated content), are going to make a courageous go of it on their own, trusting that they have enough critical mass to survive w/out Google’s help in attracting eyeballs.

In the Facebook case, they are able to use Google searches for a person to drive eyeballs into the person’s profile page, but if you want to read more (wall, etc) or see more (photos), you need to enter their walled garden.  If they can pull it off, this looks like a far more defensible business model than what Twitter has going on. Has anyone seen Twitter’s real revenue model yet?  I thought not …

This is a blog written by a PR firm, so it begs asking – what can PR people do as they build strategic and tactical plans to ensure we are leveraging search as effectively as possible?

Find a great search firm to partner with, and search firms need to make themselves partner friendly for their part as well.  A well crafted PR plan, whether a strategic plan or a tactical plan, if it covers online (and in this day and age, I’d hope that most would cover online), should have discussion areas in it about how best to integrate and leverage search.  Not just natural search / SEO either, but also paid search / PPC.

What are your three favorite blogs/online resources (besides your own) for relative beginners to learn about search?

I do like ours … as it’s one of the top ranking ones out there for a search for “Search Marketing Blog” and we really encourage rank and file participation from our team (rather than most Search Marketing firm blogs, where 90% of the posts are just 2-3 folks, including the company “great leader” type).  That being said, here goes:

1. Search Engine Strategies Blog
2. Danny Sullivan’s Blog
3. ClickZ

For my second interview of Search Engine Strategies speakers I’ve had the privilege of connecting with Sharad Verma from Yahoo!

Sharad is a senior product manager for content, crawl, and indexing systems of Yahoo Search Technology. Before joining Yahoo in 2007, he worked for multiple Silicon Valley startups.   Sharad graduated from IIT Bombay (India) with a degree in chemical engineering in 1999.

Sharad will be speaking on the panel Discovering the Power of Linking: Link Building Basics, as well as several others.  The term “Link Building“  is often discussed among marketing and pr professional, however, more often than not a genuine understanding of what goes into this effort is lacking.  Hopefully Sharad will be able to clear some things up with this Q&A.

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I will be attending Search Engine Strategies in New York March 24th - 26th.  In preparation for the conference I’ve had the privileged of interviewing Marjorie Madfis, an Interactive Marketing Manager and Web Editor at IBM. She will be one of the speakers in the session Key Points in Launching a Global Website.

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One of the most useful free tools out there is Google Trends and I’m continually surprised by the innovative ways I see it used by my colleagues. Beyond the obvious function in SEM and SEO campaigns, the half of all internet users who are starting their session with a good Google must be giving use some other useful information. Google showcased this recently with their Flu Trends project and it got me thinking about other ways to bring the line graphs to life. Here are some of my favorite examples (including Quail Man) of interesting Google Trends and I ask you to add your own ideas and provide links in the comments.

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