Until recently, the sitelinks that you have most commonly seen have probably looked something like this:

The purpose of sitelinks is to help searchers navigate a specific page they are in need of as quickly as possible. However, earlier this week, Google announced its improved and expanded version of sitelinks. The newer version is arranged as a column of links and appears more prominently on the search engine results page.

The new sitelinks is certainly helping brands dominate the search results page. According to Google, displaying more sitelinks is designed to help users quickly navigate to the most relevant section of a site. But, let’s try and understand how the changes will affect websites, and how they can adapt and take advantage of them.

For starters, the new sitelinks takes up a large chunk of the first page results thus ruling out potential competitors and other less relevant sites sneaking above the fold. Online user behavior will change as more users will want to click on the pages listed in sitelinks than look for websites listed below in search results, thus helping brand conversions significantly. Also certain is the tangible increase in organic visits and sales from keywords containing brand permutations.

Adapting to this change is critical and website architecture is really important (directory structure, URL naming conventions etc…); also, make full use of Google’s webmaster console to manage sitelinks and take Google’s humanized results page and ranking factors into consideration.

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This week’s hot news, events and videos from the online marketing and social media world.

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• Social Push: Quora’s Traffic May Be Catching Up With Its Hype.

• Position² Blog: Segmenting Traffic Based On User Intent: Using Google Analytics.
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Video of the Week Why Top Ad Exec Places Bet on Social Media. Miles Nadal, founder, chairman and CEO, MDC Partners, explains why his company is making significant investments to back social media sites.

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This week’s hot news, events and videos from the online marketing and social media world.

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• How to Go Social: Why Your B2B Website Needs Social Interaction.

• Correction: Google’s Scraper Algorithm Now Live, Not Content Farms.
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Video of the Week Bing Faces Off Against Google Over Search Results. Matt Cutts, Principal Engineer at Google, accuses Bing of using Google data to improve its search results.

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This week’s hot news, events and videos from the online marketing and social media world.

• Position² Blog: Integrating Social Media Monitoring with Business Functions: Marketing.
• Survey: Many Brands Don’t Track Social Media Conversations.
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• Add-ons: Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox announce tools to block Web tracking by advertisers.
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Video of the Week How has social media changed your life? Rory Cellan-Jones asks leading figures in the social networking world how social networking has changed their lives.

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This week’s hot news, events and videos from the online marketing and social media world.

• Position² Blog: Quora: A Growing Channel for Brand Monitoring and Engagement.
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• SEO: 32 SEO Tactics to Avoid in 2011. You probably have a long list of SEO tactics in the pipeline for 2011.
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Video of the Week A new frontier for social media? Broadcastr: Listen to stories pinned to your location.

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This week’s hot news, events and videos from the online marketing and social media world.

• Position² Blog: Integrating Social Media Monitoring with Business Functions: Customer Service
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• SEO: Why StumbleUpon Sends the Most Traffic
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• Search Engine War: ComScore December Search Data Out! Google And Bing Up, Yahoo Down
• For Web Developers: Microsoft Launches WebMatrix, a Web Development Tool Which is Pretty Awesome
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Video of the Week The Daily Show’s Take On The Verizon iPhone Announcement (The cause of a lot of hilarious commentary on Twitter channels #veriPhone and #attfail)

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This week’s hot news, events and videos from the online marketing and social media world.

• Social Media 2011: SEO for Social Media ‘Must Change’ in 2011.
• In-Vehicle Infotainment: Pioneer Brings Deeper Facebook, Twitter & Pandora Integration to the Car.
• Future Value: Social Media: Next Dot-Com Bubble?
• How-to: Building Your Brand with Social Media.
• Facebook: Facebook Details Leaked: Company Is Much More Profitable Than Everyone Thought.

• SEO: Is Your Business Still Chasing Google?
• Bookmark: 10 Websites to Watch in 2011.
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Video of the Week Marissa Mayer: ‘Google Hasn’t Gotten Social Right Yet’: Google consumer products VP Marissa Mayer admitted that her own company has lagged a bit behind in the space.

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This week’s hot news, events and videos from the online marketing and social media world.

• Social Media Monitoring: 7 Ways to Fatten Your Social Media Monitoring Payback.
• Best and Worst Campaigns: Top 10 social media hits and misses of 2010.
• 2011 Predictions: 4 Social Media Marketing Predictions for 2011.
• Twitter: The Power of Twitter in Information Discovery.
• Facebook: Google has been overtaken by Facebook for the title of “Most visited website in the US” in 2010.

• SEO: 7 Ways to Improve Your Blog SEO with Inbound Links.
• Adwords: Google Targets Small Businesses With $100 Million Worth Of AdWords Credits.
• Design Innovation: The Best Ideas of 2010, in a dynamic NY Times layout.
• Borrow and Lend eBooks: Amazon announces Lending Books with Kindle.
• Online Privacy: “2010, the year that privacy died?” – Informative op-ed by the BBC

Video of the Week Following Dell’s Approach To Social Media: Forbes speaks to Brian Solis on the impact of Social Media on business.

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This week’s hot news, events and videos from the online marketing and social media world.

• Kodak’s Social Media Play: Kodak recently introduced a service they are calling Social Photo Album Creator for Facebook.
• Skype Goes Down: Skype is not working for millions of users, and the angst is playing out on Twitter right now.
• Social Money Transfer – Dwolla: Dwolla is a peer-to-peer payment platform that allows social network users to exchange money quickly and at a low cost.
• Facebook Feed Filter: Facebook Rolling Out Redesigned News Feed Filtering Options.
• How Travelers Use Social Media: Young adults ages 25 to 34 checked social sites most often, with nearly a third using them multiple times an hour.

• SEO 2011: SEO Predictions for 2011: Local, Trustbait and Social Media Optimization.
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• Google Sitelinks: Getting Google “Sitelinks” Under Your Brand Search Result.
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• Google Goes to Pakistan: A delegation from YouTube and Google.org, the company’s philanthropic arm, just flew to Pakistan to “explore business and content opportunities.”

Video of the Week Google Search Trends by Matt Cutts: “What are some of the things on your radar, or some of the trends in search you’d like to talk about?”

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A recent phenomenon, tag clouds are commonly seen on blogs, ecommerce sites and several ‘Web 2.’ portals. Other than their visual appearance and ‘coolness’ factor there are benefits for your web site, especially for SEO.

What is a Tag Cloud?

A tag cloud or word cloud is a visual depiction of user-generated tags. Sometimes, they are just the word content of your site, typically used to describe what it is about. They are usually single words and are listed alphabetically. The importance of a tag is shown with its font size or color, and they are hyperlinks that lead to a collection of pages associated with the word.

Because of their role in search engine optimization of web pages, tag clouds have become even more popular. When properly implemented tag clouds make your web site appear more interlinked to search engine spiders, and this improves search engine ranking

How Are Tag Clouds Used?

There are two common ways of using tag clouds – by popularity and by relevance.

• In the popularity model, the most frequently used keywords used are displayed as tags on a web site In this method, the most commonly used tags or keywords are displayed in larger font sizes in the tag cloud. Less frequently used tags or keywords are displayed in smaller font sizes.
• The other method to use tag clouds is by relevance. When a user lands on your web page, the tag cloud displays related tags or terms. Clicking on a tag in this cloud would list all the pages or articles associated with that term. This acts as a search-assist, and helps visitors find other relevant pages in the site.

How Do Tag Clouds Impact SEO?

When used correctly, tag clouds can improve the internal linking of your web site, the internal anchor text relevance of pages in your site, and by extension, its SEO. They also increase the keyword density of a page but are better left unused for this specific purpose. This is because of the risk of abuse; keywords stuffed in the page content would make search engines ignore your web site. .

How Are Tag Clouds Used for SEO?

You can either custom build your tag cloud or pick one from the internet – both free and paid versions are available. For the latter, select the tag cloud carefully because most off-the-shelf versions have built in JavaScript or AJAX, and a few even use Flash. These do not help your web site SEO, because search engines ignore content served by JavaScripts, AJAX and Flash.

The best way to use Tag Clouds would be to custom build them using tag micro-formats.

The Ideal Tag Cloud

It is better to have tag clouds that list tags by ‘relevance’ rather than by ‘popularity’. Tag clouds need to be useful to the your site’s visitors, help them find other relevant content, and aid their navigation. Do not use tag clouds that list “most popular searches” or “what others searched for” or “most commonly used terms”. Instead, build tags that list “you may also be interested in”, “other relevant searches”, and “related content”.

Do not compromise and pick a tag cloud for how ‘cool’ it looks. Build a cloud that helps navigation on your site, and it will aid your site’s SEO.

References include: Search Engine Land, Webtop, several other snippets of insight from the web and Position² internal analytics data.

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