Whether your business is large or small, branding has become a larger factor in performing well in an SEO campaign. Google now has a larger preference for brands in search results, so it is important for you incorporate branding into your SEO strategy.  The folks at SEOmoz did a great job outlining how branding impacts an SEO campaign. Check it out!

Finding the right keywords to target is the hardest part and to be successful your keywords have to reach beyond core terms. Here is a great post from Search Engine Guide on how to segment your keywords and target longer, more specific phrases in an SEO campaign.

You should be thinking about your site’s page load speed for SEO purposes and more importantly for improved user experience.  Search Engine Watch’s Simon Heseltine discusses tools for optimizing page speed so you can continually enhance your site.

Getting started with SEO can be a big project… so where to begin. David Harry developed a strategy known as Task ROI and wrote about it in the Search Engine Journal. Basically think before you SEO! What are the benefits which will be gained for your efforts and does a particular strategy really make sense for you? Every website is a special snow flake requiring, special efforts. Don’t just SEO on autopilot.

On the topic of links, Gabgoldenberg has a few points to make over at Graywolf’s SEO blog. In an effort to sculpt links, most SEO’s have taken a less is more approach. While it’s important to strategically place links, there’s one question that still needs to be asked. If you’re going to write about something, why not provide links to resources so your audience can be as well informed as you are? So in other words, link when it makes sense for your readers, not just when a bot might be keeping score.

Even the most experienced SEOs can make a mistake, and this post from the SEOmoz blog shows a recap from a webinar that covers common issues and some quick fixes to improve your SEO campaigns.

Check out The Adventures of SEO Boy: Heroic Feats of Search Engine Optimization at http://www.seoboy.com/. Copyright © 2008-2009 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

David Meerman Scott, the author of “The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to Use Social Media, Blogs, News Releases, Online Video, and Viral Marketing to Reach Buyers Directly, 2nd Edition” will be giving the opening keynote at SES New York 2010.

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Continuing the expansion of its real-time Web search, which was first announced in December, Google has added updates from Facebook Fan Pages to its data source. This allows access to Facebook’s three million Fan Pages, but not to data from all of the social media network’s 400 million active users.

This means that status updates, links, photos and videos shared on Fan Pages are now indexed by Google Real Time Search, making Facebook the latest addition to Google’s real-time initiative that includes Twitter, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku, Indenti.ca, and most recently, of course, Google Buzz.

Comments made on Facebook Fan Pages by non-owners, however, are not included in the search index, nor are updates made on personal pages. As opposed to the massive amounts of data potentially available through Facebook’s network of personal pages, Fan Pages are generally owned by celebrities, politicians, businesses and brands.

While Facebook is granting full access to the much more voluminous public user updates to Bing’s real-time Web search, nothing is live yet and Bing’s index remains non-functional. How this all will affect the search-engine landscape, 90 percent of which currently belongs to Google, remains to be seen. But for the time being, at least, anyone hoping to capitalize on the latest opportunity to land on Google’s search index will want to explore Facebook Fan Pages—if they haven’t already.

Earning access to the Fan Pages rather than Facebook’s entire user network, theoretically, denies Google a significant amount of data for its index. But are updates from 400 million Facebook users what people want to find in their search results? We should have the answer when Bing’s real-time Web search eventually goes live.

12 updates to read over a lazy weekend.

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In case you missed anything, today we feature Website Magazine's top 10 content items from February, 2010. In addition to these items, there was other interesting news; including the release of Google Buzz, Apple's iPad, and the official merging of Yahoo! and Microsoft search.

Coming soon, look for Website Magazine's April issue (at right); coming in the mail to Pro subscribers and on newsstands. The issue focuses on e-mail marketing and features more great content including optimizing PPC accounts for Quality Score, optimizing Web coupons, affiliate software metrics, Top 50 SEO agencies and more. Not yet a Pro subscriber? Subscribe here.

In the meantime, enjoy these articles from February while we work on the next issue of Website Magazine — including a close look at emerging SEO practices.

23 Must-have Chrome Extensions for Web Professionals

Top E-commerce Apps for Facebook

Are Businesses Drinking the Social Media Kool-Aid?

100 Retweet Targets for Web Professionals

SEO Research: Website Size Study

New Social API's Worth a Look

Slideshow Messages in E-mail

Twedemption Twitter Tool

Ustream: The Next YouTube?

Google Acquires Aardvark: Beefs Up Socail Search?

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