Social media is huge.  That’s right; you heard it here first. Big news flash, huh? Everybody knows that anything ‘social’ is all the rage right now and it looks like it isn’t going to slow down anytime soon.  So, obviously, we all want to be ‘doing social’.. the problem is: what exactly does that entail? Beyond that, how do we answer the dreaded ‘what do we get out of it’ question to the accounting types?

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During SMX Advanced we talked with several experts about social media marketing.  Tarla Cummings is a Social Media Manager from Location3 Media. She discussed the acronym ‘M.O.M.’ (Monitor Outreach Measure) for looking at your social media campaigns.

At Yahoo’s annual shareholder meeting, Chief Executive Carl Bartz said the company had “nothing to say” about any potential deal with Microsoft and asked investors to be patient as she works to overhaul the company.

“If we ever have a deal with Microsoft, it will be announced publicly and until we do, we have nothing to say,” said Bartz said at the meeting in Santa Clara, Calif.

Both Yahoo and Microsoft have talked about a possible deal of some sort since last year when Yahoo rejected a $45 billion acquisition bid from Microsoft.

Matt Cutts of Google has been producing daily videos answering questions from the SEO community. Many of these videos have useful information for all levels of SEO. I wanted to share Matt’s most recent video and then point you to his other videos.

Lee from the UK asks:

“Hi Matt, could you confirm whether the geographic location of the web host has any significant ranking factors for organic SEO?”

Recorded on April 23, 2009.

Twitter is a phenomenon.

But man-o-man do people love checking out Tweets. It’s new and hip, and it’s got its own unique feel. It’s like all the people following along can actually look over your shoulder and see what you’re up to.

Now sure, not everyone really cares what you’ve got going on with up-to-the-minute updates. But SOME DO.

As marketers, it’s AMAZING that we can use a tool like Twitter to keep in constant contact with our biggest fans and cheerleaders. But BOY, the folks at Twitter, don’t make it easy on us.

Matt Cutts of Google has been producing daily videos answering questions from the SEO community. Many of these videos have useful information for all levels of SEO. I wanted to share Matt’s most recent video and then point you to his other videos.

Richard M. from Australia asks:

“We sell a software product, and there are 100s of software download directories on the web of varying quality. Could submitting our product to all of them hurt our rankings or domain trust/authority?”
Recorded on April 23, 2009.

At a recent non-profit training held in Google D.C. office of issue campaign managers the basics of “search engine optimization” (SEO), or how to earn a spot for your content that is closer to the top of Google’s natural (left-hand side) search results. It was a rewarding experience because we were able to take what’s often a technical conversation and make it feel like something everyone could (and should) do.

Craig Geis, SEO technical lead who also maintains the SEO Tech Blog, provide some insights on how improperly handled 404s can be negative from an SEO perspective. He has looked deeply into this issue, and provides some general best practices to follow when deciding how to handle pages that can’t be found.

These aren’t the only ways to deal with this problem. However, from an SEO perspective it would be wise for developers/designers of many large Web sites to heed Geis’s advice:

• Check your backlinks. Since it won’t be possible to set up a redirection from the old .yu domain to your new one, all links pointing to .yu domains will lead to dead ends. This means that it will be increasingly difficult for search engines to retrieve your new content. To find out who is linking to you, sign up with Google Webmaster Tools and check the links to your site (you can also download this list as a “comma separated value” — .csv — file for ease of use). Then read through the list for sites that you recognize as important and contact their webmasters to make sure that they update their links to your new website.

Matt Cutts of Google has been producing daily videos answering questions from the SEO community. Many of these videos have useful information for all levels of SEO. I wanted to share Matt’s most recent video and then point you to his other videos.

Robert from Charlotte asks: “Is over optimization bad for a website? Ex. – excessive use of nofollow” Recorded on April 23, 2009.

Google wants to make the internet faster. By speeding up the “most important computing platform of our time,” Google believes that consumers and businesses will experience a wide range of benefits, many of which we can imagine, some of which might be revealed over time.

There’s no product or specific consumer offering here. Rather Google is trying to advocate multiple initiatives in parallel that the company believes are important to usher in a better, faster internet (including for mobile devices). This Google Code Blog post lays out the arguments and suggestions as does the video below:

Matt Cutts from Google answer a SEO questions:

Mani from Delhi asks: “We are changing a fairly large HTML site to CMS. What are the essentials to keep in mind so that we do not loose our search rankings?” Recorded on April 23, 2009.

The Google News home page is a good place to go to find headlines from publications around the world. But what if you’re interested in the work of a specific journalist in addition to perspectives from different publications? Last Thursday, we launched a feature that highlights the contributions of journalists everywhere by allowing you to find more articles by individual reporters.

If you spot an article by a specific journalist, you can click their name to bring up other articles they’ve written: