Today on SEM Synergy we focus on branding and the Vince algorithm change. Bruce, Virginia and Christopher open the show by discussing how establishing trust, authority and quality is vital on the Web. Chris says that establishing a long-term value position of expertise among your market is the key to branding. Bruce says that a company doesn’t have to be a brand to be an expert in the field or to be relevant to a query. He thinks characteristics like longevity or fast servers could actually responsible for brands just naturally performing better.

Jayme Westervelt

Jayme Westervelt of Simply Optimized then talks to Virginia about ranking shifts she saw among her clients over the last few months. Jayme compares the changes among those sites with a strong branding focus and those that are more general in content. Among her clients, she always recommends a strategy that covers highly-targeted and more broad terms in order to cover the search spectrum and to please clients who refuse to give up on the very competitive terms.

Then Susan and Fernando debate their perceptions of the target goal of the update. Fernando proposes that changes to the algorithm may have included increasing the value of link age or decreasing the value of anchor text while raising the value of the page theme. Susan argues that trust and authority are the qualities of a brand. So even though Google said they didn’t boost brands, they did in fact boost qualities of brands.

Hosts Bruce, Robert and Susan discuss a number of recent search headlines, with Google taking a starring role. Some of the topics covered include Google’s ability to crawl and index text in Flash files, the newly launched Google Affiliate Network, and Matt Cutts’s announcement about how the search engine uses the data it collects to fight spam.

Then Matt McGee, creator and author of Small Business Search Marketing, talks to Virginia about how his blog has helped him gain feedback and insight into a new book he wrote about the rock band U2. Through a survey on his U2 blog, Matt also found that Twitter has not yet gained mainstream adoption, so social media efforts should focus on Facebook and MySpace. Matt recently accepted the position of Director of Strategic Search at the SEM company KeyRelevance.

Following up on Matt’s suggestions for small business search marketing, Susan and Virginia offer some things to keep in mind when optimizing for local search. From the local results of the major engines and local-only search engines to Internet yellow pages and local review sites, local search is a fragmented space. Providing accurate business data through a number of avenues and going after long-tail queries should be a focus of any local campaign.

News of a new and improved Alexa Traffic Ranking system hit the Web this month. While Robert and Bruce don’t see Alexa Rankings regaining relevance for the industry, the overhaul is a much needed change for the often-inaccurate and easily-manipulated rankings provider. Also on the mind is how the depressed market has affected the search industry. Our hosts predict that the recession could see advertisers moving online for its high accountability.

Bruce speaks to our SEO Charity Contest winner Ryan Freeman. Ryan runs Strider Inc., a small business SEO firm in Toronto. He won the competition for his proposed organic SEO campaign for The Elisha Foundation. His business is focused on SEO for small businesses and non-profits because he likes to see them gain the visibility needed to compete in the market. Bruce and Ryan talk about the unique challenges of optimizing for small businesses.

Finally, our hosts preview some of the sessions at the upcoming eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit in San Francisco. The conference has been around since 2002 and focuses on technologies and methodologies of measuring site success. Best practices and the benefit of analytics is looked at in detail.