I am very honored and humbled to see that two of my articles were nominated for a SEMMY (The Year's Best Posts in Search Engine Marketing).

In the category of SEO category for the 2008 SEMMY Awards, my article on Search Engine Land was nominated, "Sculpting Your PageRank for Maximum SEO Impact."

Vote here for the year's best in SEO articles.

Also, in the category of Web Analytics, my June article from Practical eCommerce, "SEO Metrics that Matter" was also nominated.

Vote here for the year's best in Web Analytics articles.

My colleague, Chris Smith, was nominated for local search from his recent article in Search Engine Land entitled, "Anatomy and Optimization of a Local Business Profile."

Vote here for the year's best in Local Search.

Good luck to everyone who was nominated! Voting ends on January 30th, so be sure to cast your vote for your favorites today!

Most SEOs think the path to better snippets is writing a compelling, keyword-rich meta description tag. But that's only part of it.

Meta descriptions aren't going to help your rankings, but it's worthwhile spending time on them because they can -- and often do -- make their way into the snippet.

But did you know that Google snippets can contain meta description copy and page content? Yep. Here's an example. Do a Google search for "lord of the rings downloads" and you'll get the following search listing of the lordoftherings.net home page at #2:

The first part of the snippet, the part preceding the first elipses ("The Lord of the Rings Movie: Return of the King tickets.") comes from the meta description. The rest of the snippet ("shelob, and dark moria here. lord of the rings fellowship of the ring trailer movie downloads") comes from content in the page's HTML.

It was funny to see where this page content (which makes up the second part of the snippet) comes from... as it's not visible to humans on the page; it's actually keyword-stuffed hidden text embedded within a noscript tag. (Also note the mile-long meta keywords tag. Who woulda thunk... Peter Jackson is a black-hat! )

When I was in their HTML source, I also noticed that LOTR's meta description contains a keyword list, which I'm not a proponent of. A meta description tag containing repeated keywords or long strings of keywords separating by commas does not make for a compelling snippet. This is LOTR's home page meta description:

Another tip... don't use the same meta description across all your pages. That makes for a lot of similar-looking snippets, which could potentially trigger Google's duplicate content filter.

Late last year I had the pleasure of interviewing Chris Alan, a true SEO veteran and head of SEO over at Expedia.com. Chris was one of my fellow speakers at the AMA Hot Topic: Search Engine Marketing conferences I chaired in Seattle and Boston last Fall.

Now this interview is finally available as a half hour long audio podcast for your listening enjoyment, as well as an abridged transcript for you speed readers who prefer the written word over the spoken.

Chris and I had a fascinating discussion about the unique challenges of search engine optimizing huge sites. One of the topics we covered was landing pages for SEO and how they differ from PPC landing pages. Chris explains that, unlike with paid search campaigns, in SEO you can't just switch out landing pages very easily -- at least not without some powerful technology. Furthermore, any changes to improve conversion on the SEO landing page can negatively impact the page's organic rankings, thus making it harder to pinpoint what's making the page less effective. What's needed is a solution that allows you to make changes to the page yet still maintain your rankings.

Chris understands the value of empirical testing. SEO is an experimental science. You can't just blindly implement SEO tactics prescribed by SEO experts on their blogs and in the forums. You need to test it for yourself. This is harder than it sounds when you're dealing with millions of pages indexed. That's why Expedia has a suite of very sophisticated tools at their disposal, that Chris could only briefly allude to.

Hope you enjoy this podcast!