As I'm sure you've figured out by now, search engine optimization isn't exactly a single uniform entity. You have to take all sorts of things into consideration, like how the user is finding you on the web in the first place. More and more, these users are coming from the mobile side of things.

Yes, regular laptops and desktop PCs still make up the lion's share of our web surfing habits, but a recent report by comScore Device Essentials is showing that a full 8.2% of web traffic is via a mobile device. That's substantial and it needs to be acknowledged.

That's why it's also important to know that not all mobile traffic is the same either. users who are surfing for web content on their smartphones are not the same as the ones who are on the Internet on their tablets. You have to take the context into mind: smartphones are more "on the go," whereas tablets are more likely used while lounging in one place, like the living room or coffee shop.

So, for the smartphone side of things, it makes more sense to offer more hyperlocal content that is more location sensitive. It also pays more to bid for the first couple of positions in the SERP, since the screen size is smaller and the user is less likely to find content further down the page. Including a "Click to Call" option is huge too, since smartphones are still phones.

More money appears to be available from tablet traffic, though, since it more closely mirrors the PC experience. As such, your ad bid strategy can go beyond the first couple of positions in the SERPS, since more results are displayed on the larger screen of a typical tablet.

Tablets need to be thought about like desktops, so you'll want to adjust your keyword lists to accommodate more of the long tail. It also helps if you have more tablet-centric landing pages, since a smartphone-oriented landing page can look pretty terrible on a bigger screen. That said, you should still avoid Flash, as the iPad (which makes up 90% of tablet traffic) doesn't support it. Use HTML5 instead.

What do you think? What other optimizations do you do to maximize value from smartphone and tablet traffic?

Yes, it might be a little hard to believe, but Google rolls out its first Panda update exactly one year ago today on February 24, 2011. Panda was designed to be a "filter" that would penalize content farms and other websites on the Internet that were deemed as being too "thin" to be useful to web users.

Not surprisingly, Google Panda (and its various updated versions) has created many problems for professional SEO specialists and webmasters alike. An infographic has been put together by Search Engine Land and BlueGlass that does a great job of outlining exactly how Panda works and what impact it has had on the Internet at large.

The first version of Panda was designed to target "scraper sites" that copied copyright content from other sites. Google says that 12% of searches in the United States were affected. Subsequent updates expanded language support and made "minor changes" to the algorithm. Now that we are a full twelve months after the initial Panda update, only 13% of those polled by SE Roundtable said they have fully recovered. Only 29% have recovered partially and a whopping 58% say they have not recovered from Panda.

And Panda hasn't only impacted smaller "scraper sites" and "content farms" either, as bigger players like About, Yahoo, and Demand Media have all had their ranking significantly impacted by Google's bamboo-munching creature. So, where do you stand with Panda? Have you recovered? What are you doing to avoid getting hit by the filter?

Backlinks are the backbone of just about any effective SEO campaign, but how do you go about finding the sites where you can get these backlinks? There are paid links services like Text Link Ads, but Google has a much easier time detecting those than the more "organic" links that you would get through interacting with the site owner directly.

A simple Google search in your niche is one way to start, but Erin Everhart has come up with at least five other ways for you to find those valuable link partners. She outlines these strategies in a recent blog post published on Search Engine Land.

One tool is called Listorious and it is used to find a list of people tweeting about a certain topic. This is more robust that sifting through hashtags and you can even search for Twitter lists instead of just individuals. Erin also recommends looking through the Facebook likes of pages in your niche to find related businesses and webmasters. Curated lists are another way to go, as are the blogrolls you find on sites that are already in your industry.

Another strategy is to search through LinkedIn. This won't lead you to a directory of websites that could be potential link partners, per se, but it will lead you to the people who are in that niche. You can sift through based on companies, locations, keywords, and so on, finding just the right people in just the right positions. And finally, Erin talks about utilizing guest blogging communities like My Blog Guest and Blogger LinkUp for the same purpose.

What strategies do you use to find potential link partners? How do you ensure you're getting a quality backlink from a quality website?

Most search engine optimization experts will likely tell you about the importance of backlinks, keyword structure, and all the other fundamentals of good SEO. Another topic that comes up all the time is that of sitemaps and most people will tell you that you should have a good sitemap for your website that is kept up to date. But that may not necessarily be the case.

Over on Search Engine Roundtable, they're highlighting a thread that discusses what happens if you choose to remove the XML sitemap completely from Webmaster tools. Conventional wisdom will say that this will have an adverse effect on your overall search engine rankings, but that might not be the case.

In fact, John Mueller of Google says that removing the URLs from a sitemap won't really hurt your rankings, because sitemap files are used "for discovering new URLs and recognizing when existing ones have changed; we don't remove URLs from the index that aren't in the Sitemap file." But that only talks about removing URLs from the sitemap and not removing the sitemap altogether.

That said, it seems that adding and removing sitemaps doesn't "dramatically impact a website," as long as you "make sure your internal link structure is good and the iste has no big technical issues." That insight comes from forum moderator GoodROI.

What do you think? Are sitemaps still important?

When it comes to search engine optimization, there is literally a never-ending list of things that you can do. Some strategies are more effective than others, but a great number of them also happen to be very time-consuming. The irony is that many people forget to take care of the little things. It's like deciding to go on a road trip, only to forget where you left the keys.

Over on Search Engine Watch, Josh McCoy has compiled a list of eight SEO tips that you can accomplish in fifteen minutes or less. Regardless of whether you have a blog, a company website, or a resource site, you'd be foolish not to go through these eight basic steps.

You'll still want to pay attention to things like keyword density and inbound deep-links, of course, but these eight simple steps are so basic that they simply should not be ignored.

The tips include such things as remembering to review your robots.txt file to see if you're withholding pages from search engines, reviewing the most frequently linked pages on your site, looking for duplicate title elements in Google Webmaster Tools, requesting anchor text changes from authority sites, and verifying your Google and Bing Local listings.