All posts in Social SEO

The recent integration of social and search at Google marks a huge change in how information on the internet will be presented to us. When a logged in user now performs a search, they will be given two types of search results: the anonymous search results that we are all used to and personal search results, which are generated from information shared within that user’s network of Google+ circles. This new platform presents a major marketing opportunity for brands and it requires a developed strategy just like other social media platforms. It would be daft for brands to consider Google+ as just another fad, and, in the same breadth that brands define strategies for Facebook and Twitter, the same now needs to be done for Google+.

While it is apparent that Google+ is not yet fully developed, it would appear a good time for brands to set up their Google+ page, start uploading regular content and playing about with the different features on Google+. What should you as a brand be doing now?

1. Grow Your Circles

You’ve probably heard by now that Google announced the roll out of social search yesterday, dubbed ‘Search, Plus Your World’. There has been vast speculation about Google’s motives, with the most credible of which suggesting it’s to do with…

  • Gaining market share in the social network market.
  • To improve the quality of search results through increased trustworthiness and personalisation (research by Nielsen suggests that 42% of people trust search results, but 90% trust recommendations from friends).

In reality, all of the above will contribute to why Google’s launched social search. However, in this post I don’t want to talk about the politics – I’ll leave that to the tabloids. I want to talk about how this is inevitably going to impact our jobs as SEOs.

What’s Google’s Game Plan With ‘Search, Plus Your World’?

To really understand the impact, we need to realise what Google’s game plan with social search is. I’ll point out now that I’m not an expert or an insider in any way, but this is where I think Google might be going with Search, Plus Your World and Google+.

  1. Google is creating a ‘map’ similar to Facebook’s Open Graph that connects people with their content, websites and readers to understand who produces what content, what happens with that content and how people react. This is where the rel=”author” and rel=”publisher” tags play a big part (I wrote a post about this on Social Media Explorer).
  2. Google will then learn contextual information about readers and content producers taken from their Google account activity (e.g. what YouTube videos they watch and searches they make when signed in) and use this data in combination with existing ranking factors and G+ sharing data to better place content in search results.

If I’m right, then I can see a shift in prominence in the SERPs to content producers with an active audience, but only in niches where communities exist.

For example, in the social media niche, sites such as Mashable, Social Media Explorer and Social Media Today will receive extra prominence in SERPs because they have an audience containing not only the ‘influencers’ but also the remaining mass of social media enthusiasts who share their content. The social media sites that don’t have an active audience or community will lose prominence.

In niches where there is no community (think ‘septic tank maintenance’ or ‘zinc coating of ships’) social search won’t change anything, at all. That is unless a company creates an active audience from scratch – for example, how Compare The Market arguably created an active audience in the insurance niche using Aleksandr Orlov.

As I never wrote a ‘2012 predictions’ post, here are five things I think this shift towards social search will make us think about more as online marketers.

By now I’m quite weary of the manifold failed attempts by Google to enter the social media arena. We had:

  1. Google Answers
  2. Google Bookmarks
  3. Google SearchWiki
  4. Google SideWiki
  5. Jaiku
  6. Google Wave
  7. Google Buzz

to name just the most known failed or abandoned Google social media services. As with most of the previous offerings, last week’s Google +1 started in a clumsy beta or rather alpha version. I didn’t even want to test it at first, but then all the search and SEO publications frantically reported about it so I felt compelled to give it a try.

I encountered many difficulties, and it took me two hours just to “get it”.

Google +1 is way too complicated right now and it was quite buggy when I tried it over recent days. The Google +1 page itself redirected me to 404 pages in German (I’m in Germany) despite browser and Google preferences.

When Google +1 finally worked for me, I tried to use it extensively but to no avail. Nobody has noticed my +1s it seems, and I barely see any by others.

Still, everybody is writing about it and the list of resources is already huge. Furthermore, there are high profile people in the SEO industry who actually suggest we jump into it. So to provide a more objective resource, I decided to compile the links and to enable you to make your own choices.

 

As it’s a Friday afternoon and we’re all winding down for the weekend, I thought it would be an appropriate time to reveal a lighthearted tale involving keyword density, penguins, and Sambuca that I recently admitted to the SEOptimise team – something terribly shameful…

A story of why keyword density is in fact not dead.

A few friends and I were playing the infamous ‘Happy Feet drinking game’ whereby each player is assigned a frequently mentioned word that whenever they hear whilst watching the film Happy Feet has to drink a shot. I was assigned the word ‘fish’ (which I wrongly assumed wouldn’t be mentioned very much).

This is a guest post from Kelvin Newman at Site Visibility.

I’m starting to feel a bit sorry for Yahoo, not only are they seen by most people as a bit of a joke, largely the stick is unwarranted. They’ve got some great little products and services, two of which I use to this great little way of keeping tracking of easy social media interaction opportunities.

The main service is Yahoo Answers, its a hugely popular social site where users ask and answer questions. If you’ve not checked Yahoo Answers recently, go over now and have a look, there will be dozens of people asking questions related to your industry – no matter how obscure or niche it is.

The nightmare though is having to revisit the site everyday to see whether there’s anything new or relevant. Fortunately the main categories have RSS feeds so you could set up the feed in your RSS reader to keep track of the mentions in your chosen category, but your a busy digital marketer, you don’t have time to check through every question asked on the site. That’s where Yahoo Pipes comes in.

It’s been an eventful week in the SEO blogosphere, from Google CEO Eric Schmidt predicting the future of real time search engine indexing, to Yahoo flushing millions of dollars of Geocities PageRank down the drain!  Here’s a collection of this weeks top search marketing and social media links from around the blogosphere:

Google CEO Eric Schmidt explaining the future of the internet

Google CEO Eric Schmidt talking about 'the biggest challenge of the age'

SEO:

StumbleUpon discoveries
Today I almost forgot to write my Twitter Friday column. Why? I was so preoccupied with the new relaunched StumbleUpon version. To make it short: SU attempts to compete directly with Twitter and Google. This might sound ridiculous but they really do. Theoretically it would be possible: SU exists for several years and has collected tens of millions of web pages in its “index” together with millions of reviews with new sites being added very quickly. Isn’t this the ideal social search engine? Isn’t this the perfect way to determine which websites really do matter in real time? Sadly, no.

Now this is the Twitter column so I won’t compare the new StumbleUpon to Google. Let me explain though why

StumbleUpon is not Twitter and can’t compete with Twitter.

StumbleUpon does not allow business usage of its site. Yes, you can get banned solely for submitting your SEO company website to SU.

How do you use Twitter for business? This question has been answered manifold times. What tools do you use for business though? There aren’t that many business tools for Twitter it seems. You rather should ask:

Which tools enable professionals best to use Twitter for business?

This way you may find more useful tools and apps. Nonetheless there are some valuable specialized Twitter tools for business you should try. I compiled a list of both, Twitter tools for business and professional Twitter tools. Most of them are free but some advanced ones, especially in the CRM arena are not.

The press coverage of the cervical cancer jab has been unpleasant to watch and brought back memories of the MMR vaccine hysteria.

Although the press may regret the damage they have (once again) done, the Google results could remain filled with flawed information for a long time because of this.

Some of the dangerous articles have been exceptionally popular and, of course, those people who believe in a big pharma conspiracy have been linking to them and driving them up in the search engine results pages.

Well, one SEO professional has had a pretty good idea. Writing for Econsultancy (an industry source Kevin often writes for), Malcolm Coles suggests we try to boost the NHS’s ranking by linking to it within posts like this.

I don’t know if a few SEO bloggers can make enough of a difference and I urge the NHS to review its optimisation efforts. However, if linking to official pages using phrases like cervical cancer immunisation has a chance of helping, then I’m happy to try.

Do take Malcom’s suggestions on board and link to these pages using relevant phrases, as I have done here.

Let’s not see another wave of youngsters missing out on an important preventative treatment.