These are pretty crazy times that we are marketing, or attempting to market, in. And some are doing it better than others. As a kid growing up in mid-state Ohio, I worked part time at a “Filling Station.” That is what gas stations were called back then, at least in my hometown. Part of the routine was to fill up the customer’s gas tank, check the oil and wash the windows, take their cash and count back the change.

By the time I was driving, the first “self-serve” gas station came to town. One-by-one the “filling stations” disappeared and were replaced by the modern day convenience store. This approach greatly increased the transactions-per-customer and gas station owners got richer if they adjusted with the times. No one asked any of us if that was OK, it just changed. I think things are changing again.

We Learned As We Went Along the Way

I have been doing a lot of research lately on Google + for our small business, which led me to draft this post. I am worried that the landscape of search will vastly change in the ensuing months. It occurred to me how much things have changed in just the last few of years. When we first started a local neighborhood blog with inbound links back to our apartment web site, we had no idea what that did. We stumbled upon the concept of inbound marketing by sheer chance.  The issue then was that there really wasn’t an efficient way to share or validate your ideas. There were some blogs then, but nothing like today, and many bloggers had yet to establish their turf.

We experimented with this newfound phenomena by writing more articles when we needed more leasing leads and sure enough, the more content we produced, the more web traffic we got and the more prospects walked in the door. It was magic! Today we no longer need to wonder about our assumptions, there is lightening-fast data within a few keystrokes and people are sharing things they are learning at every turn.

The Floor is Moving Again

“Times they are a changing,” is a somewhat worn out phrase, but they are. Jon Mitchell penned a disturbing article titled Google + Is Going to Mess Up the Internet, over at ReadWriteWeb.  The premise of the article is that “shared” content may wind up ranking higher than original content. While that isn’t completely confirmed, the pundits-at-large and in-the-know seem to agree that Google + will have a huge impact on search.

Rohn Jay Miller from Social Media Today sums things up in an article titled Welcome to Web 3.0; The Contextual Web:

The lesson we each wished we knew back in 2002 was “it’s all about the eyeballs.” Engage the eyeballs or direct them to where they should be engaged do it on a massive scale, and the rewards are billions and billions of dollars.  If I’d only known I wouldn’t have sold the Apple stock and I wouldn’t have scoffed at GOOG at $500 a share.

Now in 2012 it feels like we’re on the middle of a massive transition on the Internet.  We see the order of power changing, but it’s not quite clear why.  Things are happening—smartphones, apps, the Internet of Things, and of course social networks.

Does That Mean the Biggest Sharer Wins?

Unlike producing more content to create a greater search result to sell more stuff, sharing and getting someone else to share your stuff is much more challenging. It is more real. You have to be real. We have hardly convinced our clients that producing quality content is the answer and now they have to share too and be real?

It is a basket-load of work to get your employees to share and to interact on line, yet that may be the only real answer to this coming change. We all know that the few automated tools we have used to skip a step, such as posting to multiple platforms at the same time with the same message only retard the outcome. People aren’t tricked, they know, and click through rates subside with automation.

What are you doing to get in front of the sharing curve?

Have You Registered For Explore Dallas-Fort Worth?

Don’t miss a day of intensive learning with some of the leading thinkers and practitioners in the digital marketing and social media marketing space. Copyblogger’s Brian Clark, Edison Research’s Tom Webster, Edelman Digital’s Zena Weist and more headline one of the leading digital and social media marketing events of 2012, February 17 in Dallas, Texas! DON’T WAIT TO REGISTER! The first 100 to do so get an incredible discount! Reserve your seat today!

Editor’s Note: This is a guest post written by Marcus Taylor, co-author of the book Get Noticed, and head of social media at SEOptimise.

Back in August, I ran several experiments to try and find out whether Google’s +1s had an impact on search engine rankings. The results suggested that in almost all cases Google +1s did have a positive impact on rankings. However, a lot has changed in the past four months, so I’d like to share where I think Google is going with the impact of Google+ on search rankings.

It’s clear that Google is going all out with Google+ and it’s no secret that it’s becoming the central hub of all their services – Google Search is beginning to integrate with Google+, as is Gmail, YouTube, Analytics, and AdWords. It’s only a matter of time before we see Google Maps, and Google’s other services beginning to integrate into the social network.

Results from my Google+ rankings experiment in August 2011

What’s interesting is how Google is starting to connect the dots between people and businesses with their related content, topics and online activity. Who you have in your circles will give Google an idea of how influential you are about various topics, which, as a content creator will allow them to position your content more accurately in search results.

Google recently made a big jump in connecting the dots between people and content with the introduction of the rel=”publisher” and rel=”author” tags.

How rel=”publisher” and rel=”author” tags will impact rankings

Over the past few months, Google has introduced the rel=”author” and rel=”publisher” tags to webmasters as a way to connect your website with your Google+ profile in search results. There have been several case studies already suggesting that the images shown next to search results with these tags increase click-through rates, but I think Google has plans for these tags to become far more profound than just impact CTR.

Below are some examples of what the new rel=”publisher” and rel=”author” tags look like in search results for my website TheMusiciansGuide.co.uk.

In combination, the rel=”author” and rel=”publisher” tags will give Google some incredibly strong signals that they’d be silly to not take into account for ranking search results.

One of the most profound signals is that Google will be able to tell apart content written by people with a relevant community from those who don’t.  If an author of a blog post on scuba diving has an online network with no one interested in scuba diving, Google might question whether that author is actually relevant to that topic. This means Google will be able to further drop the rankings of low quality content sites, and replace those rankings with websites written by people who genuinely participate in a community around the topic they write about. Using Google’s logic, that person is likely to be more knowledgeable.

This means that Google will also be able to recognize content written by influencers who are highly respected in a certain niche and reward them with higher rankings.

Google +1s will become one of the most accurate ways of ‘voting’ for a website

Likes and tweets are both great signals for determining a site’s popularity, and while there is a very good correlation between how much a site is shared on Twitter & Facebook and how it ranks in search results, both tweets and likes are incredibly easy to manipulate, as I’ve proved in previous experiments, making them a highly flawed method of voting.

Google +1s and what I’ll call ‘Google + signals,’ on the other hand, are incredibly hard to manipulate. This is because Google can tell whether you’re a real person or not by investigating your Google account history, such as the videos you’ve watched on YouTube videos, the e-mails you’ve sent in Gmail, and the searches you’ve made on Google. They can then determine whether you’re a genuine vote or not by looking at the context of your interests and relationships.

I think Google is onto a real winner with the data they’re collecting from integrating Google+ into search results and I think what we’re going to see in 2012 is an incredibly personalized search experience based around whose circles we’re in, who we add into our circles and what activity we participate in online. As the dots become increasingly connected, Google can only become more intelligent about how they position search results for us.

Final Thoughts

It’s hard to know exactly what’s around the corner for Google+ at the moment, as every week there seems to be some exciting new development. That said, I think it’s fair to say that Google+ is going to become more and more of a ranking factor as Google continue to integrate it with their existing offerings. My advice? Get on there now, start growing your network on circles and get your tags implemented.

If anyone else has any thoughts on what Google might be doing with Google+ from an SEO perspective, I’d be very interested to know, you can either drop me a tweet at @MarcusATaylor or leave a comment below.

Marcus Taylor is the head of  social media at SEOptimise, a digital marketing agency based in Oxford, England. He is co-author of the book Get Noticed and regularly speaks at online marketing conferences. Marcus is also passionate about the music industry and runs TheMusiciansGuide.co.uk in his spare time. 

No, I’m not writing a book on SEO, but I Erik Deckers and I have worked out a neat webinar for everyone. On Monday, we’ll join Jeremy Dearringer of Slingshot SEO for a webinar for his company that will also bring his expertise and knowledge on search engine optimization to bear on our seven business drivers of social media marketing. This is sure to be enlightening for everyone (including me) since it won’t be all focused on the book, but more on how search applies to our theories.

The webinar is called Search & Social: 7 Business Drivers Every Marketer Should Know. It takes place on Monday, Nov. 7 at 1 p.m. ET/11 a.m. PT. Regsiter over at Slingshot SEO and come join us!

It’s also going to be a rare opportunity to hear both me and Erik together. We elected to break up the book promotional stuff to cover more ground, but as Jeremy is a good friend for both of us, we wanted to get together for this one.

See you Monday!

Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by John Schulenburg, Director of SEO for Red Bricks Media.

Remember the old line “content is king”? For a long time in the SEO community we thought it was that easy.  Create good content and they (traffic, social, rankings) will come.  But is that still true with the rise of social, local and personalized search?  What about the recent Google Panda update?  Content “farming” as it’s called, was hit pretty hard by the Panda update and now companies are having to refocus their entire view of content creation as a viable SEO strategy.  There’s a big case for internet marketers to take their focus away from content since there are signs that content isn’t exactly “king” anymore.

The way content is delivered on the web is not dying, it’s simply changing. 

Online marketers need to think differently when it comes to creating content online.  We have to become digital story tellers.  I cringe when I see brands use their costly SEO efforts to create egocentric content that may appeal to the brand or product in question, but miss the mark entirely when it comes to storytelling.  While these methods may carry the right intentions, they only reinforce what’s wrong with the way brands push content to their audiences.  They need to rethink the engagement process beyond how many likes, shares or tweets are gained, beyond how much traffic is driven or how high they rank.  While each of these metrics are important to the process of measurability, too many times I see brands driving their content strategy through these prisms.

View content creation through a different prism.

Look at your target market and think, “What peaks their interest?”  Here’s something that may surprise you.  It almost always has nothing to do with your specific product.  Your target market has its own makeup.  Think about how you can appeal to them directly without saying a word about yourself.  Something that makes your audience go, “Hey I remember those guys”.  I’m not saying going as far as promoting other products or services.  I’m saying to think fundamentally about what peaks their interest, and don’t be afraid to step out of the box to create a meaningful customer experience that is both relevant and memorable.

Understanding the needs of your customers is more important than ever. 

Relevant content creation is not an SEO tactic; it’s a conduit to creating a memorable connection between a brand and its customer.  It’s an absolute necessity for any brand trying to be relevant online.  Bottom line, if content is ever going to be “king” again, it will happen when the content creating “tactics” have given way to the understanding that the only way to drive real customer engagement is to let go of what you’d like your customer to do for you and embrace what you can do for your customer.

As SEO Director at RBM, John and his team plan, execute, and maintain search engine optimization projects for our clients. John works closely with our social and paid media experts to create Holistic Search campaigns that integrate multiple high-return marketing channels. John gained extensive experience in SEO, SEM, social media, and web development in his previous positions as Director of SEO & Social Media at Lifescript, Director of SEO at Newegg, and Senior SEO & Content Manager at Pricegrabber. He studied computer information systems at Arizona State University.

If you are an early adopter or digital marketer then you have likely hunted down your invite, registered and created a few circles worth of connections on the shiny new social network known as Google+. Google’s latest attempt at social networking has been the talk of most towns since it was first announced less than a month ago. What do I think? In short, I think Google+ is great and can only get better. For the long version I would refer to Jason Falls’ spot on and poignant post from last week.

Now while the hubbub has been all about what Google has been doing in the social networking space, very little attention has been given to some very cool big picture things that they have been up to. Things that could greatly impact all of your content across the web.

Google Authorship Markup

In a blog post on June 7th, Google announced that they were starting something new. They were going to start supporting and recognizing code within web pages that would help them connect authors to the content that they produce. By placing some specified HTML into your web pages and linking properly Google will be able to identify content written by specific authors both on your site and if that same author wrote content elsewhere online. Once identified, Google can start to include author information in search results (see example image below) that links directly back to the author’s Google profile. Additionally, anything linked to that author will show up in the “+1′s” section of their Google profile.

Examples of Author Profiles Displayed in Search Results (Click to Enlarge)

Louis Gray's Google Profile +1's Section (Click to Enlarge)

What does this all mean and why should I care?

Although Google hasn’t explained in detail what this means overall, I see a number of important things happening that brands an content marketers need to keep an eye on.

SEO & Author Ranking

Google+ was not the first place that we became familiar with the +1 button. We started seeing the +1 button next to search results. Of course, back then, it didn’t seem to mean much, but we knew they had something up their sleeve. If Google starts to display author information along side search results it will also be able to attribute any corresponding clicks on the +1 as a social endorsement that can be factored into both a page rank and author rank score. Authors that garner a lot of +1′s within search results and when someone clicks a +1 button embedded on the web page itself will likely find their content at the top of search results for specific topics they write about. Google even mentions that they will automatically start to include the authorship markup within Youtube which ultimately means video content can be factored into an author’s rank. It’s also likely that any properly attributed content that is shared socially within Google+ and is actively engaged by audiences there will feed back into this.

In the long run, this can expand in a number of different ways. Anything that is publicly accessible for Google to crawl and index can be a potential data point for them to factor into your author rank. Google can start verifying social and content channels that you link to on your Google Profile so that it can identify which tweets, photos, slide presentations and other public content it should attribute to you.

It could provide unprecedented insight into who is influencing customers on the web by combining Google+ engagement, authorship data, Adwords & Google analytics information to form a more comprehensive picture of your online presence.  Services like My mPACT (client) that work to rank influential authors & content creators could possibly tap into future authorship data provided by Google.

How to Take Advantage Now

Although Google hasn’t completely spelled out how everything will fit together just yet, I have a few suggestions of things that you should think about doing as soon as possible.

Set Up Your Google Profile

If you are an author that represents a brand or someone that produces content for many products or services then you need to make sure you have a complete and accurate Google Profile. Head on over here to get started. Pay most attention to filling out the “ABOUT” section of your profile. Take a look at my profile for some ideas. It could use some pruning, but you get the idea. Keep in mind that your profile is where Google is directing those who click on your author information in their search results so include any relevant information for those who want to learn about you and any products, services, or other content channels that you represent. Also add a link to any author pages you have on any of the sites you contribute content to.

The previously mentioned profiles are only for individual people, not businesses or organizations. Google recently mentioned that in as little as 2 weeks they should start opening up the ability for businesses to have a Google Profile. For more information on getting a Google Profile for your business that check out this post.

Add the Author Mark Up

Now that you have your profile you will want to make sure that any blog or web site that you author content has the new authorship mark up set up properly. This is a bit technical so you will probably need help from a web developer to help you get the code into place. Google provided pretty extensive instructions on how to properly add the authorship mark up here. If you don’t have access to all of the blogs/sites where you author content then you might want to talk to the manager/owner of the site. The good things is, by adding the code to most good content management systems (like WordPress for instance) any content that you previously published will get properly attributed when you add the code.

Consider Having an Author About Page on Your Site

Google’s instructions provide specific details, but if the online publication you write for doesn’t have author pages for you and the other authors who contribute then they may want to add them. Not only is it a good way to allow your readers to connect with authors, but it’s also an important element for Google to identify which content you produce. Within Google’s instructions they say:

To identify the author of an article, Google checks for a connection between the content page (such as an article), an author page, and a Google Profile.

• A content page can be any piece of content with an author: a news article, blog post, short story
• An author page is a page about a specific author, on the same domain as the content page.
• A Google Profile is Google’s version of an author page.

In confirming authorship, Google looks for two things:

• Links from the content page to the author page (if the path of links continues to a Google Profile, we can also show Profile information in search results)
• A path of links back from your Google Profile to your content.

 Add the +1 Button to Your Content

Now let me preface this by saying that, as of the time of this post, Google’s +1 button implementation needs some work. Its code is inflexible and not without the need for improvement, but it’s easy to plop into your site. Just as you would add the Facebook LIKE button, you should consider adding the +1 button to all posts and strategically to some stand alone content pages. An example of a stand alone page might be a landing page with a white paper or a slide deck presentation. Place a +1 button on the page so visitors can provide a little social endorsement of the content. There is a good chance it will help boost the rank of that page in search results, especially if the rest of that page has targeted keyword rich content. Get instructions and code to add the +1 button to your site here.

The Wrap Up

I anticipate that over the next year we will see a ton of great offerings for brands and customers from Google. I’ve had some conversations with smart folks who have been connecting the dots in some very interesting places. I hope to share some of those discussions down the road, but for now… add me on Google + , share this post and say hello.

On a final note, if you find a colleague or friend who is getting distracted by the new car smell of a new social media tool. Tell him/her to take a stop getting caught up looking at the “finger” or they might miss the “heavenly glory” of something more useful to their bottom line (see video below).

Related articles

• Google+ Mania: Most Pundits Are Missing the Real Point (adage.com)

Polishing up on my local search knowledge recently, I came across a Local Search Ranking video from Google featuring product manager Jeremy Sussman. He explains in the video (embedded below) that three of the primary factors Google uses to rank your business in local search are relevance, prominence and distance.

Relevance is easy. If you’re searching for a coffee shop, Google will eliminate dry cleaners. They aren’t relevant to what you’re looking for.

Location is easy, too. If you’re looking for something near you geo-location or the address or area you’ve entered into the search, it’s a matter of measurement.

Prominence is not so easy. Unless you listen to Sussman’s explanation of it:

“Prominence is determined by how well-known or prominent certain coffee shops are, based on sources across the web.”

If you’re not talking with your customers online or giving them something to talk about online. You aren’t affecting prominence.

Three ways you can affect your prominence today:

1. Offer some expertise in a blog post or Facebook post that is helpful to your audience.
2. Run a special for your Twitter followers.
3. Post a sign in your store that encourages users to check-in on Foursquare, Gowalla or Whrrl.

Yes, there’s claiming and optimization and all that to do, but those three will make you incrementally more prominent today.

What other ways can you think of to make you more prominent in sources across the web? Drop them in the comments and we’ll collect a nice arsenal for everyone.

The first social media conference I ever attended was a two-day festival on how to game Digg. Okay, it wasn’t officially advertised as such, but it seemed like every discussion on- or off-stage circled around to how one could accumulate enough votes to get on the front page and crash your website’s servers from the impending explosion of traffic. Granted, this was 2007 and “social media marketing” meant getting on the front page of Digg.

For several months after, I played on submission sites (known then as “social news”) trying to figure out the secrets and ins and outs. What I learned — or at least convinced myself of — was that while these communities were supposed to be news filters for the average user, they were essentially overrun with black hatters and paid submitters who ruined the purpose. The sites were supposed to be where one could submit and then vote for the top stories of the day along with other users so the site’s front page would become a democratically chosen top stories listing. Instead, they were about 50 percent that and 50 percent stories that someone gamed the algorithm to get their site or client’s site in the coveted top 10.

Just like Google’s search algorithm, the comparison code that dictated what stories ranked where on sites like Reddit, Digg, StumbleUpon, Mixx and more was susceptible to manipulation. For every page rank 7 back link I can proactively seek through PR or linkbuilding techniques, I can also ask 50-60 people to go thumb-up my post at the right times after my submission to better my chances of pay dirt.

Over the years (nay, months), paid submitters became the ace-in-the-hole for some digital marketers. Whether you were an ad/pr guy or gal trying to impress your client with pageviews and unique visitors or an SEO hack hoping to engineer some cheap bookmarks or even lucky backlinks, finding a top influencer on the social news sites who would submit your content for a fee was the dark secret of the web.

I say dark secret because no paid submitters would admit to doing it for fear the communities they submitted to would excommunicate them. Other top submitters would swear it wasn’t happening, but were mostly full of shit, ignorant or both. But finding a submitter to help you was nearly impossible. Perhaps being a straight-shooter and honest to a fault worked against me, but I flat asked six of the such animals one simple question, “How much?” and got the run around. I knew they were doing it, but I suppose they thought I would out them. (For the record, I wouldn’t. I’m honest, but I’m also loyal and consider that a breech of integrity.)

A few months later, mid-2009 if you will, there then became some level of acceptance this was happening. While identification of the newly coined, “submission marketers,” was still under the table, if you asked someone in the know, they could hook you up with someone to help. But the submitters were smart. They would only do it if they had some sort of control or input into your content and if they thought the content was strong enough on its own to warrant submitting and voting.

It was almost legit.

But a funny thing has happened on the way to the front page. People started realizing one of the core usefulness features of Twitter: If you followed the right people, you could find good content.

Sure, the social news sites still have a leg up on how they aggregate and present information. Twitter can be a cacophony of noise if you don’t know where to look. But sharing content today has become social capital, not capital capital. Can you trust the old Diggers for good content? If your tastes match theirs, sure. But the secret voting circles, paid submitters and system gaming behind the scenes that makes the hat many people wear there at least gray, if not black. Follow the right person on Twitter, Facebook, or even a good Tumblr or Posterous blog and you’ve got great content filtration with less chance of paid placement. And because the ethical discussions around social media matured (and the FTC intervened), when you do have paid placement, you have disclosure.

Don’t think at some point the FTC isn’t going to level their sights on paid social news submitters. All you “top Diggers” out there should think that through.

While I don’t think Digg and its ilk are going away, I think there’s something to be said for the fact that, at least according to Compete.com, Digg’s traffic is down almost 2 million unique visitors per month since this time last year. While it is unfair to compare Digg to Twitter, the microblogging site doesn’t have the same trending data. And the common thread of why people use Twitter has emerged to include at or near the top: to find value and content in other people’s Tweets.

So has submission marketing evolved to the point that the genuine folks just build followings on Twitter and the pay for play kids still know who Kevin Rose is? Will the submission sites continue to gradually lose steam as people find more relevant content from true friends on networks build more on trust, not good headline writing?

I’m thinking so. You?

Related articles

• Why I gave up on Digg (news.cnet.com)
• The Rise and Fall of the Digg.com Era (smarterotti.com)
• Can Digg Find Its Way in the Crowd? (nytimes.com)
• How Much Does a Front Page Digg Cost? (centernetworks.com)

When I was a 10, Denise Anderson gave me my first lesson in, shall we say, choice language.  I think it had something to do with the Girl Scout troop leader and that blessed song we had to belt out while marching a mile to the campsite (and back!) in the peak of June under the Florida sunshine. *shudders*

Today, I have different words for the distasteful and often irritating aspects of life online.  Spam. Bots. Cloaking.  Memes.  Link-dropping in comments. There are many more terms, and some people might throw article marketing into the mix.  But I disagree, provided you have the right objectives and are committed to producing high quality content.

Content in an analog world

Paraphrasing Wikipedia, “Article marketing has been used by professionals about as long as mass media has been around … [a] business provides useful content to the newspaper free of charge, and in return the newspaper prints the business’ contact information with the article. Because newspapers and other traditional media are expected to present content on limited budgets, this arrangement is generally advantageous for all parties involved.”

Get all scientific on me

There has been a lot of debate about the SEO value of article marketing as well as the ethics of distributing content from directory platforms and the sister practice of republishing content (“spinning” variations of the original content to skirt around the dupe content penalty).  You’ll find a good discussion about some of the technical SEO aspects over on seoMoz if this interests you.  Clearly the academic debate will go on, mainly because GoogleBot is still one of the great mysteries of the modern era – perpetuated by the constant re-invention of the product through universal search, instant anticipation, incorporation of social streams and more.

Rank:  Gotta Get Some

Let’s say you’re not a professional link builder or affiliate marketer — both tough jobs.  But you need to improve your organic SERPs to drive more traffic to your small business site.  Or maybe you own an eCommerce site in a specialty category and sell some considered purchase products — things that prospects typically research quite a bit and mull over before committing to buy.  In either case you may have already worked your on-page elements and  now want to focus on gaining inbound links and spreading the word around about your business.  You just need people to know about you is all.

Article marketing, like any tactic, isn’t a silver bullet.  Trying your article marketing hand on several sites, you might see mixed results or even run into difficulties properly attributing pieces of your larger SEO strategy to having done this or that.  Lots of moving parts.

All that said, as someone who has managed article marketing programs for several eCommerce sites across both B2C and B2B channels within several markets, there’s Google juice to be slurped.

In the land of small budgets and good web writers

If your’re competing against some highly entrenched niche brands or battling over some really competitive keywords, a constantstream of fresh, well written, and helpful content can really boost site traffic.  The screen shot at the right shows a 2-week comparison of traffic characteristics originating from an article directory.  There are always short term fluctuations, but the big picture has shown me that on average, traffic originating from a directory views more pages and spends a longer time on site.  Repeat:  the good content off-page led them to consume more good content on-page.

Ahh, but what about sales, you ask?  Well in my experience that’s been more of a secondary benefit rather than a goal.  Unless you’re distributing articles with long-tail keywords you’re really not going to pull in people in the “ready to buy” mode.  The click-through rate on the articles I’ve worked with ranges from 11.5% to as high as 14%. Whether the sale takes place immediately or through them circling back, you’re casting a wide net and catching all you can.

When people become so satisfied by your article they’re then interested in learning more (as demonstrated by the click), you have earned the chance to continue pulling them down the conversion path.  Don’t blow it with a disruption in the tone or style of the message lest you be sniffed out for being disingenuous.

You there!  Don’t do that.

Personally, I’m not a proponent of article spinning.  Most would agree that since the intent of spinning is to manipulate the system while providing no additional value to the message, spinning is cheesy.  In theory,  someone performing a search could click on several page one results and stumble onto your article or spin through multiple listings.  While dominating the front page may sound good on one level, it makes for a poor user experience.  I know some folk who have success with spinning, but I suspect the hand of the Goog will come down sooner rather than later and that will be the end of that.

Just write good stuff

Related articles

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• Can Article Marketing Work For B2B SEO? (searchengineland.com)
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As social media grows and matures, it seems pretty clear that there are a few aspects of this integrated discipline that are becoming increasingly important, yet are undeveloped skills in most social media practitioners.  One such aspect is search marketing.

Just a few short years ago search engine optimization (SEO) was a highly specialized discipline, and primarily was being executed within standalone SEO firms and some digital agencies.   The guys (yeah, mostly guys, though a few gals too) who were search experts often had coding backgrounds, and they really understood the nuts-and-bolts of how the search engines, and websites, worked.  They used this info to help static websites get noticed by the engines, and then they extended that knowledge into paid search, also called PPC (pay-per-click) or search engine marketing (SEM).  Blogs came along and they figured out the best ways to optimize those too.  If you needed to build a website or blog, or run a PPC campaign, you knew who to call.

These days, it’s not quite so simple.  Sure, you can (and should) still call in the big guns when you’re building a website from scratch.  But lots and lots of agencies: PR, digital and pure-play social, are building client blogs.  Do those firms hire an SEO company every time they build a blog?  Not if they’re smart.  Those that understand the importance of a properly-optimized blog (and the properly-optimized writing that goes into it) have built up enough SEO expertise in-house (or have developers who have) to be able to create and implement a search-friendly blog and then train the writers on at least basic best practices of search-optimized writing.

Search marketing now goes far beyond websites and blogs.  It’s part of nearly every aspect of social media, from Twitter to YouTube, Facebook to Flickr.  But many social media practitioners or front-line engagers don’t realize how pervasive it is and they’re not always fully equipped to manage search optimization on social platforms.  Want proof?  Look at how many brands haven’t used every available text space on their Facebook page, or who don’t add brand keywords to their YouTube videos.

So speaking of YouTube, did you know that you can optimize videos on YouTube?  Including the right keywords, writing keyword-rich descriptions and uploading video transcripts (yup, you can do that) can all have a big impact on how easily your video is found in YouTube – and in other search engines, such as Google, as well.

Twitter search is getting more important, and more complex, every day.  Twitter can be a very powerful tool to get your brand ranked in search engines.  It all starts with your profile – even if you can’t get your perfect username, you can make up for it by using your real name/brand name as your Actual Name in Twitter – so if your brand name is “Brand Blue,” using exactly that as your Actual Name will be more effective than being “Erin at Blue.”  From that simple start, there are a number of other key Twitter SEO practices to follow; because of Google’s near-instant indexing of its content, quick fixes on Twitter can often make a big difference.

And Facebook … ah, Facebook.  With 500 million + users, the search potential within Facebook seems pretty great.  However, their search function is not clearly optimizable and it’s improving only slowly.  It is true that there are some best practices for Facebook search optimization, including appropriate keyword use (in your info page, photo titles, and status updates); choosing the right name/URL for your Facebook page; and using the About text box (left sidebar) for keyword-rich copy.  Another tiny tip is to use a tall image for your brand logo – you’ll command more space in the search results page.  Try it and see.

So what can you, the social media practitioner, do to expand your knowledge about search?  I recommend starting by adding a few SEO blogs to your blog reader.  Some of the posts will be pretty techie, and they won’t all apply to what you do every day, but I can just about guarantee you’ll start to feel smarter about search in just a couple of weeks.  Maybe set up some Twitter keyword searches (yet another form of social search!) for “twitter + SEO” or “facebook + SEO.”  Breathe it all in – you might find it really appeals to you as a new concept to master.

And the next time your firm hires an SEO specialist to work on a site or a blog, get involved, listen and learn.  You can no longer afford to have a “not my department” attitude.

How does your firm or company manage search marketing in relation to social media?  As a social media practitioner, do you feel like you know a lot about search or are you just taking baby steps?  The comments are yours.

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You’ve heard of search engine optimization on sites like Google, Bing, and now even Twitter; the question is, what’s next? Marketers in the digital age need data and content, and there are lots of innovative tools coming out to organize the vast amount of stuff that’s out there. Here are four search engines that will be making huge waves in search by 2012:

OneRiot – The Real-Time Search Engine

The Pitch: “OneRiot crawls the links people share on Twitter, Digg and other social sharing services, then indexes the content on those pages in seconds. The end result is a search experience that allows users to find the freshest, most socially-relevant content from across the realtime web.”

Why you should pay attention: OneRiot gets roughly half a million visits per month, according to data provided by Compete and Quantcast. That doesn’t seem like much, but it doesn’t count the traffic from Yahoo real-time search (which OneRiot built) and mobile real-time traffic through a service called Taptu. The company also recently launched an ad network that provides ads based on the trending topics of the moment.

How marketers can use OneRiot:

1. Track keywords in real-time – One of my clients has two natural soda brands, so I use the term “natural soda” to stay up-to-date on news and trends in the industry and across the web.
2. Find influencers – OneRiot shows you who tweeted the story first, indicating who the influencers for your keyword phrase are.
3. Find publications to pitch – OneRiot shows you which publication published the popular story – you can use that information to create a list of publications you want to target.
4. Follow your industry – Use keyword searches to keep track of breaking news about or from your competitors that you may need to respond to.
5. Find information your fans/followers would appreciate – Use keywords to see what articles are popular and relate to your brands, then tweet them from the brand’s account.
6. Create content people like – OneRiot is the ultimate source on how to write popular articles in your niche – you can learn a lot by studying the articles that are coming to the top and emulate the style and formatting.

Check out OneRiot at http://oneriot.com

Wolfram|Alpha – The Computational Search Engine

The Pitch: “Wolfram|Alpha’s long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. We aim to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything.”

Wolfram’s Alpha version allows users to compute their search engine results, rather than find links that will give them the information. For example, you can use Wolfram to find the phase of the moon from the day you were born in just seconds.

Why you should pay attention: Wolfram gets about half a million visits to their website each month, similar to OneRiot. Their iPhone app is priced at $1.99 (formerly $50 because it can replace your graphing calculator, and then some). The computational aspect of Wolfram is powerful, and the visual organization of data is a great tool for any marketer.

How marketers can use Wolfram:

1. Integrate visual data into your company blog, website, or presentations – Infographics are a great way to demonstrate a point, and Wolfram is capable of creating very pretty ones.
2. Conduct market research and make comparisons – You can compute lots of information about various companies and products in seconds – for example, type in “Big Mac vs. Whopper.” You might be surprised how much data there is.
3. Build separate website properties that are useful to your consumers – There is opportunity to partner with Wolfram to create a niche-based search engine for your company, or even a widget that can be embedded into your site. An application is if a company like Enterprise wanted to incorporate a widget that let users calculate the distance between two cities with one-click.
4. Create an internal knowledge base of data – Wolfram’s corporate services include setting up an internal search engine that can store and compute company data. You could capture accounting data, marketing data, line production data, and more with this service.
5. Analyze corporate information for faster, data-driven decision-making – If you had accounting, marketing, or line production data at your fingertips as an analyst, imagine how much faster and more in-depth you could do your job.

Check out Wolfram|Alpha at http://wolframalpha.com/

Book of Odds – The Research-Driven Content Provider

Pitch: “It is a destination where people come to learn about the things that worry or excite them, to read engaging and thoughtful articles, and to participate in a community of users that share their interests and ambitions. It contains hundreds of thousands of Odds Statements, from the odds of being the only one to survive a plane crash, to the odds of having a heart attack, to the odds of having ever eaten cold pizza for breakfast.”

Why you should pay attention: Book of Odds is a search engine three years in the making that helps people learn more about the odds of every day life. It’s not getting much traffic now, but I think the potential as both a research and credibility tool as well as a marketing too is quite strong.

How marketers can use Book of Odds:

1. Brainstorm ideas for your company blog – Book of Odds takes you places you don’t expect to go. I hang out here sometimes when I’m stuck on ideas for my blog or when I just want to learn something completely new.
2. Integrate visual data into your company blog, website, or presentations – Like Wolfram|Alpha, Book of Odds is a great place to find data-driven visuals.
3. Find funs facts to incorporate into research and reports – For example, “The odds that an adult is a baseball fan is 1 in 2.22″ has to be useful somewhere in your career, right?
4. Suggest odds about your company or brand – Can you imagine if this tool had been around during the Harry Potter craze, when everyone was trying to figure out the odds on various characters dying? You can come up with tons of ways to tie your brand to odds, and Book of Odds has a tool to submit the information directly to it’s search engine.

Check out Book of Odds at http://bookofodds.com/

Evri – The Contextual, Widgetized Search Engine

Pitch: “Evri’s automated content delivery capabilities will help you drive up user engagement, increase page views, and decrease costs. Our platform is designed to help you solve tough problems.”

Why you should pay attention: Evri gets roughly half a million visits per month and has partnerships with major news sites like the Washington Post. Evri also recently acquired the web semantics talent of search engine start-up Twine, which helps you “join groups based on what youíre searching for and connect with people who are searching for the same things.”

How marketers can use Evri:

1. Get a visual mock-up of all the latest news on one keyword – Evri is a bit like a newspaper that only talks about one subject – the keyword you give it. It incorporates videos, pictures, headlines, blog posts, twitter updates, and more into a mash-up that quickly gives you a snapshot of the subject you’re searching about.
2. Get data on keywords over a 30-day period – for larger search terms like “Tiger Woods,” Evri let’s you browse through the keyword trend history for the past month.
3. Put contextual results on your blog or website – Evri offers corporate and partner services to bring more functionality to your website and provide users more content value.
4. Integrate widgets with your social media accounts – Evri’s selection of widgets can be plugged in anywhere that accepts HTML and JavaScript.

Check out Evri at http://evri.com

Have you heard of any other good search engines out there? As marketers, what other search engine tools do you want to see in the future?

Monica O’Brien is the author of Social Pollination: Escape the Hype of Social Media and Join the Companies Winning At It. She also serves as the Director of Digital at Fizz, a word of mouth marketing agency. You can also read Monica’s blog, Social Pollination.

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The more I learn about search engine optimization, the more I want to experiment and play with search. I’ve begun to develop my own opinions and instincts about search as a business driver, some of which I’m sure all the SEO dorks would refute and criticize me for, but nonetheless, I’m better armed as a digital marketing strategist because I’ve taken myself to school on SEO.

When Brian Clark came out with Scribe SEO, I immediately signed up to see how this tool could help, not only my knowledge of writing for search, but for my clients and their projects. Using it helped me develop an understanding (or maybe it’s one of my theories that the SEO dorks can yell at me about) that it’s not about targeting keywords with your content. It’s about targeting a singular keyword. Scribe helps you identify a primary keyword and recommends steps to take in order to go after search results, one term at a time.

Last week, I tried a little experiment to measure the effectiveness of primary keyword targeting on a Google search. It turned out to be an interesting proof point that targeting a primary keyword works, but also an interesting read of how Google ranks a post over the course of the first few hours and days of a new piece of content’s activity.

Last Friday’s post, “Where Social Media Monitoring Services Fail,” was constructed specifically to win the search term, “Social Media Monitoring Services.” Using Scribe, I optimized the post for that primary keyword phrase, ensured the phrase was in the title, description and several times throughout the copy, tagged it and published at 7:35 a.m. ET. Look at the post image below and notice the occurrences of the keyword phrase:

Here’s a snapshot of that search result at the moment I published (Click on any of these images to see larger versions):

You’ll notice the starred result is from Social Media Explorer, but this is the result of me starring that item in Google Reader for reference. It was a relevant result from my own Google information. You would not have seen that result. The search winners on that graphic are, in order, Trackur (a social media monitoring service); an article on social media monitoring from ReadWriteWeb; a post on social media monitoring services from Jeremiah Owyang’s blog; Radian6, another service; a Wikipedia entry and an article from Marketing Pilgrim on social media monitoring tools. (Note: Marketing Pilgrim is authored by Trackur CEO Andy Beal, so kudos to him for having a double entry of sorts.)

Using no promotional tactics of my own, other than an automatic Twitter and Facebook Brand Page post when there’s a new article on my blog, and the fact that Social Media Explorer is a widely read industry blog which has accumulated an organic marketing army of its own from readers who Tweet or Re-Tweet links to its posts, here’s what happened next:

At 9 a.m. ET, almost an hour and 30 minutes after the post goes live, a Google search of the term begins to show Twitter links to the article. The post is already ranked No. 5! (Keep in mind the starred item would not be there on any search but one I conducted.)

At 11 a.m. ET, the post still ranked No. 5, but at 12:30 p.m., it’s all of a sudden the second ranked result for the search term:

Notice a previous post (actually the one starred) is showing up as a sub-set result under the result, meaning Social Media Explorer technically owns the No. 2 and No. 3 result for that term. In a weird reversal, however, a check of the search term at 1 p.m. shows the post coming at No. 5 again. How this happened, I can’t explain. Perhaps Matt Cutts can shed some light on it?

On Saturday morning, 24 hours after the post went live, I checked again and the post seems to have settled in to a solid No. 5 position in the Google rankings for the term:

But three days later, on Monday morning and after several other blogs and websites have picked up on the post and linked to it, the entry ranks an impressive third, putting it in the sweet spot where 85-90 percent of all clicks occur on a search result page.

As I write this, a full week later, the post has now dipped back to No. 5 in the rankings again. Still, with no link-building tactics, no post promotion other than two automated mechanisms for Twitter and Facebook and no SEO magic, my blog now ranks in the top five for a search term that might prove useful.

It’s fair to note that, according to Google’s Adwords traffic estimator, there is little competitiveness for this particular search term. Still, logic tells us that the phrase “social media monitoring services” is likely to be used by someone looking for one, or a list of them. Aaron Wall of SEO Book estimates that for long-tail keywords like this, on-page optimization accounts for 50 percent of the search algorithms. Not to mention 25 percent of all keywords entered into a search have never been entered in one before.

What this experiment leads me to believe includes:

• Targeting a primary keyword is a smart way to rank well quickly.
• You don’t have to promote your posts to rank well, but probably only if the content is on a well-trafficked website. (Hence the need to begin building one!)
• Google’s algorithms are dynamic enough that your ranking can be affected by the hour, especially as the early activity builds around a post.
• Scribe SEO really does work and is helpful.

Now it’s your turn. What did this experiment stir in your brain? If you’re an SEO expert or professional, what am I missing, what factors have I not considered? What other methods can be implemented to see that singular blog post get a win rather than a top five?

Please jump in the comments and help us all understand what good SEO copywriting can do for a blog or website. We’ll all learn something good from your thoughts.