Editor’s Note: This is a guest post from Anthony Piwarun from Zeon Solutions in Milwaukee.

Last month I presented at my first online marketing conference about aligning search and social to improve organic visibility and increase traffic. Jason was kind enough to help me with a quote for the presentation on how search and social don’t necessarily get along. His words spoke volumes to both me and the audience:

As a search engine marketer who’s been in the industry for about five years now, I know where he, and you are all coming from. I’ve dealt with SEO specialists and agencies in the past who’ve kept the “secret sauce” to themselves instead of going the route of education with the client. The truth is – there is no secret sauce. Search engine optimization is about analyzing your site’s visitors – not chasing Google and Bing.

Social Media is a Ranking Signal

Since mid-to-late 2010 (or maybe earlier), Google and Bing have been using social media engagement metrics as a ranking signal. Things like mentions, shares, likes, and retweets are used by search engines as a form of “social proof,” much like links. An analogy that I like to use with clients when describing the quantity and quality of links – and now social mentions – to their website is like a “vote.” I know the majority of you are sick of all of the political talk, but think of each link and each social mention as a vote of confidence. The more votes you have, the more likely you are to be seen as an authority on the topic (web page) or as a whole (your site / domain). Logic tells us that the higher the quantity – and more importantly, the quality – of those votes, the higher we will rank for the keyword terms that we’re targeting. Take that to the bank!

Social Media is Engagement – Not Follows, Shares and Likes

When you think of social media, what do you think of? Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest. Being the seasoned professional that you are, you know very well that’s not it at all. Social media is about engagement, no matter what set of metrics the C-suite has you chasing. Follows on Twitter, shares on LinkedIn, likes on Facebook and repins on Pinterest are only half the battle. As digital marketers, our success is judged upon how many conversions that our efforts can be attributed to – be it form submissions, ecommerce sales, or in-store purchases. Everything digital is measurable.

Think about the last time that you, as a marketer, went looking to purchase a good or service. What were some of the things you noticed? Did the mom-and-pop shop have a fan page? Did the e-com shop have a Twitter presence? No. Even as marketers, we have needs. We did in fact look at Twitter and Facebook – who wouldn’t? Engagement is key. A thousand followers on Twitter can easily be bought for $17. The quality of those followers is evident, and to the average consumer support, service and accessibility is what matters. There’s no number of fans or followers that can calm the nerves of a potential customer on the fence.

Bring Alignment – Gain Visibility, Traffic and Conversions

In case you’ve been living under a rock, search and social media specialists have been getting cozy beside the bonfire for some time now. If you’ve missed the memo, it’s time to get aboard the traffic train and integrate your efforts with the agency or in-house SEO. Promoting your client’s content through social networks will not only work to build authority, increase your following, and drive traffic, but will also assist in boosting search engine relevancy using social signals. Aside from their role as secondary traffic mediums, social mentions like tweets, shares, likes, and +1’s are effecting search engine rankings, whether you like it or not.

If you’re interested in saving time, money, and resources in your organization, bringing alignment to all traffic-generating mediums is the key to success. Through internal meetings, conference calls, and close coordination with external vendors, you can ensure that your efforts are put to use and not lost in the shuffle.

Does anyone else have touch points where SEO and social media can get along and share information? If so, we’d love to hear them!

Anthony Piwarun is a Milwaukee SEO and Search Engine Marketing Manager at Zeon Solutions, an e-commerce web development company based in Milwaukee, WI. Follow Anthony on Twitter, or read his blog to stay in touch.

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Long ago, before “social media” was a twinkle in Pete Cashmore’s eye, I used to build websites. Before that, I designed print flyers, billboards and brochures. The one thing that has never changed?

Nobody knows when to stop adding things.

I’ve been involved in creating websites since 2004, either as a coder, copywriter, project manager, webmaster, SEO, content manager, content strategist or some other capacity. In every single project, the client used the word “clean” to describe their ideal website design.

So why does nearly every website eventually end up a cluttered mess?

I don’t care. 

We could spend the rest of this blog post investigating the cultural and psychological causes behind a desperate need to fill every inch of white space on a design. We could talk about how modern life gets us addicted to overstimulation, making us profoundly uncomfortable with things like silence and emptiness.

Or we could discuss how you can keep it from ruining your conversion rate.

Let’s tackle that last one instead.

You’re messing with my Zen thing, man.

img courtesy winkler on sxc

First, let’s step back and get to a point of agreement that page clutter is a bad thing. A business website or blog is not a digital brochure, it’s a media channel.

Notice that word “channel”? It implies a free-flowing stream. Clutter dams the river.  Too many page elements make it difficult for a visitor to figure out what to focus on. Your calls-to-action get lost in the chaos.

When visitors first arrive at your home page, can they quickly find the ferry to their desired destination? Clutter means your visitor gets stuck on the bank like the avatar from Frogger, overwhelmed. Overwhelm translates to lack of confidence, fear and inhibition. Congratulations, instead of offering a warm, inviting welcome, you just intimidated your curious visitor like a bouncer outside a bar.

This isn’t just the prevailing wisdom, implied as having business value to justify aesthetic preference. Split-testing shows that eliminating page clutter dramatically improves conversions. In eCommerce websites, cluttered product and checkout pages increase abandonment rates, costing you sales.

But avoiding page clutter isn’t only important at the end of the sales funnel. It’s also vital if you use content as a lead nurturing tactic. Your content should be like you sitting down with a prospect, sharing your expertise. Would you rather that conversation happen:

• In a quiet coffee shop with no interruptions, or
• On a busy street with other elements screaming like street hawkers from the sidewalks?

At every stage of the sales funnel, it’s important to keep clutter to a minimum. Doing otherwise sabotages your carefully laid path to conversion.

The middle way to an uncluttered design.

I like metaphors. You can probably tell, because I’ve crammed a half dozen into this post so far. You probably won’t be surprised that I’ve got another one for you: think of your refrigerator. 

How many times have you had to ask someone “Where are the pickled ghost chilis?” only to be told they’re right in front of you… behind the milk? (Which you ‘ll need anyway, if you plan to eat pickled ghost chilis.)

What did Mom always tell you? “Everything can’t be in the front.”

It’s the same with your website. You can have as many pages as you want. You can have as many widgets and graphics and PDFs as you want. But everything can’t be in the front. Some things must be a click or more from the home page. Some things should be shifted to the footer. A page will only hold so many “featured” items, until nothing’s really featured.

If this was your fridge, what items need to be front and center (top of home page)? What could go on a lower shelf (below the fold)? What could go to the door (sidebar, footer)? What’s okay if you have to dig for it a little (doesn’t make the home page, but is easy to find in the navigation)?

I think we’re all in agreement that your terms & conditions page and privacy statement should be buried in the vegetable crisper.

Getting back on the path

Sometimes, a website starts out beautifully focused. This happens most often with blogs. In the beginning, a lot of bloggers are able to start out with a fairly clean layout, partly because they lack the development skills to add much to a basic blog theme. The beginner’s mind grants clarity.

Then over time, the clutter starts building up. Someone wants to put banner ads on your site.  Someone decides you need a live chat box.  You win some meaningless web award, and decide you need that logo to show off how awesome you are ”provide social proof.” Someone suggests you’ll sell more if you add the logos from the BBB, the local chamber of commerce, your industry associations and your brother-in-law’s Masonic Lodge.

Honestly, though, the worst offender when it comes to gradual clutter build-up is social media. You add a Twitter widget. You add a Facebook page widget. Someone says you need a Pinterest or a Google+ account, so you add those, too. You add share buttons to every page. You start adding share buttons to multiple items on a single page.

Then one day, you realize that your website has become the waiter from Chotchkie’s, with 57 pieces of flair. When that happens, it’s time to get back on the path. Let go of your attachment to that award logo. Or the badge telling everyone you sponsored that event. Don’t let your ego get in the way of keeping your eyes on the real prize: conversions.

Screenshot a few pages of your website. Print them out. Circle in red any items that you added “to see if they’d help.” Dig into your analytics, especially the In-Page Analytics and Visitor Flow reports. Have those items measurably helped guide visitors down the path to conversion? If not, ditch them.

Riding the white elephant

Sometimes, you get stuck with content elements that you can’t get rid of, despite their total lack of usefulness. This is especially true with corporate websites.

In that case, if you can’t get rid of it, the best approach is to see if you can at least make it less noticeable. If you can’t provide visitors a calm, zen-like environment, at least clear a path for them.

Push the clutter elements to sidebars, footers, and subpages wherever possible. Push it below the fold, if moving it off the home page isn’t an option. If it’s a graphic, see if you can apply a filter to grey out the item unless someone mouses over it. The same people who like adding endless graphics to an already-busy page usually love any kind of animation.

Also, consider the possibility of making subtle tweaks to your CSS and HTML to create the illusion of more space and fewer items on the page. Increasing the line spacing, leading, or font size can give users eyes a rest, as can softening the colors a bit. Gradients, drop shadows, patterns, rules and other background design elements can create a more sophisticated design, but if you have to sacrifice them in the name of clarity and content focus, it might be worth it.

Balance the value that each item adds to the page against the overall cost in creating greater friction for the visitor. Some items may have more value than the non-negotiable-but-worthless stuff, but if the plane is going down, you toss the bags of rice and hope you can find food when you land.

The supreme art of war is subduing the enemy without fighting. – Sun Tsu, The Art of War

Also, let go of the idea that every visitor needs to pass through the home page. If you’ve lost that ground, concede it. Instead of wasting your efforts fighting a losing battle, redirect your energy. Go build on uncontested land. More than likely, you have the power to create clean, streamlined landing pages anywhere but the home page. So create them, and then point your search, display, email and social campaigns directly to them.

In Summary:

If you want visitors to convert, you have to provide them with a clear and inviting path.

Unnecessary clutter can cause visitors to stumble on that path.

Identifying and eliminating clutter that has built up over time can improve conversion rates.

If you can’t eliminate or neutralize clutter, provide an alternative path.

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Last week, we talked about a simple workflow for using Google Analytics to inform your content planning. We looked at the Content Drilldown report, and used it to reveal the gaps in your existing content, helping you plan your editorial calendar.  While looking at content performance is interesting, have you ever wondered how your content performs before the click?

• How many web searchers see your content in search results?
• Which keywords and content get a lot of eyeballs, but relatively few clicks?
• What topics could you add to your editorial calendar to exploit strong search interest?

Today, we’re going to continue our exploration of data-supported content decisions. Most digital marketers have added Google Analytics to their business websites and blogs. However, the complementary Google Webmaster Tools is often overlooked. It’s quite simple to set up, and once you do, you have access to a useful set of pre-click data on how your content is performing in organic search.

Webmaster Tools integrates with Google Analytics, so you won’t be adding another dashboard to check. Once you connect the accounts, the new data will show up under the Traffic Sources > Search Engine Optimization report. Since digital marketers are always busy, if you’re manually checking your visibility in Google, this will save you time.

Setting Up Webmaster Tools

You’ll first have to sign up for Webmaster Tools at www.google.com/webmasters/tools/. Be sure to use a Google Account that has administrative access to your Google Analytics account. That will make it easier to connect them later.

Once you’re signed in, click the red “Add Site” button to verify that you control the site. Enter the URL of your business blog or website, and Google WMT will create a unique verification code for you.

This might be the point at which you’ll need a little developer help if you don’t have FTP access to the site, but it’s very little help. Download the HTML file (which is empty, it just needs to exist on your web server as proof that you control the site). Then you or a developer will need to upload the file to the root directory (the same folder as your home or index page) on your hosting server.

There are alternate means of verification, like adding the code as a meta tag to the header of your site, or having it look up your Google Analytics account, but I’ve never had good luck with these methods. Also, if your site is on WordPress and you change your theme, you might lose the verification code (and your data till you figure out that you’ve done it.) So if at all possible, stick with the recommended method. It’s recommended for a reason.

Once that’s done, return to Webmaster Tools and verify the site. Once it’s verified, you can connect it to your Analytics account.

Log in to the dashboard, click the Traffic Sources tab and then Search Engine Optimization > Queries. It will tell you that you need to enable Webmaster Tools. Click “Set up Webmaster Tools data sharing” and you should see your new WMT account as an option to connect at the bottom. Apply those changes, and you’re off to the races.

There’s a slight data lag with Webmaster Tools, so don’t be concerned if it takes a day or two for your new data to show up. Once it does, you can see how your content performs before a visitor clicks through to your site.

More Information > Better Content Decisions

You can quickly look at your site’s performance in terms of impressions, clicks, average position, and click through rate (CTR). The Queries report will tell you which keywords or topics are generating the most visibility and clicks. The Landing Page report look at the individual posts or pages on your site, and how they’re performing in search.

You can filter these reports on the fly using the search bar or the advanced filter tool, which is just above the list of top keywords (Query view) or content (Landing Page view). Filtering will let you drill down to see your average ranking, which is called “position” in this report, for specific content or keywords. A little digging around should show you topics and keywords that have strong search interest (lots of impressions).

You can create a running list of “opportunity rich” keywords and topics, and use that list to inform your editorial calendar. Additionally, you can investigate content that is getting high impressions, but low clicks or CTR. If the average position for that page or post is >10, it’s not showing up in the first page of search results.

These pages might be good candidates for spending a little extra time beefing up the SEO.  Small adjustments in the title, URL, or description might deliver more site visitors. (No, search engines don’t rank based on the description, but visitors do click based on it, and those clicks are what you’re after anyway.) Alternately, you might create new content on that topic, and link between the two posts, improving overall authority for your site on the subject.

Once you can take a peep behind the curtain at what is happening with your content when people are previewing it in search, you can make any adjustments you need to make sure you’re offering them what they want.

To a certain extent, content marketers will always be guessing at what their audience wants. But if data from Webmaster Tools can provide good clues, why not make it a more educated guess?

If you’re a digital marketer and don’t log into analytics at least weekly, shame on you. You’re missing information that can help you make better decisions, even in tasks and roles that seem pretty far removed from reporting.

Most marketers associate Google Analytics with periodic reporting of traffic. Those who are responsible for tracking revenue or media buys may look at conversions or traffic source performance. But the data in Google Analytics can help content strategists, community managers and others in a more editorial role, too.

Aside from looking at how many pageviews your last post got, content strategists can use Google Analytics’ data to guide content planning. However, since content strategists are usually grammar geeks instead of numbers nerds, we’re often too intimidated to give it a serious look. It’s actually not that hard to use Google Analytics to find great opportunities and ideas for your content strategy and editorial calendar.

Let’s look at how you can use the data from your back catalog of posts to plan a kickass editorial calendar for the future.

Join me in the Wayback Machine, Sherman.

Here’s our use case: You’re a new hire responsible for content strategy on a popular blog that has been churning out daily weekday content for five years. The blog is a lead generation tool for a business, so the categories align with your service set. Over the years, the content has had some hits and some misses. Now, you’re working on a content strategy for the next quarter.

You’ve decided to create an “onboarding” page to orient new visitors, giving them a feel for the site’s voice, perspective and “editorial beat.” You hope the links will also help bump up the SEO value of those posts for important keywords. The onboarding page will have links to the “Top Ten Can’t Miss Posts” for your website.

Since the blog has been around for a while, its purpose (and content) has evolved over the years. The original blogger didn’t start with a cohesive plan to build “cornerstone content”– or else the business model changed and the original cornerstone content may not be as relevant as it should be.

So how do you go through a backlog of five years of at least five posts a week to find the ten you need to set the tone for new visitors? (And for the rest of you grammar geeks, the math for that works out to 1,300 posts. Even if the use case was three posts a week for three years, that’s 468 posts. Way too many to read all of them individually.)

Sorting the Haystack into Smaller Haystacks

So as our intrepid hero(ine), you’ll log into analytics. If you don’t have analytics access — get it. Now. You need it. If you’ve looked at analytics at all, you’re used to just looking at the most recent month of data. For this exercise you’ll need to go to the Standard Reporting dashboard and change the date range. Set the beginning date as far back as you’ve got data, up to the current date.

Now, you’re going to move to the Content tab. Click the subsection called “Content Drilldown.” If your mission is to find the needles that are the top ten posts in a haystack of 1,300 you’re going to need to start sorting and filtering.  The Content Drilldown assumes your folders are categories. If you click the link for the Category folder, voila! You’ve gone from looking at the highest traffic posts to the highest traffic posts for that category.

Adjust the number of rows to something manageable, but probably larger than the default of 10 rows. You might make the break point the top 25 or 50 posts in terms of pageviews. You might decide the break the list at a particular number of pageviews, for example, anything that generated more than 100 or 500 or 1000, depending on the typical traffic to your site.

Download this report into a CSV file. Now you have an editable “short list” for the category.

And Then There Were Ten

Congratulations. You’ve gone from 1,300 potential choices to maybe a dozen or so for each category. Now, start culling the short list. Eliminate anything that’s not “evergreen” right off the bat. You can probably quickly get rid of several posts this way. Posts that focus on a hot news item of the day often get big short term boosts, but they aren’t likely the best representatives of your editorial focus. In fact, anything time-sensitive can go. Or anything that got an “unnatural” boost in traffic.

At this point, you’re scanning the headlines and getting a sense of what the topics of the posts are. Aside from pageviews, look at the Average Time on Page to see which posts kept the readers’ interest longest. Think like a book editor. If you were trying to turn the blog into a book, which posts headlines would be the most obvious chapters to include?

If any headline or URL piques your curiosity because you’re not sure what it’s about, pull it up and spot check it. Read through it quickly to see if it’s a hidden gem that might have gotten better traffic with a clearer or more compelling headline or stronger keywords in the URL. You might be able to refresh and optimize that post to get a second life out of it.

At this point, you’re now using your best analytical tool: your own brain. It may take a while of reading through the top contenders, but you’ll quickly get to a short list of 2-5 posts that represent the best evergreen content in that category. Then lather, rinse and repeat with the other categories.

You may want to weight certain categories by importance: for example, if you have one primary focus for the site, that category may have 5 of the top 10 posts, and the other categories will divvy up the remaining five.

Also, question the writers. What posts of theirs are they most proud of? Which ones got memorable feedback? Using analytics data doesn’t mean ignoring anecdotal information. It just gives you a manageable starting place for human analysis.

Back to the Future

At the end of this exercise, you’ll notice something interesting. You not only have a good overview of the most resonant posts from the past, you’ll have a much clearer and more specific sense of the site’s editorial focus, point-of-view and past coverage.You’ll have digested way more than you think about what kinds of posts work at driving readership, and which ones don’t.

Now you’re much better prepared to start planning content for the future. Our use case was a new hire, but often people who’ve been working with the same site for years get burned out. This exercise can help you get a little much-needed distance and perspective.

Aside from the winners, you’ll also have noticed the gaps.  The gaps are the key to your editorial calendar for the next period.

Certain categories or topics will have either been missed, or at least not had that “must-read, bookmark and revisit” contribution. Anytime you find yourself thinking “Wow, I would have expected to find a post on X,” write down those missing pieces. Look at the posts you rejected from your short list. What was wrong? Why was it a near miss instead of a hit?  Could you use the original idea as the basis for a stronger piece? Did you rule out a good, high traffic older post whose content is outdated? Could it be fixed with an update, refresh, or “2012 edition”?

You can use what you learned in this exercise to reinforce the foundation of the site’s content. That stronger foundation will give even more peripheral or experimental content a better chance of being seen.

Many marketers find Google Analytics intimidating, but it’s well worth digging into. Writers often resist the idea of letting numbers guide their words. I got into SEO originally because it was “copywriting with a scoreboard.” My competitive nature pushed me to learn analytics so I could see how well my writing performed against similar content. Once you start digging into the information, you’ll see the numbers start to tell a story. Understanding that story can help you create better content, seen by more people.

Who doesn’t like that?

Jump into a search engine and look for the phrase, “how to rank well in search engines.” In Google, I get 88 million results. Now look for the phrase, “how to get content seen on Facebook.” I get 5.1 billion (with a “b”) results.

Ranking well, whether it’s in a search engine or in Facebook’s mysterious Edgerank algorithm, is critical to the success of many brand’s online activities. The better you rank, the more you’re seen. The more you’re seen, the more clicks, conversions and so on. It’s not the only way you can be successful online, but it is probably the most impactful determinant of online success.

For the last decade or so, many an expert has emerged to teach us how to rank well in search engines. Respected thought leaders like Danny Sullivan, Rand Fishkin and the like have built businesses and careers out of it.

We’re probably entering a time in the maturation of digital marketing when new experts will emerge to help you figure out the same ranking problem for Facebook. Folks like Jeff Widman and Dennis Yu are already making names for themselves in the “figuring out Facebook” realm. And we’re all better marketers for paying attention to them.

And while the advice of the above and many others in how to rank well on search engines and on Facebook is mostly sound, trusted advice, there’s one glaring gap in all this rank rancor. For you really and truly only need to do one thing to rank well on either platform:

Write amazing content

If you write amazing content, people will link to you. If you write amazing content, people will share it. If you write amazing content, people will comment on it. If you write amazing content, people will visit it.

Yes, you need to know all that other stuff, too. But the hard part of all this is that writing amazing content is not easy. Everything you write won’t be amazing. Everything you write won’t get attention … or links … or traffic. So having some technical tricks up your sleeve can help on those days when the content isn’t amazing, or the world is busy paying attention to something else.

But let’s not get lost in the busy-ness of SEO and Edgerank too much. Spend half the time you’ve spent studying ways to game the system and just produce content that games it for you.

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).

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• 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.