Don’t worry so much about whether or not the bookmarklet demonstrated in the video is needed – just look at how many times the social results are reordered.

It raises questions about misconduct, but that’s for the American FTC to handle. It’s bad news for Facebook and Twitter, but they’re big enough to handle it. What I want to discuss is…

What We As Marketers & Business Owners Can Do About It

Get on Google Plus. That’s a no brainer.

Next build a Google+ Page for your business.

Finally, figure out how you can best use Google+ to engender interaction with your business.

Google+ is still so very new, no-one knows what’s going to work on it. It really is a case of trial and error. What might work for one person may not work for another.

But like we did with Myspace, Twitter, Linkedin & Facebook, just being consciously active on the platform is the best way for you to get to understand it. Heck, you might get so good at “doing” Google+ that others want you to teach them how to do what you do (if that’s you, let’s talk ).

I may not have any answers yet on how to best utilise Google+, but recent developments have demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that if you’re not at least on Google+ you’re going to get hammered by your competitors who are.

Whether your affiliate business gets its traffic from pay per click, search engine optimisation, email marketing or social media, I’m sure you’ve found it’s getting a lot tougher than it used to. Google is cracking down on many affiliates both through SEO and PPC. People on social media are increasingly likely to report you as spam if you even hint at trying to sell them something and email delivery rates are pretty poor.

At the risk of causing you to set fire to my website (digitally, of course), may I suggest that you take your skills and begin to move beyond affiliate marketing? Build an actual, sustainable business that you have control over.

Yes I know it’s a little scary. Maybe you “don’t want to be bothered with all that customer support stuff”, maybe you still crave the “set and forget” business model. Maybe you just don’t think you’re any good. Hey, we’ve all been there.

It’s time to take some of those eggs out of your one basket and spread them out a little.

There are still fortunes being made in affiliate marketing, no doubt about that. But if the food being on your table is reliant on your affiliate income, that’s just not smart. I know a lot of people who do just that. They think that diversifying means getting traffic from another source.

It’s not.

If you’ve had some success with affiliate marketing, you already have a killer skill set. You are already at an advanced (maybe even expert) level at getting traffic to a website.

Use that.

Some ideas of extra business models you could add to your current affiliate model:

• Offer your traffic getting skills to some local businesses for a fee. I’m sure they’d LOVE some of the visitors to their website that you could get them with little effort!
• Create and sell your own products. Don’t create internet marketing products unless you’re truly elite (in which case why are you reading this? hehe). Build a product that competes with your current best selling affiliate program – you already know the market like the back of your hand and probably have all the funnels in place. The product can be one you write, or go to Odesk and get an ebook ghost written. Flesh it out with your own knowledge, understanding and research and make something you’d be proud to sell.
• Write a blog. You’d be amazed at the benefits that can come from blogging, whether that’s in ideas for a new product, refining your communication style, advertising revenue, building a community around your personal or corporate brand, etc.
• Get in touch with some traffic related agencies in your area. Who knows, you might strike up a relationship with them and they may hand off clients too small for their organisation that could be perfect for you. Or even pay you a salary to do exactly the same as what you’re doing now for an affiliate commission.

If you’ve spent any time in the affiliate game, you know that your income could dry up instantly. One of my most reliable sources of income in the early days paid me an average of $1,000 per month without fail. Then one day they just shut down their affiliate program. No warning, just a “sorry, we want to do things differently”. And that’s their prerogative. But it’s tough for a university student putting himself through lawschool to suddenly lose $1,000 per month.

It can happen to you just as easily, but imagine if it’s an entire network that bans you. Imagine if Clickbank or Commission Junction get a bad report about you (false I hope lol!) and decide to cut you off. Can you afford that?

Look at it as if your affiliate business is a job. Keep doing it, but start a part time business using one of the models I listed above, or something else.

Just don’t put all your eggs in one basket.

I’ll spare you the technical jargon found in many guides and just give it to you straight. For a more technical explanation, check out the Ultimate Guide To The Facebook EdgeRank Algorithm.

You may have seen EdgeRank in action without realising it. Ever noticed how an update from your favourite sports team just popped into your news feed with 17,000 likes and 500 comments? They didn’t get that in the 2 minutes since you last checked Facebook. They may have posted it an hour before, but it only just had enough EdgeRank to make your feed.

Sometimes friends might talk about something they’ve posted, but you swear you haven’t seen it. That could actually be because you didn’t see it – there wasn’t enough EdgeRank to push it into your news feed.

You can still see these updates if you go to the Page or the person’s Profile. But you may never see them in your feed.

How Does EdgeRank Work?

EdgeRank multiplies three factors to get a score. Each status update, picture, video, link, etc is scored for each person. The three factors are:

• Relationship
• Type of content or interaction
• Recency

Relationship is between you and the other person’s Profile or Page. You can increase this by interacting more with that Profile or Page: liking or commenting on their content or posting to their wall.

Type of content or interaction: the general idea is that content or interaction that takes more effort is worth more to the score. Posting videos or pictures is higher than just liking something. We don’t know the actual weighting, but this trend has been observed and reported upon many times.

Recency: the more current the content, the greater the likelihood it will show up. 3 hours after posting seems to be the generally accepted time frame for highest effectiveness.

Application For Marketers

If you’re planning a big product launch or campaign, you must start well before the initial launch. You need to build the relationship with all of your customers. The best way to do that is by encouraging interaction through what you post. Ask questions, take surveys, post funny photos or videos. Each interaction is like a vote for how relevant your Page is to that person.

The more interaction you get, the more they will see everything you post with your Page. This is awesome because your updates will show up soonest for your most engaged fans. As they comment and like that update, less engaged fans will also see it, hopefully leading to more interaction and increased visibility.

Because of the 3 hour effectiveness window, try to not post more than every 3 hours. It’s much better to spread 4 posts out over 12 hours than to do them all at the same time. People will be on Facebook at different times, so spreading out will extend your effectiveness.

For Your Own Profile

If you keep seeing status updates from someone you find annoying, either unfriend them or if you can’t do that, simply don’t interact with their posts. Don’t go to their profile or tag them in your photos either.

To keep a more balanced news feed, try to interact with lots of friends, write on their walls and wish them happy birthday (on their birthday lol). You can also set how important they are to you manually by clicking the dropdown next to an update or choosing what things you want to subscribe to.

“Internal Linking” simply means linking from one article on your site to another on your site.

I like to think of my websites like castles. The pages on the site are the towers and the links between the pages are the walls of the castle. The better your internal linking, the stronger your walls will be and the more powerful your overall defenses will be.

When you write, if you reference something you have previously talked about, link to that article. You don’t need to be fastidious with your anchor text, but if you can use the title of the page (which should have your keyword in it) or a modified version of the keyword, you should do so. But don’t sacrifice the quality of your writing to do it.

If the article you’re linking to is long, consider linking to the spot in the article where you talk about that specific thing. The code to do this is:

• On the target page, right before the part to which you want to link, put
  <a name=”keyword“></a>
  replacing the keyword in red with your keyword (or anything – just as long as it’s unique to that page).
• Then your link in the source page will be
  <a href=”http://yourdomain.com/target-page/#keyword>Link Text</a>
  changing the parts in red to the target url, the keyword and your anchor text

The # acts as a marker, so you’re telling the browser “when someone clicks this link, take them to this page, then scroll down automatically to this part of the page”.

Next Level

To take this to the next level, go through some of your old posts and do some internal linking. Don’t go overboard with this, but you may well have explained things better in later posts. Visitors to the old posts may benefit from your better explanations or deeper exploration. It’s good for visitors and good for search engines, so that’s just good for business.

One way to find these link opportunities is simply to do a search on your site. You’ll pick up a lot there.

Also, go to Google and search for:

site:yourdomain.com “target phrase”

Make sure your target phrase is in quotes or you’ll probably get too many options. If you’re running a wordpress site, you’ll be better to search for:

site:yourdomain.com “target phrase” -inurl:tag

As this will remove all the tag pages from the results that have /tag/ in the url. It can get a little confusing if you leave them in there for this search.

There are many tools, both paid and free, that can help you with keyword research. I’ve tried many of them, but keep coming back to the tried and true, old school method.

Go to the free Google Keyword Tool and sign in if you have an adwords account. This is good because you don’t need to deal with captcha and you get up to 800 results, instead of 100.

In the left hand column, change the match type from Broad to Exact.

The numbers shown for the different match types are:

• Broad: all of the words in any order. So under wedding music, it would count the number of times people searched wedding music, music for wedding and download music illegally for a wedding.
• Exact: only those words in that exact order. It only counts the number of times people search for wedding music and nothing else
• Phrase: the words in that exact order. This would include wedding music, buy wedding music and Catholic wedding music for church

As you can see, exact match is the only one that gives us what we’re looking for.

A note of caution about using the numbers: while they are reasonable estimates, don’t treat them as anything more than estimates. They can be too high or too low, but they’ll always be in the general vicinity. Also, don’t compare numbers across different tools. Each tool draws the data from different sources or counts it differently. Use the numbers to compare to other results using the same tool.

Change your location to Australia or whatever country you’re in. The default is USA. If you’re running a global business (perhaps an info product) you can set it to All Countries or just leave it as the default.

Next, put yourself into the mind of a potential customer and think of all the things you would search for if you were looking for your business. You don’t need to do an exhaustive list – maybe aim for 5-10. Put them into the Word Or Phrase box on separate lines.

Click Search, then scroll down and you’ll see all the potential keywords that Google thinks are related to the list you put in. Click Local Monthly Searches to sort by that.

Scroll through the list and click the check box next to all the keywords you think would be a good match for your website. I tend to not worry about keywords with more than 5,000 (too competitive) or less than 100 (not usually worth while doing separately) exact match searches a month or one word keywords (usually too competitive or ambiguous).

Once you’ve got that list, scroll up, click Download, then Selected, choose your format (I prefer CSV for Excel) and click Download.

Open that file in excel and you can sort out your keywords. I like to use colours, so I’ll have one colour for the home page, different colours for category pages and different again for internal pages. You’re essentially creating a map so you can see at a glance which page should target each keyword. It’ll also help you figure out how many new pages you need to create.

Try to put the close variations of keywords together, particularly if they are plural/singular or they don’t have much traffic. It’s easier to rank one page for a few variations of the same thing than to create individual pages for each.

If you’ve got a website already established your work is half done. Tweak a few pages, get some links to those pages and watch your site shoot up the rankings.

Slight problem – which pages should you choose? Of all the pages on your site, which is already the best optimised for each keyword? Which will require the least amount of work?

Aims

You’re looking for two pages. Why 2? So you can get a highly coveted double listing on the first page of the search engines. My suggestion for these two pages are either:

• Your home page and the best suited internal page;
• The commercially best page and the most relevant page; or
• A category page and a specific product page (especially if you run an ecommerce site).

The Method

To find the most relevant page for an established site according to Google, go to Google and search for:

your keyword site:yourdomain.com

The pages will be roughly sorted by relevance. Keep in mind that there will be some sorting based on freshness, so if the top few results are blog posts from the last week or so, I’d be inclined to ignore that and move past them.

Another way to do this is to go to advanced search (click the gear icon in the top right of your browser window when you’re at Google and select Advanced Search). Change the results per page to 100, type your keyword into the “all these words” box and click “Advanced Search”.

Now just do a find (CTRL+F or CMD+F) for your domain and see which page ranks first. You may need to go in a few pages if you haven’t done much SEO or that keyword is especially competitive.

Analyse & Tweak

I’ll cover it another time, but the basic process from here is to analyse your web page for the keyword (I use the On Page Report Card at SEO Moz). Next you fix up the issues the report showed up. Finally, build some links to that page using variations of your keyword as the anchor text.

Keep building links to that page using your keyword variations and you’ll sooner or later see first page rankings. Yes, SEO really is that simple.

Personalised Search

Google & Bing’s success as search engines rises and falls upon whether or not they give you the most relevant results. They want to keep you happy, so you keep using their search engine.

Over time, they’ll see that you visit particular websites all the time, or that you favour news over static sites, that you live in Australia, so events in the UK are less relevant. They’ll then take that information and tweak the search engine results they deliver to you.

If you search for “café” the search engine can figure out that you’re looking for a café in your town, not in New York. After a while, they might even skew your results towards your favourite local cafés.

It does this through a combination of saving your web search history (you probably didn’t uncheck that box when you signed up for a google account, did you?), your browsing history (particularly if you use Chrome or IE), many of your web interactions if you’re signed in to your Google account, your Twitter interactions and possibly your IP address (your computer’s address on the internet) – but I can’t verify the last because I’m on a dynamic IP that changes every week or so. It’s a handy feature for a lot of people, but it can make you overly enthusiastic if you’re trying to find the rank for your own site.

The problem arises because you go to your site all the time to update it, walk clients through parts of it, check everything’s working, etc. As a result, Google and Bing see your site as highly relevant to you. Hey, they’re only machines!

So if you run a wedding site and search for Perth wedding venues (<– gratuitous link to a site I’m working on lol – it gave me the inspiration for this post), your site is naturally going to be ranked far higher in your results than in the “standard results”.

Standard Results

With the rise of personalised search, especially Search Plus Your World, search results are becoming increasingly less standardised. However, they are very useful for establishing a baseline. A starting point, if you will.

Personalisation is only going to mess with the results to a certain degree. If someone is searching for information or a product in an area they haven’t searched before, your high baseline results will do very well. Also, if you have a high baseline, you increase the chance that people will pass around the link to your site on social media, which will increase your ranking on personalised searches for those people and their followers & friends.

How To Fix

My way is to keep a browser (Safari, because I’m on a PC) completely clean. I never sign in to my Google accounts on it, I never click any search results and I never browse using Safari. The only thing I use it for is looking up rankings. This is especially useful when talking to clients on the phone, because I don’t have to fire up any complicated tools to check results. In my opinion, this is the best and easiest way. If you need all your browsers (particularly if you’re a website designer), just get another one. Maybe Opera. Just keep something free from interference.

If you absolutely have to use your main browser to check rankings, make sure you log out of any google accounts, log out of Twitter & Facebook and clear your browser’s cache & cookies.

Let me begin by saying I don’t have all the answers and there are many different approaches to tweeting.

Now that we have that out of the way, here’s my opinion.

Regardless what persona you decide to go with, you should do a good mix of tweets, but keep the personal tweets to under 1 in 100.

Here’s the mix, in no particular order…

Industry News

Twitter’s main strength over its competition is that “news breaks first on Twitter”. Both news and ideas spread quickly there, so it’s easy to become a thought leader.

My workflow for staying on top of this is:

• Subscribe to the main industry blogs through Google Feed Reader
• Skim through the articles on my ipad using the MobileRSS app or iphone using the Reeder app
• When an article catches my eye, read through it
• If I think it’ll be interesting to my Twitter followers, I email it to Twitter using Buffer (so it goes out on a schedule), segmenting it with @p username if appropriate
• Go on to the next article, rinse & repeat.

Of course because of Buffer, I can post scheduled tweets from anywhere just by sending an email with the right email address.

Quotes

I use quotes to keep my tweets ticking over. Over the years I’ve built up a pretty good list of great quotes, ranging from inspiring, to comedy, to clangers (love Yogi Berra!).

About 10 per day go out, spaced over random periods throughout the day. This is great for keeping “front of mind” and a lot of people retweet these quotes.

It took a lot of work to find the best quotes that will fit in 124 characters (140 less my retweet number of 16), but the effort has more than paid off. I started the collection by going through Brainy Quote.

I use Tweetadder to schedule the  posts. I used to use Social Oomph, but on the free version you could only schedule 30 tweets and I don’t want to pay a monthly fee for it (Tweetadder is a one-time fee).

Links To Your Site

Make sure whenever you post to your site you link to it on Twitter. I have this set automatically through Hootsuite using their RSS feed posting feature. That’s just one less thing I need to think about.

Replies

Make sure you @reply to everyone who engages with you on Twitter. I don’t normally reply if they just straight retweet something, but if they comment as well as retweet or they say something in reply, I’ll almost always reply back.

Also, keep an eye on your VIP list, industry list and any other lists you set up. Reply and/or retweet anything interesting there.

General Interest

If you are posting to a personal or hybrid account (business & personal, ie if you’re trying to set yourself up as an authority in your industry), feel free to post commentary on things of general interest. Like if you follow a sports team or have an opinion on any news or current political stories. Don’t overdo it, but it’s a great way to inject some of your unique personality into your Twitter feed.

Multimedia

Using dj sites like Blip.fm can be a great way to post some cool toons to Twitter. Share youtube videos, interesting pictures you’ve taken, or even lolcats

Personal

Just don’t do it. No one wants to know what you had for breakfast (unless you’re in an exotic locale and include pictures), that you stubbed your toe, or ran out of milk.

I think I’ve covered most of the main things. Mix them up and see what works for you.

There’s no evidence that they directly affect your search engine ranking position, but they serve an important purpose, nonetheless.

What Is A Meta Description?

In the <head> section of a html document, there are often a number of <meta> tags that help the browser and search engines understand more about the page.

A “Meta Description” tag looks like:

<meta name=”description” content=”This page is about awesome SEO tips” />

You just change the part in red to whatever you want the search engines to say your page is about.

SEO Value

The best way to think of a Meta Description is as advertisement copy for that page. The title of your page is the headline of the ad, but the description shows up to hopefully entice a searcher to click on your listing.

As an example, the listing for SEO Perth when you search for “SEO Perth” is:

The Meta Description is the part in black text. Notice how it’s to the point and says exactly what a searcher will find when they click the link?

It’s important to follow some best practices to get the most out of your listing.

Meta Description Best Practices

Always make sure the primary keyword for that page appears in the Meta Description. It only needs to be there once, but try to put it as close to the start as possible. As you can see, I have it first up. The reason for this is that it 1) helps establish relevance and 2) it gets bolded if the searcher types in that keyword.

Keep it short. No more than 155 characters or it will have an ellipsis at the end (that’s the …), but shorter is better. If you can say it in only a few words, do that.

Be as descriptive as possible about the page. If it’s the Meta Description for your homepage, it can describe the site, but otherwise, it should be about that page.

Treat it like the advertisement copy of  your page. The whole purpose is to get the searcher to go to that page and realise how awesome you are

If you don’t have a Meta Description set, the search engine will cobble together something based on what the searcher typed in. So it could take text from your navigation, which would be virtually illegible.

Finally, don’t stress too much over it, except for the main pages on your site.

The Problem

When I installed wordpress on an addon domain through Fantastico Deluxe in the Cpanel area of a Hostgator Hatchling account (try saying that 10 times fast!), the domain would change from

http://targetdomain.com

to

http://targetdomain.hostdomain.com

or

http://hostdomain.com/targetdomain.com

It has only ever happened with the Hatchling account on Hostgator.

I tried all the solutions offered on different forums, tried reinstalling, checking config.php, etc. It was so frustrating! I wasted hours trying to find the solution and some projects were pushed back that should have been well on their way by now. I had a temporary workaround for a few sites, but that wasn’t good enough.

Finally figured out how to fix it easily and without the workaround.

The Solution

For some reason, installing wordpress through Fantastico Deluxe for an addon domain didn’t also install a .htaccess file. Usually this doesn’t matter. Sometimes you’ll have a .htaccess file there already and wordpress just amends it.

The fix is to install wordpress as normal, through Fantastico Deluxe, then upload a .htaccess file to your targetdomain.com root with the standard wordpress rewrite in it. Just copy and paste the following into a text document:

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ – [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

# END WordPress

Then save as .htaccess (that’s without a file name and the extension is htaccess, rather than say txt or doc).

Upload it via ftp (use Filezilla if you don’t have an ftp program, or just do it through the file manager in Cpanel). Then login to http://targetdomain.com/wp-admin/ and it will work as it should. Doh!

If this doesn’t fix it for you, please let me know in the comments and I’ll try to help you figure it out.

It’s getting to the stage where not having a Google+ page will seriously hurt your chances to rank well for your chosen keywords. It costs nothing but the 20 minutes you need to set it up and integrate it with your website.

It’s not terribly difficult, but there are a few things at the end that could trip you up. I’ve already “wasted” my time figuring it out so you don’t have to

If you haven’t already got a Google+ account, go to http://plus.google.com and create one now.

Screen shots were from when I setup the SEO Perth Google+ Page.

Build The Google+ Page

Go to https://plus.google.com/pages/create, which you can also access from the bottom of the right column on your Google+ profile.

And you’re done.

Integrate Your Website And Google+ Page

Now your Google+ page is up and running, be sure to post to it often and interact with people there.

To integrate it with your website and get a lot more people connecting, click the “Get the Badge” link on your Google+ welcome page. If you can’t find it, when you’re using Google+ as your page, click the Google+ logo at the top of the page, then click the Get Started link right under your profile picture in the left sidebar.

I suggest you use the Small Badge, uncheck Asynchronous and check HTML5 valid syntax.

Copy the header code to your header, either in header.php or if you’re using Genesis or Thesis, in the header hook.

Copy the body code to a text widget in your sidebar and you’ll have a Google+ widget for your page like in my sidebar.

Just another tip if you use the Sexy Bookmarks plugin: go into Topbar under the Shareaholic admin sidebar entry and turn everything off. Even if you think it won’t affect your code, it does. That’ll save you a lot of frustration

This is the next stage of integrating search and social. Read Google’s announcement at the link above for the full story, but essentially logged in Google users will start to see private results and posts by people in your Google+ circles.

A lot of people in the online marketing space are up in arms about it. After taking a few days to process the changes and read various opinions, I’d like to add to the conversation by looking at the issues a little deeper. To do this we’ll have to take off our blogger or marketer hat and view it from others’ perspectives.

Google’s Perspective

Forget asking whether Google is good or evil and look at it from their point of view…

If you’re Google, you would see Facebook incrementally taking control over large chunks of the general public’s time online. Not just with Facebook.com and Facebook games, but with deep integration in websites, through things like comments or logging in using Facebook’s protocol. Facebook, being a walled garden, has access to enormous amounts of data invisible to Google.

Microsoft, with Bing, much of Yahoo!, its Windows desktop systems and now Windows Mobile also control an enormous amount of data that Google doesn’t have access to.

Data, for a company like Google is worth its figurative weight in gold. With it, Google can understand user behavior, test new products, track changes to current products and keep an eye on browsing habits. Starving Google of data is like us having a cut in oxygen. Not good.

Think of it another way – Facebook, Microsoft & Apple all have their own universe where users visit. Take away Android & Google+ (both pretty recent products) and what does Google have? Um… a place where people go to look for stuff…? A bit of email & some document software? If people figure out they can find what they’re looking for just as easily on one of the platforms they spend most of their time on, Google is up a certain creek without a certain paddle.

That’s why Google’s pushing so hard to create a virtual universe for people to “live” in, so to speak.

Everyday User’s Perspective

Think how the Search Plus Your World would look to an everyday user…

Because Google+ is very new and still quite unfamiliar for most people, I’ll substitute it with Facebook for these scenarios:

• You’re planning a holiday to France and you search on your default search engine (Google) for “holidays in France”. How useful would it be for some of your friend’s Facebook writeups and pictures to come up on the search results? Status updates from your cousin saying to avoid xyz hotel or to make sure you go there in February to see the snow?
• You’re looking for cat pictures, because for some reason you like looking at cat photos (it’s ok, we’re all weird in some way, I forgive you lol). What if, included in all the other photos were prominently featured pictures of your cat, your parents’ cat, best friends, etc?
• You’re trying a new recipe. You look it up on Google and see some photos from your sister, reminding you that she also made it. Now that would be useful, wouldn’t it? You could just give her a call for tips.

While you don’t want all the results to be Facebook updates (or you’d search Facebook), a reasonable sprinkling would be very useful, wouldn’t you agree?

If your friends were all on Google+, would you slowly leave Facebook because of it? Quite possibly.

Google’s Long Term “Evil Empire” Strategy

Google has repeatedly talked of a future where we don’t need hard drive space. When everything, files and applications alike, will be stored on the cloud and we’ll access them as and when needed.

Having thought long and hard about this (yeah I know, you wouldn’t have taken anywhere near as long, but the cricket was on ), I believe Search Plus Your World is just another step in Google creating an entire online ecosystem.

The step after Search Plus Your World would be to integrate Google desktop search. But that won’t happen. It’ll be an integration with your Google docs and email right from the search screen.

The whole aim is to draw users away from the Facebook and Microsoft ecosystems into an all-encompassing Google ecosystem.

Mark my words: “Google Universal Search” will take on a whole new meaning!

If wikipedia adds a new wiki entry, it will almost automatically hit the front page of Google within a few minutes. The same with a lot of powerful websites. The reason for this is that the main purpose of the search engines is to serve up the most relevant and useful results to the people doing the searching.

It all comes down to trust – when you searched for information on food poisoning, which article would you prefer to read:

• A medical doctor with 30 years of practice, who has treated thousands of food poisoning cases
• A medical researcher who spent the last 10 years researching food poisoning & has developed a remedy for it
• A wholistic nutritionist with 20 years field experience
• etc

I’d probably prefer the medical researcher. The search engines would likely agree with me and serve that too. Why? Most likely, that researcher has published several well researched papers on the subject. A lot of people are probably talking about and linking to those papers (particularly if they’re published on his or the research centre’s website). Everything that the little machines at Google & Bing see is people saying the medical researcher can help people looking for food poisoning related information.

Think about that and apply it to your business. There’s three parts to this strong site…

Well Researched & Written Articles

To start with, you need to know what you’re talking about. There’s no fake it til you make it here. Take your time, research your subject material and write articles that help people.

Link to well researched articles, if appropriate. This will help your readers and the search engines will realise that you’ve taken the time to research and link to strong authority sites. It’s kind of like saying “so Mr Search Engine Spider, I’d like to introduce you to my friend Robert Kiyosaki. Robert, we were just talking about personal finance and your name came up…” If you did that at a conference, imagine how much your authority would rise in the eyes of the person playing the part of Search Engine Spider!

The way you write is important. You need to find your unique style and voice. This will help people identify with you and understand your topic a little better. No one wants to read boring, dry writing. Spice it up a little. Break grammatical rules. Be more conversational in your writing. But keep it highly useful.

People Talking About The Articles

The best articles are helpful ones that people interested in the subject naturally share. You don’t need to even ask. They share it because one of their friends is also interested and would get a lot out of it.

You can help the process by simply asking people to share your articles (feel free to share this one or any of the others on this site!). But make it easy for them to share it the way they want to. Have social buttons for the major networks on each page. If your site is run on wordpress, I recommend the plugin Sexy Bookmarks. No, it’s not as edgy as it sounds. You can see it in action on this site.

Go and share your articles on social media sites. Get it in front of a larger crowd. If you’re proud of your work, share it! Others will thank you for it. There’s so much information being produced every day that it can be tough to get through to the people looking for what you’re writing about. But the persistence is worth it.

Always provide a RSS feed for your sites. Encourage people who find your writing to be useful to subscribe to your feed, whether by email or in, say their Google Feed Reader. Feel free to subscribe to the posts on this site by going to http://feeds.feedburner.com/SEOPerth

People Linking To The Articles

You can start the process of building links to every article you write. If your writing is helpful, people will naturally reference your work. The stronger your site is, the higher your individual posts will rank for the terms you’ve targeted them towards. You do target the majority of your articles to search terms, right?

It becomes an endlessly strengthening cycle: Because your posts are ranked high in the search engines, people doing research for their articles reference (and link to) your articles, which strengthens your site, which causes your site to be stronger overall, which in turn makes your posts (both new and old) rank higher, etc.

You’ll need to do a lot of work at the beginning to strengthen your site, but do you think sites like Copyblogger or Problogger need to do much of their own link building to strengthen their site? Not likely. As you saw then, I just gave them gratuitous links simply because I’ve subscribed to them, read them often and know that anyone reading this article will benefit from reading those two sites. They have a track record of highly useful articles and deserve the strong sites they have.

So how will you take this and apply it to your business?

Quite a few people have written general guides for this, but I couldn’t find any easy ones for WordPress.

To keep it as simple as possible, this guide is for people with a single author blog using a self-hosted wordpress installation.

You need three links for this to work:

• A link from your posts to your author page using rel=”author”
• A link from your author page to your Google+ page using rel=”me”
• A link in the profile section of your Google+ page to your author page.

Get A Google+ Account

If you haven’t already got a Google+ account, go to http://plus.google.com and sign up.

Create An Author Page

Build a page (not post) on your site that has a bit about you and why you’re writing for the site.

It’s a good idea to display some of your latest posts. To do this, get the Exec-PHP wordpress plugin. This will allow you to add php code within your posts and pages. Bear in mind that you have to put the php code in using the HTML tab. Switching to the Visual tab in WordPress will break the code, so keep a copy of any code you add.

Activate Exec-PHP, then go back to your Author Page and add this code to display your 5 last posts:

<ul>
<?php
global $post;
$args = array( ‘numberposts’ => 5, ‘orderby’ => ‘post_date’, ‘post_type’ => ‘post’, ‘post_status’ => ‘publish’ );
$myposts = get_posts( $args );
foreach( $myposts as $post ) :    setup_postdata($post); ?>
<li><a href=”<?php the_permalink(); ?>”><?php the_title(); ?></a><br /></li>
<?php endforeach; ?>
</ul>

If you already display your latest posts in your sidebar, you may want to have the next 5 after them on your Author Page. To do that, just add ‘offset’ => 5, to the above code after ‘numberposts’ => 5, .

Finally, add links to your social media profiles. Make sure one of them is to your Google+ page. The link for that has to be:

<a href=”https://plus.google.com/106324060302594483828/about” target=”_blank” rel=”me”>

Change the number in red to your Google+ number. The target=”_blank” is optional – it just opens the link in a new tab.

Add anything else you want that will help your readers to get to know you.

Save all that and publish it.

Change Author Link

First you need to change where the author link at the top of each post points. The standard Twenty Eleven theme already has this step in place.

If your sites runs on the Genesis template, put this code into your functions.php file. It will be under Appearance –> Editor (change the code in red):

// Change author archive link to author name
add_filter(‘genesis_post_info’, ‘post_info_filter’);
function post_info_filter($post_info) {
$post_info = ‘12 January 2012 By <a href=”http://yourdomain/author-page/” rel=”author”>Your Name</a>’;
return $post_info;
}

For most other sites, look at your single.php file to see how the author link displays. You’re looking for the_author_posts_link() or an <a href= that has get_author_posts_url.

Edit the link to point to your Author Page with rel=”author” in the <a> tag.

Google Plus Profile Link

Go to your Google+ Profile page (click your profile picture, then click About in the grey navigation bar). Click the blue “Edit” button.

On the right side, it should say “Other Profiles” or something like that. Click that, add your Author Page link and the name of your site, then click save.

And you’re done!

Go to http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets and paste in the urls to one of your posts to check that you’ve implemented it properly.

It should look something like:

People say things like:

• “But I’m a businessman, not a writer”
• “Everyone knows you can’t make money running a blog”
• “Only hippies blog”
• “I don’t have time for that nonsense”

It baffles me how people can still think this way. But I guess a lot of business people are still to get on “this internet thing”, so I shouldn’t be too surprised.

A blog is just a collection of articles, regularly added to and sorted chronologically. There’s nothing hippy about that.

Let me put it to you this way:

If you’re not running a blog as part of your overall online business strategy, you should probably close your business now and get a job.

Bold statement? Yep

Care to prove me wrong? Didn’t think so

To paraphrase Blaise Pascal’s Wager:

• If I’m wrong and it doesn’t make a difference to your business long term, what have you got to lose? A few hours that you would have spent watching TV or on Facebook.
• If I’m right, what do you have to gain? Prosperity in a grand new world.
• Come to your own conclusion.

As I’ve said before, both social and search marketing are transforming into a single entity. The pinnacle of that combined entity is blogging. It builds your home base, provides ample content to build your authority on Facebook and Twitter and generally builds the “I’ve Seen You Out There” factor.

Blogging, no matter your business, should be the focal point of all your marketing. It’s one of the easiest and best ways of distinguishing yourself from your competition and building your market dominance.

You might say “but I don’t have anything to write”. Yes you do. You’re an expert in your field aren’t you? Or at least pretty damn good at what you do? If you aren’t, you better get good at it or again, go get a job.

The way the world is going, the people who are really good at what they do will be successful, while everyone else will work for them.

My sister had really bad warts that no skin specialists could cure her of. After years of painful treatments she finally went to a great doctor who was actually good at what she did and within a few weeks only has a few scars. Who do you think everyone who knows my sister will recommend in the future? You got it.

If you’re really good at what you do, but no-one knows about it, how can you run a successful business? If that’s you, blogging about your area of expertise will in almost every instance help you get past that problem.

It’s really easy to get started. It only costs between $20 and $100 (if you get a professionally designed theme) to get started blogging on your own custom branded domain. Read my free Build Your Own Website guide if you want to do it yourself or send me an email if you’d prefer us to set one up for you for a nominal fee.

As far as time spent writing, given it’s an area you’re very familiar with, you should be able to write a 400 word article (a good length to aim for), add a picture (essential for Facebook & Google+ visibility) and publish it within 90 minutes. For this to work, you only need to post once a week. Can you spare 90 minutes once a week to become a market leader in your field?

You don’t have to be Shakespeare to write a blog. If your writing is really that horrendous, get someone to proof read it. You could also dictate posts and transcribe them. Or do a podcast (audio blog) or video blog. There’s no excuse for not being able to blog.

Social media is the world’s greatest Word Of Mouth marketing platform.

• If you’re excellent, people will tell their friends and your business will flourish.
• If you’re terrible, people will tell their friends and your business will fail.
• If you’re mediocre, people WON’T tell their friends and your business will fail.

The catch is, if you’re excellent and not visible online, a few people will tell a few friends. But if you’re excellent and highly visible, a lot of people will tell a lot of their friends.

The choice is yours.