If you are like me you tend to spend a fair amount of time delving through analytics. Ok, so I don’t actually expect you to share my love of analytics. But a good habit for Facebook page owners to get into is to look at their Insights. Facebook Insights is the reporting system for all you Facebook data. It tells you how many page views you had, who is clicking, liking, sharing. You can get age and gender demographics. How many times your story appeared in the newsfeed. How viral your content is. And a lot more. There is so much information in the downloaded excel spreadsheet that you go well into the double alphabet column. You can also view a synopsis of your Insights right on Facebook from you page. The link is on the left side menu, under your profile pic.

Normally insights is behind real time by 2 days. This is not a big deal. 2 days still gives you an accurate picture of what is happening with your page. However, for the past 2 weeks insights has pretty much been down. It has provided some spotty information, but for the most part it is not actually reporting anything useful. For a data geek like me, this has been enormously frustrating.

Thankfully, despite being quiet about it for the past few weeks, Facebook has finally admitted that they are aware of the problem and are considering it high priority.

Out of this frustrating debacle has launched a website that is hard not to love: whyisfacebookinsightsnotworking.com …and they give you an option to share how far behind in data reporting they are with your Twitter followers! I love it!

Now, usually when their is a big FAIL on Facebook it is because they are making some changes to the site. Of course, they don’t let anyone know of any potential changes so when they drop and then the site is working again, we all get to have an “A-Ha” moment.

There is a marketing conference at the end of the month, so maybe they will be announcing some big new changes coming to the site.

They control more than half of the Internet search market, and more than 90% of mobile search. Their ad system is genius and their products ubiquitous. Thought the company has branched out recently, their bread and butter is still in search and in order to succeed in Google’s world, you have to play by Google’s rules.

Google populates search terms by indexing websites and plugging them into an ever-mysterious algorithm. Over time, SEOs have determined the most important factors in that indexation and they are speed, relevance, freshness and content.

What does that mean? It means that if your site is not easily indexed in Google, you may as well cease to exist.

SEO has been around since kids were trying to sneak into adult chat rooms on AOL, but the industry and its methods change as often as the Internet does: every day. Many entrepreneurs are just getting started with a serious site and have only just heard about SEO. For those people, here is a quick guide to building a website that works well with Google’s search index and will help you rise in rank and increase your views and potential for conversion.

Title Tags and Domain

This is the most basic rule of site building in SEO. You want your domain to be easily remembered and easily found. The subject of your blog should be very, very clear in your URL. If you are selling air conditioning services, you probably don’t want your domain to be Plasticmugs.net, right? The title tags appear in the title bar of your web browser and as the headline in most searches. The more relevant your title tags are, the higher you will rank for searches using those keywords or co-occurrence terms.

FRESH

Google’s freshness update was enacted earlier this fall in order to give newer content a bit more priority in searches. For example, if you search for Super Bowl tickets, you’re likely looking for seats at this year’s contest in Indianapolis, and not to the 1993 Super Bowl. Freshness is designed to present you with the most up-to-date information insofar as it is relevant to the search. What that means for you is that if your site has a blog, you can benefit from more frequent updates. Google will read frequent updates as positive activity and bump your site up a bit since it appears to be offering valuable content to a responsive audience.

This is more valuable to sites that deal in constantly changing information. For example, a site about Chicago events has to update constantly because its main subject is always in a state of flux. Sites that sell space heaters or list facts about James Van Allen were not affected by the Fresh update because their topic and content are largely unchanged.

 Locate

Relevance has been the key to SEO since the Panda update, which wiped out four score of bad, spammy sites to greater enhance the user experience. The more relevant your content is, the more Google will like you! Websites about what to do in St. Louis should mention The Loop, Cardinals and all the other things associated with the city. Google will see all those terms connected, and will connect that site with other sites about St. Louis, giving that webmaster a highly targeted audience (people searching already want to know about what to do in St. Louis) and less competition, though the competition is tougher because they all want to bring the searcher to their St. Louis events site.

It’s a long road to good SEO and brand recognition, but a healthy site is a positive and essential first step.

2 Types of Links

There are 2 ways to link your G+ on your website. The traditional badge which links directly to your G+ page, or by adding a plus button to your posts.  You should do both.

The simple badge just lets people easily find your G+ page. But that does not boost your content sharing. Plus, you need to have a Google Plus page.  The plus button lets you give your readers the opportunity to plus your post or page regardless of you having a G+ page/profile.  The plus button simply registers a link with G+ and submits it to their database. Once a post has been plused it can now be searched inside the social network.

Here are some simple plugins for your website or blog you can use to add the plus button:

Google Plusone(+1) Button- simple button but has some features to customize.

WP PlusOne This - simple plug and play. Just install and it is ready to go.

To add a badge, you need to add it like you would an image and then simply link the image. But of course there is a trick. When you grab the URL from your Google Plus profile you get a very long link

https://plus.google.com/114527180389797729264/posts

But here’s what the link must look like.

https://plus.google.com/114527180389797729264

Simply remove anything after the number. That number is your profile ID. The clean link ID will not only help with your SEO but will also help with establishing authorship and getting your profile verified. … and yes I will be talking about both of these things in a later post.

Linking

It is not enough to link your website to your Google Plus, you also need to link your Google Plus to your webpage. This is very simple.

Click on your profile and click edit. In the links section click “add custom link” then put in your link URL and title.

An interesting image is not just important for your blog post but important for you SERP.

The most important part of SEO optimizing your Google Plus posts is making sure your content is easy to share. Your social snippet is integral for making your content easy to share. A snippet is also known as a SERP, or search engine results page. This is the description that Google associates with your page. So your SERP is the summary description that people see in a search engine that helps them determine if they want to click on your link or not. In Google+ the snippet is what helps people determine if they want to read your post.Having a strong snippet can help determine if people read, comment or plus your post.

How to optimize your SERP

So now you are likely thinking, yes this is something I need to do! But how? Thankfully for blog writers there are a number of easy plugins you can use. I use Scribe SEO to optimize my blog posts. This helps me with the content, keyword generation, tags and my SERP. I have heard good things about All in One SEO and WordPress by YELP. Though, I have only used Scribe as it works well for me and I see no reason to switch.

If you need to optimize a website you will need to go into the html code. If you are not comfortable or familiar with this, then ask a web designer to do it for you.

In your html you will need to optimize your “Meta Description”, this is what sets your SERP:

<head> <meta name="description" content="This is an example of a meta description. This will often show up in search results."> </head> 

Your meta description is where search engines will pull your snippet from. This is on every page of your website…and yes you want to optimize ever meta description.

Images Matter

We are all visual people. Pictures say a thousand words. Ok, sure both of these cliche statements are true. So what does that have to do with SEO? Well, this is another important element of your optimization. If you want people to read your post you want to make it as attractive as possible. So using an image that helps captivate people’s attention is important.

Plus, when you add an image to you blog post not only does is make it more attractive to the reader, it creates another SEO opportunity. You can optimize your image information, so when people do image searches they might come across your post.

So not only is it important to make sure you optimize your Google+ but you want to make sure that if you are sharing content from your website that it is optimized as well. The quality of your snippet greatly influences views, comments, pluses and sharing.

Enjoy the resources.

Facebook

• How to Set Up a Facebook Account
• How to Find Friends on Facebook
• How to Post and Share on Facebook
• Upload Photos & Profile Pictures
• Facebook Badges
• Facebook Ads
• How To Set Your Facebook Page URL (Create Username and Vanity URL)

Twitter

• Twitter 101
• How To Sign Up on Twitter
• How To Change Your Profile Picture or Information
• How To Customize Your Twitter Design
• How to Follow Others
• How To Find People on Twitter
• How To Unfollow Users on Twitter
• What Are Hashtags (“#” Symbols)?
• How To Post a Tweet
• What are @replies and mentions?
• What Is Retweet? (RT)
• How to Post Links (URLs)
• How To Use Twitter Lists
• How To Link From Your Website To Your Twitter Account

Hootsuite

This is a social manager that will help you manage your Facebook and Twitter from one location. This is particularly useful for scheduling posts or for managing Twitter.

• Getting Started on Hootsuite
• How to Schedule a Message on Hootsuite
• How to add a social network to Hootsuite
• How to Send Messages
• How to Shrink a URL
• Help Desk

Website

• WordPress.com
• WordPress.org – for a self hosted blog. This site lets you have your custom domain like mysite.com or laurenmacewen.com and you run your site through the wordpress mainframe. This is what I recommend.
• Blogger – run through Google
• GoDaddy: Register your domain
• Hostmonster – Register your domain and host your website

Gaming the Search

Gaming the search, otherwise known as the search algorithm, is optimizing your posts for Google; knowing what Google looks for.

First is simple text. Google does a simple text match in the search queary. Of course this leads to keyword loading your posts instead of writing for quality. However, since your post is all the text you can provide you still need to make sure the writing is quality. Because even if you show up in the search, your text is what will get someone to click your link.

ex. “pink socks. red socks. blue socks. socks. I love socks. knee high socks. ankle socks.” will not likely get you a lot of clicks, but it might get you in the search results for socks.

The good thing is the text match is restricted to people who are in your circles, which does limit the potential for SEO spammers. Additionally, people you engage with more will show up higher in your search results.

Public or Private

So should your posts be public or private? Public posts rank higher than private ones. So if you want to increase the potential visibility of your posts, and reach people beyond your immediate or extended circles, make sure your posts are public. (You can make your post public when you write the post. Where you have the option to add your circles you can also choose “public”).

Most Recent vs. Best of

When you do a search you will notice that they are sorted into two options, most recent and best of. Most recent is simply that. These will be the most recent posts. If it is an active topic you will see your search results refreshing frequently to stream recent topic related posts. You can hit the pause button to freeze the post.

The best of search results will show you the posts that have larger ripple effects. So if you are looking for viral content, you might want to look here.

Plus Button

I have mentioned that the plus button does not have as big an impact on your SEO as a share does, though this is true this is not to say that the plus button is not integral. In fact it is key to Google Plus’ SEO.

When someone gives web content a plus, it is loaded into Google+. Now that post can be found on Google+. The more people give web content a plus, the better your internal search results will be on Google Plus and there for on the Google search engine.

Make sure that your web content: web site, blogs, etc. Have the plus button added so people can easily plus your content.

Google eliminated social search last year, it has been replaced with Search+. This is Google’s integration of Google+ with its search engine.

Search+ delivers search results based on your circles, engagement and activity on your page. However you can turn the personalization off if you don’t want your user history to be factored into your search:

Click the icon of a person in the top right of the page. Then select “do not use personal results”.

Search Plus is not just being used while you are in Google Plus. Any time you are logged into to the network and use the Google search engine, your results will go through the search plus filter.

This is why making sure your profile is set up properly is important. Now you profile and your posts can show up in search results on Google.

In the results you will be given a list of potentially relevant people and pages. These will be a mix of people you have already circled and ones you have not. If they are not in your circle you have the opportunity to add them.

So how do you come up in the search results? Truth be told circle count greatly affects. So the more people who have circled you the better chance you have. Unfortunately this does encourage people to buy followers just for the SEO boost.

Of course your optimization will affect but currently it does seem that Google Plus has “curated” lists. AJ Kohn from Blind Five Year Old goes into detail on what a curated list means. In a nut shell it means that Google has picked specific well known people to appear in the top of the list. Though they are trying to improve these results a bit by including more of an expanded list.

Powerful Searching

Google does give priority to items being shared in Google Plus, however to make sure you content qualifies for their results you need to make sure your content is easily sharable.

The most powerful element of boosting your search results is making sure you have good amplification. You want people to be plussing and sharing your posts. The more people share your content the better your SEO both on and off the network.

Not sure what you amplification is? Google helps you understand the ripple effect of your posts with Google+ Ripples. Ripples will show you the amplification of your shares. The graph below shows a post that was shared by Good Morning America. The arrows off their profile show all the people who publicly shared the post. The one big circle shows another circle inside the larger one. This means that one person shared the post and then someone shared her share. In this case Laetitia shared the original post then Ogla shared Laetitia’s post.

Notice that I did say publicly shared posts. People have the option of sharing publicly or privately. Privately means they only shared it with their circles and the post is not publicly searchable. Your amplification data from Google only includes the public shares, though they do you tell you the total shares.

If you see someone who shares a post and then has  number of other people share their share, that is someone who has good personal amplification. It would be a good idea to reach out to that person and work on engaging them. They could be an influencer. If they continue to share your posts you could increase your “ripple effect” greatly.

The more people who share your posts the better it will come up in search results. So do pluses affect in the same way. Unfortunately no. This is not to say they have no value, but a share is weighted significantly more.

Your Name

Make sure that your name is actually your name. Think of this as your personal branding. You want people to know who you are. The nice thing is that if you use a nickname, they give you the option of adding it without it replacing your name.

• To add a nickname, click edit on your profile. Then click your name. Then click “more options”. You will see a box to add your nickname.

or

Just a little word of caution. Just like Facebook, Plus does not like you to change your name to frequently. So make sure you know what you want before you change it.

Your name, whether it be on your profile or you page is important. When people are searching for you on the network or on search engines, they will be using this name to find you. Make sure it is the name you want representing your brand.

Search Signals

Search signals are the things that search engines are looking for when you do a search. Google Plus has made this part easy. The search terms that you want to be found for are the ones that you need to put in your profile.

The most important areas to load keywords are you introduction, employment, education and places.

If you place your keywords in these sections you will be more likely to turn up for search results for that key term. Places is an important one in case people are looking for someone from, or living in, a specific town. Make sure to include places you previously lived to make it easier for people to find you.

What about the tagline? Good question. It does not seem to be heavily weighted, if all. So put whatever you want in the tagline. Occupation and bragging rights are also not weighted.

In a search for your query, after your key word the number of people in your circles, profile verification, and engagement are all weighted and in that order from heaviest to lightest.

Currently Plus seems to be giving profiles more weight than pages, which makes it even more important to SEO optimize your pages!

Certain search fields are more important for internal searching on Google Plus vs. searching on Google the search engine. Places you lived is one of those fields, it seems only relevant for people searching for you within the social network.

There are ways to spam with keyword loading and people are doing it. But Google is smart and will catch on to this kind of SEO practice. So it is best that you do not blatantly keyword load. Keep your descriptive writing relevant and good quality. It will be better for you in the long run.

Because there is so much information that needs to be covered to go over Google Plus SEO properly, I am going to break it up over 5 days.

• Your Profile: How to optimize your profile to appear in search results
• Search Results: How you appear in search results on and off Google Plus
• Social Snippets (SERP): How to optimize your SERP (search engine results page)
• Badges: Linking your website and your Google Plus page
• Engagement: The importance of being social

These posts will cover SEO on Plus from a basic to advanced level. There are things that everyone can do very easily, and some things that you might need to ask your webmaster to implement. But even if you do the bare minimum of SEO you will be doing yourself a huge favor.

After this series, I will be writing on a couple of more advanced issues for Google Plus SEO: Getting Verified and Authorship.

Getting verified will talk about how to set your page/profile up to qualify to get verified by Google Plus. This means that they give your page/profile a little check mark that says you are really you, or your brand is really the official brand page. This is more important for larger brands and for people with a modicum of renown.

Authorship is the ability to establish that you are the original author of your content. Often on social networks, your blog posts or web content gets credited to the person who is posting about it rather than the person who wrote it. Social etiquette says that you should give credit to the original poster, but that is often not the case. Guy Kawasaki is a huge violator of this rule of etiquette, and when someone of influence posts your link then the web generally gives authorship to that person. Google Plus is giving you a solution to that.

Overall SEO for Plus is not the simplest of tasks. But once it is set up, maintaining good SEO habits is very easy. No matter what, if you are investing in Plus then take the time to invest in SEO.

It’s no secret that social media has real effects and results for businesses that do it right; more and more companies are seeing the light. The most recent trend in businesses of all sizes is hiring in-house social media teams to handle brand management, customer engagement and digital marketing.

Savvy marketers have long praised the growth and efficacy of social media on the whole. Facebook has ballooned to more than 800 million users in the wake of its OpenGraph platform – the behind-the-scenes protocol that allows integration with Spotify, news sites, and all that other cool stuff. Perhaps it is this continued success for Facebook that led to its recent and long-awaited IPO.

More companies across the board are following the lead and cultivating in-house teams dedicated to social media. They generally operate within the realm of a marketing department, though their tasks are more dedicated solely to social media.

The big question is how this will affect firms that have helped companies with social media strategy up to this point.

The importance of business-suited social media is also evident in the backlash Google+ received when users learned they could not create business pages – an innovation Facebook pioneered – that have since become standard procedure for any real social sharing network. YouTube’s announcement of brand channels was welcomed with ringing bells and banging drums by enterprise businesses.

More often than not, a business will enter into a social media campaign believing there are fans of their brand out there waiting to have a place to congregate and spill their guts about just how much they love a company. What we’ve seen is that, though that is sometimes the case, most people are waiting for a tweet offering free coffee or a grocery coupon. “Liking” a brand on Facebook is more indicative of an interest to receive something for nothing than it is a genuine curiosity about a brand.

Rather than be pulled into these campaigns by outside marketing firms or agencies, businesses have elected to develop their own in-house teams that will take a perspective that emphasizes the companies’ strengths instead of just diving into social media because they read 100 blogs on the internet telling them it was the right thing to do.

These in-house teams are culled from freelance social media professionals or marketing gurus who have the wherewithal to understand what social platforms work for the business by which they are employed. Whereas some shoddy agencies have put companies that sell plumbing services to the residents of Muncie, Indiana on Twitter and Vimeo without any real reason, these in-house teams are being assembled with the mindset of the company taken into account; hopefully, these in-house teams will understand which of the many, many social platforms actually present an opportunity – and which should be ignored.

If this trend continues, social media marketing companies like Back At You will have to start leveraging their expertise in order to stay relevant. And the case may become harder to make as more experienced social media professionals are snatched up to work exclusively for big brands.