Last year when Facebook opened up it’s Open Graph Protocol to website owners and developers, the impact was huge.  Up until then, social media mentions were just done on social media–with Open Graph, we in essence, never left Facebook–when we went to another site, if we liked the content, all we had to do is click the like button and it was noted on the target site, but more importantly, it was also posted to the persons Facebook account which gave it exposure to many people who wouldn’t have to opportunity to see the post or page.

The possibility of good content going viral was even made easier with this protocol.  It really brought word of mouth recommendations to reality on the internet.

In December, Matt Cutts (Google’s search guru)  indicated that they do use social links as part of their rankings algorithm.  Here’s the video he released.

Now, this has been taken a bit further. Bing, in association with Facebook, is using Facebook Likes count in their search results.  With Bing gaining ground with search, this is something to take note of.

Now, less than two weeks prior to writing this post, Google has added it’s own version of the Like button, called +1.  Now in the same way the Facebook Like count is added to Bing results, the +1 counts are being added to Google results.  I have some suspicions on what this will mean to search optimization and Google results.

Be a part of my experiment

It is my educated guess that the +1 count on a site will have a dramatic result on search engine rankings.  To test this, I have set up the +1 button on one of my sites.  It ranks number 5 for the term PPC management.  I would like for all of you to go to the site and press the +1 button and I will in turn watch the change in its search results and report back to you what occurred.  Just click on the picture of the site to go there.  You can see a red arrow where you would click the +1 button.

How to add to your own site

If your site is on WordPress, all you need to do is search for a +1 plugin.  If you don’t, just click here to get the code you need to add to your website, it’s pretty simple.

Who is going to win the war?

It’s really hard to say–Google does search well.  It hasn’t done social so well–remember Google Buzz?  Google Wave?  These experiments did not fare as well as they likes.  Facebook on the other hand owns social media.  Now if Google puts more weight on +1 over likes, it will effect search one way, but social another.

My recommendation would be to do both rather than wait–it takes virtually no time and you surely don’t want to be behind the curve!

I have had several of my students to contact me over the last few weeks because they’ve thought some of the links they have built to their websites have been lost.

Typically in SEO, one of the ways we can tell which links we built are indexed by the search engines is by is by checking the links to the domains in Yahoo. Although this hasn’t been entirely accurate as we know there are many more links than what we can see in Yahoo, the technology change that has occurred recently with the Yahoo/Bing search alliance is that the links showing in Yahoo are dramatically less than what they were even a few weeks ago.

No one has lost their links so don’t worry that your links have disappeared. At this point it however, it will be much more difficult to see what links your competitors have and that will make SEO a bit more difficult until this is sorted out. There are other tools such as Majestic SEO that have a copy of the Internet (I know that sounds weird, but they have been indexing pages for some years now) and you will get a much more accurate report of links using this service.

Of course, comparing many different websites to see how many links and where their links come from is more difficult this way.

My advice would be to continue building links as you have been and monitoring your search positions. I have seen no change in your website rankings as a result of this.

I know I’ve always been telling you about all the Google changes–sometimes I like them and sometimes I don’t. For example, I don’t like Google instant, the new change that shows search results before you’re done making a query. In fact, I’ve turned that off as I found bothersome. I am though, very interested in all of these changes and how they affect search and search results.

Recently I saw a blog post by one of the Google executives showing a new experiment where an image of the destination website shows up on Google as opposed to individuals clicking through to be able to see it. Although I think it’s a cool idea, I do wonder how it will affect web traffic and conversions.

I will keep you posted as I know more about this proposed change in Google. You can read about the current experiment here:

Why SEO costs what it does and why you should never hire someone who fills out your lead form and gives their address as @gmail.com

I need to go on a rant here for a minute.  Has this ever happened to you?  On four separate occasions in the last three weeks someone with an e-mail address@gmail.com with the phone number of 010101 and no website or company, filled out a lead form on my site with a message that went something like this: Want more traffic to your website? We can make your site number one on Google.

My first question to people like this is “What is your website address and where do you rank on Google?”  My second question is “What other clients have you done this for successfully?” My third question, “if you’re so good at this why are you wasting my time filling out my lead forms? If you were truly that good, wouldn’t people be calling you? Wouldn’t they be finding you with all your number one positions on Google?”

I hate the fact that there are so many unethical vendors out there. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to help someone who called me for help because they were ripped off by one of these supposed  ”SEO” experts that have no clue what they were doing.

Of course the easiest thing you can do is simply hire Yada Yada marketing, if you really want to do a good job of due diligence, these are a few things you need to ask any SEO company before you hire them so  in order to properly assess their reliability and expertise.

Things you should ask any SEO Company before hiring them:

1. Can you show me some examples of search engine positions that you have achieved for yourself and for your clients?
2. Do you have any clients that would be willing to take a call to recommend you? Sometimes high-profile clients are unwilling to take calls, but you can be shown examples of what has been done, and any written testimonials by the clients. Regardless, they should have at least one or two firms they’ve succeeded with who would be willing to speak with you.
3. Do they do enough research before telling you what they can do for you?
4. Are they a member of the Better Business Bureau? And if so, what is their rating?
5. Are you able to reach them easily?
6. Are they easy to communicate to?

If they pass these tests, you are probably dealing with a reputable SEO firm.

http://RichQuickReview.com/

This is part of my video-series about SEO Elite version 4.0, which is a neat little tool that helps you with your search engine optimization efforts.

Project number six in SEO Elite is a simple indexation checking service. You enter the URL of your domain (or several domains and it goes out to Google, Yahoo and Bing to check if your website has been indexed (picked up by the SEs) and if it has, how many of the pages have been indexed.

Duration : 2 min 12 sec

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Grow Net Biz is a Los Angeles SEO Company
We secialize in Video Search Engine marketing www.grownetbiz.com

Duration : 34 sec

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In this video, Charles Lumpkin describes the importance of creating a wide variety of content for SEO purposes. Whether it's articles, white papers, videos, or pictures, you have to become a content creation beast.

Duration : 2 min 29 sec

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George Brown SEO, show how to work with reputation management problem, you can see I have created multiple site to show how easy it is to make a bad rep.

Duration : 7 min 35 sec

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http://bruteforceseo.com
Using the power of SEO Software to automate your back link generation, the speed of which you are able to gain a lot of backlinks to your website, also gives you a unique ability to understand how Goo

Duration : 10 min 34 sec

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