The Reciprocal Consulting Blog

Google is no stranger to search tools. While we’ve been talking about Yahoo! lately, Google rolled out another search tool called Google Trends Top Charts.

Top Charts is a sort of monthly Zeitgeist. You can search the latest search trends by month and by region.

For instance, the top actor searched for in the United States in April 2013 was Selena Gomez. The top athlete for the same period in the U.S. was Michael Jordan. The top author was William Shakespeare.

If you change the month and year, you’ll see the top searches that month in the U.S. were for Ryan Dunn, LeBron James, and William Shakespeare, respectively.

Let’s go back to December 2004. The top searches in the three aforementioned categories were Lindsey Lohan, Michael Jordan, and, again, William Shakespeare. That Shakespeare guy is one popular fellow!

The list of categories on Top Charts is pretty long. Currently, you can search in the following categories: Actors, Animals, Athletes, Authors, Baseball Players, Baseball Teams, Basketball Players, Basketball Teams, Books, Business People, Car Companies, Cars, Chemical Elements, Cities, Cocktails, Colleges & Universities, Countries & Regions, DJs, Dog Breeds, Drinks, Energy Companies, Financial Brands, Financial Companies, Foods, Games, Government Bodies, Kids’ TV, Medications, Movies, Musical Artists, People, Politicians, Quick Service Restaurants, Reality Shows, Retail Companies, Scientists, Soccer Players, Soccer Teams, Software Technologies, Songs, Space Objects, Sports Cars, Sports Teams, TV Shows, Teen Pop Artists, US Governors, and Whiskeys.

Top Charts goes all the way back to January 2004. Currently, you can only search in the U.S., but other countries are on the way.

If you are running a business in any of these niches, or related niches, then Top Charts is a great search tool. You can use it to write relevant blog topics on current events or run your other promotions.

Are you using Google+? If you are, then you might be excited to learn that Google is planning 41 new features to Google+. Most of these you probably will have no interest in, but some of them do seem exciting.

WebProNews mentioned four of them:

1. A multi-column desktop format
2. Related hashtags
3. A new Hangouts app
4. A photo-editing feature with multiple components, one of which is dubbed “auto-awesome”

I presume the Hangouts app is going to be an Android app.

The WebProNews article came out yesterday and says, “Most of these new features will be rolling out to Google+ this afternoon.”

I haven’t seen them yet, but maybe they were talking about the other 37 features.

It’s nice to see Google improving Google+. As long as these improvements keep coming, I don’t think the service is in any danger of being killed (like Google is doing with Google Reader this summer). A product that is in continuous improvement mode is not likely to go away. To me, that means you should probably be using it, especially since the implications for search rolled into the product are very high.

Are you using Google+? Will you be using it in the future? Why or why not?

Google’s Matt Cutts, head of the web spam team, posted a YouTube video about upcoming algorithm changes. This is something Google rarely does, but Matt thought it was important he posted on Twitter that “Pretty much every SEO should watch this video:”

I’m going to post the video for you to watch, but before I do, here’s a summary of what you’ll hear:

1. There will be a major Penguin update
2. Google will address advertorial spam
3. Spammy queries will be looked at
4. He doesn’t say what, specifically, Google will do in this regard, but Matt does say they plan to “go upstream” to address link spam
5. More sophisticated link analysis (Matt seems really excited about this one even though his language is tentative)
6. Improvements on how Google handles hacked websites
7. Algorithm tweaks to boost “authority” as a ranking factor
8. Google will attempt to soften the blow of Panda for sites in the “gray area”
9. This one actually makes a lot of sense and it’s surprising Google didn’t think of it sooner, but they will diminish the number of times a domain cluster appears in the SERPs for the same domain, addressing specifically subsequent SERP pages
10. Improvements to webmaster communication

Much of this has to do with addressing blackhat SEO techniques, so most of us don’t have anything to worry about. The changes that will affect us whitehat guys are mostly positive. Should we be worried, or do you see any of this as good for webmasters?

Watch the video before you answer:

Every once in a while someone jumps up and asks the question, “Are Bing and Yahoo! still relevant?” The short answer is, yes, of course they are still relevant. The long answer is a little more involved, but it goes something like this.

Google enjoys a huge share of the search market. More than 60%. The rest is divided among Bing, Yahoo!, and the various search engines below that (Ask, Mahalo, and even YouTube). While it’s important to make sure your website meets Google’s guidelines so you can rank your website well in its index, it’s equally important to ensure that you diversify your traffic sources.

Those of you who have been around for five years or more may remember MySpace. At one time, it was the No. 1 social network. Now, hardly anyone thinks about it.

Why is MySpace important? Because it should serve as a lesson. Obscurity is just one competitor away no matter who you are – even Google.

Google may be top dog in search today, but that doesn’t mean that Web users won’t find something to replace them next year. It could be Facebook or it could be something else. If you rely entirely on Google and Google starts sending you less traffic (even if they don’t fade into obscurity), then your business is shot. Traffic diversity is one of the most important things for anyone running a business online.

For that reason, Bing and Yahoo! are still relevant. Diversify your website traffic.

Mike Blumenthal recently experienced a face brownout with Google. Ouch! How painful.

Don’t worry. Even though it could happen to you, it’s only virtually painful. No physical pain.

What happened is, Google didn’t like his author photo. So he changed it.

The thing that strikes me about this is, Google is able to identify an author by their photo, which is pretty amazing. And another thing, Google arbitrarily decides it doesn’t like certain photos and that becomes your problem. Welcome to the world of Google.

If you find your photo not showing up in Google search results alongside your articles, especially when it did before, then do as Mike Blumenthal did and change your photo. If that new photo starts showing up in search results, then you know the problem was the photo. If it doesn’t, then it’s a problem you can’t fix, evidently.

Here’s a little advice about author photos. When possible, use full face photos. I think Google likes those better.

At any rate, don’t use photos where your image is obscured or where only half of your face shows (I know, Seth Godin does it – but, he’s been doing it for forever and a day).

You want to make it easy for Google to associate your name with your image. That’s the main thing. And there’s even a fancy name it – FaceRank.

We’ve talked about Google+ Hangouts before, and we’ve talked about YouTube marketing too. But did you know you can integrate these two features to make them both more powerful?

Google+ Hangouts is like Skype. You can host a web conference with up to 10 people (with Skype, it’s 25). However, Google+ Hangouts has some additional features that Skype can’t touch.

For instance, you can share documents with the other webinar participants in real time for free. You can share your computer screen and use Google Drive to share your documents. You can also click the “ON-AIR” button once your Google+ Hangout is underway and record your Hangout live. Let’s see you do that with Skype!

But it doesn’t stop there. You can easily share your Google+ Hangout with all your friends on YouTube. That makes your webinar available to your YouTube channel’s followers and the billions of YouTube users who search for videos on a daily basis.

Once your web conference on Google+ Hangouts is shared on YouTube, you can then share it on Google+, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and any other social media site you are a member of.

Google+ Hangouts is a free feature that is a part of Google+. It’s a powerful business tool for video marketing.

According to Constant Contact, 74% of all social media users are using #hashtags. That’s interesting because at last count, Facebook hadn’t incorporated hashtags – yet.

They’re working on it, though.

So, what is a hashtag and how can you use it for business?

Simply put, a hashtag is a word or phrase accompanied by a preceding # symbol that is often used to track a conversation. For instance, if you want to know what people are saying about hashtags on social media, you can go to Twitter or Google+ and search for #hashtags. You can even subscribe to the threads to follow the conversation more easily.

As a business, you can enter conversations where hashtags already exist or create your own hashtags. For instance, the popular micro-job site Fiverr has the hashtag #Fiverr on Twitter.

This is another way to optimize your social media posts. By creating hashtags around popular topics related to your niche you can pull in people who may not already be following you on the social media sites where you have a presence. Be sure, however, that you use the hashtags appropriately. Don’t use them to spam people with related topics. That’s a sure way to tick people off and get a bad reputation.

Hashtags are powerful social media tools if you use them correctly. They’re easy to implement and could lead to some big boosts in your business.

Google+ just keeps improving. You can now search photos exclusively using Google+’s search bar.

This actually makes sense and was no doubt done to encourage more photo uploads. But photographers have always been active on Google+, and there seems to be a very active and close-knit community of photographers on Google+, so I’m sure they’re taking a liking to this new feature. But it will serve to benefit the rest of us as well.

In fact, if you haven’t been adding photos to your Google+ posts, you should.

When you add photos to your Google+ account, and you can do it in a couple of ways, you should go to great pains to make sure they are associated with the proper keywords. Start by keyword optimizing your posts with a great title and well-optimized content. When you tag your photos, make sure your tags match your keywords. If there are specific keywords you’d like that photo to be found for, include those.

So how can you upload photos in Google+?

For starters, you can upload photos by clicking the camera icon in the post field. Use the “Share what’s new” box, click the camera icon, and add your content.

The other way to upload photos is to click the Photos icon on the sidebar in your Google+ account. Click the red +Add Photos button and add your photos. Or, click “Instant Upload” or “Albums.”

Albums are another way to optimize your photos. Name your albums using keywords you’d like your images associated with. It’s an excellent way to categorize your photos and increase your optimization efforts.

Here’s another reason to use Google+, particularly the Hangouts feature. Google has added a new app called Capture. And what does it do? It allows you to take a photo of your Hangout in progress.

You might wonder, well, why would I want to do that?

If you are using Google+ Hangouts for business and you can schedule frequent webinars or other business meetings, then you can take photos of participants, screenshares, and other events within the Hangout then post them to your blog, Google+ stream, and other social media to promote your brand and events.

That’s just one use I can think of for the Google+ Hangouts Capture app. You can also use it to capture shots of documents you share, or that others share with you, for future reference.

I’ve said all along that Google+ Hangouts will get better. This is one example of Google’s attempt to improve its brand and social media community. Google+ Hangouts is one of the unique and innovative tools of the web. It’s great for business or personal use and there are no limits to what you can do with it. The Capture app takes a good thing and makes it better.

What unique ways can you think of for using Google+ Hangouts and the Capture app?

Google recently announced the publication of a new webmaster cheat sheet. So if you just built your first website and want to know how you can get it to rank in Google’s search engine, you should download this PDF right away.

Keep in mind, however, that it’s just a basic overview, not a full tell-all. In other words, it isn’t comprehensive.

The PDF essentially offers the following advice:

• Write a concise, informative page title
• Chose a domain name that is descriptive and easy to remember
• Write unique meta descriptions for each page of 160 characters or less
• Give images short and descriptive file names
• Write a keyword-based alt tag for each image
• Include an informative and descriptive caption for each image
• Keep your website’s content up to date and unique with fresh regular blog posts

This advice really isn’t earth-shatteringly new. Reciprocal Consulting has been giving this same advice for years. And remember, it’s still basic information. There is a lot more you can do to help your website rank in the search engines. For instance, you should build some inbound links to your site by sharing it on social media, encouraging your site visitors to share it with their friends, and writing guest articles and blog posts on niche-related websites.

It’s nice to know Google affirms what we’ve been saying for years now.

Five days ago Google announced that July 1 would be the last live day for Google Reader. So what does that mean for your business?

Honestly, not much. You’re losing one avenue of readership. One channel. That’s all.

Most people don’t use RSS anyway (and never did). The good news is everyone uses e-mail. If you don’t already have an e-mail subscription option for your blog, then you should offer one. You should set it up before July 1, 2013. In fact, you should set it up right now.

Another way you should be promoting your blog subscription feed is through social media – Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, etc.

If you do these two things, you will not lament the loss of Google Reader for long. You’ll likely miss it more as a blog subscriber yourself than you will as a business owner. You may see your subscription rate fall in July, but if you offer an e-mail option, then I’d be willing to bet that you’ll see your subscriptions go up on a continuous basis after July.

If you publish a newsletter, you should also include one or two sample blog posts in your weekly newsletter. This will introduce your newsletter subscribers to your blog and encourage more readership.

Google Reader may be dying, but it’s not the end of the world. Just find other ways to keep your human readers coming back.

If you want to succeed at social media and SEO at the same time, then you need to learn the 5 basics of social media SEO. Here they are in a nutshell:

• Optimize your social profiles – This is real simple. Write your social media profiles in such a way that you will be found for the search terms you wish to be found for.
• Optimize each social media post – When you post to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc., optimize your posts. You don’t have to overdo it. You can get by with a few here and there not optimized for your key search terms, but if you post a lot about things in your industry, then include your key terms in the posts.
• Include social sharing buttons on your website – Add the popular social share buttons to your website and blog. Encourage your visitors to share your content.
• Optimize your images – Social media now includes images. Include images with your content and optimize those images. When you share your content on social media, include the images.
• Sign up for Google+ – Seriously. Your Google SEO will go a long way if you have a Google+ account. Use it. Spend a little time each day on Google+ and share your best content.

In this decade, search and social media go hand in hand. Make sure you optimize your social media as an ongoing content marketing strategy.

Google+ is making it easier for you and your website visitors to share information. Now, you can install a Google+ sign-in app much like the one that Facebook has. So your site visitors and app users can sign in without signing up.

Welcome to the future of the Web.

I think this is the way the Web will work for the foreseeable future. If you use the Internet in any way, you’ll likely be signed in to your Google+ account, your Facebook account, or another social media account, or all of them. Then, when you visit another website that you like and respect, you can sign in to those sites using your Google+ or Facebook account.

When you first sign in to a third-party site using Google+, you’ll be asked what people in your circles you want that site to know you have a relationship with. You’ll also be asked who you want to share information with on that site. You can opt for all your circles, select circles only, or just yourself.

Social media marketing is changing. I’d say for the better. And the Google+ sign in is just another piece of evidence to prove it.

The question, now, for webmasters is, should you implement the Google+ button on your site? I don’t see how you can lose.

Google has introduced a new tag for publishers that essentially allows you to link your website to your Google+ page. It’s an interesting concept.

First, why would you want to do it? The most important reason I can think of is to help Google better identify your website as relevant to specific search queries from inside Google+. You can learn more about that here.

Two other reasons Google gives for using the rel=publisher tag are:

1. To connect more easily with fans, friends, and customers
2. And to become eligible for Google+ Direct Connect

What is that Google+ Direct Connect and why is it important?

Verify Your Brand Page With Google+ Direct Connect

If you’ll log into your Google+ account and search for “Pepsi,” you’ll see, on the upper right side of your screen, a “People and Pages” heading. Below that is the Pepsi brand page. You can add that page to your circles from there. Notice that there is a check mark next to the Pepsi brand name. That signifies that Pepsi has verified its brand page.

Doing that is really simple and it makes your Google+ brand page more prominent in a search when people are looking for your brand in Google+.

I suspect that this feature may not be used much now, but I believe it may very well become useful in the future. It’s easy to implement and it’s better to do it and never been seen than to not do it and miss good opportunities.

The question often arises, “Can you compete both in local search and global search?” Of course, the answer is “Absolutely.”

The key is to claim your Google Places and Bing Local listings while continuing to optimize your website for organic search. Where you want to dominate in local search is on Google Maps and Bing Maps. To do that, you want to claim those listings. Be sure to include address, phone number, hours, and other locally identifying information in those listings.

With global organic search, you just do all the normal things you would do on your website and off site to rank your web pages. I’d also encourage you to open up a Google+ account.

On Google+, you want to link to your website’s home page. When you set up your Google+ account, you have a Links section. That’s a good place to link to all of your websites. Just link to each website once. And if you are a contributor to third-party websites or blogs, and you should be, then list those links in the Contributor section. Ask the owner of those sites to follow the Google guidelines for Authorship.

You can rank locally and globally. You just have to focus your efforts on organic search for your website and make your local search efforts focused through Maps.

Social analytics is very important. Today I’m going to discuss a tool that you can use for a few good purposes. With this tool you can search for information about a certain topic within your niche to see how popular that topic is. It’s a good keyword research tool that you can use for your online content – that includes website content, articles, blog content, and social media content.

Another practical use for this tool is to see what your competition is up to. If your competition has been posting information on a particular topic, then Topsy will let you know. It’s good for competitive intelligence.

Finally, you can use Topsy for social analytics. If you click on the Social Analytics link at the top of the main page, then you can compare search data for up to three keyword phrases. Again, it’s a great keyword research tool.

The great thing about Topsy is you can measure the data you’re looking for in realtime. You can also measure it over time. Furthermore, you can search for content by type (i.e. tweets, links, photos, videos, experts, and trending).

After you search for information on a particular topic, you can narrow down the content search results by time. For instance, you can narrow your search to the last hour or broaden it to the past 7 days. You also have options in between. You can also search by network, but the only options available at this time are Google+ and Twitter.

Topsy looks like it will be a good social media tool. I hope it sticks around awhile.

As we enter a new year, search marketers will start to make their predictions for the coming year. I always read and pay attention to what the leaders in the industry are saying. One leader I like to keep tabs on is Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz. His predictions for 2013 aren’t really striking (most of them), but I’d like to hone in on three of them for a little bit.

1. Google+ – Rand says that Google+ will continue to grow albeit at a slower pace. I think that’s a reasonable prediction. I also believe that some time in the near or mid-term future Google+ will be an essential element of SEO. We’re not there yet, but I believe it’s coming, and a part of that is the steady growth of the service.
2. Facebook/Twitter metrics – One of the downsides of marketing on Facebook and Twitter is that neither service offers very robust tracking and metrics tools for marketers. Facebook is further along than Twitter, but their admin portal is still quite slim. If Rand’s prediction on this one comes to fruition, then you can expect Facebook’s and Twitter’s value as marketing tools to increase.
3. Co-citations – Another interesting prediction is that anchor text will diminish and co-citations increase. This has already started happening, but Rand is saying that confirmation of it will come in 2013. I suspect that Google’s reliance on the change will also grow. This will be a big deal to search marketers who have traditionally relied on link building techniques for search rankings.

Interesting, there was hardly any mention of mobile search or tablets in Rand’s predictions. Don’t think that these will be off the table in 2013. I still see growth in those areas as well.

Every couple of years I read about exact match domains and how Google is clamping down on them or helping them out to some extent. I recently read a blog post published by a popular SEO company on the same subject. They’re essentially asking – and stopped short of outright saying it – that exact match domains are done for. But they went on to say that partial match domains are still good.

It just so happens that Google is always tweaking its search algorithms to reconsider its ranking criteria in fluctuating models of importance.

What that means is that on some days your exact match domain may very well push you higher in the rankings while on other days it may not help at all. Then, on other days it could actually hurt you.

This popular blog pointed to a recent Panda update that seems to be diminishing the effect of exact match domains on search rankings. But does it?

It’s possible that Google has re-ordered its search ranking algorithm to put more favor upon other ranking criteria such as inbound links, anchor text, or something else entirely. Or it could be that there was some initial fall out for some websites with exact match domains when Google did something that affected other search ranking criteria. Who knows?

We can’t really reverse engineer Google’s Panda updates with certainty. What we can do is offer some reasonable explanations about changes in behavior with search results based on careful observation. I still think that exact match domains have some search engine results effect. How much is the question.

A few days ago Google announced quite a few new improvements to Google+. Most of them have to do with Android, Hangouts, and Events.

Here’s a quick run down:

• On-the-go profile editing
• Easier content authoring for mobile phones
• Mobile notifications
• Increased Community involvement via mobile phones and tablets
• Full-size backups for your photos
• 360-degree photo panoramas
• Inline photo swiping with iOS
• Pan-zoom-scale effect through an iPhone app
• Specific-guest messaging for Events
• The ability to see who has opened your Event invitations
• Low-bandwidth capability to interact through Hangouts
• Easier duplication of events
• Video feed expansion for single-participant Hangouts
• Conversation cards for iOS with expanded features
• Animated GIFs, screen lock widget, and Google Now birthday reminders for the Android
• and Google Play and App Store mobile apps

From a mobile user perspective, these improvements will ensure a better experience with Google+ all around. From a marketing perspective, it makes for an easier way to connect with your audience through Google+ via mobile. That’s whether you are using mobile, your audience are on mobile, or both.

Google seems committed to maintaining Google+ and improving it for the long term. I expect that to get a lot better over time. The new Communities feature is being used widely and a lot of people (and companies) are getting a lot of mileage out the new features. You can too.

If you’re a user of Google+, then you’ll be excited to know that Google has added a new feature to its social network: Communities.

Communities were just introduced yesterday and already some communities have nearly 10,000 members. This is a great way to drum up some interest in your topic. You can join a community or start one.

For instance, if you want to network with others who are avidly interested in marriage counseling – maybe they’re counselors or maybe they need counseling – then you can look for a community related to counseling by entering “counseling” in the search box above the list of communities present, or you can just start your own community. Either way, and you can achieve your goal in minutes.

After you start your own community, you can then promote the community to your stream. If you have circled people who are already interested in your topic, they’ll see the community and can join.

I’m anxious to see how communities do in the search engines. I think they’ll do well. Each post should be optimizable the same way that forum posts are. And if you create a community with your brand name or a keyword related to your brand name, then it should be searchable in Google’s index.

Google+ Communities are another great way to get some search engine optimized content out there related to your business.