The Reciprocal Consulting Blog

Have you ever wished you could broadcast a video online in real time to an audience of thousands of eager watchers? It won’t be long before you can.

I like this idea. It’s about as sublime an idea as I can think of. But what does it take?

1. First, it takes a Google+ account. If you haven’t signed up for a Google+ account, then I’d suggest you do so. This is only going to get better.
2. Secondly, you need a YouTube account. If you don’t have one, sign up for one now. Remember to sync your YouTube account and your Google+ account by using the same login address.
3. Start a Google+ hangout. Invite people. Enjoy the hangout.

The Google+ Hangouts on Air hasn’t been rolled out publicly yet, but when it does go public, you’ll then be able to have a recording of your hangout post automatically to your Google+ stream and your YouTube account. Then, you and the other participants, as well as people watching the recording after the event, can discuss it. That’s powerful video marketing.

In fact, it’s the most powerful video marketing ever. After all of that, you’ll be able to share the video on Facebook, Twitter, LinkIn, and wherever else you have a social media presence.

Google+ Hangouts is already a powerful feature of the new social network owned by Google. When you add the ability to record your hangout and have it post automatically to YouTube – well, you can’t beat it. It isn’t exactly realtime (thought the event itself is), but it’s just one step away.

An SEO company conducted an experiment with a well done control test that sheds some light on the connection between organic search rankings and social media promotion. The conclusion is that Google+ promotion increases search rankings. I think there may be some nuances this test doesn’t touch on, but it looks pretty reasonable to me that they’ve drawn the right conclusion.

I have noticed that Google+ is a good reputation management tool.

If you look at the results of the study, they seem to indicate that acquiring new Google+ followers is the best activity for increasing one’s search engine rankings, but that could be misleading. The results are based on gaining just 100 new followers. Would the results be the same if the number of new followers were 1,000? How about 5,000?

Next in line for increasing search engine rankings is getting +1s. It actually makes sense that getting more +1s would increase search engine rankings. This doesn’t surprise me at all.

That Facebook promotion actually does increase Google rankings does surprise me a little bit. But I’m glad to see that it happens. Facebook has done a lot to make itself a walled garden so a lot of your activity isn’t measured by Google. Evidently, Likes and shares are.

Tweets and retweets can also increase search engine rankings, but only by a smidgen. The only thing that surprises me about this is that the results are much lower than expected. I’d have thought that Twitter promotion would do more to increase search engine rankings.

Finally, simply acquiring new Twitter followers not only doesn’t help, but there was a slight decrease in search engine rankings. That’s another surprise. But this might not have anything to do with Twitter. If no other social media activity took place, then the slight decrease in search engine rankings might have been as a result of that lack of activity.

Given these results, it seems to reason that if you engaged in Google+, Facebook, and Twitter promotions simultaneously, then your search engine rankings should improve relative to the amount of activity engaged by your competition. Nice test. I’m glad someone undertook it.

One of the good things about Google is that it is constantly updating its indexing and ranking practices to make its search engine better. This of course has some drawbacks. One of those drawbacks is that the search index itself will never be perfect.

Chris Crum at WebProNews illustrates how Google’s freshness update doesn’t always return the most relevant search result for a particular search query. By the same token, freshness also means that Google won’t always return the most recent search result possible for any given search query.

That last point is mentioned in this 10-point list on SEOmoz.

Google’s freshness update makes it more difficult to engineer effective search engine optimization campaigns. But I wouldn’t use that as an excuse not to try. I’m just saying that freshness makes it more difficult to guess how Google will react to the ever-changing landscape of content marketing.

For any given query, Google could return the most relevant-but-dated search results, the most recent search results that come close to matching, or a mixture of the two. We hope that most of the time it will be a mix.

While freshness changes things for Internet marketers and SEOs, it doesn’t change a lot. Our job is still to write the best content we can create about the topics we are writing about. If we do that well and we can beat the competition, then we should get search engine rankings for the short term as well as for the long term.

Google has always had it out for webspam. After all, it dilutes the search engine’s search results and makes it difficult for real quality content to rank as high as it should. That’s why webmasters should kill the spam before Google does.

Yesterday Google announced another algorithm update that will address some of the ongoing webspam issues. In January, the company addressed content quality with an algorithm that punished web pages with too many ads at the top.

It behooves you to keep an eye on what Google, and all the search engines, are up to so that you don’t run afoul of their policies. By keeping your site “clean” – or free of spam – you increase your chances of ranking well for your keywords.

Many an innocent business owner has found herself slipping in rankings because of some algorithmic change that addressed a problem that the business owner didn’t know was a problem. You might think you are following search engine guidelines only to discover that the practices you’ve been engaged in are practices the search engines don’t favor.

The best way to protect yourself from algorithmic changes that make your site good today and not-so-good tomorrow is to follow the search engine blogs and stay up-to-date on their policies. But if you can’t do that – admittedly, it is nearly a full-time task – then hire an SEO firm that does keep on top of industry changes and tries to steer clear of objectionable practices.

SEO is ever-changing. It requires daily practice and daily monitoring.

Incrementality is a term that is associated with how many PPC ad clicks are caused by a lack of similar organic results. In other words, if you have a PPC ad that targets a specific keyword phrase and you receive 100 ad clicks in the absence of an associated organic result, 50 of those are said to be incrememntal if they are not replaced by clicks on organic results when those organic results are present.

Let’s take a concrete example.

Let’s say you are targeting the keyword phrase “red banana.” If you have a PPC ad that you run periodically targeting that phrase and you get 100 clicks a day on that ad when there is no organic search result for your landing page, we’ll consider that your base of comparison. Now, let’s say you have an organic search result that appears alongside your PPC ad. If you get 50 clicks on the organic search result when it is present and 50 clicks on the PPC ad, then you do not have any incremental clicks on the ad. However, if you only get 25 clicks on the organic result and 50 clicks on the PPC ad, then 25% of your ad clicks are said to be incremental.

Google recently performed a study concerning incrementality on ad clicks.

The interesting thing about this study is that it shows that 50% of ad clicks are incremental when the advertiser has the top ranking for the targeted keyword phrase. If your organic result is in the 2nd, 3rd, or 4th positions, then advertisers’ incrementality rate is 81%. The incrementality rate is 96% for advertisers whose organic rankings are in the 5th position or lower.

While Google is careful to point out that individual advertisers will have differing results, this is a telling study. For one thing, it illustrates the importance of high organic search rankings. But it also says that PPC advertising is more important when your organic search rankings are lower.

If you had any lingering doubts that search engine optimization was still a valid form of marketing, you can put them to rest right now. According to WebProNews, search is up by 68% since 2008.

This shouldn’t surprise anyone really. While the hype these days is around social media, search is still getting a lot of air play.

The interesting thing is that Microsoft, or Bing, has gained the most ground in that time. Google has already increased the number of searches it gets. In fact, it’s share of the search market is almost 70%. Bing’s is just under 20%. And Yahoo!’s is falling.

For the first time in search history, Bing is actually No. 2 in terms of total market share. Yahoo! has fallen to No. 3.

And here’s another surprise: A few people are still using AOL.

What all this boils down to is that more people are searching for information online through search engines than ever before. That means that search engine optimization is no less important than it ever was. In fact, I’d say it’s more important now than it ever has been. And that will likely increase even more going into the future.

So let’s answer the all-important question: Why? Why is search growing?

I think it really boils down to one thing. More and more people are using the Internet. As the younger generation gets older that means more people enter into the information market. And older people are going online more and more each day as well. All that spells a huge increase in search driving up demand for professional search engine optimization.

Where people are searching there is a need for more information. That means you should be putting your marketing money into search. Even now.

For awhile webmasters were stuck on buying paid links. But link networks have pretty much gone by the wayside and I think the reason why is because their business model has been destroyed.

Google has built a great system for detecting bogus links. There are tell-tale signs that a link is a paid-for link and not a natural link. For instance, if you have the perfect anchor text for “viagra” on a website about pet ownership, then there’s a clear indication that you have a bought link.

There are other signs as well. Link sellers generally spin their content. So if you find articles online with similar content over and over again with a mix of irrelevant anchor text links, that’s likely a link seller’s page. Google Panda took care of a lot of those.

And then the big kicker. Google operatives.

Imagine trying to sell links to an unsuspecting webmaster, but that webmaster turns out to be a Google employee. Bam! You’re dead.

It’s much like the way drug dealers and law enforcement personnel work. The dealer tries to find strung out peeps to sell his drugs to, but he has no way of weeding out the real fiends and those playacting. Law enforcement actually has an advantage. They work undercover pretending to be the type of customer the drug dealer wants. When an offer is made, bam! Snagged.

Google has its undercover agents as well, and they’re pretty good. If you’re still buying paid links, you’re throwing your money away. You’d be better off buying content the old-fashioned way and marketing through high quality content that builds your reputation and your SEO.

Google now has a new service called Google Play. Go ahead, I encourage you to check it out.

The service has been available for a couple of weeks now, but just yesterday they added a link to Google Play on the Google black bar (for those of you logged into Google Plus). The big question: What does that mean?

It means that Google is serious about marketing Google Play. But should they be?

First, I’d like to say that the Google Play subdomain is quite colorful. Click the link and you’ll see. It’s got that Google simplicity the company has become famous for, but it’s quite colorful, which is a departure from most Google products.

Here’s where we get down to the gist of the service, however. And this is the simple part. There are really only 4 offerings:

• Music
• Books
• Movies
• Android Apps

This appears to be Google’s answer to the Apple iTunes store. But I hardly think it will compete. Apple fanboys are a loyal bunch and iTunes is quite popular. Those who are not Apple fanboys can go to Amazon – and most of them do. So what does Google Play have to offer that Amazon doesn’t? Nothing. Except Google Wallet.

And who uses Google Wallet?

I do like the fact that Google puts books on the same plane as movies and music. And of course Android Apps are pretty popular as well. If anything, this is what makes Google Play stand out more than anything. Android App lovers have one place to go for their favorite downloads. But there’s no PayPal option? Seriously? Come on Google.

If this is Google’s way of luring people into starting an account with Google Wallet, it’s a pretty feeble attempt. I’ll just go to Amazon. At least there I can use my own bank account or a credit card.

Nevertheless, as a producer of books, music, movies, or Android Apps, Google Play does offer another avenue for marketing your products. After all, someone will use it. And if someone uses it, then you should have your products in the store and market them.

Site speed has been an important metric for webmasters for a time now. Recently, Google announced that they have added a site speed metric to its Google Analytics product.

This is good news for webmasters. No longer do you have to guess at how fast your site is loading. And you don’t have to go out and buy a third-party tool to figure it out. If you’ve already got an Analytics account with Google, just login and take a look at your Site Speed Report.

The Overview part of the report gives you a pretty good look at the important information that you should measure. It includes analytics for

• Average page load time by browser
• By country/territory
• By page

These are important overview metrics, but if you want to drill it down even further, then you can do that too. You can view site load times in three ways including Performance, Explorer, or Map Overlay simply by clicking on the appropriate tab.

Intelligence Reports are reports that analyze your website to highlight any variance in your statistics. You can receive alerts when variations occur. You can also view Site Speed metrics in your Intelligence Reports inside your Google Analytics account.

Google is a company that is constantly improving its products. Google Analytics is a free analytics tool that anyone can use, and I’d add that it is perhaps the best analytics tool on the market. There is really no need to pay for analytics when Google provides it all for free.

So what are you waiting for? Do you know how fast your website is loading?

Google has announced that it has made 40 algorithm changes in February 2012, which sets a new record. Here are 5 notable changes to Google’s search algorithm changes and what they might mean for you.

1. Local predictions in YouTube – If you search YouTube on a specific topic, Google will predict your intentions based on your location. This could have a significant impact on video marketing for businesses. I think many marketers who use video will be testing this one.
2. Global shopping rich snippets – Rich snippets have not caught on popularly, but they are extremely valuable for search. If you run an e-commerce store, then you should learn about the shopping rich snippet. This one could prove to be a big advantage to webmasters who use it masterfully.
3. Freshness improvements – More and more, users want fresh search results. I’ve noticed that lately Google has delivered these more quickly. This is good, especially for bloggers. If you write a business blog, traditional SEO still works.
4. Improvements to local search results rankings – Speaking of traditional SEO, Google is saying that local search results now rely more on traditional SEO signals. If you run a local business online, then you should be testing this one.
5. Link evaluation – This could be a big one. Google is saying they have turned off link evaluation signals that they’ve been using for years. And that means that many websites that have relied on links for their rankings could see a decline in rankings if they continue to use the same link practices. This is one that will definitely be tested by a broad swath of SEOs in practice.

Google rarely is this specific about its algorithm updates. It’s time to start testing some of these changes to see if you can reverse engineer them. I know many SEOs have already started this process.

Aaron Wall has posted a nice infographic that shows life before the Panda update and what life has been like afterward. I think it’s a fitting infographic for a number of reasons.

First, today marks the 1 year anniversary of the Panda update. That’s reason enough for celebration (or woe, in some cases).

Secondly, the infographic illustrates some hard truths about the Panda update. Here’s a little summary:

• The Panda update wasn’t just one update. The update was really a series of updates that occurred on average about once a month through the year. That’s very important to understand.
• Before Panda, relevance was driven largely by links, which angered many journalists who saw themselves producing better content than website that were ranking better. After Panda, the journalists are winning.
• Most of the sites impacted by Panda were large sites with marketing issues. Smaller sites and brands were unaffected.
• Important! – The big winners were YouTube, big retail brands, and mainstream media. I think it’s interesting that the mainstream media sites started using bots to write their stories, and those stories are ranking.
• Another interesting tidbit is that some sites that were hit by Panda recovered by complaining publicly while others went back to the drawing board.

This is an interesting and very telling infographic. You could say that the takeaway here is to complain about Google if you don’t like their search and ranking algorithms. It might not help, but it can’t hurt.

Without further ado, I’ll give you SEO Book’s Panda infographic.

SEM Infographic by SEO Book

Checking out Google’s classic search page, there is now a little microphone in the search box. Do you know what that’s for? Try this as a test: Click the microphone and speak a search term. That’s right. Just tell Google what to search for.

That’s Google’s voice-to-text search feature. I’ll say it works pretty well. I’ve done a few tests myself.

So the big question is, if you are an SEO or concerned about search engine optimization at all, is this: How do you optimize a website for voice-to-text? And here’s the answer: The same way you’d optimize for text-only search.

The best that I can tell, the search results for voice-to-text and text-only are the same. So what Google has done is taken its search index and converted it to voice-to-text so that people who can’t type or who have physical or mental handicaps preventing them from making a text-only search can still enjoy the search experience. The overall index is the same.

This is a great feature for accessibility purposes. Some countries have laws that require websites online to meet accessibility requirements. That may be why Google introduced this feature in the first place.

SEO is SEO. You don’t have to try to figure out how to do it for handicapped persons. For the most part, their needs are the same as yours. You can, however, spend a little additional time and resource to make your website accessible and the best time to do that is in the design planning stage. Implement a good website design that is accessible to everyone and you’ll increase your searchability as well.

Facebook stole the show this week with news of its initial public offering. But the news that should have been the big news didn’t quite get the same press.

Google has acquired a handful of patents and pending patents having to do with fiber optic technology. What could they possibly do with those?

Seeing as how they’ve already announced plans to introduce a fiber optic network in Kansas City, this patent transfer should have been the biggest news of the day. It has the potential to make a huge difference in how the Internet works all over the world.

Kansas City will likely be the first municipality in the world to offer high speed Internet by fiber optic as a city service. And if Google is successful with its fiber optic service in Kansas City, then they will likely introduce the same service to other cities. Eventually, there could be high speed fiber optic Internet everywhere in the world, courtesy of Google.

But who will pay for that? There are any number of ways that fiber optic Internet could be paid for. Cities and municipalities could foot the bill for local citizens. Or they may turn around and charge a fee for services in the same way that local phone companies do today. In either of those cases, fiber optic Internet service could be considered a utility.

Another way it could work is as a free service from Google. Now why would Google offer free Internet access to the entire world?

If more people are online, shopping, building businesses, etc., that will lead to more click-throughs on Google’s paid ad networks. More advertisers means more revenues for Google over the long run.

I’m not saying any of these scenarios is the right one. They’re just possibilities. But I could see any of them playing out. The real news, however, is that high speed fiber optic Internet would benefit everyone – consumers, online marketers, and Google as Internet service provider.

You’ve likely seen those social media badges on your favorite blogs and websites. Facebook has the Like button. Twitter has the Tweet and Retweet button. And Google+ has the +1 button. Except now, it just got better.

That’s right, Google+ has improved its +1 button.

The new options include:

• Choosing a width for your Google+ button that works for your website’s design
• Finding a badge that works with the dark background of your website
• Using a badge that also shows your Google+ profile’s circle count

Google+ pages can also display a Google+ badge, which makes them a lot more attractive as well.

It’s already been proven that websites with social media badges get more shares, Likes, tweets, and +1s. Social media sharing is a great way to connect with new followers and potential customers. Google+ is a new social media site that also carries search engine marketing benefits so you can no longer discount it. I highly recommend using it.

Another thing you can do through your website that you should do is encourage your website visitors to add you to their circles on Google+. It’s easy to do and it carries a ton of benefits. I think those benefits are going to get better.

If you’ve been wondering about using social media badges on your website, start with a Google+ badge. Work your way up from there.

A reader asked Mike Blumenthal if linking to her Google Places page would make it rank higher in the search engines.

The question has its basis on the longstanding practice of many SEOs to build inbound links to pages on their websites. Such inbound links have often increased the rankings of their web pages in the search engines. But there are flaws in thinking the same practice when applies to a Google Places page would have the same effect.

First, a Google Places page, as Mike Blumenthal points out, is a search result. Linking to it would be like linking to a search results page for a query that is related to your business niche. That wouldn’t boost your web pages any and it wouldn’t make any sense.

Secondly, linking out from your website to an external page would drain link juice that you could put to better use on your internal pages.

While such linking might be detrimental in terms of your website’s SEO, there may be times when linking to your Google Places page constitutes good marketing. For instance, if you want your website visitors to see all the rave reviews your business gets on Google, then you could link to the page. But I wouldn’t do that from your home page and I’d recommend that you do it using a no-follow link.

Sometimes, detrimental or harmful linking practices can be good marketing practices, and vice-versa. This is where you have to do some weighing of pros and cons. Choose a value that is most important to you and perform the action that makes that value work for you.

Reputation management has become one of the most important tasks for any Internet marketer, particularly an author. Google has a tool that can help webmasters test their reputations online to see if their content is doing what it should. That tool is the Rich Snippet Testing Tool.

So what does it do?

In a word, it looks at a web page on your website, or any website you want to test, and tells you whether or not that web page is using microformats to present your authorship of the page in the best light. Specifically, it will:

• Tell you whether the page is linked adequately to your Google profile.
• Let you know if the page is linked to your social media profiles at Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, StumbleUpon, Quora, and other social networks.
• Show you a preview of your Google snippet for that page should it be returned in a search results page for your author name.
• Give you the extracted rich snippet data from the page.
• And show you what a custom search engine would see if it were to look at your rich snippet data.

That’s a lot of information. More importantly, it’s a lot of useful information.

Rich snippets are very important for authors and other creatives who spend a lot of time creating content in their own names. Even if you employ a ghostwriter to create your content, you are its author. You should test your rich snippet data on a semi-regular basis to ensure that you are making the most of your microformatting opportunities. It not only has reputation management consequences, but it can affect your SEO as well.

A brilliant post at SEOmoz illustrates how Google uses its own SEO guidelines to rank its own pages higher in the search engines.

Consider this:

How has Google won so much real estate on their own search pages in such a short period of time? Do they cheat? No, not really – more on this later. Google wins by employing really smart Search Engine Optimization techniques – the same SEO practices available to any online business.

What Cyrus Shepard doesn’t tell you is that Google knows its own algorithms better than anyone else. It has the inside information. Facebook doesn’t. And that’s one of the reasons that Facebook is at a disadvantage.

On the other hand, the SEO principles that Cyrus shares in his post are pretty much all common knowledge. They’re things that everyone – even Facebook – at this point should understand.

One really telling point is how Facebook blocks Google from crawling its profile pages. As Cyrus points out:

Facebook actively prevents Google from crawling most of its content, allowing big G to access “Fan” pages, but limiting information from regular profiles. Now that Google+ has entered the social game, this policy puts Facebook results at risk of dropping in rankings and losing search real estate.

On the one hand, Google+ has an advantage in the search engines because it is owned by the largest and most popular search engine. On the other hand, Facebook doesn’t employ sound SEO tactics anyway, so if you take away the Google+ advantage, Facebook would still be at a disadvantage.

So what’s the lesson here? No matter what business you are in, think about how search engine optimization can help you reach your goals.

Now that Google Knol is dead, is there an alternative that you can use for your articles?

Yes, there is. It’s called Blogger. That’s Google’s free blog service.

You can use Blogger as your own article directory and there are two ways to do it.

First, you can start one blog and periodically post your articles there and link back to your company branded blog or website. The second way to use Blogger as an article directory is to upload each article you want to post to its own blog utilizing your primary keyword as the blog subdomain.

Both strategies work well.

Blogger has been listed as the second most trafficked social media website, ahead of Twitter by more than twice the traffic.

Of course, this Nielsen report doesn’t consider YouTube. Still, that puts Blogger into the high traffic arena, and it’s good for SEO as well. Being owned by Google, you’d expect no less, right?

The key to using Blogger as your own article directory is to not overdo it. You don’t want to draw undue attention to yourself as a link spammer, but you do want to use the tools at your disposal to build good inbound links. Blogger is great as a link building tool, and it could send you some additional traffic as well.

Rand Fishkin is at it again. Predicting the direction of search for 2012. He does it every year.

Two things stand out in this year’s predictions:

1. “SEO without social media will become a relic of the past”
2. “Google will make it very hard to do great SEO without using Google+”

These two predictions are intricately linked. If SEO and social media go hand in hand, then that includes Google+. If Google forces search marketers to using Google+, then that will enhance the need for social media overall. I agree with Rand. It’s coming.

Google could see this as a way to control link spam. Which brings up another one of Rand’s predictions: “Google will finally take stronger, Panda-style action against manipulative link spam.”

These three predictions seem to be linked in ways that make sense. If you are using Google+ to improve your website’s ranking prospects, then you aren’t out building questionable links. Link building, as we know it today, could be a thing of the past after 2012.

I think a lot of SEOs would welcome that change. A lot more will hate it.

But it could be a way for Google to finally kill link spam once and for all while improving the search results for users – especially users who are also on Google+. What do you think?

In the current landscape of search engine marketing, it isn’t enough to get your content published, crawled, and indexed. You want to own it. You want it working for you. But there is a major obstacle to that happening for many webmasters.

It’s called duplicate content.

Duplicate content is a phrase that has scared a lot of webmasters into unnecessary paranoia. The problem with duplicate content has always been scraping, not two articles by the same author that are somewhat similar.

Look at it this way. You have two articles that overlap. They are both on your website and clearly have you as the author. What’s the worse that can happen? In Google’s world, you could have one of the articles de-indexed. While that could be an inconvenience, it pales in comparison to an article you wrote being de-indexed while the same article with someone else’s byline being catapulted to a No. 1 ranking. That would hurt.

Google’s problem with duplicate content is knowing which version of an article came first. If they get it right, no problem; if they get it wrong, that’s a problem.

When you publish your content on the web, article directories may not be the best place to go to. That’s because you are competing with thousands of articles and if your article appears elsewhere on the web, there’s no guarantee that your article in the article directory will be recognized by the search engines. Send original content to niche publishers that link back to you with a bio. Make sure those article are indexed fairly quickly.