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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

Awesome!

This makes me wonder whether Google+ Hangouts can be used for marketing purposes. I don’t see why they can’t. In fact, I know they can.

Brands can set up a Google+ page, but to do so they first need to have a Google+ account. That account has to be a personal account.

So let’s say your CEO gets a Google+ account then sets up a Google+ page for the business. As a page, he could start a hangout and invite anyone he wishes. What he invites all of the page’s circles into a hangout and while inside the hangout he entertains a little while providing a bit of an uplifting marketing message?

The hangout could just last for a minute, but during that minute the CEO could field questions from the people in his circles providing for an interactive marketing moment.

Welcome to the new world of marketing and advertising. Social media is getting better all the time.

SEOMoz has a great post on how Google looks at sentiment and how that affects SEO at the local level. You’ll be amazed at the technology the search engines now have.

Using something called stylometry, Google can determine whether your link from a third-party website is a positive endorsement, a negative endorsement, or neutral. And I find that amazing. It could affect your rankings.

Get enough bloggers to link to your website using negative references and you could see your search engine rankings plummet. On the other hand, get enough rave reviews and you could rise to the top. It’s pretty easy to imagine what you need to do to improve your rankings then, huh?

No, I don’t mean buy positive endorsements. I mean provide great customer service. Your reputation is more than just a few paid-for links. It’s how you do business.

What I think this infographic is saying is that Google is favoring big corporations at the expense of small businesses. Do you see that? Do you agree?

Something else that Aaron Wall does not mention in this infographic is Google+. I believe it is Google’s hope that everyone will start using Google+, then they will know what your interests are intrinsically. Link building won’t be necessary if Google can rely entirely on social cues to deliver you the content you’d be most interested in. And companies that spend their time building links for SEO purposes will just be wasting their time.

This makes me wonder what kind of Web we’ll have 2-5 years from now. Will link building be completely dead? Will the Web be entirely social and will the Web’s biggest search engine deliver all its results based on how you interact with Google+?

What do you think?

It’s easy to see where he is coming from in choosing these companies to represent what the world may look like 25 years from now. But that’s a long time in Internet time. Remember, it only took a decade for any of these companies to make an impact on the world as it is now.

But his blog post does make me question some things about the direction that the Web is moving in. Here are a few that come to mind.

1. Will Apple primarily become a mobile app company?
2. Why hasn’t Microsoft leveraged its core products by hosting them in the cloud? It seems that this could be a key area of competitive advantage given the popularity of services like Google Docs, Zoho, and Salesforce.
3. Can Google succeed in becoming the core reputation management platform online? Has it already?
4. Is Amazon the Wal-Mart of the Web? Can it put Wal-Mart “out of business?”
5. Can Amazon position itself as the premier cloud service for the Web in the next 20 years?
6. Would a public IPO push Facebook higher in the rankings, perhaps past Amazon, or Google?
7. Who will emerge as the Internet’s most prominent icon for the next generation? Will it be Google, Facebook, Amazon, or some company we haven’t heard of yet?
8. Can Google win as long as it maintains confidence in the Open Source Web given that none of the other four companies do?

The interesting thing about this list is that Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon all have core online businesses. Apple is integrated heavily into mobile apps. Google, of course, is the leading search engine. Facebook is the leading social network. Amazon is the leading e-commerce website. Only Microsoft has a core business that is not an online business – its Office suite of products. How will that affect the Internet for the next generation. If Microsoft doesn’t take its core product online, will it become obsolete?

What are your thoughts?

In the meantime, I expect Google to keep increasing search complexity such that it’s prohibitively expensive to make & market a small independent commercial website. That will force many smaller companies to live inside the Google ecosystem, with Google ranking the Google-hosted pages/products/locations for those companies, so that they can serve ads against them and get a bigger slice of the revenues.

In other words, small business owners will be forced to use Google-powered site hosting products because they won’t be able to afford to pay professional SEOs to do their optimization work. Meanwhile, big companies like Wal-Mart will be favored in the search engines unless small businesses use the Google-hosted sites, which will serve up ads and increase Google’s revenue at the small business owner’s expense.

Somehow, I don’t think that business model would work well for Google. What would happen when small business owners discover the game is rigged against them?

SEO is already plenty difficult for most small business owners. They either have to take the time to learn how to do it themselves, and most of them don’t have that kind of time, or they have to pay a professional anyway. Forcing small business owners into a corner doesn’t seem like a plan that would benefit Google.

I believe social annotations are going to become a key metric for a lot of online marketers. They could very well be a major part of your PPC campaigns going forward, and it’s real easy to see why.

Dan Friedman of Google’s Inside AdWords Crew says that 71% of shoppers online make decisions based on the recommendations of their friends and family. If that’s true, then you give your fans every opportunity to +1 your content, PPC ads included. When a searcher calls up a search results page and sees that their friends have +1ed your ads, they’ll either +1 it themselves or click on the link. It could increase the effectiveness of your advertising.

At the very least, you’ll have a key metric to judge the effectiveness of your advertising. Getting tons of +1s? Then you’re making an impact. Getting +1s but no click-throughs? You can evaluate the reasons why. Getting +1s and click-throughs but no conversions? Check your landing page.

Social annotations are here. Now it’s time to try them.

The question is, How can this benefit your business?

I look at it as like a metric. It’s nice to know how many +1s your content is getting around the world. For instance, let’s say you write a blog post and within 30 days you discover that it has 200 +1s. But what if you found out that 125 of those +1s were local to you? That would be a useful metric, right?

I think it would certainly be a useful metric if your business is a local business. It can tell you how effective you are at reaching your audience and that’s always good knowledge.

Another thing Google is telling searchers is who shared a particular page of content through Blogger. This could potentially make Blogger a much more valuable piece of real estate for SEO purposes, and for social media marketing purposes.

If Google keeps making these kinds of changes to its SERPs, then Google+ could become a much more valuable social media outlet than people are currently giving it credit for. This is worth keeping an eye on.

It’s not that people don’t have legitimate beefs. They do. Google+ can certainly improve. In fact, many users agree on the top 10 things they’d like to see on Google+.

But let’s get real. Google+ will improve.

I don’t remember a time in its history when Google didn’t make an attempt to continuously improve a product or service it introduced to the public. They may not have succeeded, but they tried. The company has a long list of failures, particularly in the social media realm. But they always try to improve what they’ve made available to users. That’s the way Google operates.

I for one believe that Google+ will improve. Business page for Google+ will improve. There’s no reason to go crying that we haven’t arrived just yet. Perfection is a nebulous goal.

The big question that every business should be asking right now is, Do I need a Google+ account or a Google+ business page right now? I think it’s safe to say that you will likely want one at some time. When you jump on the Google+ bandwagon is up to you and your staff. But now is the time you should start discussing it.

If you’re wondering just what a Google+ business page is, think of it as a Facebook page for Google. There are, of course, some subtle differences between Google+ pages and Facebook pages. One such difference is that you must have a Google+ personal account before you can add a page. But that’s a minor hurdle. I recommend that you get a personal account as well.

So what can you do with a Google+ business page?

For one thing, you can post to Google+. If you’re not sure if that’s a benefit or not, consider these points and then make up your mind.

• Google+ is owned by Google, the largest search engine online. While SEO benefits are currently unproven, you can bet that Google will eventually provide greater weight to personal profiles and business pages for brands.
• Increased online reputation management opportunities.
• Better targeted marketing as you can create circles around your different market segments and communicate with each segment more easily.
• Multiple pages possible, which means you can have one for each product or brand you support as well as each location you serve.
• More effective video marketing since YouTube and Google+ are integrated allowing you to share videos more easily.
• Google+ is the fastest growing social media website in history.
• You can schedule hangouts with your clients and partners and communicate for free with them via video right inside Google+

This is just the tip of the iceberg. Google+ is only going to get better. If you haven’t joined yet, I highly recommend that you do and set up your business pages now.

YouTube is the second biggest search engine online. But it’s more of a social media website due to its viral video nature.

Twitter and Google+ are both in the top ten most trafficked sites online as well. And LinkedIn isn’t too far behind.

But the race isn’t over yet. All of the social media sites are working hard every day to improve themselves. The latest, Google+, is constantly improving and growing fast. It could become the second most trafficked website online in a matter of months. And Google is already suggesting that it will be the face of Google in the future. How that will affect its traffic numbers is anybody’s guess.

Who will ultimately win this war between social media websites is indeterminable. What is important for business owners is that you have menu options. You are not stuck using one social media site for your marketing and branding.

In fact, if you aren’t using multiple sites to establish a social media presence, then you aren’t getting the full benefit of social media marketing. The best approach to social media is to analyze the sites for their strengths and determine which ones make most sense for your business, niche, and situation.

It happened in just the last couple of days. Google added a YouTube search feature. In the top right corner of your screen (if you’re using Google+) you’ll see the YouTube icon. Click it and a search bar extends left a couple of inches.

All you have to do is enter a search term. When you do, a popup box the size of a YouTube video appears with a video playing related to your search term and a playlist below it. You can watch videos right through the playlist or go to the video you want to watch. Then, when you want to share on Google+, you click the green Share button.

The share button allows you to pick your circles, write a message, and send, just like on Google+.

So how do you make the most of this? If you’re a video marketer, upload your video to YouTube. When you’re ready to share it on Google+, just use the YouTube search feature. It’s the easiest video marketing I’ve seen to date.

• Sites – Need a website? Google Sites allows small business owners to establish a basic website without having to pay for hosting.
• Gmail – Gmail provides e-mail addresses for millions of online marketers and business owners.
• Blogger – Google’s Blogger service allows anyone to establish a blog online – even for business.
• Images – If you use images on your blog or website, you can get unlimited hosting with Picasa.
• Image Editing – Edit your images with Picnik.
• Video Marketing – Start your own channel, host and market your videos (and your business) with YouTube.
• Offers – Promote your business through Google Offers.
• Reader – Keep tabs on your competition and other important industry news blogs with Google Reader.
• Alerts – Monitor your reputation and important topics with Google Alerts.
• Code - Create awesome products with Google Code.
• Trends – Research popular search trends you can respond to within your niche.
• Custom Search – Create your own search engine and use it for your website.
• Google+ – Go social with Google+, Google’s own social networking website.
• Checkout – Take payments on your website with Google Checkout.
• Calendar – Stay organized with Google Calendar.
• Documents – Create and share your business documents with Google Docs.

I’m certain these are not the only Google services you can use for your business. You can find more through Google’s service listing page.

I’m also not saying that I recommend all of these services. In some cases there is a better alternative. For instance, PayPal is a much better payment service than Google Checkout, but if you were so inclined you could feasibly run your business using Google Checkout and take credit card payments through your website (you can do the same thing with PayPal).

In this century, Google provides small business owners with many services that allows you to run your business entirely on Google.