With the roll out of the new Google +1 share button, chances are you will want to add this snazzy button to help optimize your website or blog. Installing the Google +1 share button is very simple.

Place this tag in your head or just before your close body tag:

<script type=”text/javascript” src=”https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js“></script>

Place this tag where you want the +1 button to render:

<g:plusone></g:plusone>

The button should look something like this on your website.

You can go here to create a custom +1 button and/or access some very helpful Google +1 button FAQs.

Google and Microsoft have made announcements lately that Social Signals are being incorporated into the search algorithm (including this interview with SEO Moz back in December). Which means that whether or not a link has been shared via social networks affects its performance in search.

How much do Social Signals matter? Keep in mind that there are several hundred signals Google looks at – and this is one. But it can be an advantage. Google is indexing Tweets within seconds, and search engines are finding a way to incorporate that data.

SEOmoz did a great case study on Social Signals of an instance where a link that was tweeted by Smashing Magazine (and then retweeted again and again by the magazine’s loyal following) began to appear higher in the results after it was tweeted.

Social Signals Offline: The guy getting all the hugs must be cool.

Rule of Thumb: Include Links in your Social Media Posts

Links add context to a tweet and give you the opportunity to drive fans back to your website (or someone else’s that you think is really great). 140 characters can be limiting, but a link can provide more content for someone who is interested. This also has the opportunity for Google to see your link as more valuable.

At the recent SMX Conference the Schipul SEM team had the opportunity to attend, Microsoft recommended including a link in every Tweet and Facebook status.

Twitter recently added a tab for “Tweets with Links” when you search from Twitter.com – which tells me that Twitter knows that tweets with links are more interesting (similar to how they pull out “Tweets near you” because those are more interesting).

All these factors point to the same conclusion – include links in your Tweets!

What About No Follow and URL Shorteners Affecting my Link Juice?

According to Danny Sullivan at a panel at SMX this month, link shorteners are ok for “link juice”  as long as they use 301 Redirects to get you to the long URL (most do), including these three:

• Bit.ly uses 301 Redirects
• Hootsuite – ow.ly does use 301 Redirects but ht.ly does not (the top bar robs the link juice)
• is.gd  uses 301 Redirects

Fun fact about Bit.ly – add a plus sign to the end of any Bit.ly link to see the stats on who has clicked on that link

Most Social Media sites classify outbound links posted by users as “no follow” in their code, which tells the search engines not to count that link as an “endorsement” for the site like it would normally. If Google is following its own rules, these links don’t get counted as “link juice” for the site. Links from Social Media sites are being indexed differently than “regular” links. Search engines only count the link as “Link Juice” after taking into account Author Authority from the person who posted the link.

Author Authority in Social Media

Author Authority refers to the authority of the person posting the content. Most of us can do a “squint test” and tell if someone on Twitter is a spammer (no photo, following thousands of people with no one following back, they haven’t been on Twitter long and only have a few spammy looking posts, etc.). Google is getting smart about identifying low quality accounts on Twitter as well. We don’t have many specifics on exactly what factors they look at, but we know that Spam is a top priority.

Search Engine Land compiled a great list of Social Signals the Search Engines may use to determine authority. Here’s the recap:

• Bing says they look at – how many people you follow, how many follow you, carries much more weight in Bing Social Search than regular Bing search
• Google says they look at – author authority, how many people share a link
• What about Facebook? – Bing looks at pages and “Everyone” status posts, Google treats links shared on Facebook fan pages the same as tweeted links, no personal wall data (no comment on public wall data)

For more on building Twitter authority: Dan Zarella’s The Science of Retweets is a fantastic Article on the patterns behind Retweets – Time of day, Words used, Word length, etc. – including tips on how to get Retweeted.

Social Connections Matter

Your content doesn’t just show up in your Fan’s Facebook News Feed and follower’s  Twitter stream… people connected with you through Social Media are more likely to see your links in Search Results as well (you’ve probably seen this under “Links from your Friends” in Google Search Results). This makes those Social Connections even more valuable.

What About Other Social Networks?

We have heard Google and Bing specifically mention Twitter and Facebook now. Networks like LinkedIn that require a  login to see the content, Search Engines won’t be able to crawl that data.

Recap – What Do I need to do?

1. Link back to your site when posting on Twitter and Facebook
2. Use a URL shortener that uses 301 Redirects (bit.ly, ow.ly, is.gd, etc.) – also find one that gives you stats (I like bit.ly, ow.ly)
3. Make sure your company social media profiles are public – Facebook allows you to make Fan Page 18+ or 21+, those will be difficult (if not impossible), because the Google crawlers can’t log in to Facebook. Make sure Twitter is public as well.
4. Be a high quality account – make sure your accounts have photos, bios, and you are interacting with your followers regularly
5. Post awesome content people want to link to – the best way to get links and retweets is to post great stuff
6. Be a good neighbor – The internet runs on karma, and posting content from other people that you think is interesting encourages that karma to flow. Sharing other people’s content shows them and the world (and Google) that you are participating in the conversation, not just broadcasting your own message

At Schipul, we are big fans of learning, learning and more learning. One of the resources we use in the office is Lynda.com. Today, I learned Jill has a set of Getting Started videos promoting her course on Lynda.com. This is a full  set of videos for a nice refresher or to educate a client on the process of the work you will be providing. She uses a case study site she launched and optimized to illustrate what works and what doesn’t.

See some free video excerpts from the course on her SEM-Video page. Nope, we aren’t affiliated, we just like good content when we see it. Thanks Jill, these are great!

SEO News this past week:

• Library of Congress archives ENTIRE Twitter history
• Google begins indexing hRecipe microformat
• Twitter begins a promoted Tweets platform

What is Social Search and how does it benefit the social graph?

Brynn Evans is first up. She is a digital anthropologist looking at what people are doing onilne and how we design for social interactions to be integrated with Search. Search is no longer just a question inside a box. But, how can our friends help us. Search is a process over time. She defines three flavors of social search. Collective, Friend -filtered, and collaborative. People exhibit two main social strategies. Some want to ask the network for help and guidance before doing a search on their own. Others distinctly want to embark alone first and see what they can gather. It’s not until they can’t find what they are looking for when they ask friends or networks.

Next is Max Ventilla as a Google zookeeper after his startup Aardvaark was acquired by Google. Subjective questions generate majority of revenue. But and unreliable and there is a social cost of asking a favor. How do you find the best person to answer your question? Each individual’ network is growing exponentially. In queries of subjective nature, average query is 19 words as opposed to Google 3-4 words. Social context is different than the social graph, the context is frequently sufficient. Went to same school, etc. Intimacy (more than authority) facilitates trust.

Ash Rust is Director of Search Relevance at OneRiot. Advertising is matched with realtime web and focused on indexing what people are talking about in social media. Delivers very realtime both in browser and app modes for a swarming type of distributed tool. Ask the masses for best answer.

Prindle is thinking about social search in the digital marketplace. “Give customers something good to talk about in social media, and they will talk. That conversation becomes content for social search, helping to drive additional traffic and conversation.” This sharing used to happen in email, but is not happening in public. Advertising space for many years has been start in TV ad, then drive other marketing efforts. New model example: Best Buy’s @Twelpforce as example of social search platform. Using TV to extend to wider audience.

Where is Social Search going?

Will these new forms of search overtake the Google Box? 20-40% of queries can be handled by social search currently according to Rust. It depends if they will overtake. Different responses are useful in different search. Brynn comments that we often go to Google for an answer, but still need the next level of social relevance. I have an answer, what do I do with it? Then network can follow through. Rust chimes back in with how to rank in social algorithms based on history of streams and their diversity of content. Inference of smaller groups or networks and may highlight authority.

Brynn biggest problems are who is an authority, how to index them, and how to index friends. OneRiot and Aardvaark answer these in different ways. Aardfavrk is a response to the tremendous social activity happening online. OneRiot recognizes the need for different search. For example, a simple search for “killer whale” might bring up lots of information about whales, Orca, etc. But not necessarily what the ongoing conversation is about social responsibility of killer whales in SeaWorld shows after news item of killer whale attack.

Monetization of Social Search and Advertising

Reverse delivering search information starts with answers, then builds brand. Nash talks about the monetization of Social Search. Traditionally, you draw people coming to you with a clear commercial intent. Then they ask you want they want and you can answer with incentive. New model focuses on not just PPC. First deliver organic answers, then deliver sponsored ads not only at cost of PPC, but discounts on bid based on delivering good responses. Bad responses will not be rewarded. Asking people first if they want a sponsored ad typically is over 50% for opt-in. Social search will allow advertisers to target user intent and not just users.

New model is not about buying keywords, but creating content the social search indexes. Headlines are being tracked more than keywords. Links are still more important than keywords. Anchorlinks and number of people linking to your content is more important than the actual keywords and will continue to drive ranking and indexing.

How do you Measure Social Search?

Finally, in measuring social search, @ventilla on social analytics: “Who you are connected to is more important than how you describe yourself.” True analytics of social search is still TBD. Will be a growing area of research.

Bing Twitter Page and Search

Bing actually created an entire page at bing.com/twitter which displays trending topics in a cloud at the top followed by a listing of the most active links below. Each link is followed by a couple of related tweets. There is some mystery as to which tweets are being selected. It does not appear to be the first tweets or the ones from people with the most followers. It also seems the links are tied to the trending topics, and are not necessarily the most popular links on twitter.

Additionally, Bing adds the ability to search the twitter stream in real-time. After searching a term (like Yankees) and you 4 selected tweets followed by some of the top linked content relating to those words. You can view the full tweetstream and either allow it to continually refresh or pause it a read a few. Be careful with some of the top trending topics, as they can start refresh faster than you (or at least I) can read them.

The Bing search adds some value with the related links, but the selection of how these links (and top two tweets) are chosen is still not fully known. Hopefully some of this will get ironed out as Microsoft continues to make progress in developing this search option.

Google Social Search

Google takes a completely different approach to the fire hose of Twitter data. While this may not be their long-term plan for the data, they are currently integrating it with a few other services in Google Labs. At the Google Labs Experimental Search, you can join the experiment, which gives you the option to use Social Search. Once you have signed up, when you search for something on Google and click Show Options you will see Social at the bottom. Selecting it gets you into the special Social results.

These results will show links from different people you are connected to and how you are connected to them. It also gives you the option to view results from a single person. Google creates these connections using your Google Profile (you created that, right?). I have Twitter as one of my links, as well as my YouTube account. Google scans these two networks to search for connections I might have, then it searches through that data.

This is much different than a full Twitter search, but in many cases it may be more useful. You are probably more interested in what the people you know and follow have to say than the rest of the Twitter universe. It also works to filter out all of the spam that currently plagues and Twitter trending topic. The links go to tweets, blogs, and other links related to the search, which adds some additional value to just searching the twitterstream.

These two new ways to search Twitter are still early in development so expect some changes and improvements in their results over time.

Some of the most interesting features to be included are:

• Geographical Location datelines to show where tweets are coming from
• Reputation validating system to lend credibility to authors as information sources
• Reputation ranking system based on ratings from other users
• Grouping of followers by lists

Read the full article on CBSNews

Jonti Bolles

For more information on Social Marketing, Web Analytics and Search, contact our Search Engine Marketing Team at Schipul and follow SEMblog on Twitter.

What does this mean to you?

Well for one thing each person in your audience now has the ability to easily connect with each other. That means that every person that uses your product or service now has the tools to easily influence other people about you and your brand. This is a good thing and also a bad thing. If your brand is well received you are in a position to help your raving fans turn other users into raving fans. If your brand isn’t then you’re going to need to monitor your online PR.

Neilsen reports that ’90% of consumers surveyed noted that they trust recommendations from people they know, while 70 percent trusted consumer opinions posted online.’

In the past you needed to engage a PR firm to see what people were saying about you and/or your brand. You’ll still need to do that but now with some cool online tools you can do it yourself, to some degree, if you have the time. There’s a lot of data out there so you might still want to engage a PR firm.

Monitoring Your Brand Online – Websites

No matter what the scenario you fall into above you’re going to want to know what people are saying about you and below are some great tools to get started

Google Alerts

Google Alerts is a great tool that allows you to receive alerts whenever your brand is mentioned in a search result. From Google ‘Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic.’

Twitter Search

http://search.twitter.com If you don’t know what Twitter is you are doing it wrong. Run a search on Twitter to see what people are talking about. Plug in your name, your brand name or your keywords and see what people are saying right now.

Social Mention

This is a go-to site for me. If I need to track terms or brand names I run a search on Social Mention and I can see recent activity around the web. Much like Technorati’s search engine it gives you an overview of recent content on the web.

BlogPulse

BlogPulse is another tool you need in your arsenal. Brought to you by the folks at Nielsen BlogPulse ‘is a blog search engine that also analyzes and reports on daily activity in the blogosphere.’ It allows you to search trends and track conversations amongst other things. You need to bookmark this site, become friends with it.

Monitoring Your Brand Online – Desktop Applications

With advent of tools like Adobe’s Air you can now use desktop applications to monitor your brand or yourself online

Social Seek

This brand new app that lets you see, much like Social Mention, what is happening around the web without having to open a browser. Type in a term and a location and Social Seek will give you results from Blogs, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and Eventful.

Just download SocialSeek and search for various terms and locations to see what people are saying about you around the world. A great tool indeed!

PeopleBrowsr

This is a very robust platform so make sure you put on your big boy pants when you jump into this one. PeopleBrowsr offers a host of tools for you to use that include Live Search, Marketers, My PB, Industry Billboard, News and even a Conference tracker.

It’s a little overwhelming the amount of information you have at your finger tips with PeopleBroswer but quite frankly these kinds of things put a big smile on my face. Jump and give it a try. Sign up and click on the ‘PBAir Download’ link at the bottom of your browser. I know, I know very vague instructions but I cannot find any clear link to give you. Maybe the good folks at PeopleBrowser will read this and comment on how to easily find the desktop AIR app. Hint hint.

What Are Some Tools You Are Using?

Obviously this isn’t a complete list, there are literally tons and tons of tools to use, what are some cool ones that you have been using to monitor your site?

Drop us a comment and let us know how you are monitoring you and/or your brand online

Jason McElweenie

For more information please contact the Search Engine Marketing Team at Schipul – jason@schipul.com

Case in point:

Yesterday, in my personal Twitter account I tweeted about Hockey being ‘the sport of kings!’

@TheOtherLeslie I'm talking about Hockey – the sport of kings!  Balsillie, RIM/Blackberry CEO is trying to buy a team
about 17 hours ago from twhirl in reply to TheOtherLeslie

30 minutes later the basketball team the Sacramento Kings start following me

Wow, I tweet about hockey using the word 'kings' and the Sacramento Kings follow me. That right there is a Social Media Monitoring FAIL
about 17 hours ago from twhirl

@rxmike replies to my tweet about the Kings following me

@deneyterrio had a similar exp tonite. Tweeted about St Louis Cardinals #fail and now they are following me. #poorsearch
about 12 hours ago from Tweetie in reply to deneyterrio

This is where it gets really strange. An unofficial St Louis Cardinals Twitter account must be set on auto-pilot and RTs anything that is said about them. Their account Retweets @rxmike’s tweet

RT @rxmike @deneyterrio had a similar exp tonite. Tweeted about St Louis Cardinals #fail and now they are following me. #poorsearch
about 11 hours ago from web

At this point I have figured out that account is on auto-pilot so I decide to do a little test. I in turn Retweet their last tweet

RT @ST_L_Cardinals RT @rxmike @deneyterrio had a similar exp tonite. Tweeted about St Louis Cardinals #fail and now they are following me. #
about 10 hours ago from TwitterBerry

Sure enough the auto-pilot account Retweets it again but not before

RT @deneyterrio RT @ST_L_Cardinals RT @rxmike @deneyterrio had a similar exp tonite. Tweeted about St Louis Cardinals #fail and now they …
about 9 hours ago from web

Surreal for sure.

So what is the point of all this? Well as you can see above if you are promoting your brand online in such a disconnected fashion as the St Louis Cardinals are you could run into some potential problems. Yes this is not the official St Louis Cardinals twitter account, I can't easily find one, but as you can see if you don't pay attention to your brand online you can run into problems down the road. If a team or someone famous follows/replies to you and you never visit their Twitter page you might think they are the real deal. In this case they are NOT the real St Louis Cardinals Twitter account but you should always be monitoring your online presence. Our tweets above raise the awareness of actually monitoring your brand online and thankfully we were not malicious but that might not stop someone out there that might want to harm you and/or your brand.

Steps to Take to Avoid Bad Online PR

First thing you need to do is have an actual person reply and retweet about your brand. The beauty of Twitter and Social Media is that it lets regular people connect with the companies/organizations/celebrities that they love. If you are a robot you will be treated like a robot.

You should also have other people in your company/org tweet as well. They don’t have to tweet about your company exclusively but they can occasionally. A ratio of 1 to 5 is a good measure, 1 company to 5 personal. If you are an employee and you constantly tweet about your company people will tune you out. The reason for this is people want to connect on an individual level. I know I am more likely to do business with someone that I have a personal relationship with or someone I know online that has always given me the time of day.

Ways to Monitor Your Brand Online

Twitter Search

All public tweets are searchable as business you should always be searching on Twitter to see what people are saying about you

Blog Pulse

Blog Pulse is a great search engine for Blogs. Type in your brand name see what people are blogging about you and/or your brand.

Technorati

Technorati is another great search engine to see what people are saying about your brand. Technorati is blogs and Google is to websites – a great search engine.

But This is a Fan Not the Real Team!

This account I am referencing is auto-tweeting everything that has to do with the Cardinals in Twitter and in doing that they run the risk of someone attacking or ‘flaming’ them online, even if it isn't their account. This type of account shows that Twitter and Social Media in general are not as free spirited as some might think. You can’t just put your brand on auto-pilot and expect the world to be amazed. Well, they will be amazed – at how vacant and distant you are.

Jason McElweenie

For more information please contact the Search Engine Marketing Team at Schipul – sem@schipul.com

Twitter Search is about to change. CNET notes Twitter will start indexing not just the contents of the 140 character microblogs, but also crawling and indexing the content of pages sent in shortened URLs. This will provide a much clearer indication of what people are interested in and how topics are ranking. This could be a great tool to organize data and filter some of the recent spam clutter on Twitter. Twitter may be positioning for a run at part of Google’s pie in the Search community. Delivering relevant real-time results based on rank, reputation and relevance would be valuable in the semantic search development.

What does this mean to the business user getting started with Twitter? Building a effective profile in now becomes more important than ever. Many small businesses are aware of the impact of Twitter, followers and reputation in their community. Now, reputation could be ranked and the content of websites will be measured via retweets, shortened URLs and quality vs. quantity. This isn’t anything new, we have known good content is the best way to develop followers and build a community, now Twitter will begin to follow the same rules. It is conceivable to realize Twitter accounts with good followers, retweets and good reputation will be ranked higher in Twitter search results.

What can you do? Continue to learn the best tools and etiquette for using Twitter.  For example, Twitter just switched its default link shortener to Bit.ly. Bit.ly offers real-time stats on the most clicked links, clickthrough and where users are coming from. You can link to your own website and announce new blog posts and website updates, but more importantly, share the link love to good content beyond your site and contribute to the community. Use Twitter Search to find others in your community who share similar interests. Follow them and listen, then participate in the community. Finally, monitor how well you are doing compared to others using Twitalyzer to measure Influence and other new metrics.

Jonti Bolles

For more information about this article, learning to effectively use Twitter and other Social Media tools, or learning how to manage analytics, please contact our Business Development Team at Schipul – The Web Marketing Company.

We often get really powerful questions from clients wanting to know the simple things like, “Why would I Twitter?” or “Am I doing it right?” With Twitalyzer, you can see the measurement of key metrics and see how you are doing against others. You see the Twitalyzer 100 most influential people, or simply measure against your friends, colleagues or business competitors. 

A couple of the great values to review are Influence and Signal-to-Noise ratio. Influence is measured not just by your popularity, but a set of calculations based on things like how often you are “retweeted” and your reach with updates and number of followers. Signal-to-noise ratio is a the number of messages with information sharing such as @ references, # hastags, links or retweets. Twitter is a great tool for Social Media, but its popularity is also ramping up some of the noise we are all bombarded with daily. Checking out how much you are contributing above the noise is a great metric. There are other metrics available including generosity, velocity and clout.

How do you become a good Twitterer? There is a dashboard to suggest ways to increase your influence and contribute to the community. Like most analytics tools, it can let you know if you are using a social media strategy successfully.

Finally, we really like the Search tool to find others with similar interests, keywords and get a quick glance at their influence to see if we should be following them.

Of course, we Twitter because we like it and not to chase numbers. Don’t get too caught up, in the super easy to read scores and charts. Remember to enjoy Twitter for the goodness (and sometimes distraction) it brings to your digital life.

Let us know how you like Twitalzyer.

Follow us on twitter.com/semblog or me personally at twitter.com/jonti

Jonti Bolles

For more information please contact the Search Engine Marketing Team at Schipul – sem@schipul.com