In the presentation I covered the basic understanding of how SEO, Social Media and Pay Per Click can play an intricate role in building a photography business online. Some good questions came from the group after the presentation so clearly our photographers in Cape Town have a growing knowledge of web based marketing. The big takeaways from the evening are the need for links and basic strategies behind link building (competitor analysis being the focus). We shouldn’t be focused on directory links but rather building solid relationships with others in the industry. The other is to understand the return on investment, that 1.5% of traffic are going to convert, well that is the benchmark at least. We should be trying to increase this percentage to at least 5%.

I’ll hopefully have the audio for you to listen to as well. Our technicians are working on this..

Apple designer, Andy Hertzfield, was employed by Google to head up the design (I think we can all appreciate Apple’s insight into design); immediately you notice that the Google+ interface is totally different to those of other Google products out there. However, my one criticism is that there seems to be a lot of wasted white space between content streams on their wall. Although I have no doubt the Google designers will get this right.

Considering when I think back to how Facebook’s design layout looked upon first launch, its a far cry to what it is now. The ease of synchronising Google+ with Gmail, docs, calendar, chat are just a few areas, but still far beyond what Facebook has been able to achieve (FYI, Facebook has just signed an agreement with Skype to compete against Google Chat – I fear they may have missed the boat on this one, maybe they’ll prove me wrong..).

Now for the first time, we potentially have a platform that can manage our lives all in one area, hallelujah! I personally have never used Gmail as much as I have since joining Google+, I’ve even started using Google Calendar and am seriously thinking of moving away from my Outlook and plugging all my pop email accounts into Gmail.

So what does this mean for business?
This does not mean you can now create a profile for your business within Google+ ! Google have already announced that they will be launching a product for businesses shortly. According to Googler, Christian Oestlien, because of the demand for business profiles within Google+ they will be launching this product offering even sooner than originally planned. Both Ford and Sesame Street have had their profiles deleted by Google and have warned the community that migrating your ‘individual’ profiles to your new business profile will become messy.

My prediction for Google+ Business is that it will tie in nicely with Google Places. By using Google Places, which are already approved business listings within Google (thanks to cell phone/landline confirmation as well as Google Street View, adding a touch of verification to the business). They could potentially bring in Google+ streams into Google Places, which will be a sounding board for businesses. Google Places could also potentially display the followers a company has, like Facebook and Twitter. They already display testimonials but now it could even be further enhanced by the activity on the page, this will become a great CRM (Customer Relations Management) tool for businesses! Maybe this is something Hellopeter might have to aggregate??

I also believe that Google+ Business could be an eventual Twitter Killer. I say this because of the use of Circles, now thankfully, I don’t have to know that Joe Soap is scratching his back in Camps Bay. The Google + circles allows you to push content out to relevant people (or ‘Circles’) so your messages become a lot more personal, targeted and private. If Google can achieve a user base of 75 million plus they might even have the critical mass to conquer the giant known as Facebook. They have already 10 million users in their first month and are still on ‘invites only’.

I never even got to mention how Google+ will synchronise with search.. but lets wait until Google+ Business has been launched so we can see raw data!!

What I found most intriguing is the inclusion of the quick links to popular pages mixed in with the data taken from Google Places. One way of knowing if your company is seen as a ‘brand’ or authority in the eyes of Google is if there are quick links within the search result, mentioning your brand. Here’s another example of a non-profit organisation we support to give you more insight into quick links, GivenGain.

It’s interesting that there was no brand mention in “seo specialist cape town”. So Google is obviously busy testing a new method to display search results. It’s too early too make any calls but what will help is if anyone has seen this search result for any other search please drop us a line/email/comment. We are very interested in knowing more about this and Google’s lengths of spreading this search result through different industries.

Here’s the interview and we noticed a general theme from the answers..

Danny Sullivan: If an article is retweeted or referenced much in Twitter, do you count that as a signal outside of finding any non-nofollowed links that may naturally result from it?

Bing: We do look at the social authority of a user. We look at how many people you follow, how many follow you, and this can add a little weight to a listing in regular search results. It carries much more weight in Bing Social Search, where tweets from more authoritative people will flow to the top when best match relevancy is used.

Google: Yes, we do use it as a signal. It is used as a signal in our organic and news rankings. We also use it to enhance our news universal by marking how many people shared an article.

Danny Sullivan: Do you try to calculate the authority of someone who tweets that might be assigned to their Twitter page. Do you try to “know,” if you will, who they are?

Bing: Yes. We do calculate the authority of someone who tweets. For known public figures or publishers, we do associate them with who they are. (For example, query for Danny Sullivan)

Google: Yes we do compute and use author quality. We don’t know who anyone is in real life

Danny Sullivan: Do you calculate whether a link should carry more weight depending on the person who tweets it?

Bing: Yes.

Google: Yes we do use this as a signal, especially in the “Top links” section [of Google Realtime Search]. Author authority is independent of PageRank, but it is currently only used in limited situations in ordinary web search.

Source

So the question must be asked, “What authority do you have on the internet and more importantly over your competitors?”.

Having a look at the page authority of my Twitter profile, which has a SEOmoz Page Authority of 54, is a good start to calculating your authority. Another is to look at the ratio of followers vs following. The lower the amount of people you are following vs your followers the better.

What social media has done is created a more honest approach to online marketing, there is no more spammy reciprocal link requests (and if you are please STOP as it will hurt your campaign). People are much more likely to Facebook “like” or retweet an article they enjoyed reading and this will reflect on your social graph, which Google and Bing now are paying attention to. Spammers could create a bunch of artificial profiles but they will get caught out because what will the authority be of those profiles?? It will be a downward spiral of being red flagged if you ventured down this road.

It’s great to see SEO evolving so quickly, now we have search, content, links, social media interaction and blogs all coming together into one all round marketing approach. The companies that are quickest to adapt to this are the ones going to be enjoying high search traffic. The need for social media in your SEO campaign also ties nicely into branding, which Google has mentioned on several occasions.

Summarising the past year in search we have been learning a lot about social media, branding and focusing on building relationships to get links and how this affects SEO. Finally it is all tied together, 2011 is going be an exciting road to travel!