Google plus one is a rating system whereby, when logged in, users will be able rate results that they see as relevant or useful but clicking a ‘plus one’ button featured to the right of the results. This will influence the order of future searches, since Google will prioritise results that have received the most endorsements.

For the user, this will mean more relevant search results and a reduction of spammy, low quality links appearing in the SERPs. Users will also be able to determine which results their friends deem to be useful. So what exactly does this mean for SEO practitioners? Will years of work be undermined when sites with tonnes of links are subsumed by seemingly lesser competitors, just because users ‘like’ them more?

The answer is possibly, but there is no reason  for SEO experts to panic, Google concede that +1 will be just an addition to the hundreds of other signals it uses to rank sites. What +1 does indicate though is an ever increasing reliance on social signals to rank sites. Google and Bing already use Twitter and Facebook mentions to influence results but +1 represents Google’s commitment to a user-centric search model.

So how will this change the way SEO’s operate? Will SEO come down to simply ‘plus-oneing’ a result endless amounts of times? Or even paying people to plus one? This is also doubtful, such a transparent method is unsustainable and while it may be used as part of a wider strategy, Google will surely have measures in place to penalise individuals who abuse the system.

The introduction of +1 is in fact part of Google’s wider remit to improve its offering. The Panda update was the first indication that Google is serious about removing spammed or ‘gamed’ results from its SERPs, enhancing the overall user experience, most likely in response to competition from new search engines like Bing.

As Dave Naylor once said “so long as there is still a search button SEOs will still have jobs”. This raft of changes simply means that the spammers and the Black-hats will have to up their game and start producing decent content that real users really want if they are stay afloat.

Guest post by: Joe is a blogger who is of the belief that credit cards should be removed from the equation of obtaining links!

• Say Hello to +1: Google Like Button That Directly Influences Search Results – March 30, 2011
• Monitoring your Search Engines Positions – July 2, 2009
• Get more traffic to your blog with 5 minutes of work – June 12, 2008
• Google Offers Available in Charlotte, Kansas City, Milwaukee, San Antonio and Tampa – January 25, 2012
• First Google+ TV Advertising: Sharing, but like real life – November 25, 2011

Is Google +1 the Beginning of the End for SEO originally appeared on: Crenk
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Duplication

It’s a common misconception that Google will penalise your site for containing duplicate content. Google doesn’t penalise you for duplicate content, it just doesn’t give it as much credit. This is because Google doesn’t want to index the same content twice, or more. This way it can be sure that the results it serves up from your search query are not repeated, which would in turn give you a bad user experience. Anyway, if you own a website and are a little concerned about duplication then the very least you should do is ensure there is only one version of your site on the internet. Here are 3 possible variations of your home page that Google could be indexing:

http://www.example.com/

http://example.com/

http://www.example.com/index.html

If you can find versions of your website along the lines of the above examples, then you are being affected by duplication issues. You need to specify which URL is the one you want Google to see. You can do this by implementing the correct code in you web.config file / .htaccess file / httpd.ini file, depending on your website.

Page Title

Page titles play a huge role in SEO and should never be overlooked. If your current page title is ‘Home’ or worse ‘Untitled Document’, then you are doing your website a serious injustice. The title for each of your pages should tell people what’s on the page. Effective use of targeted keywords in the title is also essential for SEO. Short page titles can seem a bit spammy, so the use of themed words and stop words can work well to combine several targeted keywords. Each page should have a unique title with the current recommended limit for a page title length being 70 characters.

Page Description

Page descriptions are another onsite aspect that you should be making full use of for SEO benefit. Page descriptions (or Meta descriptions) are the informative bits of text that provide an explanation of the content on a page. They are used by search engines to display a snippet below a link in a search results page. Meta descriptions are key for a successful click-through rate and provide the perfect opportunity to tell people what exactly is on the page in regards to what they have searched for. The best descriptions will combine a couple of keywords in to a compelling description of the page. Each page should have a unique Meta description of around 156 characters.

Robots.txt

Every website should have a robots.txt file. This is the file that a search engine spider will look for to be given direction. If your robots.txt file is empty then the default behaviour for spiders is to index each page and follow your links. If your robots.txt file contains < meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,nofollow” > then this will be impacting the visibility of your website in the search engine results pages.

URLs

URLs are another aspect of your website that can be optimised for maximum search engine visibility. Including the main targeted keyword for the page in its URL and locating that page as close to the root of the domain as possible will help. Also avoid using dynamic URLs that use ?, &, $, =, +, %, and other characters that have no SEO value. Also, try to avoid camel case and format each pages URL in the same manner.

Guest Post by: Dan dreams of being a dolphin trainer and swimming pool technician who treats above ground pools with Certikin along with other swimming pool chemicals like his friend Alex Harvey, he’s cool, You can find him on Twitter here @ harvey1dash8.

• Top Five SEO Link Building Tips – March 31, 2011
• Is Google +1 the Beginning of the End for SEO – April 16, 2011
• Did AOL Really Buy The Huffington Post for the Great Content? – February 8, 2011
• Monitoring your Search Engines Positions – July 2, 2009
• Get more traffic to your blog with 5 minutes of work – June 12, 2008

5 Onsite SEO Factors You Shouldn’t Overlook originally appeared on: Crenk
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(1) Quality Content. It seems ridiculous to have to even have to suggest that quality content is important but most people think about content last. But read through most sites dedicated to SEO or Blogging and the concept of good quality writing is always treated as an afterthought. However Google’s change of algorithm makes this issue even more acute as it is their aim that original, good quality writing should be further up the search results and not hidden in a mass of terrible, keyword-obsessed, scraped content. Good quality writing will naturally create good backlinks and will bring more users to your site. What’s more, they will want to keep coming back. If the content is good, people will naturally link to you and recommend it to other people.

(2) Research Backlinks. When planning your SEO strategy & backlinks always go to your competitor’s website first to check which sites are providing them with backlinks. This is a great way to get your SEO campaign under way – anyone that is linking to your competitors will probably own a site that will link well with yours too. Then all you need to do is offer content that is better than your competitor. There are all kinds of tools out there to help you find these backlinks, from SEO Back Link Analyzer to SEO Spyglass.
(3) Quality Backlinks Only – Where possible, try to only go for higher quality backlinks. SEO links that are higher value will obviously bring greater link value to your site. Look for sites with a high PR rating, (at least PR 2 and above where possible) are a few years old, are not link farms or article farms. Also, ensure that your anchor text is of benefit – link on a search phrase relevant to your site, and not on ‘click here.’ Lastly, try to choose sites where there will not be numerous other links on the same page, as these will dilute the value and link juice of your link.

(4) Directory Submission – Though not as important as it used to be, there are still advantages to be gained by submitting your site to as many directories as possible. You can either submit your site yourself to directories you consider to be reputable or you can use a directory submission service that will automatically handle the submission process for you to more than 100 directories. Bear in mind that the most popular directories will not normally accept automatic submissions however.

(5) Local Directory Submission – Just as important as the global internet directories are local or national based directories of businesses which will help you appear in regional searches, improve your search ranking and also give you more specific and higher quality links.

Guest Blog by: Alex Simmonds is a copywriter and freelance journalist based in the UK. He can currently be found writing a daily financial blog on everything from mortgages to umbrella companies

• 5 Onsite SEO Factors You Shouldn’t Overlook – April 13, 2011
• 5 Tips For Young Bloggers – April 16, 2011
• Tips For Young Bloggers – April 16, 2011
• Is Google +1 the Beginning of the End for SEO – April 16, 2011
• Did AOL Really Buy The Huffington Post for the Great Content? – February 8, 2011

Top Five SEO Link Building Tips originally appeared on: Crenk
Join our Community: Twitter, Facebook

Centernetworks has a very interesting article about what AOL gets from the Huffington Post acquisition. Arianna always talks about the quality of the content on the Huffington Post, but is it more of just an SEO play from AOL?

Read the full article here.

• AOL Closing Over 30 Sites and Laying Off 900 Employees – March 23, 2011
• AOL Acquire the Huffington Post for $315 Million: Internal Email – February 7, 2011
• The Advertising Collective: AOL, Yahoo and Microsoft Join Forces – November 9, 2011
• Huffington Post to Launch French Edition – October 10, 2011
• Huffington Post Over One Billion Page Views Per Month – October 3, 2011

Did AOL Really Buy The Huffington Post for the Great Content? originally appeared on: Crenk
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How to use it is very simple, you don’t even have to be registered to receive any result, you can query and get some instant results about your site and a special keyword. The free registration can also give you: Email Alerts (when position changes or when a competitor has passed you); weekly reports; and monitor for Google’s Page Rank and Alexa.

Here’s a query about my blog with a keyword that I know I have a good ranking about it:

It is pretty cool to have these results and see the differences between the search engines; and of course will be very helpful to you if you are setting up your business to evaluate the status of popularity.

• Internet Search Expanded, Online Information Drilldown – November 15, 2009
• Bing Replacing Google on iPhone 4? – June 1, 2010
• Yahoo! and Bing Still Rivals – August 25, 2009
• Yahoo and Microsoft Search – Possible Collaboration – July 29, 2009
• Google Panda Got It Wrong! Scrapers Out Ranking Original Content: Crenk Example – May 18, 2011

Monitoring your Search Engines Positions originally appeared on: Crenk
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• Internet fame
• Potential to make money from ads
• Obsessed with statistics
• Conceited
• Enjoying knowing someone is reading what you wrote
• Etc.

Most of us enjoy knowing that someone is reading what we as writers spent time and energy to write, the side effects of money and fame can be nice as well, but how to achieve? One simple way that I’ve found is to ask people to view your site. But how? Where? Relying on Google search results can take time and not everyone reads your MySpace bulletins or the tweets you obsessively send via Twitter, digg.com isn’t working that well and neither is Stumble Upon, and it may not be in your budget to buy ad space on a more popular site right now, so what can you do?

Email blog owners who have written similar articles and let them know about the one you wrote. Yes, it’s that simple. Don’t do this with every article you write, pick your very best and send the links to the biggest and best blogs out there. Don’t ask them to review your site or link to it, simply let them know you have written similar material that they or their readers might want to use and you like their site. Be honest and don’t make it sound cheesy.

How do you find people with similar articles? Try Google Blog Search and look for articles written in the last week or month. Does this really work? Absolutely. I used this technique last week, here’s what I did and the results from it.

They filmed part of the Transformers II movie in my town last week and some co-workers got behind the scenes photographs of the set and a video. They gave me permission to blog about it, which I promptly did. Next, I did a Google Blog Search for similar sites and found the Transformers Live Action Movie Blog, the owners email is displayed on the left sidebar. This is the email I sent him:

I saw you recently published an article & photos regarding Transformers 2… wanted to share with you one my recent articles with more photos and a video (with more videos being edited now for publication).

Thought your readers might enjoy these: http://www.randomn3ss.com/2008/06/05/exclusive-filming-of-transformers-2-photos-and-videos/

That’s it. Within a few hours, they published this article that contains a link to my site’s homepage and the direct link to the article. More than 1,000 unique visits came to that specific article over the following 12 hours from the Transformers Live Action Movie Blog. I’d call that a success.

I’ve used this technique sparingly as not to become a burden on anyone, seem pushy or ungrateful for what others have done for me. Using this method though, I have successfully had articles linking to my sites on Lifehacker.com, GetRichSlowly.org, and several other very well known high traffic blogs.

I’d love to hear about some success stories from people who give this a try. Not every email you send will have great results, but it does work. Keep an open mind too when a fellow blogger approaches you with an idea or to share content.

• Is Google +1 the Beginning of the End for SEO – April 16, 2011
• Monitoring your Search Engines Positions – July 2, 2009
• Google Knol Released, Wikipedia Competitor – July 24, 2008
• Take A Walk With Google Maps – July 24, 2008
• Google Offers Available in Charlotte, Kansas City, Milwaukee, San Antonio and Tampa – January 25, 2012

Get more traffic to your blog with 5 minutes of work originally appeared on: Crenk
Join our Community: Twitter, Facebook