The problem with to-do lists is that they are easy to ignore.  Also, there rarely is that feeling of accomplishment that your day is done as there is always something else to take its place. It’s a depressing, seemingly never-ending list of items where you have to spend your precious time. However, most accounts (and by no means all of them) can be managed in just a simple hour a day of attention (if you know what to do) and you actually do it.

The problem is: you need to get organized. Many people either spend too much time getting organized and not actually doing anything or they chase their tail all day instead of taking a step back to get organized.

If you are running your AdWords account like a to-do list, we’ll look at two simple ways to change your style. The first is useful for companies who have multiple analysts or agencies that have multiple clients and the second method works better if  you are the only person running the account. Let’s take a look.

Determine What Must Be Done Every Month

The first step to getting organized is to determine what must be done every single month. Write down what you would like to do each month (this is not an exhaustive list), such as:

• Change search bids on Tuesday and Thursday
• Add new keywords the first week of every month
• Examine search queries for negative keywords every other week
• Test new ads every other week
• Test a new landing page every other week
• Create monthly reports the first week of each month
• Do quarterly reviews of geographic data

The list goes on. Based upon your account and team size, you may do these items, and others, less or more frequently.

Choose An Organizational System

The next step is to choose where you will be organized. If you are managing a team, are part of an agency, want a centralized place to keep and store data, or others may want insight into what is being done and what not, and what’s up next – then use a project management system.

If you are running the account by yourself and no one needs any insight, then use a calendar (see further below).

Turn Your PPC Account Into An Ongoing Project

If you are a project manager, you will probably hate this headline. After all, there is no such thing as an ongoing project. Projects have start dates, end dates, milestones and tasks in-between, right? However, for those who do not live in the world of project management, this is the easiest way to think about managing PPC accounts – a month-to-month project.

Next, you will want to choose a project management system to input your data so you can easily track it. I find there are two types of project management systems:

• Those that have reoccurring tasks and are used as both project management and business management
• Those that do not have reoccurring tasks and try to be pure project management software

If you choose software that supports reoccurring tasks (such as Deskaway) then input your tasks and mark them as reoccurring so the tasks show up on the appropriate dates.

If you choose a software that does not support reoccurring tasks (such as Basecamp) then your only choice is to make sure it supports templates. This is not as good as software that does support reoccurring tasks, as most project management software does not allow you to have a project go live on the first of each month automatically.

Therefore, you often create a template, manually set it up, and might have to manually fix some due dates. However, it is probably still better than living in to-do lists, but not as eloquent as software that supports reoccurring tasks.

If you have multiple clients, set each one up as a different project. If you have multiple team members, then assign the tasks as necessary to the various team members. If new items come up, you can add them as a new task list for that month if they are one time issues or as a new reoccurring item if they need to be done over and over again.

Once you are set up on a project management system, you then can see what needs to be done each day, do it – and when you do it, you will have a sense of accomplishment as you can actually be done for a day. That is a satisfaction that to-do lists cannot give you as there are always more items to take the place of what has been accomplished.

Now, your boss can see what you’re doing and have done. If you are a very transparent agency, you can even let your clients login and see all the work you are doing for them so they no longer question your work.

Using A Calendar To Track Your PPC To-Do’s

If you are managing a single account, you are the business owner, or PPC is not your life – it’s that other task you were stuck with, then project management software is often overkill. Just use a calendar instead.

The upside to a calendar is most people already use a calendar on a regular basis so there is no need to have yet another place where you are logging into on a regular basis. In addition, calendars are built to have recurring tasks, so there’s no need to evaluate project management systems to find what options it supports. The downside of a calendar is that it is difficult to keep notes of previous activity or give others insight into your work.

If you wish to use a calendar, take your lists of items and place them into your calendar. When you put the items into your calendar, estimate how much time a task should take and block off your calendar for the allotted amount of time so that you can accomplish your tasks.

Conclusion

If you aren’t careful, your PPC accounts can either consume your entire day, or they never perform better because you never spend the proper amount of time to nurture and grow them.

By finding an organization structure that works for you and your business, you can manage and grow your PPC accounts in a reasonable amount of time so that they can be profitable, you can feel productive, and everything you want to do actually gets accomplished!

I hope this article helps to get organized and improve your PPC accounts. If you still have questions or rather have us managing your pay per click campaigns, then please don’t hesitate to contact us.

Article based on: http://searchengineland.com/how-to-run-your-ppc-accounts-like-a-project-111787  

• Does the top navigation use dropdown links?
• Do sidebar or top navigation links cross sub-categories and topics?
• What type of navigation links do you find in the footers?

What are we to do?  According to Google: “Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links” and, “Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number.”

Google used to suggest limiting the number of links on a page to 100 or less. As Matt Cutts explained, this assists usability and prevents web pages from dividing PageRank too thinly.  At any rate, you’re dividing the PageRank of that page between hundreds of links, so each link is only going to pass along a minuscule amount of PageRank anyway. Users often don’t like link-heavy pages too, so before you go crazy putting a ton of links on a page, ask yourself what the purpose of the page is and whether it works well for the user experience (very important!).

How Should You Structure Your Website?

The following graphic shows the most typical ways website content gets organized. Structuring with categories, topics and sub-topics provides horizontal and vertical hierarchy.  While you can extend this infinitely, the accepted best practice is for pages to be four clicks or fewer from the homepage:

We prefer the following navigation rules for a  0–4 depth website:

*The Homepage links to all Category Pages (down)  

*Category Pages  

-Each Category page links to the Homepage (up)

-Each Category page links to all Category pages (across)

-Each Category page link to its own Topic pages (down)

*Topic Pages 

-Each Topic page links to the Homepage (up)

-Each Topic page links to all Category pages (up)

-Each Topic page links to the all Topic pages within its Category (across)

-Each Topic page links to its own Sub-topic pages (down)

*Sub-topic Pages  

-Each Sub-topic page links to the Homepage (up)

-Each Sub-topic page links to all Category pages (up)

-Each Sub-topic page links to all Topic pages within its own Category (up)

-Each Sub-topic page links to all Sub-topic pages within its own Topic (across)

-Each Sub-topic links to its own Content pages (down)

*Content Pages  

-Each Content page links to the Homepage (up)

-Each Content page links to all Category pages (up)

-Each Content page links to all Topic pages within its own Category (up)

-Each Content page links to all Sub-topic pages within its own Topic (up)

-Each Content page links to all Content pages within its own Sub-topic (across)

Keep in mind two things are happening here.

First, we push PageRank down into the site. What may not be obvious is you are pushing PageRank back upwards, too. PageRank is a renewable resource.  After the search engines measure a webpage’s raw ranking strength, they reuse some that authority by dividing it among the outbound links on the page and sending it along. Since every page links back to the homepage and category pages, this navigational structure gives those pages the most PageRank.

At this point you may be asking: if the homepage and category pages are getting all that authority how do I make my content pages rank?  After all, the content pages are where you optimize for most keywords, right? This is where search engine optimization gets interesting. Your site architecture and internal link structure create the framework within which you optimize, but there is much more to SEO.

Taking Site Structure To The Next Level

Beginning with the top of your website, seasoned optimizers don’t like generic categories such as products or solutions. Why waste all that ranking authority on generic pages when employing keywords as categories makes for a far stronger SEO strategy. Is it possible to  turn your product lines into categories?  For example: Wedding Gowns, Bridesmaid Dresses, and Flower Girl Dresses make ideal categories for a bridal shop.

Exceptions create high ranking opportunities. Cross-link to create SEO hub-pages. Send extra PageRank to important SEO pages.  If you have a Gasoline Powered Chainsaws page, each time you mention this, link to that page. Use sidebars or content windows to feature and link to your chainsaw page. Write multiple pages or supporting content that can link naturally to it, for example a tutorial on chainsaw safety or guide to properly cutting down trees.

The problem with creating cross-links to hub-pages is if you create too many links to too many pages, you eat away at your internal linking structure. Avoid this by limiting which hub-pages to cross-link to from your home, category and topic pages. Keep supporting content on the same level or lower in your website organization.  Make category, topic and sub-topic pages content rich. If your category pages are nothing more than links to sub-pages you waste ranking authority. Target these pages to keywords and fill them up with relevant content.

It always seems to come back to creating link-worthy content and having a strong link building and social media program to get off-site links, mentions and shares. The last thing you want is for all your off-site links to point to your homepage.  Yes, PageRank gets reused. However,  search engines limit or dampen the amount of authority with each re-pass.

Having off-site links to many different pages not only sends ranking authority to the target pages, it extends the amount of PageRank which gets passed throughout your website.  Besides that, links to many pages is a basic signal of website quality, it increases a website’s search spider crawl budget, and extends the number of pages the search engines will index and include in their rankings.

Article based on: http://searchengineland.com/everything-you-need-to-know-about-seo-web-structure-internal-links-110994?utm_source=sel&utm_medium=scap&utm_campaign=email 

Many people go online right after a noteworthy event—a political debate, the death of a celebrity, or a natural disaster—to get news and information about that event. This can cause a rapid increase in traffic to websites that provide relevant information, and may even cause sites to crash at the moment they’re becoming most popular. While it’s not always possible to anticipate such events, you can prepare your website in a variety of ways so that you’ll be ready to handle a sudden increase in traffic if one should occur:

1) Prepare a lightweight version of your site. Consider maintaining a lightweight version of your website; you can then switch all of your traffic over to this lightweight version if you start to experience a spike in traffic. One good way to do this is to have a mobile version of your site, and to make the mobile site available to desktop/PC users during periods of high traffic. Another low-effort option is to just maintain a lightweight version of your homepage, since the homepage is often the most-requested page of a site as visitors start there and then navigate out to the specific area of the site that they’re interested in. If a particular article or picture on your site has gone viral, you could similarly create a lightweight version of just that page. A couple tips for creating lightweight pages:

• Exclude decorative elements like images or Flash wherever possible; use text instead of images in the site navigation and chrome, and put most of the content in HTML.
• Use static HTML pages rather than dynamic ones; the latter place more load on the servers. You can also cache the static output of dynamic pages to reduce server load.

2) Take advantage of stable third-party services. Another alternative is to host a copy of your site on a third-party service that you know will be able to withstand a heavy stream of traffic. For example, you could create a copy of your site—or a pared-down version with a focus on information relevant to the spike—on a platform like Google Sites or Blogger; use services like Google Docs to host documents or forms; or use a content delivery network (CDN).

3)Use lightweight file formats. If you offer downloadable information, try to make the downloaded files as small as possible by using lightweight file formats. For example, offering the same data as a plain text file rather than a PDF can allow users to download the exact same content at a fraction of the filesize (thereby lightening the load on your servers). Also keep in mind that, if it’s not possible to use plain text files, PDFs generated from textual content are more lightweight than PDFs with images in them. Text-based PDFs are also easier for Google to understand and index completely.

4) Make tabular data available in CSV and XML formats. In case you offer numerical or tabular data (data displayed in tables), we recommend also providing it in CSV and/or XML format. These filetypes are relatively lightweight and make it easy for external developers to use your data in external applications or services in cases where you want the data to reach as many people as possible, such as in the wake of a natural disaster.

Hopefully these tips help you to withstand that huge traffic spike! For more information, check out our web design services.

Article based on: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/02/preparing-your-site-for-traffic-spike.html

1. No goals. It’s difficult to succeed without having a set of well defined objectives and related strategies to accomplish them. Actionable Blogging Fix: Determine what you want your blog to accomplish. Among the most common goals are to build branding, attract customers, support sales, improve search optimization and feed social media.

2. Poor look. If your blog looks like a child put it together, it won’t make a professional impression or support your brand. Actionable Blogging Fix: If you’re not an art director and have a limited creative talents, get some help to creating your blog design. Have limited resources? Try a local design school or exchange services with a graphic artist.

3. Contains telltale signs from free themes and graphics. A blog that still says “Another WordPress Blog” has a flashing red light that no one’s done much with the blog. Actionable Blogging Fix: This step should be a no brainer, but don’t get embarrassed if you’ve slipped up here, you’re not alone. Get some outside input on your blog’s look and feel. Also, check the header and footer, the most obvious places for this information.

4. Target Audience? Does your blog resonate with your target audience? Even more important: do you know who your target audience is? Actionable Blogging Fix: Take time to develop your marketing persona.

5. Lacks personality.  Blogs contain more than neutral content. They’ve got a point of view and perspective on the world that’s enhanced through their brand (even if the blog is part of an organization’s marketing efforts.) Actionable Blogging Fix: Develop your blog’s brand personality. If your blog is part of a larger marketing initiative, determine how the brand will be adapted to the blog format.

6. Doesn’t sound human. Blogs, like other forms of social media, require a human voice. Skip the corporate speak cleansed of anything remotely sounding human. Even worse, don’t write only for search engines. Actionable Blogging Fix. Even if your blog is associated with a company that requires legal and regulatory approval, don’t let the process edit out the human voice. If legal gobbbly-guck is needed, consider covering a tangential topic. Your goal in writing a blog is to be understood!

7. Lacks eye candy. Is your blog an endless stream of words? Yes—writing is at the core of most blogs but people are visual beings. You need to lure them in with attention-getting items. Actionable Blogging Fix: The easiest way to get attention is to add photographs to your posts. Don’t have any? Search online but make sure it isn’t copyrighted and can be used commercially.

8. No long-term commitment.  A blog is an on-going publishing platform. Building it for a one-time event defeats the purpose. Actionable Blogging Fix: Once you’ve built a blog and reader base, don’t abandon it! Create a path to making it an integral part of your content and marketing offering. At a minimum, offer readers an alternative.

9. Just blasts out promotions and press releases. While blogs are a form of media, just using as a distribution mechanism is the surest path to loosing readers. Actionable Blogging Fix: Create engaging posts for your blog and use other forms of media to distribute promotions and press releases.

10. Has lonely blog syndrome.  To be an effective part of your marketing and communications, your blog must be integrated into your overall plans, not something off to the side that someone does when they have time. Actionable Blogging Fix: Coordinate your blog and related content with the rest of your marketing, social media, content marketing or other communications.  Remember a blog should be at the heart of your social media.

11. Looks deserted. You might as well have a sign saying Go Away! The most obvious sign that no one’s around is the lack of recent posts. Actionable Blogging Fix: Instead of over committing and not delivering or abandoning your blog, decide how frequently you can blog and arrange your editorial calendar around your ability to deliver content. Then readers know when to expect your posts. It’s better to blog once a week at the same time than to blog in massive spurts and leave your blog empty during busy periods.

12. Doesn’t share the wealth. Does your blog use links, both internal and external? It helps your readers find more interesting materials on your blog or website and others. Actionable Blogging Fix: Include links in every post. Link out where appropriate and associate the link with the appropriate words. Aim for two links to external sources and two links to internal sources.

13. Isn’t optimized for search. Blogs are the perfect tool for supporting search optimization. Actionable Blogging Fix: Fill you RSS reader with the top SEO blogs and learn the secrets of SEO. Focus each post around one keyword phrase. Additionally, use real words, especially keywords in your permalinks.

14. No one knows you exist. Many bloggers think that they’re work is done once they finish writing their post. If that were only true. Actionable Blogging Fix: You need to promote your blog. This means using your other forms of internal and social media to let your family, friends, colleagues and social media connections know about your posts.

15. Lacks your stump speech. Go out and engage with others by writing guest posts. Actionable Blogging Fix: Target some blogs for which you’d like to write. Read them and check whether they accept guest posts. If so, submit your best suggestions. (It also helps your search optimization.)

16. Doesn’t track any (or appropriate) metrics. This relates to having goals. While many executives and bloggers love comments, it’s critical to measure what’s driving your blog or business. Actionable Blogging Fix: Create trackable metrics that relate back to your blog goals.

17. No Or Wrong Resources. While it’s possible to start a blog using a free service like WordPress or Blogger, you still need to create strong content. Actionable Blogging Fix: At a minimum, you need someone to write strong content, add graphical support and supply technical assistance.

18. Has no technical support.  While many bloggers can handle most of the programming issues a blog throws at them, there are times when having a friendly geek you can call is useful. Actionable Blogging Fix: For technical information check out Codex.Wordpress.org.

To build a successful blog takes time. It doesn’t happen overnight. It takes continuous effort to create great, interesting content and to build an engaged community.  You have to try different things in order to find out what works and what doesn’t, for you and your business.

Hope these tips help you get onto the right blogging path – Happy & Successful Blogging!

Article based on: http://heidicohen.com/why-your-blog-is-guaranteed-to-fail-how-to-fix-it/

NetConneXion, providing internet marketing services to the Barrie and Toronto area offers a full range of services that will keep you and your business ahead of the competition. These services include:

• Website Design

• Website Development

• Search Engine Optimization in Barrie and Toronto

• Email Marketing

• Social Media Marketing

• Affiliate Marketing

• Online Reputation Management

The very first step of starting an online business is to have an effective website because in an online business the website is the mirror image of your business.   Your website should be efficient enough to communicate with the potential customers. This is the reason why marketing companies stress on making the website easy to navigate. If the clients are able to access all the information available on the site without any technical assistance they will enjoy being there. Another important step that comes after crafting the website is that it is easy to find and ranks high in the search engines, and this can be accomplished by our  search engine optimization services in Toronto and Barrie.

SEO and Rankings

On and offsite optimization improves the ranking of you website in the search engines. Generally people look for some product, they go on the search engine and type a keyword and usually click on the sites that are on the top of the search engine results pages. This makes it imperative that your link should be visible so that viewers can view your products and services. Competition is increasing day by day and there must be around thousand providers who must be offering the same product and the same price. One way to cope with this is to presenting your services before your competitor can do it. This is done by making the website friendly to the crawlers and spiders on the search engines and by website submissions.

NetConneXion Internet Marketing offers all these services together, but in case you have an already existing website, that is not doing as well as you expected then it’s time to contact us. By making your online business search engine optimized you can give a boost to the business and improve your ROI. Now shopping has been made easier by adding shopping card and payments have been made easy. If a customer finds convenience on your business website, it’s more likely they’ll return to your site for another purchase. A professional internet marketing company can take your business to new heights – check out our full range of internet marketing services in Ontario, and don’t hesitate if you have any questions: just contact us!

Understandable, but it’s a shame because social media is powerful and offers a huge opportunity to get more exposure for your business, engage with your fans and customers, and ultimately, increase sales and brand loyalty.

Google+, by being the social network from the number 1 search engine, Google, offers several benefits. In the video below, Chris Brogan, the author of  ”Google+ for Business: How Google’s Social Network Changes Everything“, sharess how Google+ can help small businesses and reveals the strategies he uses to get business leads. You’ll also learn how to adapt your content strategy on Google+ to select the people you want to work with.

Things you will learn in this video:

• Why Google+ matters
• How to get your content indexed quickly
• Discover Chris Brogan’s Google+ strategy
• How Human Business Works uses Google+ to get business leads
• Why you should share personal stories on Google+
• How to show potential clients who you are
• What content strategy to use on Google+
• How businesses can use Google+ Circles for both outbound marketing and lead generation
• When to choose Google+ privacy settings
• How Chris uses Twitter differently than Google+

Watch the interview: http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/how-small-businesses-can-thrive-with-google/

1) On-page optimization has a higher impact for long keywords

The relative value of on-page web page optimization is very significant if you target very long keywords with little competition:

For example: say you want to be listed for the search term “buy blue nike ‘the overplay’ basketball shoe in Atlanta“. In this case, it’s probably enough to optimize one of your web pages for that search term because the competition for that search term is low. You don’t need many inbound links to get high rankings for that keyphrase. When targeting more competitive keywords, you’ll  need more backlinks to rank high on the search results pages (SERP’s) of Google, Bing, Yahoo etc.

2) Even if you target competitive keywords, it is important to optimize your web page content

The chart above might create the impression that on-site optimization is not important to get high rankings for very competitive keywords. That is not the case. Optimizing the content of a web page is the essential basis for high search engine rankings. By optimizing a web page for a keyphrase, you tell search engines that the web page is relevant to that keyphrase. If more than one web page has been optimized for that keyphrase  then the web page with the best inbound links will get the highest position in the search results.

3) First optimize your web page content, then focus on getting more backlinks

If you want to get high rankings for a keyword, the first step is to optimize one of your web pages for that keyword. Then work on the links that point to the optimized web page to outrank other websites that have been optimized for the same keyword:

4) The more pages you optimize, the better

When you optimize your website, optimize different pages of your website for different keyphrases. Start with longer keyword phrases that don’t have a lot of competition and then proceed with more competitive keywords. For example, start with the keywords “buy sneakers in atlanta“, “buy cowboy boots in atlanta“,  “shoe shop atlanta“, etc. When you have managed to get high rankings for many of these keyphrases, Google will know that your website is relevant to the topic “shoes”. As soon as Google knows that your website is relevant to the topic, it will be much easier to get high rankings for more competitive keywords such as “buy shoes” or even “shoes“. The more pages of your website you optimize for different, but related keywords, the better.

5) It’s not necessary to have more links than your competitors

It’s not always necessary to have more links than your competitors. You need better links. Try to get links to your website that use the targeted keyphrase as the link text (also called anchor text) and that point to the web page on your website that has been optimized for that keyphrase. Don’t focus on quantity, focus on quality. Getting hundreds of links from a link farm won’t help your website as much as a few dozen links from relevant web pages with authority. If your website has both optimized web pages and good inbound links then it will be easy to outrank web pages that only have one factor.

We hope these tips help to get you started and assess which strategy works best for your business!

Keyword Matching Options in Google AdWords

First, there were 4 keyword matching options to choose from that controlled how your ads are being shown – to a very wide audience, loosely related to the keywords you chose, or very specific and focusing on only a very small niche.

These options were:

1. Broad Match
2. Phrase Match
3. Exact Match
4. Negative Match

For a detailed explanation on what these exactly mean and do, read about keyword matching options

Now, there is also a 5th matching option, that is relatively new and is actually one of our favourites because it’s kind of the missing piece of the keyword matching options. It’s called Broad Match Modifier. This new AdWords targeting feature lets you create keywords that have greater reach than phrase match and more control than broad match.

How To Start Using It

To implement the modifier, just put a plus symbol (+) directly in front of one or more words in a broad match keyword. Each word preceded by a + has to appear in your potential customer’s search exactly or as a close variant. Close variants include misspellings, singular/plural forms, abbreviations and acronyms, and stemmings (like “floor” and “flooring”).

However, synonyms (like “quick” and “fast”) and related searches (like “flowers” and “tulips”) are not considered close variants. Be sure there are no spaces between the + and modified words, but do leave spaces between words. Examples: Correct usage: +formal +shoes. Incorrect usage: +formal+shoes. Incorrect usage: + formal + shoes.

Why You Would Use It

If you mainly use exact and phrase match keywords today, adding modified broad match keywords to your campaign can help you get more clicks and conversions at an ROI comparable to that of your phrase match keywords.

Compared to using only phrase and exact match keywords, using modified broad match can greatly reduce the number of keywords needed to generate desirable volume because each keyword can match countless word order and spelling variations. If you mainly use broad match keywords in your account today, you may consider using the modifier with keywords you’ve inactivated due to poor ROI or unwanted matches too difficult to manage with negative keywords.

It’s also important to know that switching high volume existing broad match keywords to modified broad match will likely lead to a significant decline in click and conversion volumes and will not directly improve Quality Score.

Some Visual Help

To get a better understanding of how the different matching options work, please see below image:

Conclusion

Every keyword matching option has its pros and cons. Which one to use really depends on the kind of industry you’re in, your budget, the competitiveness and amount of the bids, and your goals.

From our own experience, we can say that we like the newer Broad Match Modifier a lot – we’ve seen CTR and traffic gone up, while avoiding wasting dollars on irrelevant stuff that could be triggered by using the regular broad match options. We encourage you to give it a try for your next ppc campaign!

If you have any questions or want to know how we can help improve your ppc campaigns, check out our pay-per-click services or  contact us!

At this moment, Google’s search results are undergoing serious transformations. The new format, called “Search Plus Your World” is currently rolling  out. Basically, it means Google will find both content that’s been shared with you privately along with matches from the public web, all mixed into a  single set of listings. You will only see this personalized view if you’re signed-in to Google.com and searching in English.

The new system will perhaps make life much easier for some people, allowing them to find both privately shared content from friends and family plus  material from across the web through a single search, rather than having to search 2 times using two different systems.

However, Search Plus Your World may cause some privacy concerns, as private content may appear as if it is exposed publicly (which it is not, but it  seems like that). It might also cause concern by making private content more visible to friends and family than those sharing may have initially  intended.  It’s likely that the new format and features will cause Google to come under renewed fire for leveraging its search engine to favour its own content  and crowd out competitors. Let’s have a more detailed look at this.

Before: Separate Personalized & Social Search Results  

Google has had personalized results since June 2005. These are results from across the web that are given a ranking boost because they are deemed  especially of interest to someone, based on their personal behaviour and interests. Without the boost, these results might not have made it into the  top listings for a particular search.  Personalized results were expanded and presented in a new way in February 2007. Then, in December 2009, you no longer had to opt-in to receive  personalized results. They were enabled by default for everyone, to some degree, even if you weren’t signed-in to Google.  Separately, Google has had social search results since October 2009. These are also personalized listings but ones based on the people you know,  rather than your personal behaviour. They’ve also been given a ranking boost. Initially segregated from “regular” listings, Google’s social search results were blended into regular results in Feburary 2011 and expanded to  include not just content created by those you know but also content shared by them through a variety of social networks.

Now: Personal, Private, Public & Social United  

With Search Plus Your World, by default, there’s a new “Personal Results” view that appears. This view personalizes the listings you get based on  both your own behaviour and social connections, similar to what previously happened. In addition, content that’s been shared with you through the  Google+ social network now also appears.   Google created a toggle for this new format that allows you to switch between personalized and unpersonalized results:

Private Content In Your Search Results Pages

To summarize, personalized results include:

• Listings from the web
• Listings from the web, boosted because of your personal behaviour
• Listings from the web, boosted because of your social connections
• Public Google+ posts, photos or Google Picasa photos (all of which are also listings from the web)
• Private or “Limited” Google+ posts, photos or Google Picasa photos shared with you

The last line states actually the most radical change, that private content will now be visible in what seems to be a search across the entire web.

No Content From Facebook Or Other Social Networks

For many people it will probably be very useful to do just 1 search to locate both private and public information at once. However, one of the  biggest depositories of private information these days — if not the biggest — is Facebook.  Search Plus Your World doesn’t cover content on Facebook. Or Twitter. Or Flickr. Or any social network or place where content might be shared to a  more limited audience. Currently, “Search Plus Your World” would be better described as “Search Plus Google+” .

Why are these others missing?  “Facebook and Twitter and other services, basically, their terms of service don’t allow us to crawl them deeply and store things. Google+ is the only  [network] that provides such a persistent service,” Singhal said. “Of course, going forward, if others were willing to change, we’d look at designing  things to see how it would work.”

Perhaps Search Plus Your World will prove the carrot or stick that Google’s been after for years to get Facebook to share its data with Google. If  the new feature takes off, searchers may wonder why they can’t find privately shared information from their Facebook friends easily on Google.

Then again, Facebook could decide to push back by improving its own search features. Currently, Facebook has partnered with Bing, allowing Bing to  personalize its search results for searchers based on what their Facebook friends like.   However, only publicly shared content gets personalized like this. Potentially, Facebook and Bing could work more closely together to come up with  their own version of Search Plus Your World. That could happen on Bing, or it could happen within Facebook itself.

To date, Facebook’s not spent much time trying to refine its own search results. The main reason seems to be that the company has repeatedly said  that most of the Facebook-based searches it sees are to find people, not to find information about broad topics as happens on Google.

Only You & Those You Share With Will See Private Content  

The new format might feel strange to people in the beginning, as you’ll see “private” content appearing in what seems like Google’s “public” search results.  Of course, personalized results aren’t Google’s public results. They are results personalized just for the person viewing them. If private content  has been shared with those people, that’s visible. If it hasn’t been, then it’s not.

Google’s also not making it possible to search for anything that you couldn’t already search for before. As I explained, private content shared on  Google+ could be found with a Google+ search. Google’s really just making Google+ Search one of its Universal Search sources, in some ways.   In other words, you can search on Google and find matches from Google News, Google Images, Google Video and other Google search services without  having to go to them individually. Google+ Search is now another one of those integrated services.

Will It Lead To Concerns?  

As said, the ability to search for private content on Google+ isn’t new. However, we wonder if having it integrated into Google’s search results itself might cause some surprises and issues for both Google and its users.

Consider sites selling counterfeit goods. When Google links to these, it gets blamed for promoting counterfeiting, almost as if it created the sites.  What’s really happening is that Google comes under fire for giving sites visibility.  Now Google’s going to give greater visibility to private information.

Things that people may have forgotten sharing with others will begin to show up  through ordinary Google searches. Some might not like this, if material they’ve happily forgotten suddenly seems to reappear. Google  might take the blame, even though the sharing was done by others.

It might be similar to some of the concerns that came up recently with Facebook Timeline. It’s not that the material Timeline lists wasn’t out there  before. But by organizing it, forgotten things are brought back up.

Another issue is that it’s very easy with Google+ (as it is with Facebook and Twitter) for someone with access to private content to reshare it  publicly. Someone searching on Google, then coming across an unexpected photo or post from a friend, might reshare it to the world.   All this could happen without the search integration. Maybe none of it will be much of an issue at all. But these are concerns that come to mind.

One solution might be an option to exclude your shared content from being searchable. This is something that can be done with public content on the  web. You can tell Google or other search engines not to include published material in their search listings. Perhaps Google needs to offer the same  for private content, as well (it doesn’t currently).

Secure Search Protects Privacy; Referrers For Advertisers Does Not  

Google has been focused on a bigger concern. Mixing private content in with its search results means that anyone searching without a secure connection  potentially exposes that private content to eavesdropping.  And now the full story about why Google rolled out secure search for signed-in users back in October can finally be told. It was necessary  preparation to allow for Search Plus Your World to happen today.

The encryption that secure search provides means that any private material mixed in with your regular results is protected, seen only by your browser  and Google, not by anyone somehow monitoring an internet connection that you’re using.

Many publishers were upset about the encryption move last year because, as part of that, Google also stopped providing referrer data, information  that shows what searches someone did on Google before visiting a web site.

Expect Google to point to today’s move as a further reason to justify the dropping of referrers. However, the move might  make things even worse, in terms of privacy, since referrer data is still being passed to advertisers.   Potentially, people are going to search for even more private things than they ever did before. Potentially, they’re going to click on ad links and  pass these private search terms to advertisers.

Opt-Out, Not Opt-In

Don’t like the idea of personalized search? Unfortunately, Google didn’t go the opt-in route. Instead, you have to deliberately opt-out.   You can opt-out permanently through the Search Settings area on Google. You can also opt-out on a per-search basis using the aforementioned toggle.  Click on the globe symbol, and you’ll see unpersonalized results.   This is nice. It’s the first time since December 2009 that people have been able to easily see “normal” results, if they want them.

Personalized Is The New “Normal”

Of course, it’s a mistake to assume that doing this really shows normal results. It will eliminate personalization factors such as your web browsing  history (if you provide that to Google through its toolbar in Internet Explorer), your searching history or your social connections.   But geographic targeting — which have have a big influence – will still happen. So will targeting by language. Google has begun calling these  contextual signals rather than personal ones. Both can be overridden, for those who want. But doing so will still produce results that are still  tailored, just to a different geographical location or language.

More importantly, with Google heading toward 100 million users on Google+, if a good number of those are active users, then they’re logged in to  Google. That means the “normal” results they see are personalized. Personalized results are normal; non-personalized are not.

Google Profiles Get Big Push

Another big change as part of today’s release is how people with Google+ accounts are going to be much more heavily highlighted in Google search.  For those logged in, they’ll begin seeing their friends appear right within the search box.  This is very similar to how Google Direct Connect works for Google+ Business Pages. The results individuals see are biased toward people in their own  social networks, similar to how Facebook works when you search for people there.  In other words, if you searched for a friend who had a common name, you should be shown your actual friend’s Google+ profile, rather than someone you  don’t know.  In addition, the search results themselves will devote much more room to displaying material from a Google+ person (and actually have been doing so  since November):

What About Promoting Facebook Profiles Or Even Web Sites?

Still, it’s a lot of room devoted to Google+ profiles. While Facebook’s terms have prevented Google from getting some data, there should not be any  particular reason why the type of direct connect suggestion being shown above — as well as the deep display of content from a Facebook profile page —  couldn’t also be done for Facebook, not to mention Twitter.   After all, if Google can do expanded sitelinks for social media profiles like at Quora or Twitter, then expanded profile listings showing some  relevant posts from those profiles doesn’t seem that difficult.

People & Pages Suggestions

There’s another change coming up: suggestions for people and pages on Google+ to follow.  These will appear on the right-hand side of search results, when Google decides they are relevant.   That’s nice promotion for Google+. But there are still many more people on Twitter and Facebook versus Google+.  Google should be able to easily figure out what profiles on other social networks might be relevant to searches. That’s Google’s job as a search  engine, if it’s going to make these type of recommendations. But now only Google+ gets this type of treatment, and it doesn’t feel quite right.

Conclusion

Overall, we like the integration that allows for searching through private and public material. As mentioned, many people will probably find it useful.  However, we believe there are some additional privacy controls that could be added, in particular, the ability for people to opt their content out of being found through search, if they want.  But really, more than anything, we’d like to see Google work to see how it can level the playing field and include the other social networks.  Yes, there are things that Facebook or Twitter might not allow, not without Google cutting deals or agreeing to terms it may not want to. But there  are also above-and-beyond things that Google probably could do to promote these other services in the way it’s doing for Google Plus. Exciting to see what the near future will bring!

Want to know more? Watch this video about Google’s Search Plus Your World: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Z9TTBxarbs&feature=player_embedded

Article based on: http://searchengineland.com/googles-results-get-more-personal-with-search-plus-your-world-107285

 1. Work Hard (No Short Cuts)

It doesn’t matter if you want to lose weight after the holidays or if you want tobuild high quality links: it’s the same for both: you have to invest time and effort. You cannot lose 30 pounds in a month and you also cannot get your website on Google’s first result page for a very competitive keyword in that time. If you want to get lasting results, you have to work continually on your links and the content  of your web pages.

2. Be Consistent

SEO isn’t a one-shot solution. It doesn’t help your rankings much if you get many links at once and then stop building links. Search engines also consider how many websites link to your site over time.

It’s the same if you want to get in shape: doing a 12 hour workout on a single day and then doing nothing won’t help you to lose weight. It will be bad for your health. It’s the same with link building: if you build many links at once and then no links at all, search engines might think that you try to cheat them with a linking system. If you want to get in shape, you have to be consistent. You might not see immediate results, but there is a constant change and some day, you’ll find that you’re much thinner.

Link building works exactly like that. Don’t try to fool the search engines by joining link systems or buying links. Get one link at a time, optimize your pages and the rankings of your website will improve steadily.

3. Be Aware Of Scammers

The SEO industry is full of scammers that promise easy and quick solutions. You should be very careful. If something sounds too good to be true then it probably is. There are no easy and quick solutions and there are no secret tricks that nobody else knows about. The same applies to weight loss and fitness. There are lots of diet pills and miracle machines that look attractive and promise easy and quick results. However, these methods just don’t work.

4. Don’t Trick The System

There are a lot of diets and diet products out there that promise to help you to lose weight quickly. Unfortunately, you only lose water weight with these diets and you’ll get your old weight back soon. Link building is  similar. Sometimes, some webmasters find a loophole in Google’s algorithm. These loopholes allow people to get on Google’s first result page without doing the hard work. This usually works for some weeks, but once Google or Bing finds out,  websites that exploited the loophole are penalized and probably removed from the index. It’s very risky to use these methods to get high rankings because search engines don’t like spammers as it causes a poor user experience.

5. The result is worth it…

People who lose weight usually feel more healthy and happier. Being number one on Google’s result page for the right keyword can mean many more sales for your business. You have the choice: Don’t make the mistake to fall for rip-off products that promise easy and quick results without much work. These products don’t deliver long term results and even worse -they often put your website at risk of getting penalized and removed from the indexes!