The video format is interesting but I wonder if it would have gotten more shares as an infographic instead of a video? Or perhaps an HTML5 interactive piece where you could roll over different components and have the data zoom out to the foreground or the sizes of the elements change?

It would be very interesting to do a test of some sort to determine which format was the most effective. But I can’t think of a way to format such a test. If you do it sequentially — first video then static then HTML5 — you risk the latter formats getting less buzz based on saturation of the information from the previous formats. But if you release them simultaneously on different social platforms — say YouTube for video, Pinterest for static and Facebook for HTML5 — you obviously risk the biases introduced by the size of the audiences there.

I suppose you could always do standard A/B testing of the format on your own site, but the most interesting thing is what happens to the information off your site. Where and how it’s shared. Which formats have stronger reach on which social networks. You can make suppositions but what if the data surprised us? What if the sheer volume of Facebook users wiped the floor with YouTube sharing? And would that change if the primary home of the video was a blog post on your site that embedded the YouTube video rather than sending traffic to Facebook or YouTube itself to see the video? So many interesting questions. Too bad I’m an SEO and not a data analyst.

Thanks to Melissa Fach over at SEJ for the post idea.

Bing must be delirious with joy. They have an exclusive relationship with Facebook to include data in Bing search results. Hello personalized search data boost!

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Two photo sharing giants coming together, this is huge. Obviously FB is more than photos, but easy photo sharing has been important to their success. Now adding the size of the Instagram network and the appeal of their filters (which I still don’t get, personally) to the massive FB social overlord is just huge.

I’d love to know how many non-FB Instagram users Facebook is acquiring. I’ve got to think there’s a lot of overlap, but out will be interesting to learn more.

Search engines like Google develop algorithms to determine the quality of a site’s content as well as its contextual relevance and link popularity. Site quality is a pretty nebulous concept for a piece of software to understand, but search engineers have linked social signals such as Facebook’s Likes, shares and comments, Google+’s shares, +1s and comments, and Twitter’s tweets and retweets to the quality of the page being shared. The more shares, the higher quality a page must be. There are other quality signals in play as well — hundreds of signals factor into each engine’s algorithm — but social signals are thought to be harder to manipulate than linking signals.

The most obvious way that social signals impact search results is in each individual searcher’s personalized search. For example, a Google search for “social search” returns different search results depending on whether I’m logged in to my Google account. On the left below are the search results I see when I’m logged out of Google search. On the right below are the results for the same search when I’m logged in to my Google account.

The point is that I may be the only person who will see this exact personalized search result. My circle of friends in Google+ shared 130 items relevant to the phrase “social search.” To have the same set of results, you would have to have those same 130 friends in your Google+ circles….

Read the article in full at Resource Interactive’s weThink blog »

As search and social become ever more entwined in Google’s and Bing’s algorithms and search results, search engine optimizers cannot afford to turn a blind eye to social media. Bing incorporates Facebook data into its search results. Google has taken another big step with the introduction of Search, Plus Your World. Last week Practical eCommerce explored the social media impact of Search, Plus Your World, in “Google Integrates Google+ in Search Results.” In this article, I’ll focus on the search-engine-optimization impact of this new feature.

Visibility in Search Results

The biggest impact SPYW has on SEO is the visual and personal nature of the results it returns. Compare these two search result sets for a very common search phrase: “shoes.”

Read more »

Optimizing title tags is a bit like eating your vegetables. No one wants to do it, but everyone knows it’s good for you. Search engine optimization professionals universally agree that title tags are the most influential on-page element. SEOmoz recently confirmed the importance of title tags in a report that strongly correlated title tag optimization to higher rankings.

The guidelines for optimizing title tags are simple, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. Begin the tag with the most valuable and relevant keyword phrase, use the exact keyword phrase, end with the brand, and keep the length to 70 characters or less.

Read more about the finer points of optimizing title tags »

How etailers manage their social media marketing channel has a growing impact on organic search results. Google and Bing have both incorporated social data into their algorithms to signal content freshness and quality. While the datasets each engine has access to differ, the fact remains that search marketing and social media cannot be managed in silos.

According to the presentation given by Andrea Fishman, vice president of global strategy at BGT Partners — a marketing and design firm — at Search Engine Strategies Chicago 2011, “57% of digital marketing impact is derived from SEO.” But search engine optimization also has a symbiotic relationship with social media, press relations, paid search, offline advertising, and other marketing channels.

Read more »

From Google’s +1 FAQ:

However, your site may make the same content available via different URLs. For example, your site may have several pages listing the same set of products. One page might display products sorted in alphabetical order, while other pages display the same products listed by price or by rating. For example:

http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish&sort=alpha
http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish&sort=price

If Google knows that these pages have the same content, we may index only one version for our search results. As a result, +1′s for the other versions may not appear in search results.

You can make sure Google displays +1 annotations for the most search results possible by adding the rel=”canonical” property to the non-preferred versions of each page. This property should point to the canonical version, like this:

This tells Google: “Of all these pages with identical content, this page is the most useful. Please prioritize it in search results.” Now, when a user +1’s a page with a non-canonical URL, Google will associate that +1 with the canonical, preferred version.

All you need to do is share a post with someone who isn’t a Google+ member yet. I just share the same post over and over from my profile stream. Here’s what I use.

You can paste in their emails individually or create a Circle of unregistered friends and invite that Circle all at once.  When you add unregistered friends an option appears at the bottom of the share window next to the Share button to confirm that you want to share with these unregistered users by email. YES, you do! Check the box and hit send.

Google+ will send them an email work the first words of the post you’re sharing as the subject line of the email. It looks like this.

All your friend needs to do is click that orange-red button to start the registration process. New users are rate limited by hour so if they can’t get in at first tell them to try again later.

This is a Google+ invitation loophole, so be warned that it may stop working temporarily at any time. Good luck!

Oh and if you don’t know anyone who can invite you, leave me a comment here with your email. My comments are moderated so no one will see your email but me. PieRat’s promise not to use them for any purpose except your Google+ invite lest I be keel hauled.

Why was it so hard to find anyone else on Google+? How long would the typical new user really put up with this sad experience on a new social network? Not very long. But I’m a geek. And I want Google+ to win with an unreasonably strong desire.

Then I discovered the “Nearby” screen in the mobile app’s Stream. When viewing your Stream in the Google+ Mobile android app, just swipe to the right to switch to the Nearby Stream. At least now I could see comments from people I didn’t know physically nearby having conversations I didn’t really care about. But they were people — I’m not alone anymore!

Better than skulking around after random people, today I discovered that Mashable and The Next Web are on Google+ and followable! Following them led me to discover their writers, such as my favorite Mashable author Ben Parr. Ben is single-handedly lighting up the stream with Google+ chatter, Hangouts and generally helping folks practice their Google+ing. Now my stream has content in it, and I can see the appeal of Google+ a little more clearly. I’m more eager than ever to invite my friends so that I can use Google+ how it was actually intended.

Today Google+ is a mini-Twitter to me. Content streaming in from a couple of blogs I already follow in my feed reader.  Not that interesting, but a novelty.

In the future, I can see Google+ as a maxi-Facebook. Google+’s sharing and communication features are superior to Facebook’s. Hangout is brilliant, and I don’t even like video chatting. The idea of “hanging out” with a group of friends near and far online over video somehow seems more desirable than video chat, even though I know it’s the same thing. Incorporating it into a social experience where I’m likely to be signed in most of the day anyway on my PC and phone, though, makes it somehow feel more interesting.

All I need now are my friends and family. And guess who has them: Facebook. No, you can’t add your friends directly from Facebook to Google+ since Facebook and Google don’t Like each other. But Mohamed Mansour developed a Chrome plug in that let’s you export your Facebook friends to CSV or Google Contacts, from which you can add them to your Google+ Circles. Way to go! I’m trying it out right now. With 400+ Facebook friends, it’s a slow process, but it’s working in the background so what do I care. Hopefully someone I really care about out of those 400+ friends will be on Google+ too.

LinkedIn also allows you to export your connections here http://www.linkedin.com/addressBookExport. I should do this anyway, but importing these 460-some connections into my Google Contacts now will likely yield a  few more Google+ers.

Aside from those import options, I wait for invitations to open up again. Care to follow me? Jill Kocher on Google+.