Search Advisory   Brought to you by Prominent Placement, Inc., provider of search engine optimization services and pay-per-click advertising

I know the last thing you need is yet another social media account to keep up with – believe me, I get it!  But ignore Google+ at your own peril.  It is becoming more and more important in search engine optimization (SEO) for Google:

• Christine’s blog post earlier this month outlined how big brand Google+ pages have started taking up a lot of room in the organic results.
• Catherine’s blog post two weeks ago talked about how Google’s new “Search Plus Your World” is serving up even more personalized results than before, including yet more Google+ posts, photos and pages.
• Back in June, our newsletter described the impact of the +1 button on the search engine results visually.
• Since then, Google has stated that they often recrawl sites after a +1 button has been clicked.

We’ve covered this — why are we talking about this topic yet again?  Because we recently heard inside scoop that Google is increasing the importance of the +1 button in its organic ranking algorithm, and it eventually may count for even more than inbound links!

Read more…

In what was reportedly the biggest search marketing story last year, the launch of Google+ had much written about it: Will it overtake Facebook?  Will Google use the data in their algorithm? What’s the deal with the Google+ button? The jury may still be out on its true impact, but one thing is for sure, Google is working hard to make sure Google+ doesn’t end up being just another 2011 trivia question. Read more…

Google+ (“Google plus”), a new social network, launched about two weeks ago.  Although there was much cynicism surrounding the launch (given Google’s late entry into social media and their failed efforts with Google Wave and Google Buzz), early reviews are quite positive and millions have joined Google+ already, despite the fact that it’s still “invitation only.”  We wrote last time about Google’s “+1” button and how it affects search engine marketing – the odd naming of “+1” makes more sense now that we know it’s part of Google+.

So what does Google+ mean for search marketers and how can we leverage it to drive more website traffic, leads and revenue?

On the Search Engine Optimization side…

Social media activity around a piece of content is always positive – it generates posts, links, shares, tweets, likes, +1s, etc.  So having this kind of activity happening directly on a Google property will presumably help popular content rank high organically on Google.  This is the opposite of Facebook, whose content is mostly in a “walled garden” – behind a password and unavailable to search engines. Read more…