Many of you who are into organic SEO may be unimpressed by Google’s latest unveiling, entitled “Search Plus Your World”. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, SPYW affects anyone who is both

• Logged into their Google account when they search, and
• Has a Google+ account and at least one person in their Circles.

If you meet both of those qualifications, and you go up to the upper right of your search screen and click the “Show Personal Results” button, you’ll find that any relevant content created on Google+ by people in your Circles gets filtered into the results. I follow Ed Dale, for example, and when I search for “Search Plus Your World” on Google and click “Show Personal Results”, I get a few of Ed’s blog entries in and amongst my other traditional results.

So what does all this mean?

In short, it means that there’s going to be a vicious cycle in play soon. Some SEO people are going to start leveraging hardcore social marketing techniques on Google+ in order to get their content to appear on people’s “Personal Results” (hi, Ed!). That, in turn, is going to accelerate Google+’s ascent to dominance of the social marketplace — and the more dominant Google+ becomes, the more SEO pukes are going to try to abuse it.

It will almost certainly all end in Google starting to put limits on Google+ accounts much like Twitter did. But the ride we’re in for to get to that point is going to be a quick one, and some sharp, hardworking people are going to win big from this change.

Now, will all of that matter to the rest of us who aren’t going to put in the hard work to take advantage of SPYW? In the long run, probably not. It does mean that normal SEO will be mildly less effective, as there will be more ‘competition’ in the form of Google+ results that we have to unseat in order to keep our first page placements — but competition is something we’re all used to by now, so I don’t really see this being that much of a gamechanger until something unexpected comes along and upends the whole thing in an unpredictable manner — which will happen.

Sometimes, SEO isn’t enough — you can have mountains of traffic, and if your website simply isn’t able to turn that traffic into buyers, you need to stop focusing on SEO and worry for a while about your conversion rate. There are several tricks websmasters use to improve conversions — from targeted Email marketing gimmicks to flash banners — but two of them work on a different, more fundamental level than all the rest. The best part is that the two can be used together.

Priming Words
Like it or not, science has proven that the human mind works in large part on a subconscious level. Researchers have been able to prove that introducing a set of words that all relate to a given topic, even out of context, cause the people hearing or reading those words to start subconsciously thinking about that topic. Here’s an example:

Jerry Florida was worried. It was a gray day out, and he was wondering how lonely his morning jog would be. He usually jogged alongside a few of his neighbors, but the threat of rain might make them “forgetful” of their morning ritual. Looking around his apartment, his eyes hit upon his old treadmill, now a place to hang his freshly-worn clothes before they were washed. Bingo! He’d get his morning jog despite the possible moisture, and catch Regis at the same time.

Believe it or not, right now on a subconscious level, you’re probably thinking about what it will be like to get old. Huh? Check out the priming words hidden in that little story:
old, Regis, worried, Florida, lonely, gray, bingo, forgetful
Scientists have shown us that after reading a story like that, people will walk more slowly, think less clearly, and even be slightly more fatalistic than they were before they read it.

Consider that the next time you start writing your website copy. How can you use the power of subconscious priming to get your audience thinking about the problem that YOUR product or service solves?

Web Presenters
A Web Presenter is simply a pop-up video of a person. They are generated dynamically on the surfer’s screen so that they follow the reader as they scroll. They offer your website the opportunity to have a “face” and a “voice” that are human, and thus hard to ignore. 90% of communication is non-verbal, and a Web Presenter brings most of that 90% back to the table. In short, a website with a Web Presenter will appeal on a fundamental level that a text-and-pictures website simply can’t.

Consider the opportunity that a Web Presenter gives you — not only can you add that extra layer of communication to your website, but you can have the Web Presenter deliver the priming words in a voice that the reader can’t easily skip over. That’s some top-tier converting power!

It’s actually fairly likely that you’ve never heard of a web presenter, but if you have, it’s actually fairly likely that you’ve only heard glowing things said about them by people who want to sell them to you. Web presenters are still fairly new in the world of online marketing; they don’t have the credibility that tools like custom blog creation or targeted Email marketing have. Like Email marketing, Web Presenters aren’t a part of your SEO strategy — they’re the second stage, a tool used to increase conversions.

The basic law of making money online is mathematical: the number of visitors you get times your conversion rate times the sale price of the product minus your costs equals your profits. Increase the visitors (with SEO), and you make more money — but increase the conversion rate (with a Web Presenter), and you make more money as well. At some point, improving your conversion rate becomes more profitable than pushing more traffic onto a low-conversion page, and that’s when tools like Web Presenters come in handy.

A Web Presenter, for the record, is a full-body or head-and-shoulders image of a person who pops up on your screen and talks to you about the content of the page. The benefits of a Web Presenter are intuitively obvious: they talk to you, they have posture and gesticulations and all of those secondary elements of communication that text lacks, and they’re hard to stop watching once they get started, so they increase stickiness as well.

But there are pitfalls to be found when hiring a Web Presenter. You should be careful to choose a Web Presenter whose image matches that of your company. Hiring a conservative-looking older gentleman for an agile young SEO company might not be the right fit, for example. You should also make sure that your Web Presenter is comfortable with your content. Having a Web Presenter that pronounces ‘SEO’ as a one-syllable word that rhymes with “Rio” will immediately throw suspicion on that company’s site, for example. Make sure that the image and the content come across clearly, however, and you should find that a Web Presenter has very positive effects on your bottom line.

Most of the world has heard it by now, but just in case you haven’t, Google has changed the rules once again. The infamous Google algorithm that determines page rank and position for searches has been changed, dramatically. This time the search giant knocked out link farms completely, invalidating any link that comes from a site with either no content or duplicate content, including, it appears, RSS summaries on news sites. Those links can still give you traffic, but they won’t count towards your positioning when potential customers are searching for your products or services.

On the flip side, Google has obviously decided that on-site content development is what they want to see for sites to be awarded those top spots on Page One. Blog posting, once considered a casual pastime, has now become an essential element of any internet marketing campaign. If you plan on getting any kind of significant organic traffic from search you will need to start writing or hire someone to do it for you. In the three months since the Google Panda announcement websites have been literally disappearing from the top twenty pages of Google’s search results.

For the time being, other search giants like Yahoo and Bing are playing by the old rules and you can see the disparity in the rankings. Seeing a top ten in two columns and a Page 30 in another might seem hopeful to some, but not when the Page 30 is the search engine that controls a 90% global market share. When it comes to search engine marketing, what Google does is what the industry standard is. The smaller players may win back some ground over this, but not enough to be significant.

Organic SEO companies have always used link building as one of their staple elements in any campaign, but they don’t all do it the same way. Here at Webwise Media, we’ve always focused on content rich links, site development, and article writing and distribution to high-PR directories. The exact details of the Google algorithm remain secret, but we know from tracking our analytics that none of our sites have lost any ground. That tells us and our clients that we’re doing something right. What would we recommend for you? Let’s start with some blog posting.

Most internet marketing strategies have two sets of myths attached to them. The first is the most common – over-inflation of statistics. That’s where hundreds become thousands and thousands becomes tens of thousands. The second is disparity – putting things in a negative light and saying they don’t work. Both have been applied to article writing and distribution. The truth lies somewhere in the middle. Claims of massive traffic flow from one article mass submitted are no truer than those that declare article marketing is a huge waste of time. If it was, why do we get such great results from it?

A few months back, Google made some changes in their algorithm that made publishing duplicate content either on your website or in multiple article directories an obsolete practice. If you want quality links now, you’ll have to write original articles and content pages and link them manually to internal pages on your website. This is the way we have always done it, so the change didn’t affect our clients. In fact, we’d been expecting the change for some time. It was necessary to improve the quality of information on the web. Far too much garbage content has been published in recent years.

There are those in our industry who claim to be organic SEO “experts” because they’ve been able to use auto-submitters to build links at a rapid pace for their clients. These charlatans are now running for cover as Google invalidates all of their work and client sites disappear from search pages. It’s evidence that short cuts simply do not work. Articles that were written by legitimate writers and submitted to reputable sites are still good for the back links they produce. Those other auto-generated, scrambled, spun, and kindergarten-level bodies of text aren’t worth anything and won’t be seen by searchers any time soon. Web surfers will now get quality when they search, as they should.

One article on a product or service will bring you on average about fifty page views. Writing about current events could get you several hundred. If you have an anchor text link in the body, expect about a 2% click-through rate. Those aren’t big numbers, so you need to write hundreds of articles to see a recognizable change in your traffic volume. That will come with time. The link juice comes immediately. Every article counts, as long as it’s original, quality, and submitted to a legitimate directory.