“You should be willing to accept that Google is going to have a powerful social network on which you should have a presence,” says Rand Fiskin, a former marketing consultant and current CEO of SEOMoz, an SEO software company. Not convinced? Here are some stellar reasons your business needs a Google+ Page.

1. Because it will boost your SEO. Google+ has just a fraction of Facebook’s audience—40 million users versus 800 million—and will likely do anything within its power to even that gap. To draw more attention to the social network, Google could fundamentally alter its algorithm to move Google+ pages to top of search results. Or it might not alter search results directly, instead creating a prominent widget displaying Google+ Pages in the search results’ upper right-hand corner, perhaps near the sponsored advertisements, says Eric Clemons, a Wharton School management professor who has studied Google for Congress.

“All the risk, all the pain is borne by the company who isn’t found,” Clemons says.

2. Because your message will have a longer shelf-life . There’s another angle to Google+’s relatively sparse audience. It means your company’s content won’t have to cut through as much clutter in a Google+ stream, which is the equivalent of Facebook’s news feed. Fishkin recently ran a little test to judge Google+’s potential. He distributed three posts through Google+, Facebook, and Twitter, and used different Bit.ly links in each, so he could see the analytics behind each. The results surprised him: The one sent through Google+ kept people on his site longer and had a higher click-through rate.

3. Because it will be the social network for businesses. Twitter is for sharing links. LinkedIn? Professional networking. Facebook? Mostly socializing–sharing pictures, posting comments to friends and family. These social media platforms already have dedicated uses. But Google+ has no brand distinction at all. (Good for you in this case. Bad for Google.)

Read More at INC.

“Given the incredibly fast pace at which information moves in today’s world, the most recent information can be from the last week, day or even minute, and depending on the search terms, the algorithm needs to be able to figure out of a result from a week ago about a TV show is recent, or if a result from a week ago about breaking news is too old,” explains Google Fellow Amit Singhal.

After making significant improvements to its ranking algorithm, Google expects that 35% of searches will be affected. Searching for recent events or trending topics will now result in higher-quality pages that might only be minutes old.

Additionally, regularly recurring events, such as elections, won’t need qualifying keywords. Instead, Google will assume that you’re searching for the latest scores or results. Finally, searches for topics that are frequently updated, such as the best tablet or car, will always provide the most up to date information.

Of course, there are still some cases in which older results will still be of value. The new algorithm is designed to better differentiate between these kinds of searches and the level of freshness desired.

Read More at Sprout Social Insights

Immediately below is a “before” image of the results for a query on the San Francisco restaurant “Gary Danko.” The Places content appears below the restaurant’s own sitelinks. There’s address information, some images and links to reviews. However much of the information is visually buried.

Now the “after” SERP, with the Places content moved to the right and organized more clearly. It’s a much more user-friendly display of Places content: hours, location, menu links and links to reviews. There’s also a quick link to directions at the top of the map.

Read More at SearchEngineLand

According to the “Science of Sharing” study, conducted by M Booth and Beyond, two communications agencies in the Next Fifteen global network, more than half of consumers (53 percent) say they interact with brands on Facebook, four in ten (42 percent) have written a product review online, and a third (33 percent) have written an online post about a product.

One in five consumers are “high sharers”, according to the survey, and are three times more likely to make a product recommendation online. They tend to be younger, brand loyal, own multiple internet devices and are conducting online research that requires minimal emotional or monetary investment.

“Low sharers” tend to be older, put a premium on quality, are less brand loyal, and are researching products online that cost more and involve more consideration.

Strength of Search

When it comes to influencing consumer decision making, search is the most powerful online gateway followed by digital word of mouth and recommendations made by friends and family. The most common products that people recommended online, according to the study, are from the beauty, electronics, fashion and music categories.

“Search is essential for brands, and sharable creative content creation is of the utmost importance in order to generate strong organic search results to increase search’s influence on the consumer,” said David Hargreaves, CEO, Beyond. “The brand that can identify their online advocates and get them to share more content with their friends will most likely see an increase in sales.”

The impact of online channels on consumer decision making rises and falls across product categories. Facebook has the highest influence on baby brands, YouTube on music, and review sites on electronics. The most influential channels in brand decision making, according to the study, are search results, the brand website, rating and review sites, news articles and online ads. The least influential are Twitter, Wikipedia, personal blog posts and Facebook comments.

Read More at eyefortravel

Since mobile search algorithms work differently than desktop, Covario released a white paper Thursday to help marketers sort through SEO practices. The white paper walks through strategies to optimize sites.

For starters, marketers should list companies in Google Places, ensuring that content systems used to serve Web pages detect user agents, so search engine crawlers can determine Web pages for mobile vs. desktop. Serving only redirects to a mobile sub-domain when a specific subset of pages are used for rendering on mobile search. While mobile represents a small percentage of advertising budgets today, Google’s decision to acquire Motorola Mobility will change that in the coming years.

About 77% of mobile device owners use their phone to conduct searches, according to Google. Mobile will account for between 3% and 5% of the overall market share in paid search in 2012 among Covario’s clients, who globally spend about $400 million in annual paid-search programs globally, according to the company’s Q3 2011 paid-search spend analysis. Advertisers supported by Covario in Q3 2011 spent 26% more on search budgets sequentially, and 24% year-on-year. The uptick driven by back-to-school purchases for electronics will fuel the estimated 20% year-on-year. Fears of slowdowns in the amount marketers will spend for paid-search advertising due to economic concerns seem muted as a result of “resiliency” and the ability to measure performance.

Advertisers forecast growth between 18% and 22% in 2012 overall. North America should see an uptick between 18% and 20%; EMEA, 15% and 20%; and Asia-Pacific, more than 40%. Covario suggests marketers must factor rising cost per click (CPC) inflation into advertising budget plans. In Q3, CPCs rose between 2% and 3%, sequentially, for the fifth straight quarter.

The study points to impact from Google Instant, and increasing spend driving more competition in the market, particularly for relatively “expensive non-brand” keywords.

Read Mora at MediaPost

• Queries: impressions, clicks, position, and CTR info for the top 1,000 daily queries
• Landing Pages: impressions, clicks, position, and CTR info for the top 1,000 daily landing pages
• Geographical Summary: impressions, clicks, and CTR by country

All of these Search Engine Optimization reports offer Google Analytics’ advanced filtering and visualization capabilities for deeper data analysis. With the secondary dimensions, you can view your site’s data in ways that aren’t available in Webmaster Tools.

To enable these Search Engine Optimization reports for a web property, you must be both a Webmaster Tools verified site owner and a Google Analytics administrator of that Property. Once enabled, administrators can choose which profiles can see these reports.

Read More at Google Webmaster Central Blog

As a result of this change, ads that have mobile optimized landing pages will perform better in AdWords and drive more traffic. The core guidelines for landing page quality apply across devices (on desktop and on mobile) but this consideration will only affect AdWords on mobile devices.

For background, Google’s landing page quality for mobile sites factors in site navigability, simple layout, content prioritization, mobile features, touch features, minimal flash, landing page load time. Landing page quality is one of several factors that determine an advertiser’s keywords’ Quality Scores.

As Google says, a poor mobile web experience can negatively shape a consumer’s opinion of a brand or company and make it hard for them to engage or make a purchase. In fact, 61% of users are unlikely to return to a website that they had trouble accessing from their phone.

Read More of this at TechCrunch

Sitelinks have been around for a while, but when we first launched them years ago, they were much more limited—a single row of just four links. It turns out that sitelinks are quite useful because they can help predict which sections of the site you want to visit. Even if you didn’t specify your task in the query, sitelinks help you quickly navigate to the most relevant part of the site, which is particularly handy for large and complex websites. Sitelinks can also give you a good overview of a website’s content, and let webmasters expose areas of the site that visitors may not know about.

As it became clear how valuable sitelinks were, we continued to improve their appearance and quality. We rearranged them into a column of links to make them easier to read. We doubled the number of links, creating direct access to more of the site. We started showing sitelinks for more results and we continuously made improvements to the algorithms that generate and rank the links. With each of these changes, people used sitelinks more and more.

That brings us to today’s launch. Sitelinks will now be full-size links with a URL and one line of snippet text—similar to regular results—making it even easier to find the section of the site you want. We’re also increasing the maximum number of sitelinks per query from eight to 12.

Read More at Google Search Blog

Whenever a user publicly shares a link on Google+, an annotation will show up under that link when it appears in a friend’s search results. For example, if I share a Mashable article about Google+ eliminating pseudonyms publicly on my Google+ page, users who have added me to their circles will see a note that I shared that link if they stumble upon it in Google Search.

Google+ now joins Flickr, Twitter, Quora and Google Buzz as other inputs for Google’s Social Search product. Social Search debuted in 2009 at the Web 2.0 Summit, partly as a response to Bing’s integration with Facebook and Twitter. Social Search highlights what links your friends are sharing on the web and returns results it believes are relevant based on your friends’ interests.

Read More on Mashable

Soon after Google launched its most ambitious foray into social media, a number of companies have already set up hacked pages on the service, most notably Ford Motor Co. In response, Google has set up an application page where firms can apply to become part of Google’s initial test phase for business pages. Most likely, Google’s forthcoming branded accounts will be somewhat similar to Facebook’s company pages, which have become the dominant and driving force behind that social network’s advertising revenue.

Meanwhile, Google said it can barely keep up with requests. Christian Oestlien, the lead product manager for social advertising at Google, talked to Ad Age about how the company plans to bring in big companies into its budding social network.

Read this interview at AdAge