Content is king. No matter how many people try to deny this very fact, your best bet as a SEO is to develop fresh, valuable content for your websites on a daily basis (sometimes twice a day). Google’s freshness algorithm is slowly but surely affecting queries that we all search for. Of course, the quality of the content you put out is important as well. Google+ is a great place to mine for content ideas. You can easily see which stories are going viral and who has helped them get there. Here are 5 ways you can use Google+ to take your content strategy to the next level:

• Content with superstars: there is a good reason some folks have very large followings on sites such as Google+. By watching what they do best and learn from them, you can take your business to the next level. You should also keep an eye on the content they share to see what may be working for them.
• Watch out for top stories: don’t have any idea what to write about? Taking a look at hot stories on Google+ could help. You can also add various searches to your sidebar and keep track of them all at all times.
• Check out G+ Ripples: By using G+ Ripples for top stories, you can see who the top influencers are and how stories have gone viral on Google+. It could help you plan your content distribution process better.
• Watch Google+ trends: Google+ does have a trends section you can check out to find out about the hottest stories. You can go through these trends on the search page.
• Keep an eye on user feedback: when you are tracking the top stories on Google+, you want to make sure you pay attention to the number of comments, +1s, and reshares they have received. That way you will get a better sense for what types of stories work on Google+.

Google+ is here to stay regardless of what some experts have claimed in the past. Taking advantage of it before others is a no brainer for smart content publishers.

Make sure you choose the right category for your page. Don’t forget to include information about your company and its products in your page description. The basics of SEO apply here. Using bold text and keywords in your profile is a must. You should also take time to promote your pages. Google provides buttons and badges to help page admins out.

As always you should track your traffic and have a real content strategy to get the most out of your Google+ page. Putting a page together right away, putting great content on it, and promoting it are good initial steps to take.

Of course, making occasional grammatical and spelling errors does not necessary make your work less valuable. I highly doubt it will ever be a direct ranking factor. After all, there are always going to be false positives. We all make grammar and spelling errors from time to time. Just because a site does not have these errors does not mean it has more value to offer to searchers. I prefer Google ranks pages based on +1 and other social signals rather than using shallow factors such as spelling.

What do you think? Should Google use grammar and spelling to rank sites?

From time to time, large companies such as Google bring services to the market that have the potential to be game changers. That is certainly the case with Google+. Google did strike out with Google Wave but Google+ is a much more useful service. The demand for it has been so high that not everyone has had a chance to register for an account. If you happen to be in, more power to you. Those of you who are still waiting for your invitation may want to ask your Twitter friends or Facebook fans to get you one (or you can buy one on eBay though I don’t recommend it).

The jury is still out on how Google+ will affect the search engine rankings. But you can be sure that Google has big plans for this project. The rules of the game still remain the same. You want to be a source worth connecting on Google+. Adding your photos and other kinds of content to your profile is a good start too. Many of us still remember how fast Facebook and Twitter have risen to their current position. Those who joined these communities early on did get a head-start over others. Google+ may or may not become the Facebook killer many experts are suggesting. But you should not wait to find that out.

Google gets a lot of flak from experts and search professionals for some of its practices. The company is in a delicate situation with its ranking algorithms. It can not specifically discuss things that affect rankings. There are already thousands of people who are gaming Google’s ranking system to show up higher in the SERPs. Since we do not know all the factors that affect search rankings, it is not that easy to blame one factor for ranking drops. Here is an example of some folks jumping the gun and blaming Google without knowing all the facts:

Why after installing the Facebook ‘Like’ Pluggin using Open Graph, my Google ranking dropped?

For starters, implementation matters big time when it comes to adding social media buttons to sites. If done the wrong way, they can slow down your pages. Also, every webmaster needs to make sure they have optimized their websites for speed. That way they do not go under the speed threshold (as set by Google). We have over 200 websites in our blog network. Almost everyday, we see some dropping in the rankings while others rising.

From my own research, Facebook Like buttons could indeed help improve search engine rankings for sites. Of course, webmasters need top notch content that get a lot of likes from the Facebook community. They need to be careful about the type of plugins they install on their sites though. Some of these “harmless” plugins can inject spammy links to their sites. Using official plugins is always the best way to go. If a plugin is proved to be problematic, just remove it. There is no reason to take any unnecessary risks.

Google is to blame for a lot of things. Not for everything though.

Content is king. It’s true that link building and on-page optimization tactics can help you get more out of your content. But you need to be involved in multiple content channels to maximize your organic traffic. Here are 8 steps you can take right away to enhance your chances of getting more traffic from Google:

• Add your Blog to Google News: if you have a multi-author blog and provide information to your visitors on a daily basis, there is no reason not to add your blog to Google News.
• Optimize Your Images: a lot of “gurus” have been using this tactic to generate some extra traffic on the side. Don’t just use free images you can find online. Take some of your own, optimize them properly, and give them descriptive names.
• Upload Your Videos: if you have not taken time to upload your videos to video sharing sites, now’s the time. Use the right keywords and tag your videos properly to maximize your opportunity.
• Add Your business: don’t forget to add your business to Google and get yourself on Google Maps. If you have a local business, there is no reason not to. 
• Start a Blog: if you have an online portal which you don’t update too frequently, you should put some effort into starting a blog next to it. That way you can show up in Google’s Blog search results too.
• Upload Your Book: if you happen to have written an e-book, there is no reason you should not upload it to Google (unless the numbers don’t work for you). Gives you yet another opportunity to get traffic from Google.
• Forums Still Matter: forums and discussion boards still matter. They may be based on an old technology, but they can provide you with backlinks and some coverage from Google.
• Take Advantage of Google Products: if you sell products online, you can bring more visitors to your website by getting listed on Google Products.

This is just a high level overview of the opportunities Google’s new interface provides to publishers. The X’s and O’s of search engine optimization still applies to each step. So don’t go overboard and forget about spamming the SERPs.

Speeding up websites is important — not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users and we’ve seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there. But faster sites don’t just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs. Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed — that’s why we’ve decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings.

I have mixed feeling about this. It’s true that Google will not give this factor a whole lot of importance in comparison to factors that determine the relevancy of your website to the searched keywords. Having a speedy website makes life easier on visitors and could improve ROI as well. But a speedy splog is not exactly what I call a user friendly website.

If you are a webmaster, you shouldn’t panic at this point. There are tools you can take advantage of to find out ways to optimize the speed of your website. In fact, Google itself discussed a few tools when announcing this move:

• Page Speed, an open source Firefox/Firebug add-on that evaluates the performance of web pages and gives suggestions for improvement.
• YSlow, a free tool from Yahoo! that suggests ways to improve website speed.
• WebPagetest shows a waterfall view of your pages’ load performance plus an optimization checklist.
• In Webmaster Tools, Labs > Site Performance shows the speed of your website as experienced by users around the world as in the chart below. We’ve also blogged about site performance.

Google has implemented these changes a few weeks back. So if your site hasn’t disappeared from the face of the earth, there is a good chance you haven’t been affected by this move. But it’s still not clear how Google will apply speed towards a website’s rankings. How slow is too slow? Of course, Google never discusses its algorithm with us users, so this is yet another uncertainty added to the mix.

You certainly want to do your best to improve your website’s performance. But you don’t want to do it for Google. Google is not your audience. You should care more about your users. So don’t go out of your way, cut corners, and take away from things your visitors have come to love just to make Google happy (or think you are doing it).

Google promises that content relevancy will still be more important even with all these new changes coming into play. Let’s hope so. It’d be a shame if Google pushes those splogs and thin sites (that still do rank high for terms even though Google claimed they wouldn’t) even higher in the rankings for their Site Speed.

We have all heard of how real time search is the future. It’s actually not that far out if you think about it. Google’s Real Time search is a good indication to where the industry is heading. By integrating services such as Twitter, you can now do your search on Google more effectively, and in real time. I have talked about in the past how portal developers need to focus on videos, images, forums, blogs, and other avenues to maximize their presence on sites such as Google. But with real time search, you’ll have yet another revenue to get the word out about your product and get traffic back from Google in return.

As long as you are on the latest tab, you are going to see real time results on Google. It may seem a bit strange at first, but if you have been on Twitter for a while, it should come naturally to you. You can obviously click on the tags and search based on those.

Google’s real time search may be exciting, but Google Goggles is what has set the industry abuzz. Google Goggles truly reminds of some of those SciFi movies of the past. It has a huge potential and indicates Google’s major effort to go beyond keywords and try to make sense of images and other types of content.

The future is still about content. I am sure that Google will find a way to bring all these services together. But as a publisher, your goal should be to focus on as many channels as possible to get the word out about your goods and services. People will have more ways to find your content, so the standard for better content will be much higher (when you add the social aspect of search). Are we really that surprised that after all these years content is still king?

That’s not really a question if you listen to Matt Cutts and other top Google engineers. A Google redesign is in the works, and we are not just talking about the look and feel of the site. After all, who really cares about how Google.com looks as long as you get the most relevant results that help you move forward with your project. The future of search is social, mobile, and much more. Your only source of information will no longer be Google news. There are millions of people who are blogging, discussing issues in forums, creating videos, taking photos, and writing books on all kinds of topics. The next generation search engines bring all of that together.

If you have wanted to try this new Google design but have no clue how to, Gizmodo has you covered. The site has released a mini trick that forces your Google to use the new design to do your search. The trick does work, and the results are very interesting.

As you can see, the new design allows you to easily find what you are looking for by searching through videos, blogs, news, maps, forums, and much more. So there is a better organization of information involved here. The new design intends to save you time as well. As you can see in the below figure, there are plenty of ways now to customize your search results and get as much or as little as you want to see.

The so called trick doesn’t seem to work on international Google websites, but it should work fine on Google.com. Is this the future of Google? I am sure there will be changes and not all the services seem to be added on the interface (unless they are being discontinued). But it’s certainly worth looking at to get an idea what matters to Google in the near future.

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It’s nice to see that Google has identified site speed as one of the factors that could affect searchers’ experience. Nothing can be more frustrating when you search for something only to find websites that just don’t load up. But the move to count site speed towards search engine rankings could open a can of worms for Google and publishers. It’s a known fact that spammers are very good at hacking, breaking, and doing everything but providing value. Does that mean these guys will get away with making their sites fast and climb the rankings once again?

Site speed should absolutely count for something. But how would you define a fast or slow site? Is waiting 5 seconds for a site to load up slow? Also, a lot of small businesses may not have the servers and resources to make their sites super fast. Will those folks get penalized for trying to provide value on a budget?

To be fair, we still don’t know how Google plans to implement these changes. Sites that are super slow and down most of the time should probably get moved down the search engine results. I would be very surprised if site speed played a significant role for websites that are not too slow or too fast. You don’t want your site to load up fast, but I doubt Google will sacrifice relevance for speed. We will have to wait and see.