Nashville, TN – It’s day two of Social Media Week and 21 cities around the world are celebrating with lectures, events, discussions, and parties. Owned and operated by Crowdcentric, Social Media Week offers “a series of interconnected activities and conversations around the world on emerging trends in social and mobile media across all major industries.” Starting in 2010, the event went biannual, occurring every February and September.

As you can imagine, the social media conversation grows rapidly. The SMW website explains why the event moved to twice a year: “Engaging a global audience to explore the practical applications and business benefits of the most important communications revolution once a year is simply not enough.” Topics such as “Men are from Foursquare, Women are from Facebook”, “Social Media Governance and the Law”, “Blogging BootCamp for Business” and “Social Media for Business and Finance” are just a sampling of what the 60,000 plus attendees will find at SMW events across the globe.

Here at Master Google, we’ve talked a lot about social media and its relationship with search engine optimization. Between Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, and Pinterest, it can be a full time job just keeping up with social media for your business. Master Google CEO and SEO expert Ali Husayni explains why a social media presence is so important.

“Social media outlets such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Vimeo- just to name a few- provide additional ways in which our clients can get their information out to potential customers. The great thing about posting items such as videos, articles and press releases to these sites is that doing so provides relevant links back to our clients’ sites,” Husayni says.

For clients to find you easily, your business needs a strong SEO campaign. Once your content is optimized and your design is friendly, you’re ready to venture into the ocean of social media. Be careful not to overwhelm your audience with posts. If you’re on Facebook, spread out your posts instead of firing off eight posts in an hour. If you’re on Twitter, use hash tags when necessary, but don’t overload them. A post reading “#Writer #JessicaBates has a new #scifi book coming out in #March” will only annoy people. Be genuine. Twitter also thrives on mentions, so get personal. Ask your followers direct questions and learn what they like.

You can follow live SMW tweets from attendees and enthusiasts with the hashtag #smw12 or download the SMW mobile app on your smartphone. To see if you’re close to any Social Media Week events, visit the schedule and search for your city. Major participating cities include Hong Kong, Hamburg, New York, Miami, London, San Francisco, Paris, Tokyo, Toronto, Washington, D.C., Singapore, and São Paulo. Most of the events for the week are free or significantly reduced in price.

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NASHVILLE, TN – Evaluating your SEO strategy may seem daunting, but one adjustment you could make (if you aren’t already), is to add a blog to your business’s website. Master Google’s CEO Ali Husayni emphasizes the importance of blogs to overall SEO efforts.

“Blogs seem to be an important part of any site because they get updated on a regular basis. I suggest site owners should write for their sites on a regular basis. The more fresh, quality and relevant content they post to their sites, the better chances of exposure and inclusion on Google search results they will have,” Husayni says.

Free blogging services make it easy to set up a blog and start posting content. There are tons of free blogging websites out there, but for today we’ll focus on Blogger (Blogspot), WordPress, and Tumblr – arguably the biggest platforms for blogging. (Some other popular ones include Weebly, TypePad, and Live Journal.)

As a blog enthusiast, I’ve tried out all three of these. I find Tumblr visually stimulating, but for SEO optimization, it seems Blogger (powered by Google) and WordPress are more content heavy and content friendly. All three platforms let users upload posts from their phones, schedule posts, and view statistics. While Blogger and Tumblr show Google Analytics and allow third party tools, WordPress only shows users WordPress Stats.

Blogger

Google’s free blog service, Blogger, allows users a simple and visually dynamic website that takes just a minute to set up. On your dashboard, you can view statistics of your visitors, save other blogs in your reading list, and add widgets to your sidebar.

Pros: In Blogger, you’re able to edit your template’s HTML and save those changes. If you code your own themes, you can upload them to Blogger. This makes it pretty easy to customize, assuming you know HTML, while still being free. No advertisements will show on your Blogspot blog unless you choose to monetize your blog. Within your Blogger dashboard, you can view your website optimized for a mobile phone.

Cons: One of the biggest complaints I’ve seen with Blogger is the inability to create a static landing page on your blog or website. There seem to be a few ways to overcome this through HTML, but they seem to be hit or miss.

WordPress

WordPress hosts many personal and business blogs as well, and users seem to agree that self-hosting your WordPress blog is the way to go, but you’ll have to pay to host it yourself. The free version seems to have good benefits as well. WordPress also has widgets, and the layout includes categories for you to add key words and tags, increasing your SEO reach.

Pros: WordPress, like blogger, lets users easily add tags to blog posts, allowing for optimized search results. Here you can also “team blog” by setting up titles for group users like Administrator, Editor, Contributor, and Author. These contributors can log in and upload posts, and then the Administrator can post them. WordPress also offers more storage space in their free version at 3 GB. (Blogger offers 1 GB in storage and 1 more GB in photo storage via Picasa. Tumblr offers 1 GB.)

Cons: WordPress doesn’t allow users to manipulate the blog templates in CSS without paying an upgrade fee. Your blog posts will also be accompanied with advertisements (unless you pay to upgrade).

Tumblr

While Tumblr is the baby of these three platforms, it has gained quite a bit of blogging street credibility.

Pros: With Tumblr, you can follow other blogs easily. From your dashboard, you’ll see a timeline of blogs that you follow, with the most recent at the top. This layout is optimized for comments and for sharing other people’s posts on your own blog (called “re-blogging” here). When you post something to Tumblr, you first choose the type of post, such as “quote”, “video”, “photo”, “text”, “link”, or “audio.” If you have an iPhone or Android, posting content through the Tumblr app is super simple. Tumblr also has many more free design templates than WordPress or Blogger.

Cons: Tumblr may not be the place to reach all potential clients. If you’re an artist or a photographer, i.e, someone with a visual portfolio, Tumblr might be the way to go. If you’re writing lots of content, Tumblr may not be the most text-friendly place to blog.

This is a very brief overview of these powerful services. It barely scratches the surface, and the best way to get to know a blogging service is to try it! There’s no harm in trying out a Blogger, Tumblr, and a WordPress blog, especially since they’re all free. See what format you like, what makes sense to you and your business. Combined with a fierce SEO strategy, like the ones implemented through Master Google’s SEO experts, blogging provides fresh content to move your business up the search results page.

Which blogging service do you use for your business? What advantages and disadvantages have you found with your preferred service?

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NASHVILLE, TN – A comprehensive SEO strategy, like the ones we provide here at Master Google, give our clients the benefits of a bigger audience with a top spot on Google. Now the question is: how can you extend your social media marketing efforts to keep that audience?

We all have our preferred methods of social media to interact with others, including potential and current clients. Blogging tools such as Tumblr, WordPress, and Blogger give us a place to create content. But where do we share it? I’ve been on the Twitter and Facebook bandwagon for a while, but lately Pinterest has really caught my eye. It all started with a big move. See, my husband and I are currently working on our new house – painting walls and replacing fixtures before we move in. Recently, my aunt called me to inform me of something she saw on Pinterest. It was a cute photo of a man and a woman who painted a heart on their wall before they started painting their first home. She told me to check her pin board and see the photo.

Photo Courtesy of VisualPhotos.com.

Pinterest, the virtual pin board to both bookmark and organize cool things you’ve found online, is gaining popularity quickly. It’s easy to use, it has a simple, dynamic layout, and it’s highly visual. People love it, and this report can back up all the hype.

Pinterest Drives Traffic: Pinterest wiggled its way up the January 2012 Referral Traffic Report. This chart shows that for December 2011, Pinterest was responsible for 2.5% of total referral traffic. In January, that figure rose to 3.6%. In July of 2011, Search Engine Journal reports that Pinterest had only 0.17% total referral traffic.

For a reference, Facebook held 26.4% of total referral traffic in January. StumbleUpon came in second with 5.07%, and Google and Twitter took the third and fourth spots with 3.62% and 3.61% respectively. Ranking under Pinterest in total link referrals for January are LinkedIn, YouTube, and Google+.

I know from first-hand experience that this virtual pin board is insanely popular. Sometimes when I want to pin something, Pinterest is over capacity. It’s like when you really want to tweet something clever, but you see that fat whale on the screen. You’ll have to wait!

Are you Pinning? The coolest part about Pinterest is that you can create multiple boards and title them as you choose. You can also select a category for each board with a handy drop-down menu. (Hello, keywords!) So, what should you pin? Pin what you do; pin what you like. Solely pinning your own content doesn’t allow your boards to grow organically. Pin things you like, things that inspire your business, and things you’ve created. That way users will choose to follow your boards, potentially re-pinning your pins and sharing the link-love.

Get creative. If your company sells tires, you could create blog content on tire care tips or how to change a flat. If you make letterpress wedding invitations, pin images from your past designs and other designers you like. Informative pins, such as “how to” or “DIY” do especially well on Pinterest.

Pinterest user Laura Scott-Davis has a board dedicated to SEO and so does Patina Marketing. As you can see, graphics hit hard on Pinterest – it’s all about the visuals.

Use Photos: If your blog content is compelling and informative, people will find it, especially if it’s optimized for search engines. By including a photo (also optimized for search engines) with each blog post or web page, users can see a visual pairing to the content. Make sure your images are relevant, of course.

Make it Easy: Adding a “pin it” button to your content makes it ridiculously easy for users on your blog to add your content to desired pin boards. Here’s how you can get a button. Once your button is added, users can share your content with a simple click. (Users can manually add a pin to their pin boards, but embedding a “pin it” button will allow seamless content sharing.)

Now your content shows up on their board, and every Pinterest user that follows that board can now see your content and they have the option of “re-pinning” your content to their boards. The more users that re-pin your content, the more people have the opportunity to view your content and click the link, driving hits to your website.

While Facebook is a place where friends can chat, share personal photos, and connect with each other, Pinterest has a stronger niche for link sharing, especially in the Do-It-Yourself community.

A strong SEO campaign will drive folks to your website. Pinterest allows those users to virally spread your content through their followers.

As Master Google CEO and SEO expert Ali Husayni says:

“You cannot just sit and wait for others to link their sites to yours. That simply won’t happen.”

Don’t be afraid to share your content. Giving your customers easy ways to link to your content, through Pinterest or Facebook or Google+ can only work in your favor. Now, go forth and pin! Or, to see how our SEO can help your website, Contact Us.

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NASHVILLE, TN – The New York Times reported on January 29, 2012, that Food Network executive Bruce Seidel is moving to an unnamed YouTube channel for foodies. The channel will partner with Urbanspoon, a restaurant review website.

This seems to be a trend with big talent. Well-known actors such as Will Ferrel, Jim Carrey, and Zooey Deschanel have contributed to Drunk History, a popular web series on Funny or Die. Friends star Lisa Kudrow starred in Web Therapy, a semi-improvised web series. The flexibility that web series allow is attractive to many people.

In my home, my husband and I only pay for Internet service. We watch several TV shows, but we watch them online at our own pace. This fits our lifestyle better than scheduled television programming. Plus it’s cheaper than paying for cable TV. This shift of the way we entertain ourselves and the way we obtain news puts all our eggs in the Internet basket. Since the younger generations spend more and more time on the web, SEO is of utmost importance. The more time we’re on the computer and away from the television, the better your chances are to gain customers online through a powerful SEO campaign.

Image Courtesy of Vator.tv.

With all the focus on YouTube and web videos, now’s the time to examine your business’s video strategy. Not all businesses need to post videos for their customers, but for some businesses, it makes perfect sense. Using YouTube effectively can increase the visibility of your business. If you own a bar, uploading quality videos of your trivia nights can gain attention. If your customers know you have a YouTube page and that their faces may appear there, it could give them an incentive to follow your YouTube channel or frequent your website to see the updated video.

Take your video content as seriously as you do your web content. Don’t make a video just because other people are doing it. Brainstorm what your business could offer its customers through a video that could be better visualized than read on a screen. Do you offer cooking classes? Maybe a short video on how to properly roast a chicken could benefit your potential customers. It’s possible that showing the warmth and originality of your chefs would entice people to sign up for a class. Instructional videos are especially useful, but entertainment also gets you clicks.

Viral videos are all the rage. If you’ve got a clever idea for a cool video, partner with a filmmaker to see your idea come to life. As we mentioned before, title your videos accurately, imbed your videos to your website or blog, and consider including a transcript of the video to increase Google’s ability to crawl your website.

Interesting and professionally filmed videos will look much better than a shaky video shot on your point-and-shoot camera. Quality is better than quantity. Combined with a professional SEO strategy, a strong video campaign can set you apart from the competition. In the SEO game, you have to stay fluid, ready for anything. Master Google’s CEO and SEO expert Ali Husayni agrees.

“The industry is constantly evolving and SEO has grown to encompass much more than on-site optimization. It’s really only five or ten percent of the total work,” Husayni says.

By producing videos, driving social networking, developing quality content, concentrating on search engine optimization, and giving customers a solid product, you should see more buzz around your business. But remember, a solid SEO strategy takes time, so stick with it, and keep on reading.

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NASHVILLE, TN – These days, it’s common for people to search for information on their mobile phones. It’s so convenient to search for restaurants, stores, and services on mobile devices while we’re out and about. For users with smartphones like iPhones and Androids, our telephones are essentially pocket computers. So should we be tailoring SEO content to a mobile platform?

On December 15, 2011, Google introduced their smartphone Google-bot Mobile. It is Google’s hope that by indexing smartphone content separately, users will have better search experiences on their phones. The blog post, written by Yoshikiyo Kato, says:

“With the number of smartphone users rapidly rising, we’re seeing more and more websites providing content specifically designed to be browsed on smartphones.”

Image Courtesy of DigitalTrends.com

In a Search Engine Land article about mobile searches in 2012, Michael Martin explains how users may want different information from searches across different platforms:

“The intention of inputting a search term on a desktop, feature phone, smartphone, or tablet can mean different things for the same keyword. For example, when typing in the term ‘tacos’ on a desktop I may want information or recipes; but on a feature phone, I may want to call a local taco shop; on a smartphone, I want directions to a local taco place, and on a tablet, I want to check reviews or what different items on the menu look like.”

For your business, it’s relatively easy to provide all this information to your potential customers. Having a variety of content, such as recipes, directions, menus, reviews, and photos, can be important on a mobile platform (and on a stationary computer).

A study by the group Meditative shows that images and reviews draw in your user’s eyes. For iPhone users, the study revealed that positive reviews on the Google Places app made a huge difference in which listing got clicks and which did not. While you need to register to see Meditative’s eye-tracking report, Search Engine Land breaks down the basics in this article.

Ryan Jones at Search Engine Journal doesn’t believe you need a different strategy for mobile SEO. Since our phones are just little computers, Jones thinks it’s easier just to design your website to work well on all devices – including phones, tablet computers, and traditional desktops and laptops. Jones writes:

“If you want something that is really native to a device, an app is definitely the way to go. Apps can access multi-touch features, rich media, in app purchases, gps, camera, and other aspects to provide a truly unique experience that a website cannot.”

My favorite websites that I frequent online all have apps. If your business could benefit from a mobile app, brainstorm ideas that would entice your customers, entertain them, or practically inform them about your business. Maybe your pizza place could commission an app to let users create their own pizza. Your personal training business could create a personalized workout app, complete with a nutrition and exercise routine.

While mobile screens are smaller than traditional computer screens, apps can give users a tailored experience on a smartphone. Apps with in-app purchases, such as the photography app Hipstamatic, drive users to their website with extended packages and the ability to purchase photography prints. The Pinterest app is just as useful as the full website for users to share things they like.

Focus on how your customers will find you, and keep up your tireless SEO endeavors. If you believe your business needs a separate mobile site, or even an app, evaluate what’s best for you and for your customers.

But no matter which form of technology is accessing your website due to your SEO efforts, all SEO strategies require three things to be successful, as outlined by Mater Google’s CEO Ali Husayni, who says:

“SEO takes the following three things: expertise, hard work, and patience. On average, our clients see the best results within six months to a year after we start a project.”

Master Google client CariniAir.com recently saw their site rise to the top of Google Places and other search result areas after working with us. Doug Cooper, the VP of Marketing for CariniAir.com, was thrilled with the results.

“Finally achieving the top spot on Google Maps for our most important keywords is a dream come true. Everyone at Carini Heating and Air is very excited and grateful to Master Google for their continued hard work and persistence,” Cooper says.

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NASHVILLE, TN – Optimizing your site for search engines is one thing, but how do you know if all of your hard work is paying off? Google offers a free service – Google Analytics – to marketers and webmasters that tracks visits in multiple ways. Many large organizations, including Costco Travel, the American Cancer Society, and CKE Restaurants, use Google Analytics to track their web traffic.

While marketers may receive more benefits from keeping up with in-depth statistics provided by Google Analytics, individuals that manage their personal or business websites can also use these tools to better understand what drives people to their sites.

Photo Courtesy of Google's http://Analytics.Blogspot.com.

Learn the Dashboard: There are tons of reports you can view through Google Analytics, but those will take more time and more in-depth coverage to learn. For now, get acquainted with your Dashboard. This is the main page, the starting point, for your Google Analytics information. Here, you’ll see a 30-day graph for total visits; the time period shown is customizable. You’ll see a snapshot of Site Usage, including statistics for Visits, Pageviews, Bounce Rate, Average Time on Site, and Percentage of New Visits. Further down the page, you’ll see a map, which highlights where your views are coming from. You’ll also see a pie chart containing information about how visitors are getting to your site. Are you visitors coming from search engine results? From referring sites? From direct traffic? This information can quickly clue you in to your strengths and weaknesses.

On the dashboard you’ll also be able to see your top content. Adding fresh content in the same vein as your top performing content will give your repeat viewers some new material and will likely draw more unique visitors to your site.

Know Your Visitors: It’s important to know who is visiting your site. Are your visitors first-time viewers? How long are they staying on your website? How many pages within your website are they visiting? How many unique visitors do you have? With Google Analytics, you can see a detailed version of this information.

If you learn that most people stay on your website a very short amount of time, try to find out why. Is your design pleasing and simple, or is it cluttered and hard to read? If you discover that the majority of your visitors have visited your site before, then you know you’re doing something right. Having repeat viewers is just as important as bringing new, unique traffic to your site. You can also customize the information you’re gathering by taking advantage of the Premium Analytics feature Extended Custom Variables.

To evaluate if the SEO steps you’ve taken are working (although that’s a hard thing to measure just with a few clicks!), try downloading a plug-in to enhance your Google Analytics. Here’s one from Juice Analytics that gives you data on your new referring sites and your keywords with 50% higher traffic over the past week.

This doesn’t even cover the tip of the iceberg that is Google Analytics. To really be well versed in the GA scene, you’ll need to spend some time clicking around, browsing forums, and viewing different reports. Different data will be helpful to different users, so learning what you can do on GA will open your eyes to a whole new way of tracking your web traffic.

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NASHVILLE, TN – Most businesses already understand the importance of a social media presence, as their potential customers are likely on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, or all three. For this article, we’ll focus on Facebook, and how it affects SEO.

An article by Blue Glass Marketing’s Selena Narayanasamy states, “Word-of-mouth marketing  has been a tried and true strategy for many brands, and to this day, it’s still one of the driving factors of brand recommendation. The “Like” or “Recommend” feature is almost an online version of word-of-mouth marketing.”

Image Courtesy of www.MrInternetTips.com

This isn’t a surprise. People are more likely to follow a friend’s recommendation on a great new restaurant or their favorite local spa than to take unknown (and potentially spambot) recommendations from the web.

On Facebook’s Developers description of Open Graph, we see that when someone “likes” or comments on a business’s app, Facebook users have three places where they see that information just on Facebook. If the business has a “like” button on its website, then when someone views the business’s webpage, they can also see a count of how many people have “liked” the page from Facebook.

For instance, if I “like” Blumhouse Productions, my Facebook friends will see that action in three places once they visit Facebook. The information will show up in my friends’ News Feed, on my Facebook Timeline, and on the Ticker (the new-ish box on the right of the screen that scrolls recent activity). Once you’ve gotten a “like” from someone, your subsequent posts will all end up in that person’s News Feed. That person is tuned-in to your business on a personal level. It also affects their friends, as the more activity your fans bring (“liking” your posts, commenting or sharing your posts), the more potential you have to gain viewers or “fans”.

Facebook gives developers and businesses with web savvy comprehensive information on how to use Facebook to its fullest. In the Key Concepts for Open Graph, Facebook explains how different sites can tailor their keywords, i.e., their Objects and Actions, to their company. Explaining further, the page states: “First you must define your actions and objects in the Dev App. For example, a running app may define “Routes” and “Marathons” as objects, and “Run” as the action in the Dev App. A cooking app may define “Recipe” and “Menu” as objects, and “Cook” as the action.” This is basically adding specific keywords to your business’s app to further integrate with Facebook.

So what does all this mean for SEO?

Well, when you’re on Facebook and you search for “Nashville bakeries”, any bakeries you’ve “liked” will pop up. If you haven’t “liked” any, search results from the web will show inside of Facebook, powered by Bing. Therefore, optimizing your website for Bing results can be a big help for a user performing a search within Facebook.

Jim Yu, CEO of BrightEdge, mentioned SEO strategy for social media in a panel on Facebook, Twitter & SEO at the Search Marketing Expo East in 2011. His tips for optimizing your Facebook page are very informative, including: “Use brand name in wall posts and tweets” and “push for engagement through likes and shares.” He also urges posting useful content as well as asking yourself if you’re using your SEO knowledge to freshen up your Facebook page.

In a recent Master Google blog post titled “Top Five Free SEO Tips of the Week”, we highlighted how to optimize your business Facebook page. Facebook is a great place to promote your business. First, the market is giant! Facebook will introduce your business to a vast amount of people. Second, the fans that “like” your page can become a community, sharing information and automatically seeing your posts on their News Feeds. This provides an organic opportunity to share special promotions for your business and gain new customers.

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NASHVILLE, TN – It’s hypothesized that the term “Search Engine Optimization” was first documented by John Audette and Bruce Clay in 1997. When search engine algorithms were simpler, webmasters could saturate a page with keywords, ensuring a higher rank in search engine results. Ultimately, as users really want the most relevant data, search engines worked to make their algorithms stronger to avoid “Keyword Stuffing”.

In an article by SEO expert Jill Whalen, she comments on the minor changes that helped SEO evolve from 2000 to 2008. In an outline she found from 2000, her introduction stated that Google had 1.3 billion pages indexed. When the article was written in 2008, Whalen, CEO and founder of High Rankings, estimated that Google had nearly 10 billion pages indexed. As all of these small changes and unexplained algorithms rock our SEO boats, Whalen comments on what stays the same: “The one element that will never change is the same one that I’ve been advocating forever—whatever SEO methods or strategies you use, the thing that will get you the furthest is creating an awesome website!”

More Competition
The easier it is to make a website, the more people sign up for personal blogs or websites that can potentially distract users from the relevant information they’re searching for. Services such as WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr, and Weebly make web development a breeze. As these sites have gained popularity in the past few years, more people have dumped their information onto the web.

Five years ago, if you had a serious niche, it’s possible that you could be one of several websites, or even (gasp!) the only website, discussing a subject. Now that it’s so easy to make a website, i.e., you don’t need to know how to code it, you don’t need to purchase a domain name, new sites spring up daily. In the wake of this over-saturated market, ensuring that your website has up-to-date, relevant information is crucial.

More Social
Twitter launched in July of 2006, and since then, its users have grown to giant proportions. An article from Time Techland dated September 2011 revealed that Twitter has 100 million active users. Facebook launched in February 2004, and as of January 2012, there are 800 billion users. Now Google announced that search results are getting more personal, as users will see Google+ results as well as normal search results in the “everything” category.

These sites are a destination, where people spend lots of time connecting with friends or acquaintances with common interests. While before, friends could share links fairly easily through email, now, these websites like Facebook and Twitter provide a common ground for link sharing. As Eric Hammer from Quantum SEO Labs writes, “[Social media] has really taken the concept of SEO and stood it on its ear because until now, you were trying to get Google to notice you. Now, for the first time, because of social media, you need to try to get human beings to notice you too and recommend you to their friends.”

Google Loves Change
To keep searches fresh and readily improving for users, Google is speculated to make changes almost daily to their search algorithms. Google introduced Panda (previously known as “Farmer”) to better their search results by weeding out duplicate content and lowering the prevalence of “content farms” in query results. Google launches Google Places to give businesses a place to be recognized.

Just as Google likes changing their own search algorithms, they also favor fresh content, as we recently reported in “The Google Freshness Update”.

While the SEO horizon changes daily like the phases of the moon, what stays the same is the importance of relevant, accurate, and fresh content.

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NASHVILLE, TN – If you’ve been on the Internet at all in the past few weeks, chances are you’ve seen posts or news articles about two piracy bills that are swarming around Congress: SOPA and PIPA. SOPA is the Stop Online Piracy Act, and PIPA is the Protect IP Act. While these bills may have good intentions – stopping copyright infringement – they could be detrimental to information sharing and the Internet as we know it today.

In a 24-hour protest on Jan. 18, many websites blacked out their content, including probably the biggest and most influential participant Wikipedia. Fight for the Future, whose tagline reads “a non-profit working to defend online freedom”, reports that more than 115,000 sites participated in the Jan. 18 blackout. Their numbers show the progression of Senators publicly opposing PIPA, which grew from one lone Senator on Nov. 16, 2011 to six on the morning of the protest. On the evening of the Jan. 18 protest, 34 Senators publicly opposed the anti-piracy bill.

You may have also heard that, for now, these bills have been postponed in Congress; they were scheduled for a Jan. 24 vote. It’s hard to tell if Congress has heard the pleas of many Americans to stop these censorship bills, or if the postponement is a way to shut us up temporarily. Will the bill slide back into Congress with revised text? Will they try to slip it by us?

Clay Shirky, in a very telling TED Talk (which I highly recommend watching), speaks about the history of copyright infringement legislation and its chilling future. He begins by explaining the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992, which basically said copying content such as songs from the radio to share with friends is okay (i.e, making personal mix tapes). It also said that taping high-quality versions, making multiple copies, and selling these copied tapes is not okay. The media companies wanted Congress to stop all copying, but Congress didn’t go that far. Now media companies, especially those who produce music and films, are spearheading these anti-piracy bills once again with SOPA and PIPA.

Shirky states: “The real effects of SOPA and PIPA are going to be different than the proposed effects. The threat, in fact, is this inversion of the burden of proof, where we suddenly are all treated like thieves at every moment we’re given the freedom to create, to produce, or to share. And the people who provide those capabilities to us – the YouTubes and Facebooks, the Twitters and TEDs – are in the business of having to police us or being on the hook for contributory infringement.” Some businesses may not want the job of policing their content, which could result in the businesses walking out, leaving us no place to voice our opinions or share our findings.

In the same talk, Shirky also enlightens listeners to an even deeper-rooted problem that SOPA and PIPA propose. He explains how the bills threaten our freedom and an inherent human right: “And because the biggest producers of content on the Internet are not Google and Yahoo, they’re us; we’re the people getting policed. Because in the end, the real threat to the enactment of PIPA and SOPA is our ability to share things with one another. So what PIPA and SOPA risk doing is taking a centuries old legal concept – ‘innocent until proven guilty’ – and reversing it –’guilty until proven innocent.’”

The real problem, as Shirky so eloquently states, is that SOPA and PIPA will make everyone a criminal. Without a proper trial, without gathering significant evidence, the government would be able to shut down your blog or website. The government could shut down your favorite websites. Forgoing the foundation of our basic rights – our Sixth Amendment right to a speedy, public trial with an impartial jury and our First Amendment right to free speech – the government will be able to censor our content seemingly without reason and without a proper check of power. Shirky goes one step further, deducing that media companies don’t want us to produce, but only to sit on our couches and consume. The producing is what threatens their livelihoods.

The hacker organization called Anonymous has shown their disdain for SOPA and PIPA by attacking major websites. Anonymous supposedly hacked the Department of Justice in retaliation to the shutdown of Megaupload.com, a major file-sharing website, and the arrest of its operators. They also hit the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), Universal Music, and the Recording Industry Association of America, according to a Forbes article. These organizations are supporters of SOPA and PIPA.

Facebook’s Washington, DC, office has a Facebook page where they discuss their views on these anti-piracy bills. While Facebook is sympathetic to the music and film industry on this copyright issue, they think SOPA and PIPA “are not the right solution to this problem, because of the collateral damage these overreaching bills would cause to the Internet.”

For now the bills are tabled, but Wikipedia writes, “SOPA and PIPA are not dead: they are waiting in the shadows.” This isn’t the end of the fight.

Master Google Ali Husayni has this to say about these two piracy bills and what they mean for website content sharing as we know it today:

“I’m all against piracy and hacking. But being raised in Iran, I’ve seen what censorship can do to freedom of the flow of information. You ‘censor’ only when you feel unable to verbally ‘engage’ and ‘encounter’ your opposition. Censorship by its very virtue puts you on the defense and the weaker position. And we don’t want to be portrayed as weak.”

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NASHVILLE, TN – On January 10, 2012, Google introduced “Search, Plus Your World,” SPYW for short, which allows users to see tailored search results when they’re signed in to their Google+ accounts.

Here’s what this means for you, as a user of Google. If you have a Google+ account and you stay logged in (as I do most always from my home computer), you should see your information across the navigation bar at the top of your page. Once you type a query into the search bar and hit ‘enter,’ if you have any personal results (such as acquaintances posting relevant topics on Google+), these will show up. For now, the search results aren’t commingled. If you look to the right of the screen, there’s an inconspicuous little toggle button where you can select “Show Personal Results” or “Hide Personal Results”. See the full explanation straight from Google’s blog.

Even if you aren’t logged in to Google, you’ll still see Google+ results on the right side of the page. In a small box, Google is promoting Google+ content under a People and Pages headline. Here, content is featured from Google+, including personal profiles and business pages, which is an incentive for people to use Google+.

Rand Fishkin, the CEO of SEOMoz.org, an SEO expert featured in a recent post about the importance of producing quality content, weighed in about Google’s SPYW on his blog.

“It’s my opinion that if [it] continues to roll out to all logged-in Google users and Google stays as aggressive as it’s been in the last 10 days with pushing Google+ for even logged-out users, the service will become a necessity for search and social marketers,” Fishkin says.

Fishkin also believes that marketers who don’t use Google+ are missing out on a huge platform, as Google is promoting its social application, Google+, through this new search feature.

Get Google+

If you don’t have a Google+ account, get one. As SEO Expert Ali Husayni tells us, Google+ pages for your business are absolutely essential.

“It’s a real step in the right direction. Initially, they said that they weren’t going to add that component, but they needed to have it from the get-go,” Husayni says.

Now that Google integrated SPYW into people’s searches, Google+ is even more crucial. For example, if I search for the term bicycles, and one of my friends on Google+ bought a bicycle from Bob’s Bike Shop and +1′d the store’s page, then Bob’s Bikes will show up in my personal results. As much as people like reviews, a review from someone you actually know usually goes further than a review written by a random person online. How do we know a random review isn’t one written by the business owner to promote his own business? It’s a given that we trust information more fully from people we’ve met and have a connection with.

Update Your Profile

If you have Google+, now is a great time to make sure your information is up-to-date. Since Google is pushing Google+ profiles to the top for users that are signed in, you want your content to be fresh, relevant, and accurate.

Get Your Customers Talking on Google+

Make it easy for your customers to find you by posting your content to Google+. Include a +1 button wherever you have other social networking buttons, such as Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest links. Consider holding a promotion, such as “add us to your Google+ circle and you’ll receive an exclusive coupon code.” Having an incentive for your customer will bring your brand to the front of their brains, and having them add your Page to their circle or +1 you will be vital in their future Google searches.

For this new integration of Google+ into search results, Google is forcing us to get personal. Now’s the perfect time to be friendly in person and on the web. Having a strong SEO presence on your website and on your Google+ can help push you up to the top of the page.

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