Google+ with Circles is alive! More importantly, it feels alive, which is more than we could ever say for Google’s other ill-fated attempts at creating a social network. In all of my circles, one topic continues to dominate today’s conversation: Google+.

Everyone is chiming in with what they love about Circles, what they hate, and whether they think Google+ has a future or will go the way of the Wave on the shores of Facebook’s dominance.

How Google Circles Works

Upon signing into Google+ for the first time, you will be prompted to create circles and add people to them. By default, there is a circle for friends, another for family, and so on. After adding someone to circles, your stream (essentially your “news feed” on Facebook) will display public posts from that person. If you are part of one of their circles, you will be able to see posts shared with that circle.

Google’s unique selling point here is its ability to compartmentalize incoming and outgoing information easily. I created a circle for “close friends,” with whom I may discuss things passionately and in a manner potentially unsuitable for public discussion. Since none of my best friends are into Internet marketing, though, I can easily remove them from posts they wouldn’t care about. Likewise, my industry contacts don’t need to see video of my latest vacation. Circles allow you to control who sees your information, giving it an absolutely unparalleled ability to foster your conversations between like-minded individuals and groups.

One of my favorite features is the ability to view your profile through the eyes of any given person:

In the above example, Danny Sullivan could, if he were so inclined, view everything that I had posted to my “Internet experts” circle. He would be spared, however, from seeing the cute kitten video I posted to my family.

Why Google+ Could Succeed

Google’s Circles are an absolutely brilliant way to allow users to incorporate every facet of their life under a single account. This is good news for everyone (like me) who struggles to find the right balance of professionalism and expression on Facebook, or for those who are uncertain about making their wall posts public. In Google+, you control your own information.

Google Plus also combines Twitter’s strengths with Facebook’s usability and interface. Like Twitter, there is plenty of public discussion – I posted a brief public note on my wall, and immediately had two intelligent responses from online marketers who then added me to their circles. Facebook tends to be more of a conversation between friends, which is still possible on Google+ by simply posting to the appropriate circle.

As I said in the captured post, there is a lot of excitement about Google+. Almost everyone loves it, and Circles is undeniably brilliant. If Facebook fails to adapt and find an easy way to segment incoming and outgoing information, Google+ has a definite chance.

Why Google+ Could Fail

There is a tremendous amount of effort required to get people to switch from one social network to another. Common resistance to Google+ (or any other new social network) can be summed up in the following: “Everyone I want to share with is already on Facebook. I don’t want to use Google+ if the people I know aren’t there with me.”

How many people are jumping at the chance to rebuild (sometimes enormous) social webs? How difficult do you think it will be for your parents to use the new service? These questions, and their potential solutions, should occupy Google’s thoughts right now.

In today’s social market, it seems everyone is quick to jump to conclusions about whether the network is going to make it. In many ways, however, this perception becomes reality. No one wants to switch to a social network that isn’t going to thrive.

My feeling is that Google needs to act loudly and quickly in every marketing channel to get as many people on board as possible. I understand the desire to roll the service out slowly, ensure that it works, and make it feel exclusive. Still, I feel that Google needs to capitalize on the hype, show how Google+ is better, and get people invested and involved ASAP. Right now, I don’t see that happening.

Citing “insane demand,” the service was temporarily shut down to new invites. This is a problem. Worse yet is the fact that invites are required at all. For Google to succeed as a social network, it needs to allow a person’s entire social web to move with them – not just a strand.

One Internet Marketer’s Conclusion

The strengths and weaknesses in the Google+ vs. Facebook war have been examined by our social media team and discussed extensively elsewhere, but the search giant’s chance of making it in a big way comes down to its ability to leverage the power of Circles vs. heavy resistance to changing networks.

I see Facebook as a company that is smart enough to recognize Google+ as a real threat, and I suspect that something is already in the works to give Facebook circle-like functionality. If that happens in a reasonable amount of time, don’t expect the common man to be overly zealous to switch.

Still, don’t expect Google+ to disappear any time soon. Google has a huge advantage over most companies in its ability to integrate a social network with Gmail to create a more social version of search – whether you join or not. Ultimately, full adoption of Google Plus will depend on A) how quickly Google moves to fill up its network by promoting its (currently unique) benefits, and B) how quickly Facebook comes up with a good answer to Circles.

The Future of Google Plus and Google Circles is a post by SEO expert Carson Ward. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

Google recently completed their Inside Search event where a number of new products were announced and presented for demonstration. This recap discusses some of the products that may impact the future of SEO.

Search by Image

Perhaps the most exciting and interesting development from Inside Search was the announcement of Search by Image. Users may upload, drag and drop or paste the URL for images that Google will then treat as a search query.

The demonstrator searched Google by uploading an old picture near a beach. Google determined where the picture was taken, and returned the top result of a Wikipedia page on the location, followed by “similar images” of the surrounding area. In another example, the “y u no” guy (an Internet meme) was dropped into the search. Google returned two results about the image, in addition to a few similar images.

How does this impact search engine optimization? Optimizing images to be found by search engines is an often underrated organic SEO tactic. Image search volume is likely to increase due to the new Google features. While the majority of image searches will continue to be informational, an increased number of users may be searching with purchase intent.

Suppose you are an online retailer selling shoes. A buyer goes into a shoe store and takes a picture of the shoe itself in order to find more information. As users become more familiar with Search by Image, this kind of activity will likely become increasingly common.

The prospective buyer may be searching for competitor pricing, reviews or additional information. Depending on a multitude of factors, your product page and/or image may appear, and you increase your chance of a link and/or sale – even if they don’t buy from you until next time.

Businesses can increase their chances of showing up for standard image results and Search by Image through keyword-targeted filenames, alt text and optimizing surrounding text. In addition, having multiple angles of the same product will be more likely to trigger Google’s “similar” image results on Search by Image. In the world of online retail, multiple product views are almost always a good thing, and Google’s new service makes multiple product images a worthwhile goal.

Google Instant Images

Again, image optimization is a rarely discussed method of bringing relevant users to a site. Image visitors can raise your site’s visibility, spread your brand and attract links that may otherwise be impossible to obtain.

Even if a user has typed in two letters, Google will begin showing images. If your images are eye-catching, users may pause queries or stop their search because they have found what they were (or weren’t) looking for. There is only one piece of advice I can offer for taking advantage of Instant Images: investing in quality, attractive images is more important than ever.

Google Voice Search (for Desktop)

The vast majority of Google voice searches in the past have been performed on mobile devices, but, with the announcement of Google Voice search for desktops, that may change. In my experience, people tend to search using very different queries when speaking and typing. With a six-fold increase in speech-assisted queries since May 2010 (according to Google’s presentation), there will likely be slightly fewer broad search queries and a slightly increased volume of “long-tail” keywords to optimize for.

Obsessed With Speed

If Google is “obsessed with speed,” and they have found that faster speeds lead to improved user experience, perhaps we, as website owners, should be obsessed with speed. Specifically, we should be obsessed with the time it takes for a user to find what he or she is looking for. This is good advice for both conversion optimization and organic SEO.

Google has, at several points, mentioned that they are concerned with the user experience of pages within search results, though the method of measuring the user experience and the impact on rankings is still a matter of speculation. Whether user experience is measured directly through user metrics or algorithmically, a bad user experience is increasingly bad for SEO, and a bad experience has always meant fewer natural links. SEOs would be wise to suggest and implement improvements related to page load time, navigation and a better user experience.

What announcement are you most excited about? Do you see any of Google’s other new products having an impact on how we do SEO?

New Google Products Will Impact SEO is a post by SEO expert Carson Ward. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

Since becoming addicted to online marketing, I have found a large amount of information that is either out of date, irrelevant, incorrect, or communicated in about the worst way imaginable. It seems to be especially easy to find bad advice about strategic keyword selection and optimization. This post will look at three myths related to keyword relevance and competition.

Example: “Cookie the be to of and a in”

If you’ve ever seen a screen capture like the one below and gone into rage-triggered cardiac arrest, you probably know which myth I’d like to debunk:

Red boxes and over-the-top red arrows are a must when a manipulative or misinformed SEO shows that their (or their client’s) page is ranked FIRST out of 260 million sites! Who’s winning?  This guy. Now you’re going to get all of the traffic when throngs of people search for “cookie the be to of and a in.”

The fact of the matter is that the number of results is largely irrelevant. Considering the number of results as a gauge of competition is akin to trying to figure out how hard the Seahawks will be to beat by asking how many fans they have in the stadium. Just as this might lead you to erroneously believe that the Seahawks are talented, some SEOs use a high number of page results to fallaciously suggest that the term is harder to rank for.

Competitive Keyword Analysis – the Right Way

To gauge the true SEO competition for a keyword, I strongly suggest searching for the term and opening the first 3-5 results. These are the pages you need to out-rank to get meaningful traffic. Consider the following:

• Authority: Use tools like Open Site Explorer to determine the “page authority” and number of linking pages, domains, and class C IP addresses. Generally speaking, a newer site is not going to outrank a PageRank 7 site with a page authority of 85, even if the keyword is ranking incidentally and not through intentional targeting.

• Relevant Links: Take the analysis a step further and analyze the anchor text pointing to the page.

Would anyone like to guess which shoe maker is on the first page for the keyword “basketball?” If you think you can stop at anchor text, though, we need to have a heart-to-heart about how Google determines relevance. Are the linking pages authoritative and relevant to the topic?  What about the domain? If you really want to get crazy, you can look at the pages/domains linking to the linking page/domain.

• On-Page: Is the ranking page targeting the keyword, or ranking for it incidentally? Does the exact phrase exist in the title tag? Is it even in the content? If the exact phrase is at the front of a highly authoritative page, can you top that?

Strategic/Competitive Keyword Analysis

Determining the true amount of competition for a keyword can be tricky and takes a little practice. Luckily, you can look at tens of thousands of SERPs (search engine results pages) to learn how the variables/factors are connected. Between the first draft of this post and publication, SEOMoz announced a new tool that should prove extremely helpful for the discerning strategist. It actually looks disturbingly similar to a report I have been tracking data with recently.

Non-strategic SEOs play it by ear and learn what works based on results, learning slowly while campaigns succeed or fail. Strategic SEOs can determine what works before even starting a campaign, based on lessons learned from hundreds of results and case studies available on each page of any given query.

Keyword research will set the course for an SEO campaign, and changing course mid-way can be costly and frustrating. It is important, therefore, to use a more strategic approach to targeted keyword selection to determine what terms will provide acceptable results within a given timeframe.

Dirty Lies and Strategic Keyword Research is a post by SEO expert Carson Ward. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.