For anyone out there with an interest in SEO—or anyone that runs a website—it is important to know what tools are available to track and analyze your site. A couple of weeks ago, I posted about some nifty tools that provide you with real-time feedback—something that Google Analytics can’t provide. What I didn’t mention is all of the amazing things that Google Analytics can provide for SEO specialists, small business owners, and even content providers.

Identifying your traffic. It is important to know if, after all the hard work developing your site, tweaking your pages, and producing quality content, you are actually attracting your target demographic to the pages you want them to visit. Imagine a captain attempting to navigate the sea with no indicators of current location, speed, or direction. This is you without the traffic information that Google Analytics can provide.

Quality content matters when building an SEO-optimized site. It pretty much matters all the time.

Tracking your conversions. Google Analytics can help you track and differentiate the visitors that ended in conversions for your site and visitors that decided to leave immediately. This information can aid in creating better content that’s specifically designed to help convert site visitors.

Monitoring your content. When you produce new content it is important to see how it is performing—how many people are reading your content? how long are they staying to read it? Quality content matters when building an SEO-optimized site. It pretty much matters all the time.

Catching HTML issues. In my experience, nothing is a complete catch-all in the medium of building and maintaining a well optimized site. However, Google Analytics will catch duplicate content. It will notice a missing or included “ / “ or extraneous capitalization. It’s an effective last line of defense to go back and fix these problems, making sure that you have uniformity in the URL implementation.

I took Memorial Day off from my round-up and steered clear of my RSS reader. There’s a lot to catch up on so let’s jump right in and get down to business with Google’s +1 button. It’s similar to Facebook’s “like” button. TechCrunch reports that “the +1 button allows you to recommend content to your friends and contacts directly from Google search results and ads.” This feature has the potential to really alter search results, too. The entire thing is still an experiment for Google, so not everyone will see the +1 option in his or her search results. You’ll have to opt-in (and be logged in to your Google account) if you want to start seeing it now. I’m pretty excited about seeing this feature develop. I expect nothing less than great things from Google, though. They always impress me! You can learn more about the +1 button here.

I learned a new term recently: automotive infotainment. I had never heard of this before reading about a new partnership between Salesforce.com and Toyota. This partnership is called Toyota Friend, and it’s the creation of a social network for Toyota customers and their vehicles. Not sure if I would use it if I were a Toyota driver, but it’s certainly interesting to read about. All this is part of an effort to boost the automotive infotainment industry.

It’s probably not a big surprise to marketers that posts in a Facebook newsfeed are prioritized based on calculation called EdgeRank. It’s important to note though, that  “Scores and metrics are important to consider — but they should not be the sole driver of your strategy. Your audience, your brand, and your content should be priorities.” Word of wisdom. I’m not sure how much success marketers have had in trying to figure out how to raise EdgeRank, but I’d be curious to hear from any of our readers on the topic!

I was immediately drawn into another MarketingSherpa post simply because of its Elf reference. Elf is probably one of my favorite movies. I call it my happy movie, because it never fails to cheer me up, no matter what time of year or what is going on in my life.  But I digress. This post is all about discovering your value proposition. It’s certainly no easy feat, so this post offers up 4 steps to helping companies discover their value prop.

I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m personally freaked out by what Google is up to these days. It would appear that in its quest to stretch the reach of its influence and dominance, Google is now working on something that could potentially revolutionize mobile social media – and not necessarily for the better. What am I talking about? I’m talking about Google Face Detection.

You’re probably wondering what I’m so worked up about. If so, you probably have the wrong idea of how the program operates. When I first heard of it, I immediately assumed it was some sort of software that would work through a webcam to positively identify you when you sit down in front of your desktop or laptop – sort of like a much less invasive retinal scan. But that’s not what Google Face Detection is at all.

What it is, in a nutshell, is a technology that may soon come your way via a mobile social media app that you can use to identify someone by simply snapping their picture. The application works by running the person’s image through facial recognition software to find out who they are. If their information is found, it’ll immediately fork over the kind of private data that some people pay a monthly fee to keep revealed. We’re not talking about Social Security Numbers or anything, but we are talking about full names, addresses, and phone numbers. So what’s the big deal? Here’s the big deal.

Google says that in order to be “found” using the app, an individual will have to jump through a few hoops to do so – but in the end, those hoops will amount to nothing more than a couple of “CYA” opt-in forms telling Google that you’re cool with everyone having access to the basics of your identity. And maybe you are, who knows? After all, not everyone in the world likes to live like they’re constantly on the run from someone or something. But I wonder how many people will feel the same after they get a midnight phone call from some stranger who saw them at a restaurant, snapped a pic, got their name and number, and decided to try forcing a friendship.

Of course, this sort of scenario is probably very unlikely. The fact is, not everyone in the world is a raving lunatic out to get you. Where I’m concerned, I feel pretty safe – I’m not exactly in danger of being singled out and stalked for my physical beauty. But I certainly wouldn’t want my own kids leaving themselves vulnerable to this type of technology. Forget issues of social media privacy for a second – we’re talking about physical safety here.

To its credit, Google is going about the whole thing extremely carefully. Which really only makes me more nervous. That, to me, indicates that someone there knows they’ve developed a technology with unforeseeable ramifications, and they’re almost afraid to implement it. Maybe I’m just being paranoid. Or maybe they’re thinking exactly what I’m thinking – like what could conceivably happen in cases of mistaken identity when the person in the crosshairs just happens to resemble someone that broke your heart 10 years ago… or someone last seen fleeing the scene of a crime. Throw in the hero factor and you’ve got a recipe for disaster where you might actually welcome the roving eye of Big Brother to keep you safe from the misplaced wrath of angry strangers. And that, my friends, is the scariest thought of all.

Google Social Search was introduced in 2009, but recently made SEO marketing and blogger headlines when Google announced that they were going to place more emphasis on social results in individual search queries. What this means is that if you search for a review on the Movie “The Lincoln Lawyer“, for example, instead of seeing reviews in the top SERPs from Rotten Tomatoes or The New York Times, you’ll likely see twitter posts or blog posts from people in your social network that posted a review or tweeted about it. The premise behind this strategy is that content from your friends, acquaintances, coworkers or business partners means more to you than that of a random stranger. But does this have implications to the search engine marketer?

There’s no doubt that social search is changing the SEO map.

According to SearchEngineWatch.com, optimization of social media should be an integral component of any business’s search engine placement strategy. It’s becoming increasingly more important for companies to embrace Google Social Search by:

• Maintaining a blog with frequent blog posts
• Utilizing a twitter account with frequent tweets (and retweets)
• Opening a Facebook account and employing strategies to accumulate “like’s”
• Monitoring, promoting and participating in Quora discussions
• Establishing connections through LinkedIn
• Encouraging customer follows on social networks
• Encouraging content sharing
• Including social networking links in advertising, whether print or online
• Participating and encouraging conversations about the brand and company

Now more than ever, your direct network has an impact on your success — but so does your indirect network. A brand’s social strategy can play an important role in boosting SEO marketing results. Even images shared by others through your social media connections will play a part in the search engine results. YouTube, Flickr, Google subscriptions and Gmail contacts all will play more importance in driving marketing than before, as will twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. With the increase emphasis on Google social search, companies should strive to boost social media profiles by using tools such as Listorious, Follower Wonk, Crowdbooster, Twtpoll, Rowfeeder and Timely says Janet Aronica at One Forty.

It’s likely that Google (and other major search engine players) will look for more ways to make search engine results more relevant to the user with an even more personalized search as time goes on. The potential of a company’s social footprint is exponential with more emphasis placed on personalized search results. There’s no doubt that social search is changing the SEO map. Within these retweets, likes, @mentions there is a built-in growth factor that presents opportunities to build a large-scale network effect unlike ever before.

Clients are always asking ideaLaunch to help make the case to their management team for both ideaLaunch and Content Marketing. Google appears to be helping content marketing fanatics like us make the case. Here’s how:

As you know, Google’s new algorithm called Farmer (Panda) launched a few weeks ago and shut down the traffic for thousands of crappy websites packed with low quality content and/or, in most cases, link farm support.

Here’s a great summary of what’s going on, first in Google’s words, then in Danny Sullivan words. And then a quick note from me ; – )

Google:

“Our recent update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites, so the key thing for webmasters to do is make sure their sites are the highest quality possible. We looked at a variety of signals to detect low quality sites. Bear in mind that people searching on Google typically don’t want to see shallow or poorly written content, content that’s copied from other websites, or information that are just not that useful. In addition, it’s important for webmasters to know that low quality content on part of a site can impact a site’s ranking as a whole. For this reason, if you believe you’ve been impacted by this change you should evaluate all the content on your site and do your best to improve the overall quality of the pages on your domain. Removing low quality pages or moving them to a different domain could help your rankings for the higher quality content.” – Google

Danny Sullivan:

“This algorithm specifically targets sites (not necessarily content farms) that are low quality in a number of ways, such as:

• Shallow content (not enough content to be useful)
• Poorly written contentContent copied from other sites
• Content that’s not useful
• Low quality content on part of the site can impact the rankings of the entire site
• Remove the low quality pages of the site to increase rankings of the high quality pages

A key phrase is “information that [is] just not useful”. It’s not enough that content is unique and verbose. Another key is that even high quality pages can lose rankings if poor quality pages tarnish the overall site.”

Byron White:

Invest in quality content, invest in content marketing, invest in listening to the wants and needs of your customers, and invest in delivering high quality information your readers and customers want and need. If you make the investment, your customers, readers and even Google will likely love you, and your site, and your company. Yah, love. And if you don’t make the investment…sell your company quickly and/or find a new job.

One of the most frequently asked questions among new web designers and their increasingly SEO-knowledgeable clients is “how important is metadata?”  Does metadata even matter anymore? If it has any relevance, how much?  And even if its importance is limited, how much time should be dedicated to meta tag optimization?

To answer these questions, you have to first do a quick history lesson of meta tags. One of the first things first-generation web designers discovered was the power that metadata tags had to place a site near the top of search engine results. But as Google ascended to its place of dominance among search engines, it, along with its competitors, began to realize savvy designers were using the system to their advantage. They loaded code with metadata that had little to do with the actual content of the site and more to do with winning the race to grab the attention of people searching the web. Since that time, meta tags have ceased to even be considered in Google rankings. As a result, metadata became one of the first significant losers in the never-ending spam wars.

But does this mean meta tags optimization is a thing of the past to be buried alongside your old IBM XT and QBasic? Since Google is king, listen to what they have to say about the matter. In a video released a couple of years ago on Google’s Webmaster Central Blog, a spokesman answered the following questions about meta data tags:

Q: Does Google ever use the “keywords” meta tag in its web search ranking?
Google’s basic answer is: No. Google’s web search does not take keyword metatags into account in determining its rankings.

Q: Why doesn’t Google use the keywords meta tag?
About a decade ago it was decided that meta tags were being used by designers to load often-irrelevant keywords. Much of the decision to ignore meta tags in rankings was to overcome the efforts of spammers.

Q: Does this mean that Google ignores all meta tags?
Not exactly. Description tags aren’t used for rankings but they are useful for search results snippets.

So that means we should forget meta data tags, right? Sorry, but no. While meta keywords do not affect search engine rankings they still have an important purpose. If nothing else, the Title Tag is useful because Google uses it to indicate what the content of a page is about. They still carry importance when they are matched to page content, but their value by themselves has lessened. The important thing is to make sure your tags match the actual content.