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So, What Is Google's Google Strategy?
January 06, 2012
Most people don't realize this, but as both a "publisher" and a search engine, Google actually has to optimize for itself.
It's interesting to think about the fact that if Google wanted to, they could take all of their own websites, and rank them the highest for a ton of different popular and trending search phrases. They could monetize this in the short term in a big way, but they're smarter than that. They realize - unlike a lot of folks using social media today (and I'm sometimes as guilty as anyone) - that would be so self-serving that their customer base would quickly lose trust and run away. You see, Google is the most popular search engine with nearly 90% of the market share for one main reason - they actually help their visitors find what they're looking for. So, they can't just take their own websites and rank them the highest.
What they have, however, that all other websites don't - is knowledge of their own algorithm and how to optimize for it. So, we need to study this and draw some conclusions.
One thing they know is that ranking high for people's names is like e-marketing gold. Think about it - Angelina Jolie, Kim Kardashian, Barack Obama, Ryan Seacrest, LeBron James ... How many times have you Googled a celebrity's name? Or simply a person that you're looking for or about to meet up with?
Up until Google+ came along, LinkedIn was the leader at ranking high for people's names. Now, Google+ has taken over - again, for obvious reasons. Briefly, here are the main things Google+ appears to be doing in order to secure such a high page rank...
1. Incentivizing Inbound Links - (from SEOmoz.org) Not long ago, Google started displaying author photos in its search results. In order to display a photo, Google asks authors to add links from their webpages to their Google+ profile. This creates potentially millions of high quality links from the world’s most influential online publishers, all pointing to multiple Google+ profiles.
2. Internal Linking - Google+ "circles" make it extremely easy to connect with thousands of people within a matter of weeks, rather than taking months or years to build up such a comparable following on Facebook or Twitter.
3. A lot of Indexable Content and Search Engine Friendly Profiles - Google+ has 2,621 words appear on each profile. Facebook only has 275 words and Twitter only 491 words.
4. On-Page Optimization - Better use of title tags (longer, more descriptive).
5. User-Generated Content - Public posting and encouraging public sharing (basically, public link building).
The good news for your company is that you can basically do all of these.
Need SEO help? Contact us at marketing@atiba.com or follow @ATIBAmarketing
Paul Hickey
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-plus-seo
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