SEO World

At our recent Linklove conference (did you see that the videos are now on sale?) I talked about the challenges of getting to exceptional but the extreme rewards available online for those that make it. You can check out my full slidedeck below.

As part of the thinking I had to do in order to pull this presentation together, I put a load of effort into two things:

1. how to carry out a realistic evaluation of where a company’s gaps lie and where there are opportunities to cultivate “spikes of amazingness”
2. a methodology for improvement based on applying elements of lean startup and agile to the marketing mix (I came up with “Discover, Pitch, Experiment, Invest”)

I took the evaluation process and turned it into a self-assessment survey. If you’d like us to pull together a (free) brief report based on this evaluation methodology, start here.

(Note that depending on the volume of submissions, it might take us a little while to get back to you, but we’ll try to keep you up to date throughout the process).

The output is a heat chart showing areas needing improvement (orange / red) and the beginnings of “spikes of amazing” (yellow / green).

While you wait, you can check out my slidedeck entitled “mediocre to great”:

In summary, you can go here to buy linklove videos or here to get your free SEO strategy review.

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distilled

Matt Millen of the Raiders punches Patriot GM Pat Sullivan on Jan. 5, 1986.

Nothing stings more than waking up and seeing a massive drop in SEO rankings or worse, your site(s) banned by Google. I’m not sure what would hurt worse, as the sucker punch from Raider Matt Millen looks painful.

In any event, the update that occurred with Google on Tuesday was a major sucker punch for many SEOs and Webmasters around the world. How bad is it? A lot of SEOs are actually quitting the business. Yes, quitting.

That’s shameful as this is just like any other career you choose … you have to work at it.

Last week’s blog post dealt with Step One in recovery from Panda and we’ll shift gears slightly and discuss what just happened and what you need to concentrate on right now.

Google fried a lot of sites and while a lot of people are talking about the empty blog ranking for “make money online”, I think the more important one is how Pfizer no longer ranks for their flagship product, Viagra … HowStuffWorks does. Wow.

Doing some simple analysis on some of these top sites that were crushed in this latest update, some consistencies pop up:

- far too high on-page keyword density
- uneven anchor text distribution
- low quality links
- internal duplicate content
- duplicate title tags
- slow site speed
- high number of internal 404s

I am not saying the above is the reason for the fall, I am saying these five issues are consistent with sites that dropped. (cough, cough) You might be best served to look at your site and improve these areas.

Remember, Google owes you nothing. They will always make changes to their algorithm and it is up to you to roll with the changes, make adjustments and keep rolling. The worst thing you can do is go into a panic and just start killing off links and dumping domains. Relax, take a breath and look at the SERPs, they are still a mess so more changes are coming.

Check in next week as I dive further into Panda and changes that you can do to improve your sites and campaigns.

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SEO Revolution Blog

Every blogger wants traffic. More and more of it, in fact. No blogger, no matter how big or small, would ever turn down more blog traffic. But the truth is most of us aren’t doing all the right things we should be doing to ensure we get the traffic we want. As a result, blogs underperform, and over time, bloggers get discouraged and might even quit.

Don’t let this happen to you! There is hope. Traffic is out there to be had. You just have to first understand the reasons your blog isn’t getting it.

1. No SEO—Optimizing your posts is essential for getting long-term, steady traffic to your blog. The search engines love fresh blog content, but if you don’t optimize your posts for relevant keywords, you’re not going to rank well, causing traffic to suffer.
2. Boring headlines—When someone sees a headline for your post on Twitter, Facebook, another website, or in the search results, will they be interested enough to click on it? If you’re not writing clear, compelling headlines, you won’t get clicks.
3. No significant sharing on social networks—Twitter, Facebook, and other social media sites are some of the best traffic sources out there. It’s important to really focus on getting your posts shared as much as possible. One way to do this is to have share buttons located prominently on your blog. Another way is to focus on building your connections, so you can have a strong promotional network at your disposal.
4. Your blog doesn’t look professional—How your blog looks matters. If you’re using a generic template, you risk looking amateurish. I recommend investing in a custom design to give your blog a more professional appearance.
5. Your blog lacks focus—What’s your blog about? What topic do you cover? If you lack focus, you’ll have a hard time building a core audience.
6. You aren’t bringing anything new to the table—Are you giving your readers content they can’t get anywhere else? Or are you just recycling posts found on countless other blogs?
7. You’ve overlooked the power of guest blogging—I’ve spent a lot of time on here talking about guest blogging. I believe that every blogger should be submitting guest posts to other blogs, so they can build awareness, increase authority, and drive traffic back to their blog. I also believe that you should allow others to guest post on your blog so they’ll bring their followers to your site.
8. You don’t post on a regular basis—While I’ve recently pondered if having a blogging schedule is a good idea, I do still believe it’s important to post new content on a regular basis. You don’t have to post daily, but you do need to keep your blog alive so you can’t disappear for weeks at a time and expect to get lots of traffic.
9. The community suffers from poor comment moderation—Successful blogs are built around a community. The readers comment and interact with the author and each other, but if you do a poor job moderating comments—such as being slow to approve comments or letting SPAM run rampant—you’ll never build a strong community.
10. You lack patience—Getting traffic takes time. Sometimes, there are no real problems, and your blog just needs some time to grow.

What are some of the other major reasons blogs don’t get traffic?

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SEO Hosting Blog

The following post is a beginner’s Video SEO blueprint. Follow the steps below to ensure that you’re getting video results in both Google Video Search and Google Organic.

1. Target the Right Terms

Certain terms are more likely to yield video results than others. Look for longer tail enquiries currently returning video results or other rich snippets. Don’t expect to get a video result for terms returning a lot of local results or competitive commercial terms.

For example, search terms containing the following words will typically yield video results:

• “tutorial”
• “review”
• “test”
• “what is…”
• “how to…”
• “demonstration”
• “explanation”

2. Secure the Content

Either self-host your videos, or use a third party hosting solution which allows you to control where your videos are visible. I would recommend the following platforms for third party hosting:

• Wistia
• Vimeo Pro
• Vzaar
• Viddler
• Brightcove

If you’re self-hosting, using your own servers or a cloud solution such as Amazon S3 to host your videos is fine.

Do not use YouTube or a standard Vimeo account for your hosting, as the youtube.com or vimeo.com domains will rank for your videos, rather than your own domain.

3. Embed in a Crawlable Player

Ensure you embed your videos in an HTML5 player with flash fallback (or a pure flash player) – not an iframe. All of the major hosting solutions above have this option.

If you are self-hosting, then use a player from the following list of excellent customisable video players, or create your own in HTML5 and jQuery

• JW Player – Paid
• Video JS - Open Source
• Kaltura HTML5 - Open Source

Embed only one video on a page you wish to get a video result. Having multiple videos on a page will mean Googlebot may struggle to pick out an appropriate video to connect with the rich snippets. Equally, duplicate video content can be problematic – for best practice, ensure that each page holds only one, unique video.

4. Surround the Video with Supporting Information

If possible, ensure you have attached a closed caption file to your video player and include a link on the page to a text file with the captioning information in a TTML compatible format like SubRip (.srt). Most of the major video players have a proprietary solution for captioning, but if yours doesn’t, then you can include subtitles on HTML5 video using JavaScript

Alternatively, it’s also fine to include the transcript of the video as body text within the rest of the page.

Images, links and supporting text also help to indicate to the engines that this is a quality page and should be indexed, so make sure your video at least comes with an accompanying text description. A page with only video content on it looks thin algorithmically thin.

Blog posts featuring unique videos are the most common content types to receive video rich snippets.

5. Submit a Video XML Sitemap

A video sitemap is the main way of giving search engines rich meta-data about your video, ensuring that they have access to the thumbnail, raw video file and supporting descriptions of the content.

Once you have created your XML sitemap, ensure the sitemap is added to the robots.txt file and submit it to Google webmaster tools.
Use this template to construct your video sitemap:

<urlset xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9” xmlns:video=”http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-video/1.1″><br /> <url><br /> <loc>http://www.yourdomain.com/page-containing-video</loc><br /> <video:video><br /> <video:thumbnail_loc>http://www.yourdomain.com/thumbnail-image</video:thumbnail_loc><br /> <video:title>Video Title</video:title><br /> <video:description>Video Meta Description</video:description><br /> <video:content_loc>http://www.yourdomain.com/video-url.mp4</video:content_loc><br /> <video:player_loc allow_embed="yes" autoplay="ap=1">http://www.yourdomain.com/videoplayer.swf?video=url</video:player_loc><br /> <video:duration>Length of video in seconds (number only) e.g. 267</video:duration><br /> <video:publication_date>2012-03-16T18:30:15+00:00</video:publication_date><br /> <video:family_friendly>yes</video:family_friendly><br /> <video:tag>Target Keyword 1</video:tag><br /> <video:uploader info="http://www.yourdomain.com/profile-page">Name</video:uploader><br /> <video:live>no</video:live><br /> </video:video><br /> </url><br /> </urlset><br />

The <content_loc> element in the sitemap refers to the location of the actual video file (.mp4 or .flv etc), while the <player_loc> element refers to the location of the HTML5/Flash video player.

Dependent on your hosting solution, sometimes it’s not possible to include both <player_loc> and <content_loc> elements – if you cannot provide both, including just one is fine.

Ensure than the <thumbnail_loc> links to an image file in 16:9 up to a maximum resolution of 1920×1080 px.

Good practice is to ensure that the <video:uploader> element links to a Google+ profile or a blog profile page with rel=”author” attribution.

6. Include the Schema.org Mark-up in the Page’s HTML Code

Schema is another way of giving the search engines some rich meta data about your video. Include as many of the relevant tags as you can, for the best chance of receiving video rich snippets.

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to get in touch. Good luck!

Phil

Phil Nottingham Phil is an SEO Analyst at Distilled London, where he specialises in video, wacky link-building strategies and complaining about poor design.

Follow @philnottingham

Phil Nottingham

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distilled

class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-2372" title="google_cloud" src="http://www.highervisibility.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/google_cloud.jpg?9d7bd4" alt="" width="615" height="230" />

The “cloud” has been the rage online for a several months, even though some people may not understand what it actually is. Cloud computing is just a way to store documents online so that they can be accessed by many people. According to The Wall Street Journal, Google is launching its own version of “cloud computing” called Drive.

The application is described as similar to the popular “Dropbox.” Users can store any kind of files—pictures, videos and documents—and direct coworkers, friends and others there to access the file. This method is acceptable for people who don’t want to email a bulky file to several people. It’s also great for virtual co-workers who need a place to track their work.

The article has brought more attention to Dropbox, a company founded in 2007 that has 45 million users. Dropbox officials said Apple officials attempted to buy them out but they turned down what was describes as a nine-figure offer. Apple has its own file sharing service, Apple iCloud, which can be used by anyone, not just those who own Apple products.

According to the article, Google plans to offer this feature for free (like Dropbox). But users who store large amounts of data (this can refer to virtual businesses who need to store a lot of information) may be charges a fee. Google officials have not released an official statement but WSJ says to expect to see the service launched in the next few weeks or months. In he meantime, those who have Gmail can share documents through Google Docs, the company’s current “cloud” service.

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HigherVisibility

Guest posting has long been recognised as a good way to build not just your personal brand (reputation building), but to get links and traffic as well. The problem is, however, that it is just not that easy to get guest posting gigs. This is especially true if you don’t have the authority to back it up.

So how do you increase the likelihood that your emails asking for a chance to guest post will be positively received? Does it all depend on your email’s wording? Or does it depend more on the your timing and persistence?

According to James Agate, the answer to getting more positive responses to your guest post outreach lies in all of the above and more. In a experiment he conducted he was able to analyse the responses of potential sites based on 400 sample guest posts enquiries. Here’s what he found out:

• Women get more positive responses than men.
• Job titles matter – This refers to the fact that a larger percent of contacted websites responded positively to in-house employees and freelancers than to agency employees.
• Completely bespoke emails work best (as opposed to personalised templates and worse, completely impersonal emails)
• Proactive wording is better in most cases.
• Persistence will pay off in the end.

Note though that James Agate emphasises the fact that the best approach to take might differ for each industry. So rather than just going blindly with his findings, it is still best to find out what works best in your specific industry and stick to your own magic blend.

To learn more about how he arrived at the above conclusions, read his post entitled “ href="http://www.seomoz.org/blog/putting-guest-post-outreach-theories-to-the-test-with-some-real-world-data" class="extlink">Putting Guest Post Outreach Theories to the Test“.

Image via href="http://inkwelleditorial.com/guest-posts-wanted-submission-guidelines" class="extlink">Inkwell Editorial

href="http://www.phoenixrealm.com/getting-more-positive-responses-for-your-guest-post-requests/">Getting More Positive Responses for Your Guest Post Requests was originally posted on the href="http://www.phoenixrealm.com/">Phoenixrealm SEO Blog by href="http://www.phoenixrealm.com/author/gary/">Gary Cottam.

You can connect with href="https://plus.google.com/118018120246748277536">Gary on Google+, on Twitter href="http://www.twitter.com/garycottam">@garycottam, or follow these links to find out more about href="http://www.doublespark-seo.co.uk">Doublespark SEO or href="http://www.doublespark.co.uk">Doublespark Web Design.

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Phoenixrealm SEO Blog

class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-2336" title="linkedin-logo" src="http://www.highervisibility.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/linkedin-logo.jpg?9d7bd4" alt="" width="615" height="230" />

LinkedIn is a social networking site geared toward professionals and career development.  It is different from Facebook and MySpace because it does not have an over-abundance of games, pokes, likes, applications, silly statuses, and other features that can sometimes border on the unprofessional.

People of all levels have LinkedIn accounts; users include self-employed people, middle-management, and top executives.  Furthermore, companies (including all 500 of the Fortune 500 companies) have their own accounts to promote themselves.  Companies that have a page frequently have their employees with LinkedIn accounts listed.   These employees can be listed within categories like New Hires, Recently Promoted, and Popular Profiles.

It is not enough to create a LinkedIn account and leave it at that.  To promote themselves, companies must be active; therefore they should be sure that they have enough time to dedicate to LinkedIn.  On the other hand, LinkedIn should not consume so much time that other areas begin to suffer.  One hour per day dedicated to networking through LinkedIn is a good place to start.

Companies from all over are able to network amongst themselves, and many times the people who connect over LinkedIn never meet face-to-face.  Being able to transcend boundaries gives companies the ability to collaborate on projects, to research marketing trends in other areas, and to target sales toward groups that may not have been reached otherwise.

The benefits of networking with other companies have been known for a long time, but LinkedIn takes it to a new level.  It allows companies to network with connections of other companies and thereby broaden their realm of influence.  In addition, when companies and individuals interact with each other, other individuals and companies see that activity; this has the same effect as the old-fashioned word-of-mouth advertising.

So how do you promote your company and increase sales with LinkedIn?   Here are a few tips to get you started:

• Follow the step-by-step instructions to create your company’s account.
• Share your LinkedIn profile as often as possible through the company website, business cards, letterhead, signatures, and other networking sites.
• Make as many connections as possible.  The more connections you make, the more you increase your company’s chances of being noticed.
• Join groups that pertain to your industry.  If there is not one, make one.  When creating a group, be sure to use keywords in the title and description.
• Use LinkedIn Answers to both ask and answer questions relative to the company’s field.  This helps in two ways.  The first is that a general feeling of goodwill is promoted through the sharing of information.  The second is that the company gains attention with each question and answer posted.
• Use LinkedIn to promote your company’s events.  When people see that their connections are attending, they will consider attending as well.
• Search with the Advanced Search options to narrow your target customer base and find the people that need your products and services.
• Make all communication a little personal by mentioning mutual contacts or shared interests.
• Make as much information as possible available to search engines.
• Search out your competitor’s profiles to see what directions they are taking and use the information to improve your company’s marketing techniques.

Linked In will definitely stick around for many years to come and will epitomize the business networking niche as time goes by.

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HigherVisibility

Not too long ago I needed to hire a lawyer. As I looked at different attorneys in the area I turned to Google Maps to find which ones had the most reviews and most positive reviews. Although I could have done a basic search in Google I find that when looking for local services a Maps search gives me a better list for consideration. I went to visit the lawyers in person that seemed credible from the reviews that I read. After visiting with the two different lawyers I found that the reviews online were a fair representation and decided to hire the lawyer that had more reviews than the other.

As we went through our business dealings with this lawyer (I am going to call him Chris from now on to simplify things) I noticed things he did to improve the amount of reviews he was getting online. Although Chris is a lawyer, I feel many of these same tips can be applied to any person or business that offers services locally.

1- Start Early and Look For Clues

During my first with Chris he wanted to know how I found out about him. This is a common practice for businesses because it helps identify what part of their marketing budget is working. I mentioned that I looked at online reviews during this discussion and Chris said he would greatly appreciate it if I would also provide a review when the services were provided.

While a sales person is trying to build rapport with a potential client it is easy to find out how technical an individual is. Once a sale is made to a tech savvy person you can plant the idea early on that it would be great if they would share their experience online through a review or social media.

2- Emphasize the Unique Value Proposition

When I was “sold” on going with Chris he emphasized his Unique Value Proposition (UVP). As I continued through the process with Chris I noticed him talking about his UVP, not in exact words usually but the same idea was expressed over and over. Chris was telling me what I could expect through the process and what he was doing to make sure that he delivered on what I was sold on. By doing this Chris was priming me to see the things that were unique to him and his practice.

3- Repeat it Often

Although my business with Chris was not a long and drawn out process I want to give some suggestions about how you can keep the review fresh in the minds of your clients even if your services stretch over a long period of time. Usually longer service contracts have bench marks or progress points where a client can assess the progress of the campaign. Every time you provide a win for the client, fulfill something you have promised them, or reach a goal be sure to inform them. With tact and preparation, the client-facing individuals in your company can get testimonials/reviews that can be used in sales material, website testimonials, or online reviews. When a client is happy with the progress on the project it is easy to ask them for permission to use what they say as a testimony. This can be as simple as: “Thanks. We try to provide great services here at XYZ. Although we are not done, I am seeing great success in this project. I like sharing successes stories with other clients in similar situations. Can I share part of what you have said to some of my other clients?” At this point you can identify what information can be shared and how many people it can be shared with.

4- Strike While the Iron is Hot

Chris was very helpful throughout the entire process. When we got done I was happy with the end results and so was Chris. Right as we were finishing up our business together Chris expressed his happiness with the results and he said something along the lines of: “I really would appreciate it if you would write a review about the great results we achieved. Can I send you an email with a link to a location where you can write a review?” There it was. He asked for a review right after we had experienced a win together.

5- Keep it Stupid Simple (That is right I switched Kiss to mean it needs to be stupidly simple)

When I got the email that he promised he would send I noticed several things.

• There was a live link to their Google Places page. I was already in my Gmail so I easily went and wrote a review.
• Chris re-emphasized the great results we had achieved together. None of this was new to me or something that had not been mentioned before, but it kept everything fresh in my mind so I did not need to search for things to say about the process.
• He included a brief set of directions on how to provide a review.
• I was thanked for my willingness to provide a review. This made me even happier to do so.

All of this was done in two short paragraphs because word economy is very important. If you have clients with a Yahoo email then send them a link to your Yahoo local listing. Likewise if you have someone with MSN or Hotmail accounts send them to your Bing local listing. If their email is some other type use your best guess. In any of these situations it would not hurt to provide the client with links to multiple locations where they could provide an online review or become a fan, follow, like, etc. These links could include Facebook Twitter or Yelp. Remember to make it as simple as absolutely possible.

Through this entire process I was able to learn how businesses can get better reviews for their sites. If you want more reviews or testimonials it is not always as simple as asking for these reviews. There are many things along the way that you can do as a business owner to encourage people to provide these reviews though the most important thing, of course, is to always provide a quality service.

Chris is an attorney not an online marketer yet he does things that really help out his online campaign. I am not sure that he even concisely did these things to encourage more interaction online. Once a company has a process for encouraging online interaction in place, implementing it could take just a few minutes each day yet have a huge impact in an online campaign.

To learn about how local search (posicionamiento en buscadores) works in more detail, watch this webinar Learn the Secrets of Google’s Local Search

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SEO.com

Image above: I’m only ranking at #113 for [seo] in “people and pages” but some of my best friends are around me

While everybody was writing posts what the new Google personal search aka “Google Search Plus Your World” means for SEO I almost started to write one about what Google Search Plus means for SEO 2.0

Then I decided to be more conservative and just summarized a few common sense hands on SEO techniques for Google Search Plus and personal search results.

Neither personal search or social search is new to Google. It’s just a huge leap forward this time after it has been a bit neglected in recent years.

Google+ and +1 are part of the main motivation behind this new move. Also, the so called link economy where many webmasters are buying links to game Google is the target.

Google wants to know who you are and what you like in order to ensure that low quality web sites do not get the attention they sometimes mistakenly still get on Google search.

We have to understand first that Google Search Plus has a two tiered approach. You get still in a way organic results where personal/social search results are mixed in prominently and you can click on the “personal results” link below the search box to see solely your own search results nobody else sees in that way:

Everybody who is logged in into one of the manifold Google services will see the the new personal search results sooner or later. Logged out users will get some very broad suggestions too. They mainly see suggested profiles on the right of search results:

To really use this feature you at least need a Google Profile and a Google+ membership

if you ask me. Then you need to have some people connect to you via Google+ or other services you are using with the notable exception of Facebook it seems. These services have to be linked on your Google Profile to count.

What more can you do?

Google Profile

• Connect other sites – Link all your other profiles and sites even less obvious ones like Friendfeed or WordPress.com
• Describe yourself – Your short “Occupation” description on your profile matters a lot it seems. Also your latest “Employment” seems to have a big impact. Mention your keyword here.
• Claim authorship – Use the new authorship markup by Google and link back to your Google Profile from your blog posts or respective bio below.

Images

• Use images on your blog – Images on my blog that are properly tagged show up in image results. Michael Gray‘s images do perform even better, they come in second even when I’m logged in
• Share images on Google+ – Images shared on Google+ rank as well quite obviously
• Upload images to your profile using Picasa – Your profile image but also other images uploaded to Picasa perform very well
• Practice image SEO – Consider common sense image SEO best practices like understandable file names instead of numbers.

Google+

• Use on topic circles – Create topical circles on Google+ – I write mainly about SEO, blogging and social media thus I created these three circles for examples (and a few more).
• Use Google+ actively and frequently – Activity counts, even feeding in Twitter updates automatically, pages and profiles by active people show up much higher
• Encourage feedback – Feedback like comments and shares is very important, some profiles with more controversial posts with lots of comments show on top
• Make many people add you to circles – The number of circles you are in counts, Danny Sullivan is in 300k circles so ends up being the suggested user for SEO despite listing at as only one topics he deals with
• Make sure you’re in the right circles – The names of the circles you are in counts as well so when you are selling SEO use the term to describe yourself not many others
• Let people link to you on profiles – The number of people who connect their profile to your site is  a factor thus make your employees link, this is one of the reasons the guys from Dejan SEO ranks so well.
• Participate in social networking – Socialize with relevant people who are on your level. I don’t expect Danny Sullivan or Rand Fishkin to +1 my posts, I will +1 theirs from time, but I focus on people who are into SEO etc. and have enough time to read my posts as well.
• Share circles – You can create and share circles with other people. They can add all of the people at once.

Blogging

• Use buttons – Add a +1 button to your blog postings. I use the WordPress extension by Pleer SEO.
• Write about Google+ – Blog about Google+ your profile, your page and what’s going on there.
• Use a badge – Add a Google+ badge to add you to “your circles” in the sidebar for example.
• Call to action – Ask people to +1 your postings with a little call to action in the last sentence and display the button below.
• Check shares – Monitor who shares your postings on Google+ using Topsy and add these people to your circles.

Google +1

• +1 quality and popular sites – Clicking +1 is a double edged sword. Your authority influences the things you vote up but also the sites you +1 are influencing your reputation. Vote up crap nobody else likes and you get less influential on Google as a whole not just Google+ They call it Agent Rank. I’m afraid by quality sites they mean mostly popular sites so you have to +1 main stream sources not only high quality niche sites.
• +1 sites you often use – To see the sites you really like on top you simply have to +1 them. The more you +1 them the more likely they are to appear on top.
• +1 your own sites – I don’t like this as I prefer other people to vote for me but it seems you have to vote for own sites and articles. It seems Google doesn’t dislike self-promotion unless of course your won sites are the only ones you push.
• +1 what’s on top – To get more exposure on other people’s results it seems you have to +1 what’s already on top in organic search. A woman I follow on Twitter linked to the Wikipedia definition of SEO on her private blog and now I see her on top of my search results. I had to look up who she is, she doesn’t even follow me back.

Google+ Page

• Add keyword to name – Use your keyword in the Google+ page description. Point Blank SEO ranks better than just Point Blank of course when it comes to [seo]. The Point Blank SEO team does not only rank because of the keyword, they have a hugely popular Google+ baiting post but it surely helps.
• Update frequently – It’s crucial to update your page regularly. You know Google loves content, it’s their business model that you provide free content for them so they reward those who do provide it. Also people like me do not follow empty pages unless they trust the source already.
• Socialize using your page – Companies can follow people on Google+ and +1 updates it seems. They can comment and share like any other user.

Other techniques

• Use keywords in titles – It seems post titles with the keyword mentioned more than once rank better in personal results.
• Use common words – You can optimize for common words again. When I search for car, house or even love I see personal results but most of them are not relevant, they keywords may match but in most cases the whole update may be completely irrelevant to me. So it’s good to provide a few updates using these simple terms if you care for them.
• Share off-topic – Do not only share work related content. Google+ is not like Facebook, you don’t have to share baby and per photos all the time but some occasional beauty and humor is great to make people happy and encourage engagement I’ve noticed. It’s better than just talking about SEO.

Thanks Niall Mackenzie for screenshots he provided for this post

These are just common sense SEO techniques for Google+, the SEO 2.0 part of it starts when engaging with people. This is a bit tougher and can’t fit in short list items easily. I think I will elaborate on it in the near future. I’m still testing and trying to find out myself what’s it all about.

I’m looking forward to it. I’m glad that SEO 2.0 has become main stream finally. You can’t ignore it anymore. Social media participation and outreach from now directly affects search results. It’s about time. I’ve got used to it in 2008 already when I added StumbleUpon to my search results. Google+ integration is even better.

You can’t be a bot anymore.

Get personal now. +1 this post if you like it and join me on Google+!

Also please share more techniques on how to optimize for the new Google Search Plus Your World in the comments.

Related posts:

1. 10 New Google Personal Search Blogging, Social Media & SEO Tactics
2. 12 Effects Google Personal Search Will Have on SEO, Blogging, Social Media and the Web as Whole
3. Image SEO for Photographers and Other Visual Artists

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Source
SEO 2.0

In a further effort to make search results more relevant to it users, Google will begin to provide more personalized search results for users of the fledgling Google+ social networking service. The new service will draw search results by drawing on the photos, news and comments posted from within the Google+ network and should be rolled out in the next few days.

A new service called "Search, Plus Your World" will display users own content from Google+, along with posts from friends, said Amit Singhal, who focuses on improving information retrieval at Mountain View, California-based Google. If someone searched for a dog, for instance, pictures of friends’ dogs might show up first in their search results.

"At Google, we always want to return the most comprehensive and relevant answers to your questions, and many times those answers are in the open public Web, but many times those answers are in your own personal content," Singhal said. "This is the first time we’re bringing personal content right into the results page."

Other changes to the Google search include a new feature called “Profiles in Search” which will include an auto complete function that will display links to your friends (from Google+) accounts while typing in queries in to the search box on Google. The new service will also offer suggestions of people to follow. This information will be drawn from Google+ accounts or from Google’s photo-sharing service, Picasa.

Despite its best efforts, Google still struggles to compete with the social media giant Facebook. As of October 2010, Google had 40 million users, compared to the 800 million Facebook users.

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Beanstalk’s SEO News Blog