A run down of the recent changes being made to Google and how you can use them to your advantage.

The Internet is buzzing about all of the new changes coming to Google search. Facebook, Twitter and dozens of other social media sites are in a collective uproar, racing to find a way to fight back. But it’s just you and your WordPress blog. Maybe you have a Facebook or Twitter account. Maybe you even have a Google+ account. Now it’s time to take that extra step. 65% of all searches are on Google (U.S.). Like it or not, these changes are going to affect you. The good news is you can use them your advantage. And the sooner you start the better.

What’s This All About?

Basically, Google made three significant changes to its search functionality. The first is called personalized results, results tailored to your interests and the interests of your friends. The second is profile search, an easy way to see your friends’ Google+ profiles using the Google platform. The last is related people and pages. A sidebar has been added to Google search results that offer up Google+ profiles that match your search, as well as comments and posts from your friends. At the center of all these changes is increased integration with the Google+ platform to make searching a more interactive and collective experience.

What Can I Do?

Unfortunately, if you sit idly by and passively observe this modification, your blog may suffer the consequence. Lucky for you, WordPress is pretty SEO friendly out of the box and with a few simple steps you can get on the right track. The first thing you should do is create a Google+ page if you do not already have one (Click here to sign-up). Your interests and activities will be very important, so add interests that relate to your blog content and audience. Don’t try and include everything, but make sure that each section is filled out with at least a few. Reach out to any friends you have with a profile and add them to your circles.

You’ll also want to let Google know what blog(s) you are contributing to, so they can match up your profile with search results. To do this, click on edit profile. You will see a contributor box in this section. Type in the name and URL of the sites that you write for. Make sure that your contact info is completely up to date.

If you have a blog with multiple authors, you will want to create a Google+ page for the blog as well. That way all of your authors can join your blog’s circle and Google will have a clearer sense of how everything is connected.

The Right Tools

Your final step will be to complete the circle and integrate your blog with Google+. Chances are you’ve already been engaging with social media, adding like buttons for Facebook, Twitter and Digg or providing links for your audience to follow you on these sites. You should definitely tack on a Google 1up button. Plugins like WP Socializer or Simple Likebuttons make this a fairly painless process and connect your blog to the most popular social media sites.

There are also some other plugins that may help you out. You can pick and choose which is right for you, but they will help build your Google+ exposure.

• Google+ for Page: Add a simple badge to your WordPress posts that allow users to easily add you to their circles and view your Google+ profile.
• WPGPlus: A new plugin that is gaining some traction will post your WordPress posts to your Google+ page so your followers are always updated.
• Google Plus: A kind of all-in-one plugin which will add Google+ buttons, easy access to your profile and a list of who is following you, and a Stream which will show your recent Google+ posts on your blog. You will need an API to make this work, which you can sign up for here. It’s a little more complicated than the others but is very robust and expandable.

A Little Help From Your Friends

The bottom line is, the bigger your audience, the more likely you are to be paired up with relevant searches. Still, you never want to put all of your eggs in the same basket. It’s best to diversify and reach out to readers who share your interests on several different platforms. It’s always better to engage with devoted fans then accumulate a mass of passive ones. Think of this as an opportunity, Google+ is just another way to get a little help from a massive online community.

Don’t forget to join RichWP on Google+!

Does your website seem to take forever to load? Are your visitors not making it past your homepage out of frustration? Are you producing useful content and optimizing your site for search engines, and wondering why your site still ranks so low? The speed of your website can be nearly as important as your content, design, and features, and can be the difference between users staying on your site, or going to your competitors.

Having a fast-loading website can greatly improve your user’s experience, keep your visitors on your site much longer, and improve your search rankings (Google uses page speed as a page ranking criteria).

One of the easiest and most efficient ways to improve the speed of your WordPress site is by caching. In about only 15 minutes, you can greatly reduce the time it takes for your WordPress site to load by using the free W3 Total Cache plugin. My own website went from having a page load time of 69 (based on Google Page Speed) prior to installing Total Cache, to 97 after installing the plugin and using the settings detailed below.

A great thing about W3 Total Cache is that includes functionality that previously required the use of multiple plugins to achieve. In addition to caching every aspect of your website, Total Cache includes easy integration with CDNs, features built-in minification, advanced caching options and more.

This article takes you step-by-step though setting up and optimizing W3 Total Cache for your site, as well as a section detailing how to set up and integrate Total Cache with Amazon’s CloudFront CDN. While these settings had a great result for my site, the needs of your specific site might vary. That said, using W3 Total Cache even with the default settings should give your site a significant performance boost. You can tinker endlessly with different caching options and expiration settings, but the goal of this article is to help you understand each option, and let you set up the plugin so you can forget about it and focus on your design and content.

Let’s get started!

Installing W3 Total Cache

Like most WordPress plugins, W3 Total Cache can be easily installed through the Plugins section of your WordPress admin screen, although it does require a few of additional quick steps:

1. Deactivate (and delete, if possible) any other caching plugin you are using.

2. Temporarily set your wp-content and wp-content/uploads/ folders to chmod 777. Using your favorite FTP client (such as Cyberduck or FileZilla), right click on the ‘wp-content’ folder. If using Cyberduck, select ‘Info’. Click on the Permissions tab, and change the permissions to ‘777’ and press Enter. Using FileZilla, right click and select ‘File Permissions’. -Repeat this for the wp-content/uploads/ folder.

3. Install and activate the Total Cache plugin through the Plugins section your WordPress admin screen.

4. Go back to your FTP client and change wp-content and wp-content/uploads back to chmod 755.

Once W3 Total Cache is installed, you will see a new section on your WP admin screen titled ‘Performance’. The Total Cache options panel is divided up into several sections, including General, Page Cache, Minify, Database Cache and several others.

General Settings

Let’s first go over each section on the General page of Total Cache. Think of the General tab/page as the dashboard where you can turn each type of caching and function on and off. Detailed settings for each individual option will be covered later in this article.

Page Cache

Pages on your website consist mainly of content, images, and styling (CSS). Web servers typically have to dig through several folders and files, pull information from several sources, and then output the information as a complete webpage. This takes time, especially when the server tries to handle several requests at the same time, which can slow down your site and increase page load time. Instead of piecing together the page on the fly, page caching takes the entire output and stores it as a static html file. This lets the server retrieve the information much faster, helping your pages load almost instantly.

Recommended Settings:

Minify

Minify is a great feature that can speed up your website by shrinking the size of your CSS, Javascript, and HTML files. Minify will remove things like unneeded spacing and comments from your code.

Minify includes both ‘Auto’ and ‘Manual’ options. If you select ‘Auto’, the detailed settings on the ‘Minify’ tab of Total Cache will basically be ignored.

Important: If you want to use a CDN for your minify files, you must select ‘Manual’. If you use a CDN and select ‘Auto’, the minified files will be served directly from your (ie, your hosting company’s) servers, and not the CDN. I personally prefer this method, as it can make updating your site easier. CDN’s are discussed in more detail further on in this post.

Recommended Settings:

Database Cache

Being that WordPress sites run on a database, database caching can greatly improve you’re site’s load time. W3 Total Cache can cache all database queries within a specified time frame.

Recommended Settings:

Object Cache

Object Caching is the caching of thing like images, videos and documents on a web page. Object Caching stores a copy of each object so each object can be served directly from the cache. Objects, such as images, are typically not modified often once you post them, so caching objects for long periods of time can help improve you site’s load time. The increase of speed you might see from object caching can vary based on the drives your host is running.

Recommended Settings:

Browser Cache

Browser caching reduces the amount of requests your server makes every time someone visits your site. Each time someone visits your site, their web browser stores a copy of your site. On the next time they visit your site, their browser will check whether any changes have been made since their last visit. If changes have been made, it will load the new version. If no changes have been made, it will load the copied version. This can greatly improve the speed of your site since your server does not have to handle so many requests at the same time.

Recommended Settings (this is one of the main reasons you installed this plugin, so in case it’s not obvious, enable this):

CDN - Content Delivery Network

One of the great things about W3 Total Cache is that it includes support for several popular CDNs including Amazon CloudFront, MaxCDN, Rackspace Cloud Files and others. While these are paid services, they are typically quite affordable, with services like Amazon CloudFront averaging only a few dollars a month. A CDN (Content Delivery Network) is a network of servers that delivers a web page to users based on their geographic location. The closer a website visitor is to the server, the faster the content will be delivered to them. Your hosting company might be based in the U.S., but by using a CDN, a visitor to your site living in Germany can have your site automatically delivered by a server in Germany, for example. So, even if you don’t see a significant improvement in your site’s speed after enabling a CDN, many of your website visitors will notice a big improvement.

CDNs function as either ‘origin push’ or ‘origin pull’. With origin push, the CDN acts like a second host. You upload all your files to the CDN (this can be automated through W3 Total Cache), and the CDN caches and serves the content from their servers. The benefit to using origin push is that you can specify what content is uploaded, when it is uploaded, and when it expires. The downside, is that every time you make changes to things like your CSS and theme files, you have to manually re-upload them to the CDN. With some CDNs, such as Amazon CloudFront, uploading an updated file unfortunately won’t just overwrite the previous file. You have to send an invalidation request, or rename your files. If you are like me, and are constantly tinkering with the design and layout of your site, using origin push can be a bit challenging. In other words, origin push gives you more control, but also more work.

With origin pull, rather than having to upload all your files to the CDN, the CDN looks at your current servers, pulls the information for you, and then serves it to your visitors. You simply leave your content on your
server, and rewrite your URLs to point to the CDN (again, W3 Total Cache makes this a quick and painless process). The CDN will then cache the files, and serve those files until they expire. Using origin pull can make your site slower for users the first time they visit your site, but it will be fast once it caches your files. Besides being very easy to set up, the other great thing about origin pull is that changes you make to your site are updated on the CDN very quickly. I personally prefer origin pull to origin push, as it requires less work and is easier to use.

If you chose to use a CDN, you have to set up an account with a CDN and configure your account on the CDN tab before enabling this. CDN options are discussed it even greater length further on in this post.

Recommended Settings:

Varnish & CloudFlare

Varnish Cache and CloudFlare are two 3rd party web application accelerators that can be used in place of many of the features included with W3 Total Cache (CloudFlare also offers additional services such as security protection and analytics as well). As I do not have experience using either of these services, they will not be discussed at length in this post, but feel free to leave a comment if you’ve used either of them.

Detailed Settings

Page Cache – Detailed Settings

Once you’ve enabled Page Cache on the General page, clicking on the Page Cache link at the top of your screen will bring you to the detailed settings page.

Make sure ‘Cache Home Page’ and ‘Cache Feeds’ are both selected. Being that your homepage is typically the most visited page on your site, it should go without saying that it is important for it to be cached. ‘Cache SSL requests’ is only recommended if you are using SSL, which generally requires a license certificate. If you are not sure whether your site uses SSL, if your browser displays ‘https://’ in your URL, your site uses SSL; If it displays ‘http://’, it does not. The ‘Cache URI’s with query string variables’ option caches things like search results. To the best of my knowledge, this is not supported in Disk-Enhanced mode, so we are going to leave this unchecked.

‘Don’t cache pages for logged in users’ is an interesting option. One downside to WordPress is it can be tough to use for ‘staging’, meaning there is not a great way for you (as an admin) to view changes to your site before making the changes live. Enabling this feature can accomplish this for many sites. This feature essentially disables the page cache for you, while keeping it on for your visitors. So you can view changes to your site, while your visitors will be served a cached version of your site until the cache is cleared. The catch to this is that it applies to all ‘logged in’ users; not just admins. So if your site allows visitors to create accounts and log in, this won’t be ideal.

Lastly, caching 404 pages is only needed for certain sites (typically older sites) that have a lot of broken links. Assuming your site is up to date, this option does not need to be enabled.

The General Page Cache settings should look like this:

For the ‘Advanced’ Page Cache settings, you should be fine with leaving it with the default settings. Set the Garbage Collection Interval to 3600 seconds, and leave ‘Never Cache The Following Pages’ set to wp-.*\.php and index\.php. If you
have a page on your site that is constantly changing, you can add it to the ‘never cache’ list.

In the Cache Preload section, you can select ‘Automatically prime the page cache’, set the update interval to 900 seconds, set Pages per interval to 10, enter enter the URL of your sitemap. The Google XML Sitemaps plugin can automate the sitemap creation and updates for you.

Lastly, for the ‘Purge Policy’ section, you should be fine with the default settings.

Minify – Detailed Settings

This page gives you the ability to set up the URL rewrites, and enable minification of HTML, CSS, and Javascript. *One important thing to note is that if your site runs JQuery, you should disable the JS minification.

Database Cache & Object Cache – Detailed Settings

In most cases, the detailed Database Cache and Object Cache settings can be left as the default settings.

For Database Cache, keep ‘Don’t cache queries for logged in users’ selected. For both the Database and Object caches, the ‘Maximum lifetime of cache objects’ can stay at 180 seconds, and the ‘Garbage collection interval’ can stay at 3600 seconds. If you have any pages that rely heavily on database queries, you can add them to the ‘Never cache the following pages’ field.

Browser Cache – Detailed Settings

For the Browser Cache, I have nearly all of the settings checked except for caching after a settings change and 404 errors:

Below are the settings I use for CSS and JS:

Below are recommended settings for HTML & XML:

And here are the settings for Media & Other Files:

CDN (Content Delivery Network) – Detailed Settings

If you are using a CDN, you’ll have to decide what you’ll want to use the CDN for. You can have your CDN serve all your files, or you can decide to just use it for things like images and theme files. As noted earlier, my personal preference is to mainly use the CDN for serving images, and not CSS and JS.

If you have ‘Auto’ selected on the Minify details page, the option to select ‘Host minified CSS and JS files’ will be greyed out on this page.

Important: Be careful with the option to ‘Import external media library attachments’. If, when writing a post in WordPress, you upload an image to the Media Library, and then add the image by using an img tag, for example, that is
considered an ‘image attachment’. If you copy images from other sites into posts, those are also considered attachments. This option will upload those images hosted by other sites onto your server, and then to Amazon. If you use in-post galleries, image attachments are generally kept separate from the gallery. I learned the hard way that checking this option in total cache will result in all your attached images being automatically added to the gallery.

Setting up a CDN using Amazon CloudFront

Lastly, I will walk you through the steps of setting up Amazon CloudFront as a CDN using W3 Total Cache. When setting up CloudFront for the first time on my site, I ran into several issues. I read through several tutorials covering the CloudFront setup process, and found most of them confusing. Amazon offers very detailed information about Cloudfront and their other services, but while Amazon is great at developing products, let’s just say that writing easy-to-understand documentation is not their strong suit. I will try to describe Amazon CloudFront simply, and to the best of my understanding.

Using Amazon CloudFront requires that you first set up an account with Amazon Web Services (AWS). The remainder of this post assumes that you have already done that.

There are two aspects of Amazon Web Services that we are concerned with here: CloudFront and S3 (Simple Storage Service). CloudFront is the Content Delivery Network, and S3 is online storage. S3 is used in conjunction with your current web host. Both S3 and CloudFront are paid services, but are very affordable, and you only pay for what you use (CloudFront should cost you somewhere in the area of $1-$3 a month for small site).

CDNs function either as origin push or origin pull.

- Origin Push: You upload your files (including theme files, images, CSS files, and Javascript libraries) onto S3. Your files are stored in what are referred to as ‘Buckets’. Buckets are simply containers that will hold your folders and files. CloudFront then copies the files from your buckets to local servers around the world. CloudFront will then grab your files from the S3 servers, and then serve them on your website.

- Origin Pull: Origin pull bypasses the need for S3 (although my understanding is that you still must create a bucket on S3, even though CloudFront doesn’t use it). Instead of grabbing info from their S3 servers, the CDN will pull the info from your (or your hosting provider’s) servers. When someone in England, for example, visits your site for the first time, CloudFront will store your site on a server in England. Subsequent request from England will then be served by that server.

As I stated earlier, origin pull is an easier method to use, since pushing out updates to files once they are stored on S3 presents some challenges that require some additional steps.

Let’s get started with setting up Amazon CloudFront.

1. Enable CDN. Enable the CDN on the W3 Total Cache General page. Select Amazon CloudFront from the pull-down menu (either pull or push).

2. Configure S3. Log on to Amazon Web Services, and click on the ‘S3’ tab. Click ‘Create Bucket’ on the left side of your screen. Enter a Bucket Name (this can just be the name of your website, for example). Click ‘Create’.

3. Enter Credentials. We now have to get a couple pieces of information from your Amazon Web Services account to link it with Total Cache. In AWS, click on your name in the top right corner, and then select ‘security
credentials’. Scroll down to the table pictured below.

Copy & Paste the Access Key ID and Secret Key into the corresponding fields on the Total Cache CDN page.

4. Create a Distribution. Enter a name for your distribution in the origin field (this can be something like yoursite.com) and then click ‘Create Distribution’. Replace Site’s Hostname should then
automatically be filled in with random characters. Click the ‘Test CloudFront distribution’ button to make sure it works. Click the ‘Save all Settings’ button.

5. Check the Distribution. Go back to the CloudFront tab in AWS. You should see the newly created distribution. It will take a little while to download, depending on how much content you have on your site.

6. Set up a CNAME. Without setting up a CNAME, your images will have an Amazon web address. With a few steps, you can change it to your own name (such as images.yoursite.com, or media.yoursite.com).

Open up your hosting Control Panel (this may vary depending on your host). Scroll down to ‘Domains’ and click ‘Simple DNS Zone Editor’. Fill in the CNAME record fields. For the Name, use something like images.yoursite.com. For the CNAME field,
you’ll need to go back to the CloudFront tab in Amazon Web Services. Where is says Domain Name, you will see something like h2j4uj5k8xnm6.cloudfront.net. Copy & Paste than into the CNAME field on your hosting control panel.

7. Add CNAME to AWS. Go back to the CloudFront tab in AWS. Right Click on the CNAMEs field next to your distribution and click ‘Edit. Enter your CNAME in the corresponding field and click ‘Yes, Edit’.

8. Add CNAME to Total Cache. Go back to the Total Cache CDN page. Press the ‘Add CNAME’ button, and enter your CNAME (you can leave the ‘Replace site’s hostname with’ field alone). Press Save All Settings’.

If you are using origin pull, you can check to make sure CloudFront is working properly. Open up your website, right click on an image, and select ‘open in new tab’. The URL of the image should now start with your CNAME.

9. Additional Steps for Origin Push. If you are using origin push, there will be buttons on the top of the Total Cache CDN page. Use them to automatically upload the different types of files you want stored on S3. Once your files are uploaded, Go to the S3 panel in AWS and select your bucket. Right click on each folder in the bucket, and select Make Public. If you do not set your folders as public, CloutFront will not be able to retrieve them from S3.

You’re all done!

While it might seem like a lot of steps, setting up W3 Total Cache and Amazon CloudFront is a pretty quick process that can have a huge effect on the speed and performance of your site. Don’t forget to check your site’s speed with a service such as Google Page Speed (which is free, and available online, as well as an extension for the Chrome browser) after configuring total cache. Hopefully you and your visitors will be quite happy with the results.

However, every once in a while my stubbornness proves to be an asset.

Before I tell you how, I need to let you know one more thing about me: I strongly dislike social media. I have very little time and patience for it.

I can’t imagine hanging out on Twitter, Facebook, and/or Google+ all day just to get some of my blogging friends to come back to my blog and leave me a comment – doesn’t help me to build up my business whatsoever.

Let’s face it: most of us are online to make money, and social media is a productivity killer that has dubious results on your bottom line.

Yet this post is all about social media. Google+ to be more precise. If you are in a business to make money from your business, you want to pay attention to this.

Back to my stubbornness.

A few weeks ago, I wrote a review about a product that had a lot of potential to make it big. My review was very well optimized for all on-page factors, like title, description, header tags, etc., plus I built quite a few quality in-content links from other blogs.

There was absolutely no reason why that review should not have appeared in the top 5 spots (at the very least) for the product name. Yet, it didn’t.

I waited. Built more links. Checked out my competition, which by the way, had barely any links to their reviews.

Nothing.

Remember, I am stubborn, right? Plus, my reputation was on the line. After all, I teach my readers and clients how to drive more traffic to their sites from the search engines, and here I was, couldn’t rank my own stinking post for a very easy keyword.

Long story short, I did manage to finally rank my post, after I changed a few things in it (I bet you are curious what it is that I did, but I’ll have to disappoint you: that’s not what this post is about. LOL)

At that point, I started asking all my SEO friends why they thought my review was nowhere to be found on the first page of Google.

They really didn’t know. HOWEVER, one of them gave me a very valuable piece of information, that was staring at me right in the eye, and yet I never gave it a second thought in the past.

My friend said:

“Ana, you have nothing to worry about. Even though your post is not technically ranking on the first page, it’s STILL showing on the first page for most people who are connected with you via social networks.”

BINGO!

Let’s take a look at a live example of what I mean.

When I do a search for “premium wordpress theme” on Google, this is who I see in spots #5 and 6 out of some 17+ million results:

However, if I perform the same search via Google Incognito (which is really the best way to see the most impartial search results not affected by any personalizations), neither one of those 2 blogs are to be found on the first three pages.

As you can tell from the image above, the only reason I see those two results is because I am connected via Google+ with the bloggers themselves, plus some of our mutual friends gave those posts a +1.

Now that Felix and I are connected on Google+ as well, I bet his blog will start showing for anything “wordpress theme” related in my searches as well.

Let’s break it down a bit and see what lies in the core of this phenomenon and how we can take advantage of it.

Google Personalized Search

It’s no secret that Google is rapidly moving towards “personalized search”. What that basically means is that no two people see the same search results for the same search, because their results are highly influenced by their location, which Google database center they are the closest to, as well as who they know.

That last factor is still fairly new, but it’s quickly moving to become one of the most important determinations on what shows up on the first page of Google FOR YOU.

That’s why most of my readers who are connected with me on all kinds of social networks, ESPECIALLY Google+, see my blog as one of the top results for any given number of keywords, even though I don’t actually rank for them.

But How Does Google Know Who You Are?

I’ve heard this argument before. “But Ana, don’t people need to be logged in to Google to get search results personalized according to their social media connections? How many people really stayed logged in?”

Glad you asked and I am ready to put this issue to rest once a for all.

A couple of weeks ago, Google implemented SSL search. It pretty much caused an uproar in webmaster community, since it affected how Google Analytics shows (or doesn’t show, I should say) the keywords that bring in the search engine traffic.

According to Matt Cutts of Google, only about 4% of all searches would be affected by this though, since SSL search is all about users who are actually logged into their Google accounts at the time of search.

I wrote a post about it soon after the search was implemented and the Google Analytics screenshot I used in that post seemed to support that 4% number.

Not provided” are the keywords that Google doesn’t want me to see due to SSL search. And no, the number is not significant indeed – only 43 visits (still annoying though).

However, look at this screenshot from my Google Analytics taken about 2 weeks after SSL search was implemented.

26%!!!

OK, so this is a long way to explain that Google is ever-present in our lives, people DO stayed logged into their Google accounts, Google DOES control what an individual searcher might see in his/her results, and we need to get on top of this.

What Does It Have to Do with Making Money?

As we are well aware, search engines are one of the best, most targeted, and cheapest (as in “free” – doesn’t get any better than that) traffic generation methods out there. If you manage to rank highly for money-making keywords, then you are as good as golden, since most of your search engine traffic will come to your site READY TO BUY.

And you now have a great workaround for ranking highly for those keywords, IF that is you start paying more attention to social media.

I know, I know. It’s social media. Who has the time for it?

However, if you spend your time doing link building, improving your on-page optimization, etc. – all that SEO stuff to rank your site higher for good keywords, isn’t using social media the smart way gets you there as well, just a lot faster?

Practical Tips on Increasing Your Google+ Followers

It comes down to this: The more people you are connected to on Google+ specifically, but also on other social media networks like Twitter and Facebook, the better your site will rank on Google, the more traffic you’ll bring from the search engines, and ultimately the more money you’ll make.

That’s a good reason to start mingling, don’t you think?

Here are some practical tips on how to get connected with more people on G+:

1. Add a Google+ badge.

I’d add it to the sidebar, as well as under each post.

You can get the code for your button here: https://developers.google.com/+/plugins/badge/config

2. Ask your readers.

Sometimes it’s as simple as “Would you mind giving this post a +1?”

3. Import your Facebook friends to G+

The best way to do it is to use your Yahoo! email account as a go-between.

All you do is:

1. Log into your Yahoo! account (create one if you don’t have it yet);
2. Go under Contacts ==> Tools ==> Import
3. Choose Facebook to import contacts from and follow the instructions.
4. Import them to G+ (Circles >> Find People >> Yahoo)

Tip: I am sure you don’t really want all these contacts to linger around in your Yahoo! contact list after the export. You can easily delete them by going into “Contacts” and changing “View All Contacts” to “View Last Import“. Check all and delete.

4. Import your Twitter Followers to G+

The best solution I found for exporting your Twitter followers is to use Simply Measured.

To import to G+: Go to Circles >> Find People >> Adress Book
 

Word of caution: Google Plus has currently set a limit on how many names you can import at a time at 4,000. So if you have more Twitter followers than that, you’ll have to manually edit your CVS file: delete extra contacts or separate them into different files.

5. Send an email to your list.

If you have a list (which you should), ask them to join you on G+.

As a matter of fact, my email template includes a link to my G+ profile, so my subscribers see it in every email I send.

Marketing Takeaway

And there you have it. If all this hasn’t convinced you that Google+ is actually worth your time, I don’t know what else will.

Don’t forget to join Felix on Google+!
And I’d love it if you joined me while at it as well.

Dealing with all the technical concepts of SEO isn’t necessary. I will show what shortcuts to take and how to wrap your mind around complicated, technical SEO issues and theories. Before I teach you my “simple” approach to this subject, let me sum up what the key elements of SEO are and from where SEO has evolved.

A Brief History of SEO

In the early days of search engines, webmasters quickly discovered that it was key to get listed as high and as often as possible within the search engine results, to drive a meaningful amount of traffic to their websites. In the early days it was enough to put a handful of keywords and a nice description into the meta-tags of an html document, and you got a listing. Soon, other elements like page title and the usage of keywords within a page’s content (keyword-density) were taken into consideration to deliver more accurate results. It got fancier and more sophisticated but people always figured out how to cheat the system and manipulate the search results by tweaking those so-called on-page factors. Then Google came around and added a bunch of off-page factors to its search algorithm. The way Google engineers tried to rank the most relevant pages was by first counting incoming links to your websites.

The more people that link to your site or to an article of yours, the more important and relevant it must be (social proof). Manipulating the number of incoming links from relevant outside pages isn’t as easy as stuffing a bunch of keywords into your own texts. Besides that, if other sites are referring back to your writings, it is probably safe to assume that you deliver a certain amount of value.

See it as a scientific paper. The more your work is mentioned and recognized within the scientific community, the more your reputation in your field of expertise grows. Sure, spam site owners got out and built link-farms to manipulate those off-page factors, but Google got pretty good and fast at penalizing sites that use those so-called “black-hat” SEO techniques. What I will show you next is considered “white-hat” search engine optimization and is done completely without any “grey-” or “black-hat” manipulation techniques.

Starting out

Let’s just use a career as a scientist in a field of your choice as a framework to explain how easily SEO can be done, even if the algorithms the search engines use get more and more complicated.

You have just graduated from University with honors and you are considering taking on a career in the world of science. Not many of your colleagues outside of your own university know you yet, but you are highly motivated to get your research for your PhD started. You had a proper education and have built the foundation of your future success in your field of choice.

Translated into the world of a blogger, you know what you are writing about and are ready to put forth the effort and do whatever it takes to be successful. Set your mind on your goals. Nothing is more important. It won’t be an easy ride to the top. The competition in the blogging world is stiff and plenty. You will fall. Everybody falls. Your future success is determined by how often and how fast you get up on your feet again to continue your journey.

Keyword Research

When you just get started in science and you want to tackle the “Great Theorie of Life the Universe and Everything” right from the start, you will probably get burned and marked as a fantast and dreamer. What you want to do is to find that niche that is in great demand, but where not a lot has been published yet. This goes for every paper, for every report, and for every post and article.

At university when you had a project, you probably asked your professor about how to get started and found the first topic on which to base your paper. As a blogger, your professor most certainly will be Google. You have already chosen what your blog will be about, so let’s do some research to find out what your first post should cover.

Head over to Google and type in your blog’s main topic. For the sake of the example above, let’s start with the search term “geography” (without the quotes). If you search for that term you get 173,000,000 results. If you write an article and try to get good rankings for the keyword “geography” you probably won’t be very successful. It is too broad. Let us go deeper.

Let us do a search for the term “physical geography” (this time using the quotes). OK, we were able to cut down the results to 3,250,000. This is still way too broad. We have to go even deeper.

I am interested in deserts and I am fascinated by Death Valley. Let’s try to search for “physical geography” “death valley” (to filter out irrelevant results, use the quotes as stated). Now we are dealing with 12,200 results. That is way better. Now turn to the Google Keyword Tool to find out if there actually is a demand for that subject.

Are people searching for this topic? What are they actually typing into the search box to find what they are looking for? On the left you find a box that lets you choose how you want to generate keyword ideas. Let us use the “Descriptive words or phrases” search first.

Type “physical geography” into the first line and “death valley” (both without the quotes) into the second line and hit the “Get Keyword ideas” button. Have a look at the “Global Monthly Search Volume.” Don’t take the numbers too seriously, but they still give you a rough idea about what people are searching for.

Now take “death valley landforms,” for instance, and perform a normal Google search for it. Google shows you 16,300 results. Have a look at the results; do they match that exact key phrase you are looking for? Go through the results, and check how relevant they are. If you would be interested in finding out everything about the landforms in Death Valley, would you be satisfied with the results Google has provided you? You know that people are actually searching for this keyword and you are confident that you can provide more relevant information for people searching for “death valley landforms.” You probably have a winner here. Congratulations, you have found a keyword or key phrase on which to base your first article.

If you find a site with valuable and useful content in it, try to generate keyword ideas by letting the Keyword Tool to analyze the website’s content.

There is currently no rule about the exact numbers you should consider. What you are looking for is basically a niche with not too much competition which is in demand. Saying that the 12,200 results I mentioned in the example above is the number to go for is nonsense. Get a feel for the number of keywords and key phrases in your niche. And use them as a rough guideline to write several posts for your blog, which will provide you with a long-term flow of interested readers to your blog.

A SEO Plugin

I promised you that you won’t have to deal with too many technical issues. Here is one exception, but I am sure most of you are able to install a PlugIn on the WordPress system. There are a number of good SEO solutions for WordPress out there. I currently use the All in One SEO Pack. Get it installed. You will be able to use a page title that actually differs from your post title and it lets you fill out the classical meta-tags like “keywords” and “description.” The way I think about it is that those three elements (page title, meta-keywords, meta-description) should form a closed unit. Another important element to consider is the permalink of your post. If you have not already set up the permalinks for your blog, do it now. Keep it simple. The simpler your permalink structure, the better it is.

If you have done your keyword research for an article, use those keywords and -phrases in your page title and permalink and build them into the meta description. That the keyword or key phrase should also be the only keyword in the meta-keyword section is a no-brainer. While the page title and permalink is still a relevant on-site SEO element, we don’t have to argue about the direct relevance of meta-tags on search results. They are meaningless to non-existent, but there is a twist.

Advertise Your Articles and Posts

Since the page title and meta-description is often used by search engines to actually present your site in their results, you should look at them and use them as a direct advertising message to hunt for potential readers. They are nothing less than a text-ad and should be chosen carefully. For other businesses I do a lot of AdWords. Those are the little ads that Google shows above and on the right site of the organic search result. Making small changes in the titles of those ads or just by twisting the two lines of text, the effectiveness of an ad can increase or decrease dramatically. The same goes for the page title and meta-description and even for your permalink, which is similar to the display URL of a Google ad. I told you, SEO isn’t just a technical field anymore. Your page title and your site description should be written to attract humans, not machines like search engine spiders and robots.

Don’t promise what you can’t keep, but write a nice appealing ad for your great and valuable articles and blog posts and you will become successful. Remember: Content is King.

Example

Imagine you would like see the following results appearing for the search term “death valley landforms”:

Death Valley Landforms
In-depth explanations of the variety of the landforms in Death Valley, Nevada.
Death Valley landforms and other Death Valley curiosities explained.
www.landformsandgeography.com/death-valley-landforms

or

Geological Landform Interpretation, Death Valley June 18th, 1999
Free Online Library: Geology Facts of Death Valley National Park: Landforms…
Geologic History, Maps and Guides, 5th ed. (Brief Article, Book Review) …
www.freenononsensearticles.com/DV-a0142887019.php?id=63729…

If you would have clicked on result no. 1, welcome to my world. Have a look at how Google highlights the actual search term within the results.

Direct Marketing Simulator

If you want to get fancy, run some Google ads to find the perfect title for your post by split testing different alternatives. Check if you can figure out a way to structure the description by playing around with the two lines of text. AdWords doesn’t allow you to have enough characters to test a whole 160 character meta-description, but you will get a feeling for what your audience is responding to. Play around a bit with cheap non-commercial keywords and send the traffic directly to your post until you get a feeling for what people are actually clicking on.

Again, the key is to look at the page title, the meta-description and the permalink as marketing material. It is a text-ad for your site or article.

A warning: If you have no former experience with AdWords and you have no idea about what you are doing, educate yourself first. Otherwise, you could waste a lot of money. A good resource for that is Perry Marshall’s “Definitive Guide to Google AdWords.” Get the basics down and start experimenting.

For keywords and key phrases with no or little commercial interest, you can probably drive traffic for as little as 4 to 8 cents per click/visitor. How would you like to pay only about $5 dollars a day for 100 interested and highly targeted visitors? Could that build the momentum you desperately need in the beginning? Could some of them be converted into long-term returning readers and RSS subscribers?

Building Reputation

Like a scientist who is striving for his career, you have written a couple of well researched and valuable articles. By doing this on a regular basis, you are slowly building a presence in your field of expertise and people start noticing your work and referring others to your articles. You are on your way to building a reputation for what you are doing. The further down this road you travel, the higher up you get in the ranks.

By having focused on building a great foundation, you will now be able to broaden your view and put the pieces together. You have served a lot of little niches and now you will be in a position to take all those isolated theories and conclusions and challenge the established theories to leave your mark.

By that, I mean that you could write a bigger article for, let’s say, “The Physical Geography of Death Valley.” This article will include pieces and references to and from your post about “Death Valley landforms” as well as about “Death Valley climate”, the “rock formations,” the “fluvial erosions,” etc. I think you get the idea.

Google thinks about this in a similar way. They call it “aging.” It is basically nothing more than reputation building. As a young hotshot you will have to start small and you may get good rankings in some niches. If more and more sites which are relevant to the topic of your blog are linking to your work, your reputation will grow. For websites, like in the world of science, you can only reach a higher rank on the social ladder over time. You have to be consistent in what you are doing and build your reputation in a natural way (i.e., no link farms; there is no cheating).

If you are an aging, senior professor with a long list of significant publications in reputable magazines, you are on top of your career. People know you; you are the expert everybody is referring to. In other words, you are successful and where you want to be.

What the Future Holds

The algorithms of the major search engines develop and change over time and we will certainly see them refining their methods to calculate and present us with more targeted information.

Other services, systems and applications can also give indications about how valuable the content you are providing is to other people, and help to determine your rank on a virtual social ladder. Factors like the number of your RSS subscribers or how often your name, your website or some of your blog posts are mentioned in social networks and accessible communications systems or how often they are appearing in social bookmark applications will certainly be taken into consideration in the near future, too. Search engines serve people, so it will only be a matter of time until they use some of those factors.

Google Analytics is a widely used service that provides Google with further statistics and data about how visitors of a website deal with the information provided. Feedburner, probably the most popular RSS delivering service, is now owned by Google and lets them track exactly how often your subscribers are clicking on what article. The famous Google Reader generates usable statistics, too. All this data is already or will be used in the future. Maybe only a handful of people outside of Google know exactly how the latest algorithms work. The one and only way to stay on top of that complicated technical evolution is simply to provide valuable content and to put that valuable content into the hands of as many people as possible.

Be Aware

As you can see, it is easy to demystify SEO. All the Hokus Pokus and VooVoo about SEO is just hot air. If a company offers to optimize your site and promises you Top-10 Rankings if you give them only $500, run as fast as possible. Don’t take people serious who say that SEO is technical and complicated and that you will never get high rankings and a lot of traffic until you buy their crappy eBooks about exploiting niche profits to become a millionaire within 24 hours. Do not get scammed. Smart people deliver value. There is no substitute or short-cut to blogging success. You have to give in order to receive.

Get Started

Now, get started! Research keywords and niches for your topic. Download the SEO plugin I mentioned above. Write “advertising” (title, description, permalink) for your existing articles and write valuable, timeless content to build a strong foundation for your future blogging success. It takes time, but it is well worth it. The sooner you start to deliver real value, the faster you will reach your goals. You will dominate your field only by taking consistent action. You should start now!

Cheat Sheet:

• Content is King – you have to deliver value or you will crash and burn.
• Slowly build your reputation from niche articles to broader issues.
• Page Titles: Use Capitals – Have a look at your local newspaper or famous Hollywood movie titles to see how they use capitals to display importance in their titles. Use it to your advantage.
• Write for humans, not for machines. Write your article or posts first without even thinking about the usage of your main keywords or key phrases. You can insert them after you have finished putting your most valuable ideas on the screen. Don not over-do it by ripping your masterpiece apart. It must sound natural.
• Try to match the page- and the article title as well as the permalink as close as possible to the keywords or -phrase you are optimizing for. For example, the page title for the key phrase “death valley landforms” should be “Death Valley Landforms” and the permalink should be “death-valley-landforms.” The actual post title could be “Landforms of Death Valley.”
• Keyword Research: External Google Keyword Tool or Wordtracker – Remember to go for niches, especially in the beginning – High demand/Low Competition
• SEO PlugIn: All in One SEO Pack
• Start using paid search to gain an in-depth inside look about what people are searching for. Drive cheap traffic to your non-commercial topic posts to build momentum. Convert those visitors into long-term readers and RSS subscribers.