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Start Talking on Google Plus: Boost Your SEO

SEO for social networks is not the same as SEO for your website or blog. A large component is the social element and Google Plus is no different. Not only do you need to optimize your profile, link your website and optimize your posts, but you also need to talk to people. This is one of the biggest issues with adult brands and social media, an overwhelming lack of engagement with fans. But it is time to get over it because it is vital to your social SEO.

Sharing your Posts

When you write a post, make sure that you are sharing it to the public. You do not have to do this with every post. In fact you can create a sharing strategy. Share your more provocative post with your circles and then your more generic, aka “safe”, posts with the public.

You have a choice of what circles and with whom you want to share your content. You can make it as limited or open as you would like. But if you want people you don’t yet know to access your content you need to make sure it is publicly available. You do this by selecting “public” when you select your circles.

By making your posts public, not only will people be able to find you in searches but when they go to your profile they will be able to see what you have posted. Many people like to “browse” profiles before they circle someone. Think of this as your Macy’s window and they are window shopping.

Respond Back!

So many people ignore the people who engage with them. This is bad. If you want to grow your network, your exposure and improve your SEO you need to engage back. If someone pluses your post, add them to your circles. If someone comments on your post, respond back…and add them to your circles.

Tag People

A great way to initiate conversation with someone is to tag them in a post. You do this by typing + and then their name (which will auto-populate when you start typing). This creates a tag, or linked text, in your post. Doing this also gives a notification to that person that they were tagged.

This is a great way to start conversation or let someone know that you are talking about them, or their content.

Comment

Comment on other peoples posts. It really is that simple. Stop only looking at what you are putting out there and start looking at what other people are sharing. If you post thoughtful comments on other peoples posts you might make a new contact, create a conversation or debate. You will all be introducing yourself to all their followers who saw that post, because when they see the post they will now see your comment. If it is good they may circle you or look at your shared posts.

Circle People

Circling people is one of the easiest and fastest ways to grow your network. Go out and find people in your interest area. Find people you might want to talk to. Add them to your circle and start engaging with their content. Many people will circle you back just because you circled them.

Finding Content

Finding people can best be done by finding content. You do this through G+’s real time search. Type in a search term and your results will stream in real time what people are currently posting. You can keep this search list auto-refreshing or pause it for easier reading. This is a great opportunity to comment on people posts and find people to add to your circles.

All of these things will help boost your overall SEO. Google+ will rank you higher in their internal search engine, getting you more exposure, and thus helping your overall SEO.

SEO Optimize your Google Plus Snippet

Sexy Google Plus

Having an interesting image will help your snippet

The most important part of SEO optimizing your Google Plus posts is making sure your content is easy to share. Your social snippet is integral for making your content easy to share. A snippet is also known as a SERP, or search engine results page. This is the description that Google associates with your page. So your SERP is the summary description that people see in a search engine that helps them determine if they want to click on your link or not. In Google+ the snippet is what helps people determine if they want to read your post.Having a strong snippet can help determine if people read, comment or plus your post.

How to optimize your SERP

So now you are likely thinking, yes this is something I need to do! But how? Thankfully for blog writers there are a number of easy plugins you can use:

If you need to optimize a website you will need to go into the html code. If you are not comfortable or familiar with this, then ask a web designer to do it for you.

In your html you will need to optimize your “Meta Description”, this is what sets your SERP:

<head> <meta name="description" content="This is an example of a meta description. This will often show up in search results."> </head> 

Your meta description is where search engines will pull your snippet from. This is on every page of your website…and yes you want to optimize ever meta description.

Images Matter

Though everyone in porn knows this: we are all visual people.  So what does that have to do with SEO? Well, this is another important element of your optimization. If you want people to read your post you want to make it as attractive as possible. So using an image that helps captivate people’s attention is important.

Plus, when you add an image to you blog post not only does is make it more attractive to the reader, it creates another SEO opportunity. You can optimize your image information, so when people do image searches they might come across your post.

 

So not only is it important to make sure you optimize your Google+ but you want to make sure that if you are sharing content from your website that it is optimized as well. The quality of your snippet greatly influences views, comments, pluses and sharing.

Google Plus Search: Can you game the SEO?

SEO and searching on Google Plus, the next installment of the Google Plus SEO Series. Last part was implementing SEO on your profile.

Search+ delivers search results based on your circles, engagement and activity on your page. However you can turn the personalization off if you don’t want your user history to be factored into your search:

Click the icon of a person in the top right of the page. Then select “do not use personal results”.

Search Plus settingsSearch Plus is not just being used while you are in Google Plus. Any time you are logged into to the network and use the Google search engine, your results will go through the search plus filter.

This is why making sure your profile is set up properly is important. Now you profile and your posts can show up in search results on Google.

In the results you will be given a list of potentially relevant people and pages. These will be a mix of people you have already circled and ones you have not. If they are not in your circle you have the opportunity to add them.

So how do you come up in the search results? Truth be told circle count greatly affects. So the more people who have circled you the better chance you have. Unfortunately this does encourage people to buy followers just for the SEO boost.

Powerful Searching

Google does give priority to items being shared in Google Plus, however to make sure you content qualifies for their results you need to make sure your content is easily sharable.

The most powerful element of boosting your search results is making sure you have good amplification. You want people to be plussing and sharing your posts. The more people share your content the better your SEO both on and off the network.

Not sure what you amplification is? Google helps you understand the ripple effect of your posts with Google+ Ripples. Ripples will show you the amplification of your shares. The graph below shows a post that was shared by Good Morning America. The arrows off their profile show all the people who publicly shared the post. The one big circle shows another circle inside the larger one. This means that one person shared the post and then someone shared her share. In this case Laetitia shared the original post then Ogla shared Laetitia’s post.

RipplesNotice that I did say publicly shared posts. People have the option of sharing publicly or privately. Privately means they only shared it with their circles and the post is not publicly searchable. Your amplification data from Google only includes the public shares, though they do you tell you the total shares.

If you see someone who shares a post and then has number of other people share their share, that is someone who has good personal amplification. It would be a good idea to reach out to that person and work on engaging them. They could be an influencer. If they continue to share your posts you could increase your “ripple effect” greatly.

The more people who share your posts the better it will come up in search results. So do pluses affect in the same way. Unfortunately no. This is not to say they have no value, but a share is weighted significantly more.

This is the continuation of Google Plus SEO: Search Result pt 1

Gaming the Search

Gaming the search, otherwise known as the search algorithm, is optimizing your posts for Google; knowing what Google looks for.

First is simple text. Google does a simple text match in the search queary. Of course this leads to keyword loading your posts instead of writing for quality. However, since your post is all the text you can provide you still need to make sure the writing is quality. Because even if you show up in the search, your text is what will get someone to click your link.

ex. “pink socks. red socks. blue socks. socks. I love socks. knee high socks. ankle socks.” will not likely get you a lot of clicks, but it might get you in the search results for socks.

The good thing is the text match is restricted to people who are in your circles, which does limit the potential for SEO spammers. Additionally, people you engage with more will show up higher in your search results.

Public or Private

So should your posts be public or private? Public posts rank higher than private ones. So if you want to increase the potential visibility of your posts, and reach people beyond your immediate or extended circles, make sure your posts are public. (You can make your post public when you write the post. Where you have the option to add your circles you can also choose “public”).

Most Recent vs. Best of

When you do a search you will notice that they are sorted into two options, most recent and best of. Most recent is simply that. These will be the most recent posts. If it is an active topic you will see your search results refreshing frequently to stream recent topic related posts. You can hit the pause button to freeze the post.

The best of search results will show you the posts that have larger ripple effects. So if you are looking for viral content, you might want to look here.

Plus Button

I have mentioned that the plus button does not have as big an impact on your SEO as a share does, though this is true this is not to say that the plus button is not integral. In fact it is key to Google Plus’ SEO.

When someone gives web content a plus, it is loaded into Google+. Now that post can be found on Google+. The more people give web content a plus, the better your internal search results will be on Google Plus and there for on the Google search engine.

Make sure that your web content: web site, blogs, etc. Have the plus button added so people can easily plus your content.

SEO Optimize Your Google Plus Profile

SEO (search engine optimization) on Google Plus is an absolute must. Since they announced they are indexing everything posted, this is huge opportunity to boost your SEO. But what do you do if you don’t know how to optimize for SEO? Google Plus is making it easy.

Your Name

Make sure that your name is actually your name, and yes you can use your stage name. You want to use the name you want people to know you by. Think of this as your personal branding. You want people to know who you are. The nice thing is that if you use a nickname, they give you the option of adding it without it replacing your name.

  • To add a nickname, click edit on your profile. Then click your name. Then click “more options”. You will see a box to add your nickname.

Google Plus Nicknameor

Google Plus Nickname

Just a little word of caution. Just like Facebook, Plus does not like you to change your name to frequently. So make sure you know what you want before you change it.

Your name, whether it be on your profile or you page is important. When people are searching for you on the network or on search engines, they will be using this name to find you. Make sure it is the name you want representing your brand.

Just a side note, Google will not let you use a name it thinks is not real. This might be a problem for some people in adult. If they deny your name choice you can contact them to get it approved or you can just set up a fan page instead of using a profile.

Search Signals

Search signals are the things that search engines are looking for when you do a search. Google Plus has made this part easy. The search terms that you want to be found for are the ones that you need to put in your profile.

The most important areas to load keywords are you introduction, employment, education and places.

If you place your keywords in these sections you will be more likely to turn up for search results for that key term. Places is an important one in case people are looking for someone from, or living in, a specific town. Make sure to include places you previously lived to make it easier for people to find you.

What about the tagline? Good question. It does not seem to be heavily weighted, if all. So put whatever you want in the tagline. Occupation and bragging rights are also not weighted.

In a search for your query, after your key word the number of people in your circles, profile verification, and engagement are all weighted and in that order from heaviest to lightest.

Currently Plus seems to be giving profiles more weight than pages, which makes it even more important to SEO optimize your pages!

Certain search fields are more important for internal searching on Google Plus vs. searching on Google the search engine. Places you lived is one of those fields, it seems only relevant for people searching for you within the social network.

There are ways to spam with keyword loading and people are doing it. But Google is smart and will catch on to this kind of SEO practice. So it is best that you do not blatantly keyword load. Keep your descriptive writing relevant and good quality. It will be better for you in the long run.

Getting Started with SEO for Goolge Plus

Google Plus is becoming a major player in the social networking world, even for adult. You could actually argue that it is becoming bigger for adult than Facebook because Google is not as discriminating against adult content.

One of the biggest advantages of Google Plus is the built in SEO. Google Plus indexes every link that you post. Meaning, if you post a link to your site, that link is immediately added to the Google search engine. Yes, even if your site is XXX.

This series will be broken up over a series of posts:

  • Your Profile: How to optimize your profile to appear in search results
  • Search Results: How you appear in search results on and off Google Plus
  • Social Snippets (SERP): How to optimize your SERP (search engine results page)
  • Badges: Linking your website and your Google Plus page
  • Engagement: The importance of being social

After this series, I will be writing on a couple of more advanced issues for Google Plus SEO: Getting Verified and Authorship.

Overall SEO for Plus is not the simplest of tasks. But once it is set up, maintaining good SEO habits is very easy. No matter what, if you are investing in Plus then take the time to invest in SEO.

Google Plus for 13 Plus

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Is Google Plus no longer for adults?

Welcome the 13 year olds! Google Plus is trying to make themselves more competitive with Facebook. Though the social network is turning out to be more like a Twitter/Facebook hybrid, Facebook is still it’s #1 competitor and Twitter will likely remain a complimentary social network.

Until recently Google+ has been for 18 years and older. But staying and “adult” network was never in their long term plans. They recognize that teenagers are the biggest demographic, especially when it comes to new technology. But it does leave open the question of security.  Right now there is a lot of adult content on Google+…and we are happier for it. The tight laced nature of Facebook gets all of our panties in a bundle. But Google+ has been pleasantly more lenient. Will opening up the network to teenieboppers make them stricter parents? Well, time will tell

They are taking stricter precautions when it comes to who the teens will be able to circle. They are planning to limit it to teenagers only being able to circle other teenagers. Seems like a good start. Now what keeps someone from putting up a fake profile (ahem..remember Myspace)? Well, nothing that we can tell. But it is likely that they will have learned from their irrelevant social network pal (Myspace), that you do need some safeguards.

Opening up the social network will be beneficial as it will bring a wider audience to the network. Many people adopt a network after their kid have played around on it, look at Facebook. So hopefully this will be a boon for the network and not a big hit for all of us who like to keep the kiddies in the kiddie pool.

Google+ on Hootsuite? Yes, if you have the money!

Google+ Pages on HootsuiteIf you weren’t sure if you should get started with Google+, here is another reason to give it a good thought. Hootsuite has announced that they will be supporting Google+ through their platform. This means that Google+ Pages will be able to be monitored much like you monitor your Twitter accounts. However, this is only available to their Enterprise level clients. So the average Josephina will not be able to use this function yet.

The integration will likely be a big cross over point for Google+. This will allow people to increase their engagement and use Google+ more like they use Twitter. They will be able to have columns with their different circles, and will be able to interact with the posts, much like you interact with peoples tweets.

For adult entertainment you can easily categorize people in your circles by fans, pornstars, fetishes, adult sites…or however you want. But it will make interacting with other industry people much easier than it is on Facebook. Of course that is not hard to do, it is almost impossible to do it on Facebook.

This will accomplish 2 things.

1. Circles: It will encourage people to put people and pages into appropriate and topic relevant circles, as opposed to lumping them all into the “friends” circle. The increase in functionality will make browsing the content of the circles much easier to manage. Plus you will have the benefit of having the different columns to show all your circles posts simultaneously, but still categorized in easy to swallow bites.

2. Engagement: It will encourage engagement. The reason why Twitter has the highest level of engagement is because of how the information is presented. The platform is conducive to a high level of conversation. By applying the twitter platform to Google+ Pages, they are encouraging a higher level of engagement with people’s posts. This could actually be a breakthrough for Google+ Pages. Facebook pages have always been limited in the level of potential engagement, but this opens things up for the new social network.

The Hootsuite integration is a big development for Google+ Pages in the social network popularity race. Unfortunately it is only available to the “Enterprise” level clients. Those are the people paying $1500/month to use the platform. Yes, you read that right. Basically if you are a big brand or manage a large number of social media accounts, you are this level user. Maybe we will hear how playboy likes it because right now, not many other people will be using it.

The reason it is being reserved for these high level users is because it is in the beta testing period. They are running it through their power users to vet the new integration for any functionality issues. Hopefully in the near future they will open it up to the rest of us. In the mean time, we can get use to Google+ Pages and get ready for it to be more user friendly on Hootsuite!

Will Google be more uptight than Facebook?

Now that Google+ Pages has been launched, more people are joining the land rush to get their page. Understandably, a lot of people in adult entertainment are feeling a little reluctant to join up.  Well that might not be for a bad reason, though there are some questions that remain.

So porn, and any adult content, on Google+ is right out. It absolutely forbidden.  In their policy, under their User Content and Conduct Policy, it states:

10. Sexually Explicit Material

Do not distribute content that contains nudity, graphic sex acts, or sexually explicit material. Do not drive traffic to commercial pornography sites.

Your Profile Picture cannot include mature or offensive content. For example, do not use a photo that is a close-up of a person’s buttocks or cleavage.

So even PG13 content might be pushing the limits. And yes, they are making it just as easy to report TOS abuse as Facebook does.

However, adult is not the only place they are cracking the whip. They are not allowing promotions, contests, sweepstakes or coupons on the site. This means that businesses might really have to use Google+ just to be social!

The biggest danger is if you do get your page deleted you risk getting everything deleted. Yes, even your gmail. So if you do decide to get a page, I recommend having it associated with a gmail account that is not your primary.

Google+ Pages launched…still not for porn

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Today Google+ announced that they have officially launched their business Pages. This is almost exactly like Pages on Facebook except it is on Google+.  Some key differences are in SEO. These pages will be immediately indexed on Google. Meaning you will get an immediate search engine boost for you page, and therefore your website, if you have a page. You will also be able to do a search specifically for pages by adding a + sign before the company name. So 7 Veils would be + 7 Veils to search for my page (which does not exists yet).

Though some big questions about the functionality of the pages still exist, we do know that profiles will be able to add pages to profiles.  Of course if the networking is anything like Facebook, it means you will need to have a profile in order to start spreading the word about your page.

Of course, just like Facebook, the pages are not adult friendly. The big question is will they be active evangelists against porn pages. That is yet to be seen.

You might be tempted to run out and start your own page right now, and definitely give this a try. But the registration is not yet open for everyone, and that has nothing to do with porn. They are doing roll outs, but we don’t know how long it is going to take them to roll them out to everyone.

Because of the huge SEO boost, I would recommend putting up a page on Google+. Maybe it gets deleted, maybe not. You will get a nice SEO boost, at least for a while. Work your options while they are still options!