Search Plus Your World

What Impact Will  Search Plus Your World Have On SEO

The recent launch of Google’s Search Plus Your World has caused quite a stir in the Social media arena with Twitter in particular looking to go head to head in an all out war over non inclusion in search results.

In a nutshell Search Plus Your World blends content that has been shared privately on Google+ with public pages that match the search query and provide Google+ profiles, people and page suggestions in 1 set of results.

The big problem with this massive change to the way we will get our results from now on is Search Plus does not currently include either Twitter or Facebook in the results.  Now arguably both are far more relevant and important to a visitor that Google+ is currently and this is the main cause of Twitters argument.

Heres what Google say on their offical blog

Google Search has always been about finding the best results for you. Sometimes that means results from the public web, but sometimes it means your personal content or things shared with you by people you care about. These wonderful people and this rich personal content is currently missing from your search experience. Search is still limited to a universe of webpages created publicly, mostly by people you’ve never met. Today, we’re changing that by bringing your world, rich with people and information, into search.

Search is pretty amazing at finding that one needle in a haystack of billions of webpages, images, videos, news and much more. But clearly, that isn’t enough. You should also be able to find your own stuff on the web, the people you know and things they’ve shared with you, as well as the people you don’t know but might want to… all from one search box.

How does it affect me

This latest change to the Google algorithm has even bigger implications than the recent Google Panda review.  As we know, Panda aimed to basically remove site’s with low quality non relevant content and to favour sites providing good quality  content.  Once we discovered the main aim of the update, marketers who ensured they only provided quality unique content saw the biggest boost to thier rankings.

Now this change has more serious implications and will be far more difficult to achieve success.  Getting people to provide good quality content is relatively straightforward, they can either buy it or provide it personally, getting people to share your content on a mass scale is a much more serious proposition.

So What Next

It is quite clear the way Google wish you us to go and we shouldn’t be surprised.  They have been planning a major shift in the way we search and receive results and the launch of Google+ was only the first phase of this.

Unfortunately, if you want to continue to get traffic and sales from Google you will have to start to build your brand or personal identity through Google+ to provide the paltform required by Search Plus Your World.

Building  Google + profile page’s has now become far more relevant and important than Facebook or Twitter if you are to view Google as a continued source of traffic.  Not only do you have to build the page and create your own circles of contacts, you have to then get in to as many influential circles as possible and hope these people are in other influential circles if you hope to reach people outside your own immediate network which is not an easy task to say the least and will require some serious effort.

The Implications on SEO

Because your Google+ page is now far more relevant and important you now also need to ensure you optimise it for SEO much the same as you do with your blog posts or web page content.

You need to now ensure you use your keywords in the title, first paragraph etc as you should be doing in your web pages to ensure your content features in the search results of your network.  This has to be done as always in a normal non spammy way but this is a major shift in the way we get traffic and almost becomes more important than our actual web site in attracting visitors.

The Next Step

It is still early days having been launched less than 1 week ago, however if we are to continue to view Google as a main player in providing traffic we have to ensure we have set up a Google+ profile page, either for a business brand or a personal page and we have to work on not only creating our own circles of contacts but joining as many relevant circles of other influential people.

We should all ensure all of the content we share is well written and optimised for the keywords we are targeting much the same as we do in the posts or pages of content we publish.

Unfortunately like it or hate it this new search algorithm looks to be here to stay.  Whilst we can turn it off from the search page results and we can set the default to display the standard results, this is optional and the vast majority of users will have no idea they can do this so it looks like we simply have to play the Google game yet again.

This is a highly emotive subject and one that has split the SEO and social media world.  I am really keen to get your own view point on this so please leave your comments below.