The Beginner's Guide to Google Plus

When Google+ entered the social space in 2011, it was met largely with skepticism. Joining a crowded field with platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, many users questioned the need for another social network.

But roughly two years later, Google+ has established itself as the second-largest social media site in the world and boasts a monthly active user base of 235 million. And some of the products that Google built into the platform, such as Hangouts and Communities, along with its added integration in Google News that can benefit an active poster, have made Google+ an intriguing network for all users.

SEE ALSO: The Beginner's Guide to the Hashtag

If you're a newbie to Google+, these tips will help you get started.

Creating a Google Account

First things first, in order to have a Google+ account, you must have a Google account. To do that, go to plus.google.com and find "Create An Account" located at the top right of the screen. From here, you will be asked to provide a few pieces of information, including your name, birthdate and current email address. Next, you'll be prompted to add a profile photo to accompany your Google Account. You can either take a web camera shot of yourself to add to your Google profile or upload a headshot. Regardless, the image must be a minimum size of 250 x 250 pixels.

After adding your profile picture, you will then be redirected to your new Gmail account. From this new account, you can navigate to Google+ from the dashboard icon located on the top right in your account. You are now ready to add friends, family and others to your Google+ Circles.

Creating Circles

The first time you access Google+, a screen will prompt you to add people you know or want to follow, as well as a list of suggested users Google has curated for you to follow — also known as a Circle. Much like how Twitter works, you can follow someone and see all the activity that he or she publishes publicly. When you want to add someone to a Circle, there are already four default Circles you can choose from: "Family," "Friends," "Acquaintances" and "Following."

But if you want to add a person or brand page to a Circle that isn't listed, you can create a new Circle in the open box provided below the list.

Circles act very much like filters — you can share content with those in your Circles and you can see what they choose to share publicly. People and brands will be notified when you have added them to your Circles, but they don't know which Circle or who else is in that Circle with them.

Adding Extra Details to Your Google+ Profile

After you've added all your favorite people to Circles, Google will ask you to share just a little more information about yourself — including your current place of employment, where you went to school and where you live — to make your profile a bit more interesting. These sections will be public initially, but you can edit the visibility of this information once you have your profile set.

SEE ALSO: The Beginner's Guide to Facebook

Google+ is a very visual platform, so beyond your profile picture, you also have quite a bit of real estate on your profile page for a cover photo. If you're a Facebook user, you already know the large cover photo on that platform, which is 851 x 315 pixels. But Google+ takes that to an even more extreme level: 2120 x 1192 pixels.

With your profile set up with a profile picture, cover photo and background information, you're ready to browse the network.

Navigating the Stream

When you arrive at the Google+ home screen, you will see a variety of posts, products and more.

On left sidebar of the platform, you'll see 10 options to choose from, including "Profile," "What's Hot," "Communities," "Events" and "Hangouts On Air," among others, many of which we will cover shortly. On the right side of the screen is your Hangouts box, which shows the list of individuals or brands in your Circles. From here you can text chat or video chat with those on the list. In the center, you will see all posts from your list of Circles. You can filter through these posts by navigating to the Circle of your choice — from "Friends" to "Following" and more. This section will also include posts that Google+ has deemed popular on the network.

When interacting with posts, there are a number of things you can do, including +1'ing a post (which is essentially "liking" the post), sharing the post or commenting on the post. On the top right of each post, there is a downward carrot symbol that gives you more options for things you can do with this post, such as viewing its activity, embedding the post, muting the post or linking to the post, among other options.

Now that you know how to interact with a post, let's dig into how to create your own.

Posting on the Platform

Google+ makes it incredibly easy for your posts to target a large or small group of accounts when you post on the platform. When you try to post on Google+, you will need to select who you want to share it with — whether that's with the public, "Family" or with just one person, for example.

Much like with Facebook, you can tag individuals or brands in your posts. Tagged users or brands will get notifications that they have been mentioned on the platform. A tagged post can also serve as a private message with an individual or group. If you do tag another page, be cognizant of whether you want to share that post with just that person, brand or Circle, or if you want to share it publicly while also tagging that page or multiple pages.

Communities

If you're looking for where a lot of the conversations take place on Google+, look no further than Communities. Launched in December 2012, Communities are where users can find vibrant discussions around very specific topics with other users who are just as interested in the conversation. And the topics on the platform seem endless — ranging from social media to animals to comedy and more. In order to join the conversation, all you need to do is request to join.

SEE ALSO: Google+ Communities: A Beginner's Guide

Sharing to Communities is much like sharing to a Circle. Although you can post to the Community directly, you can essentially share to these pages from anywhere on the platform. If you are posting to a public Community, this post will also show up on your profile page and will be visible to users who navigate to your page. There are also private Communities, where you have to request to join in order to post content or see other users' shares. And unlike public Communities, anything you post within a private Community is exactly that — private from anyone outside of the group to see.

Hangouts

Google+ Hangouts are one of the most popular features on the platform. There are three types of Hangouts — the text chat version that has essentially replaced Gchat, private Hangouts and Hangouts On Air. For this tutorial, we will be discussing the latter two: Hangouts and Hangouts On Air.

Hangouts are a great option for individuals or companies who want to host a private video chat with up to 10 different accounts. Unlike Hangouts On Air, this will not be publicly viewable and will only be seen by those who are invited to join. You can initiate a Hangout from the Hangouts box on the right side of the web platform, or from an individual's profile page.

SEE ALSO: The Beginner's Guide to YouTube

Hangouts On Air are the public version of Hangouts, which can be viewed by all and are also archived as YouTube videos. You can navigate to this by finding the "Hangouts On Air" icon in the options on the left sidebar of the platform. In order to start a Hangout On Air, your account must be associated with a YouTube account; otherwise, you will not be able to move forward.

Hangouts On Air also allow you to video chat with up to 10 users (including yourself). Because you are choosing to host a public Hangout, it's important to follow a few easy, and important steps:

• When possible, try to host Hangouts On Air when you are in a place with high Internet connection speeds.
• Have headphones in case there is audio feedback on your end.
• Set yourself up with good lighting.

Not all of these are always achievable — in fact, Google now offers an audio-only mode and a bandwidth slider within Hangouts On Air if you are in a location with low bandwidth.

Events

Google+ Events is an essential tool for individuals and brands who want to promote everything from a Hangout On Air to fundraising events to private parties. An added layer for Events is that it can fully integrate within Google Calendar for added organization. Events can be found on the left sidebar of the social platform. When you arrive in the Events section, you will have to click "Create Event" to get started.

The Events interface is incredibly easy to set up. As with scheduling any kind of calendar event, you should create a strong event title, set the day and time, location (if needed) and any details that are necessary to explain the event. Finally, similar to using Google+ posts, you can set the event to be seen publicly or to be seen by just a select group of people.

What's Hot

The "What's Hot" section of Google+ is one of its major standouts as a social network. As with Hangouts and Events, you can find this section on the left sidebar of the platform. "What's Hot" shows the posts, topics and hashtags that are trending on Google+ at any given time, as well as suggestions for Communities that may interest you.

Speaking of hashtags, Google+ has gone all in with hashtags, and it has added a whole new level to social search on the platform. Using hashtags in your posts can improve your content's discoverability. Beyond that, though, Google+ will also suggest related hashtags for your posts to make them resonate more on the platform.

Google+ Mobile

The Google+ mobile app is a highly-functional, scaled-down version of the desktop platform. You can still post links and photos from the platform, filter through Circles, create events and more on the mobile app. Google has also created its own standalone Hangouts app, with which you can interact with those in your Circles through text or video chats, just like you would on the desktop version.

This guide is only the beginning of what can be a deeply immersive social experience. But if you are new to Google+, this will be enough to get you started.

SEO Is Dead. Here's What Is Taking Its Place

Thanks to recent Google changes, search engine optimization isn't nearly as powerful as it used to be. But that's OK--there's a better way.

If you've ever tried to deal with search engine optimization, you most likely have, at some point or another, wanted to bundle your whole site up and toss it into the nearest virtual trash can. Particularly if you felt compelled to focus on keywords, or any other technique calculated to artificially pique someone's mouse clicks.

You should be delighted to hear then, if you haven't heard yet, that the old-fashioned concept of SEO is deader than last week's sandwich. Google pretty much pounded the crap out of keyword stuffing and other absurdities with the search algorithm changes it's made over the last couple of years. And then Google made search secure, which means you can't even see what keywords someone used to get to your site.

It's about time, because all the minutiae blinded entrepreneurs to what is really important: making a connection with an audience. The term--not exactly new--that seems to be displacing SEO is OAO, online audience optimization. Before getting too squirrelly about another Three Letter Acronym, let's get grounded and think about what's important.

Really Know Your Audience

Over on the Marketingland blog, Brian Clark quoted great old-time advertising copyrighter Eugene Schwartz:

One hour a day, read. Read everything in the world except your business. Read junk. Very much junk. Read so that anything that interests you will stick in your memory. Just read, just read, just read... There is your audience. There is the language. There are the words that they use.

Clark takes this to mean that you have to understand the language and words people use so you know how to talk to them. I'll take it a step further. Not only do you need to know how they talk, which lets you better guess how they might specifically look for what you offer, but you also need to understand what they find funny. What scares them. What is important to them. How they think. Until you do, they're only marks and you do nothing more than run calculated cons. After you do understand them, they're real people and you might find yourself caring a bit about them. Good--care more.

Translate Caring Into Specific Actions

Do you care about your significant other, family members, or friends? If so, then there are plenty of times that you'll do specific things that you know make them happy. Emotion isn't an abstract concept, but something that drives behavior. Let the same thing happen in your marketing after you start to care about the audience. For example, Linda Ruth lists nine steps for OAO, including be consistent and clear about strategy and purpose, encourage audience participation, and employ engagement metrics and gamification techniques. Maybe you'll find that your list is the same. Maybe it will be somewhat different. Just make sure it comes with a focus on customers and how you can provide what they need.

It's like going into a shop you like where the people recognize you and get your interests and tastes. That's all you're trying to do. When the technology, any technology, gets in the way, drop it out back and return to the basics.

The Rise & Fall Of Google Authorship For Search Results

After three years the great Google Authorship experiment has come to an end … at least for now. Today John Mueller of Google Webmaster Tools announced in a Google+ post that Google will stop showing authorship results in Google Search, and will no longer be tracking data from content using rel=author markup.

This in-depth article, which I’ve jointly co-written with Mark Traphagen, will cover the announcement of the end of Authorship, the history of Authorship, a study conducted by Stone Temple Consulting that confirms one of the stated reasons for cessation of the program, and some thoughts about the future of author authority in search.

Authorship’s Gradual Slide Toward Extinction

The cessation of the Authorship program comes after two major reductions of Authorship rich snippets over the past eight months. In December 2013 Google reduced the amount of author photo snippets shown per query, as Google’s webspam head Matt Cutts had promised would happen in his keynote at Pubcon that October. Starting in December, only some Authorship results were accompanied by an author photo, while all others had just a byline.

Then at the end of June 2014 Google removed all author photos from global search, leaving just bylines for any qualified authorship results.

At that time, John Mueller in a Google+ post stated that the photos were removed because Google was moving toward unifying the user experience between desktop and mobile search, and author photos did not work well with the limited screen space and bandwidth of mobile. He also remarked that Google was seeing no significant difference in “click behavior” between search pages with or without author photos.

A Brief History of Google Authorship

The roots of the Authorship project go back to Google’s Agent Rank patent of 2007. As explained byBill Slawski, an expert on Google’s patents, the Agent Rank patent described a system for connecting multiple pieces of content with a digital signature representing one or more “agents” (authors). Such identification could then be used to score the agent based on various trust and authority signals pointing at the agent’s content, and that score could be used to influence search rankings.

Agent Rank remained a theoretical idea without a practical means of application, until the adoption by Google of the schema.org standards for structured markup. In a blog post in June 2011, Google announced that it would begin to support authorship markup. The company encouraged webmasters to begin marking up content on their sites with the rel=”author” and rel=”me” tags, connecting each piece of content to an author profile. The final puzzle piece for Authorship to be truly useful to Google fell into place with the unveiling of Google+ at the end of June 2011. Google+ profiles could now serve as Google’s universal identity platform for connecting authors with their content.

In a YouTube video published in August of that year, Matt Cutts and then head of the Authorship project Othar Hansson gave explicit instructions on how authors should connect their content with their Google+ profiles, noted that doing so could cause one’s profile photo to show in search results, and for the first time mentioned that — at some future time — data from Authorship could be used as a ranking factor.

Over the next three years, Authorship in search went through many changes that we won’t detail here (although Ann Smarty has compiled a complete history of those changes). On repeated occasions, though, Matt Cutts and other Google spokespeople reiterated a long-term commitment by Google to the concept of author authority.

Why Has Google Ended the Authorship Program?

Over its entire history Google has repeatedly demonstrated that nothing it creates is sacred or immortal. The list of Google products and services that were introduced only to be unceremoniously discontinued later would fill a small phone book. The primary reason behind this shuffle of products is Google’s unswerving commitment to testing. Every product, and every change or innovation within each product, is constantly tested and evaluated. Anything that the data show as not meeting Google’s goals, not having sufficient user adoption, or not providing significant user value, will get the axe.

John Mueller told my co-author Mark that test data collected from three years of Google Authorship convinced Google that showing Authorship results in search was not returning enough value compared to the resources it took to process the data.

Mueller gave two specific areas in which the Authorship experiment fell short of expectations:

1. Low adoption rates by authors and webmasters. As our study data later in this article will confirm, participation in authorship markup was spotty at best, and almost non-existent in many verticals. Even when sites attempted to participate, they often did it incorrectly. In addition, most non-tech-savvy site owners or authors felt the markup and linking were too complex, and so were unlikely to try to implement it.

Because of these problems, beginning in early 2012, Google started attempting to auto-attribute authorship in some cases where there was no or improper markup, or no link from an author profile. In a November 2012 study of a Forbes list of 50 Most Influential Social Media Marketers, Mark found that only 30% used authorship markup on their own blogs, but of those without any markup, 34% were still getting an Authorship rich snippet in search. This is similar to data found in a study performed by Eric which is further detailed below.

However, Google’s attempts at auto-attribution of authors led to many well-publicized cases of mis-attribution, such as Truman Capote being shown as the author of a New York Times article 28 years after his death. Clearly, Google’s hopes of being able to identify the web’s authors, connect them with their content, and then evaluate their trust and authority levels as possible ranking factors was in trouble if it was going to depend on the cooperation of non-Google people.

2. Low value to searchers. In his announcement of the elimination of author photos from global search in late June of this year, John Mueller stated that Google was seeing little difference in “click behavior” on search result pages with Authorship snippets compared to those without. This came as a shock (accompanied in many cases with outright disbelief) to those who had always believed that author snippets brought higher click-through rates.

Mueller repeated in his conversation with Mark about today’s change that Google’s data showed users were not getting sufficient value from Authorship snippets. While he did not elaborate on what he meant by “value” we might speculate that this could mean that overall, in aggregate, user behavior on a search page did not seem to be affected by the presence of author snippets. Perhaps over time users had become used to seeing them and they lost their novelty. It is interesting to note that (as of the time of this posting) author photos continue to appear for Google+ content from people a searcher has in his or her Google network (Google+ circles or Gmail contacts) when the searcher is logged in to her or his Google+ account (personalized search).

When asked, Mueller said he had no knowledge of any plans to stop showing those types of results. However, some users have reported to Mark that they are no longer seeing them. We will watch this development and update here if it looks like Google is indeed removing author photos from personalized results as well.

If Google does continue to show author photos in some personalized results, it would seem to indicate that Google data is showing that when content is from someone with whom the searcher has some personal association, a rich snippet actually does provide value to that searcher. More about this in our final section below.

Study of Rel=Author Implementations

As luck would have it, Stone Temple Consulting was in the process of wrapping up a study on rel=author markup usage. A look at the data illustrates part of the problem that Google faces with an initiative like this one. The bottom line of what we found? Adoption was weak, and accurate implementation among those that attempted to set up rel=author was also bad. If that was not enough, the adoption by authors was also bad. So let’s look at the numbers!

Authorship Adoption

We sampled 500 authors across 150 different major media web sites. Here is a summary of what we saw for their implementation of authorship tagging in their Google+ profiles:

G+ profile implementation	Qty	% of Total
No Profile	241	48%
Profile, but No Link to Publishing Site	108	22%
Profile, with one or More Links to the Publishing Site	151	30%

A whopping 70% of authors made no attempt to connect their authorship with the content they were publishing on major web sites. Of course, this has much to do with how Google attempts to promote these types of initiatives. In short, they don’t. They rely on the organic spread of information throughout the Interweb ecosystem, which is uneven at best.

Publisher Adoption

50 of the 150 sites did not have any author pages at all, and more than 3/4 of these provided no more than the author’s name for attribution. For the remaining batch, some of them would allow authors to include links with their attribution at the bottom of the article, but the great majority of these authors did not take advantage of the opportunity.

For today’s post, we also took 20 of the sites that had author pages, and analyzed in detail their success in implementing authorship:

1. 13 of the 20 sites attempted to implement authorship markup (65%)
2. 10 of these 13 attempts had errors (77%)
3. 12 of the 13 attempts received rich snippets in the Google SERPs (92%)

The implementation style for authorship was all over the map. We found malformed tags, authorship implemented on site, but no link to the author’s G+ profile, conflicting tags reporting multiple people as the author for a given article, and one situation where an article had 2 named authors, but only the 2nd named author linked to their G+ profile, and Google gave the 2nd author credit for that article.

1. Seven of the 20 sites did not attempt to implement authorship markup (35%)
2. Two of these seven received rich snippets in the Google SERPs (28%)

In the two cases where Google provided the rich snippets even though there was no markup, the authors did link to the site from the Contributor To section of their G+ profile.

Summarizing the Study

In short, proper adoption of rel=author markup was extremely low. Google clearly went to extreme efforts to try and make the connection between author and publisher, even in the face of many challenges. From a broader perspective, this tells us quite a bit about the difficulties of obtaining data from publishers. It’s hard, and the quality of the information you will get is quite low.

Summary

Google has stated many times over the past three years its interest in understanding author authority. It’s hard to forget executive chairman Eric Schmidt’s powerful statements on the topic:

"Within search results, information tied to verified online profiles will be ranked higher than content without such verification, which will result in most users naturally clicking on the top (verified) results. The true cost of remaining anonymous, then, might be irrelevance."

Eric Schmidt in The New Digital Age

However, this has proved to be a very tough problem to solve. The desire to get at this data is there, but the current approach simply did not work. As we noted above, this is one of the two big reasons why this initiative is being abandoned. The other problem identified by John Mueller is equally important. The approach of including some form of rich snippet, be it a photo, or a simple byline, was not providing value to end users in the SERPs. Google is always relentlessly testing search quality, and there are no sacred cows. If Google is not seeing end users valuing something they try out, it will go.

We also can’t ignore the impact of the processing power used for this effort. We all like to think that Google has infinite processing power. It doesn’t. If it did have such power, it would use optical character recognition to read text in images, image processing techniques to recognize pictures, speech to text technology to transcribe every video it encounters online, and it would crawl every page on the web every day, and so forth. But it doesn't. What this tells us is that Google has to make conscious decisions on how it spends its processing power — it must be budgeted wisely. As of this moment, the Authorship initiative as we have known it has not been deemed worthy of the budget it was consuming.

The rise of mobile may have played a role in this outcome as well. When John Mueller says staffers don’t see a significant difference in click behavior in the SERPs as a result of Authorship rich snippets, remember that about half of Google’s traffic comes from mobile devices now. Chewing up valuable screen real estate for this type of markup on a mobile device may simply be a bad idea.

So is authorship gone forever? Our guess is that it probably is not. The concept is a good one. We buy into the notion that some people are smarter about certain topics than others. The current attempts at figuring this out have failed, not the concept.

As Google moves forward in its commitment to semantic search, it has to develop ways to identify entities such as authors with a high degree of confidence apart from human actions such as markup. Recent announcements about Google’s Knowledge Vault project would seem to reinforce that Google is moving steadily in that direction. So this may be how it approaches detection.

If, and when, it makes use of such data, what will it look like? Don’t be surprised if the impact is too subtle to be easily noticed. We will probably not see author photos in the results ever again. Could we see some form of Author Rank? Possibly, but it may come in a highly personalized form or get blended in with many other factors that make its detection virtually impossible.

So goodbye for now, Authorship. You were a grand and glorious experiment, and we will miss you — but we look forward to something even better for Authorship in the future.

How to Succeed at SEO With Social Media Marketing

Like syrup and pancakes or peanut butter and jelly, search engine optimization and social media are made for each other. Your website and social media channels must work together with keyword-rich content. If it helps attract search engines, it will help your search rankings and therefore increase the amount of eyeballs.

To learn how to make this happen for your brand, I talked to Ray Grieselhuber, CEO and co-founder of Ginzamarkets, Inc. and the Ginzametrics Enterprise SEO Platform.

Hi Ray. Why now, more than ever, is SEO important for marketers?

If you look at the way brands are found online via organic media, the two biggest channels are overwhelmingly search and social. SEO is much more than just ranking well in Google. It's a comprehensive, multi-disciplinary approach to website optimization that ensures potential customers who come to your site will have a good experience, find what they are looking for, and have an easy time sharing your high-quality content.

Visitors from organic search have some of the highest conversion and LTV rates across any channel in digital marketing. When you combine well-orchestrated social campaigns with ongoing search optimization, you are creating leverage and a long-term competitive advantage.

How can social media help?

Until recently, search and social media were thought of as two very different things. At GinzaMetrics, we've always thought of them as two sides of the same coin. As a brand, you can reach customers with paid advertising or organic content. We believe, and our data backs this up, that customers via organic content are much better customers to have over the long run. And when you start mixing paid and organic, the combined lift is overwhelmingly better than paid channels alone.

So, within the context of organic marketing, social media is your primary engine for promoting new content. Effectively organizing your social campaigns and tying them together with new content on your site, optimized for search, can take you from zero visibility to a strong performing position almost overnight.

What are some best practices for incorporating SEO into your social efforts?

Pay attention to the basics first: have high quality content, well-structured pages, follow all of the best practices for SEO. Then look at the metadata that affects how well your content is shared on social media channels, specifically Open Graph tags, proper use of images, authorship metadata (for Google Plus and search results) and more. Finally, you need to learn from your activities, so make sure you have metrics put into place to analyze your performance and see where there is room for improvement.

What do you see as the future of SEO in relation to social media?

I see SEO and social media, as channels, all following under the larger umbrella of organic marketing (which includes content marketing). There is no reason for them to be separated and as budgets further evolve, both the practice of organic marketing and also the supporting technology platforms in the industry will quickly improve to support this new reality.

Does Recent Google Update Indicate End?

What are you hoping for when you search for something on Google?

Are you looking for a site that deployed every SEO tip and trick to game their way to the top of the list? Or a site that has relevant, reliable, authoritative content?

Most likely it is the latter, and it seems Google may want that too. If it happens to represent the antithesis of the results of good SEO, that's just fine with Google. They don't make a nickel on your optimized site and they are worried that users may become underwhelmed with their search results if the only links appearing above the fold are those not with the best content but with those deploying the most effective examples of chicanery we know as "SEO."

When Google in 2013 stopped providing data about keyword popularity, this must have served as a shot across the bow of SEO. It signaled that Google wanted to put a damper on SEO because they had determined it was skewing the results in a way unhelpful to its users.

In the "old" days, SEO was a matter of stuffing your metatags with top keywords; then it became more complicated as Google continued to refine its search algorithm. The current state of SEO, in rather sober fashion, calls for "quality content," no keyword stuffing, longevity of the domain, lack of duplicate content, a well-ordered site-map and other items more esoteric. Really, it's become more about just building a great site with great (and focused) content. Phony inbound links are not supposed to cut it anymore, although sometimes this can slip by undetected.

SEO is a big industry. According to a site called State of Digital, 863 million websites mention SEO globally and every second 105 people search for SEO links on Google. Most of them seem to be looking for "services" or "companies," which explains how there came to be so many SEO companies.

SEO is also an industry full of promises. Despite evidence to the contrary, many SEO mavens continue to insist they can fool the Google algorithm into getting your site - no matter what it is - higher in the rankings. That it is easy to see whether it works when you search for your own company makes it an appealing payoff. But the waters of SEO remain murky and it's difficult to measure success of SEO in any meaningful way (in other words, even if you got to the top, did it improve your business or did you just accumulate a very high bounce rate?).

Now SEO may be going the way of Megalodon, a 100-foot shark rumored to exist but mostly accepted to have gone extinct a million years ago. If it isn't functionally dead, it's certainly in the sick-house. Google does not especially want the SEO industry playing games with its rankings, and what Google wants, especially in a case like this, Google gets.

Customers still ask for "top keyword" reports as if they have not read the news about the unavailability of it - perhaps because they believe that if you wish hard enough for a pony on Christmas, one will eventually find its way under the tree.

It isn't going to happen.

Certain SEO principles should not be ignored, simply as a matter of site-hygiene. A well-organized, content-rich site is a good thing to have. But most other SEO tricks and tips have just a little bit (if not a lot) of snake-oil in the recipe. It sounds like a great proposition to a site owner: Drink a bottle of SEO and your site will zoom vigorously to the top of the heap. But too often, and partly because Google does not seem to want it to, it doesn't work as advertised.

There is no good reason for Google to stop trying to stamp out SEO, because in effect, SEO damps the quality of search results for the user. Google is interested in the user - and, as you might have guessed already, it reduces the value of a paid AdWord link. Because Google AdWords is a form of SEO, which really is SEM (search engine marketing); in other words, you optimize your site's Google performance by bidding on Google keywords whereby Google makes pretty much all of its money.

SEO is not going to get easier. It's going to get harder and eventually will most likely be next to impossible - because Google's algorithms are always a step ahead of the marketers trying to game them. And with no keyword reporting, a major support system for SEO has been, quite simply, taken away. If you want to rank high on Google, build a good site and market it the best you know how. Just don't expect SEO to be the answer to your traffic-related prayers because, increasingly, it won't be.