Welcome to the Kleber & Associates blog! Here’s the latest on Search Plus Your Brand
It seems like every few weeks there’s something new from Google to talk about. This week’s hot topic is Search Plus Your World. You’ll recall that when Google Plus was introduced there was a lot of talk about the concept of social searching, the idea that search would be about more than keywords; it would integrate a person’s social network into the search experience to deliver better results. We first saw this take shape in the form of the +1 button on Google and Facebook Likes displaying in Bing. Search Plus Your World is phase two of the social searching phenomenon.
Search Plus, as most are calling it, will deliver personal search results for anyone logged in to their Google account, including photos and information shared by their contacts on Google+. In addition, a list of related people and pages on Google+ will appear in the right side bar even if the searcher is not logged in to their Google account.
Google also has been slowly adding use of the rel=”author” HTML tag. This tag is designed to designate who is the original author of any content on the web and link it to their Google profile, which Google hopes will one day serve as the central location for information about the author/brand. What this means right now is that, if set up properly, when a post you write or a page you authored shows up in a search result, your picture will display next to the result with a link to your Google profile. For well established brands and thought-leaders, this can add instant credibility to the search result and increase the likelihood that someone will click through to your website. This feature is still being phased in and there’s no word yet on when displaying pictures will become standard issue for anyone with rel=”author” added to their page, but it is starting to show up.
Check in tomorrow to learn how this can have great potential for your brand.
