You've probably heard by now that Google announced the roll out of social search yesterday, dubbed 'Search, Plus Your World'. There has been vast speculation about Google's motives, with the most credible of which suggesting it's to do with' Gaining market share in the social network market. To improve the quality of search results through increased trustworthiness and personalisation )research by Nielson suggests that 42% of people trust search results,

A few days ago I was looking through my mentions on Twitter and I noticed a rough correlation between the strength of relationship I have with a person and the frequency/consistency of their interaction with me. I also noticed that strength of relationship was in rough correlation to the medium)s( that I've communicated with them on. In other words,

This post originally appeared on State of Search . Given that engaging on the social web can benefit your brand's marketing, recruitment, PR, sales, customer service, and other departments, the question of 'who should manage and represent your brand on the social web?' will inevitably arise. The answer is, all of them. I believe that all employees with a passion and interest in representing the brand should be encouraged to.

Launching a social network is to some extent a bit of a chicken and egg scenario these days, as you need people to encourage the businesses to get involved, but businesses can also attract more people. This morning Google launched the metaphorical egg in their social network chicken and egg scenario - they launched 'Google+ Pages' as a means for businesses to join Google+. The question now is: if businesses join Google+,

Those of you who follow my tweets will probably know that I've recently launched a book called Get Noticed , which is a guide that explores the processes and techniques that successful networkers use to get noticed. In the course of writing the book I carried out a lot of research around how people meet and what it takes to develop a strong relationship, which has had a tremendous impact on my understanding of successful blogger outreach.

Over the past few weeks I've been surprised to see some really great posts struggle to gain any momentum, as well as seeing some really crap posts do surprisingly well in terms of being shared by a large audience. My suspicion is that in both cases it had a lot to do with the design of the sites that the blog posts were hosted on )here's a very good post on how design impacts shareability (.

For those of you who missed the Livestream of yesterday's F8 Facebook Conference, CEO Mark Zuckerburg announced some major changes to the future of Facebook, which in a nutshell is to try and realise his vision of making the whole web social. Within Facebook, the focus is shifting from 'what you say' to 'what you do'. Here are some of the major changes announced: 1.

I'm always looking for ways to improve our social media audits at SEOptimise to make them more insightful and actionable. While there is no perfect way to approach writing a social media audit, here are some ideas on what I think are important things to consider when writing a social media audit. What's the point of a social media audit? A good social media audit can take quite a while to write,

Several months ago I ran some tests on the impact of Facebook Likes on Google Rankings. After receiving several e-mails and tweets asking whether Google +1s have any impact on rankings, I decided to run some similar experiments in order to give a more conclusive answer. Note: on September 19th I'm going to be presenting a few insights on social SEO at Social Media Marketing and Monitoring 2011 London .

In the latest video blog from SEOptimise, Marcus Taylor and Dan Bianchini take us through how to use social media to create topical content for SEO benefit. They cover how to find the latest trends, how to write the content and finally how to promote it to get publicity and links. © SEOptimise - Download our free business guide to blogging whitepaper and sign-up for the SEOptimise monthly newsletter .

Last week at SMX London I presented the results from several experiments I've been running over the months on how important Facebook likes are for search. For a full write-up and explanation of my presentation you can read my blog post on State of Search , or if you'd just like to have a look through my presentation, here it is! © SEOptimise - Download our free business guide to blogging whitepaper and sign-up for the SEOptimise monthly newsletter .

Today, Daniel Bianchini and I thought we'd create a video blog post discussing the difference between return on investment on social media and search engine optimisation. We hope this will be the first in a long line of video blogs by SEOptimise. We hope you enjoy it and provide us with your valuable comments below about the video and chosen topic. Transcript coming soon.

At SEOptimise, we've got 3 spare tickets to SMX Advanced London to give away to 3 lucky readers of our blog who are happy to share an embarrassing SEO-related confession in the comments below this post. Kevin Gibbons speaking at SMX Advanced London 2010 Ever decided to turn down a family dinner event because you secretly wanted to stay in and optimise your title tags?

The short answer, yes. Recently I decided to run an experiment to find out how Google was treating social signals - so I set up a brand new domain ) http://www.yogamatcompare.com ( with 0 backlinks and started acquiring likes and tweets to the domain. Today, just a week after registering the domain, the site ranks for 'Indian Yoga Mats' 'Cheap Yoga Mats' 'Yoga Mat Compare' 'Luxury Yoga Mats' and many other keywords,

As it's a Friday afternoon and we're all winding down for the weekend, I thought it would be an appropriate time to reveal a lighthearted tale involving keyword density, penguins, and Sambuca that I recently admitted to the SEOptimise team - something terribly shameful' A story of why keyword density is in fact not dead.

You get penalised. You get a heap of traffic, and then get penalised. While I am certainly no black-hat by any means, and do not advocate the techniques outlined in this post for long-term SEO projects, I love testing the theories and rumours that circulate in the SEO community about what link building works and what doesn't. Regardless of how dodgy the rumours are, it helps me build a bigger picture of how Google treats link building.