Pandia Guest Writer Divya Rawat argues that print publicity campaigns and organic search engine optimization are complementary, and may reinforce each other.

Though a cliché, any publicity is good publicity. History has been a witness to large and small, positive and negative publicity campaigns and stunts that affected fortunes and misfortunes of large and small corporations.

The past century belonged to the stoic print publicity campaigns. The current scene belongs to the fast moving sleek internet publicity trends.

What is Publicity?

In layman terms publicity is a deliberate attempt to make the public in general aware about issues, products, services or any other such matter that has direct or indirect relevance to their lives, using various media like print and/or electronic as well as social media.

In marketing parlance, publicity is a part of the marketing campaign that a company or organization undertakes to make their potential customers aware about their products, services or activities.

Press Releases are commonly used to disseminate information among different media. It answers the How, Why, What, Where, When and Who within the copy.

Since this blog post is all about Print Publicity and Organic SEO, we shall move on to what defines “Organic SEO”.

What is Organic SEO?

Organic SEO is a process aimed at improving visibility of a website on Search Engine Page Results using natural or organic methods like content writing and link building. Organic SEO employs unpaid and natural methods of attracting traffic to a website that has relevant information for the browsers.

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Social shopping is online shopping with networks of likeminded friends, commenting, sharing and recommendations. Here are Pandia’s top 5 social shopping sites.

The Web has changed shopping in a lot of ways. Easy access to an unprecedented amount of stores that will ship your purchase directly to me has made my Christmas shopping stress free. And it’s so much easier now to find gifts for those friends with really special interests. All of this is taken one huge step ahed with the Social Web.

Shopsquad

Shopsquad offers recommendations based on your actions on the site.

When you sign up, you are encouraged to go through a list of items in different categories and mark which items you own and which items you want. You also have the option to connect to your Facebook friends to share recommendations with them. And there is an option to follow other shoppers to see items they like or purchase.

The site offers shopping of all kinds in more than 20 categories. As you explore the site and make comments and connections, you unlock special discounts tailored for you.

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Here is this week’s news from the world of search engines.

Google Won’t Pause New Privacy Policy – Should They Have To?
SE Watch: In a lengthy response to EU regulators who had asked Google to hold off on implementing the new policy, Google makes clear the policy will take effect March 1, as planned.

Ex-Googler Laments the New Google
Beyond Search: Nelson of Nelson’s Weblog is “No Longer Loving Google, Inc.” Sour grapes? Perhaps not, as the ex-Google employee maintains he has defended the company many times since 2006.
What changed? The write up explains:

“This last month has been particularly hard for Google lovers. I took the company’s side in the Kenya mobile fiasco up until the company admitted that, indeed, employees were lying to steal customers from Mocality. Then the big stories about Google Search+ and Google’s new privacy policy. I think one is actively bad and the other is mostly harmless, but both changes are so complex and unpleasantly self-motivated it makes me sad. So now when I read about a friend getting terminated from AdSense with no explanation I just get a headache.”

Google Fined in France Because Google Maps is Free
SE Watch: A commercial court in Paris has ordered Google France and parent company Google Inc. to pay €500,000 ($660,000) in damages to Bottin Cartographes after finding the company guilty of unfair competition.

Creative Commons Search Engine
P Bradley: Need CC images, text, audio or sounds? Try the Search.Creativecommons engine.

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Here are some interesting articles from this week’s search engine marketing coverage.

Kill the SEO Bug!
SEO Book: You can learn a lot more about what Google really thinks by reading what their new hires say. They are not yet skilled in the arts of public relations & make major gaffs like this one: “Instead of being able to SEO the entire Internet, businesses can now only affect the search results for a tiny percentage of users. That’s a good thing because SEO can’t scale, and SEO isn’t good for users or the Internet at large.”

Goldilocks SEO: Too Hot, Too Cold or Just Right?
State of Search: SEO Book has a nice set of infographics they are sharing. Like for example this one below. They show the different types of SEO tactics in several categories based on whether they are too hot, too cold or just right.

How to Craft a Privacy Policy for Your Website

Social Media Examiner: Regardless of whether site visitors read the terms and conditions, companies can’t overlook the creation of policies that set out how such information will be used.

Google Says Most Invalid Clicks Come From Publishers
SE Roundtable: Google AdWords representative, Laura, said in a Google AdWords Help thread that the main reason there are “invalid clicks” on ads is due to publishers.

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Here are some interesting post and articles from this week’s social media buzz.

Tumblr Now Lets You Highlight Your Favorite Posts For A Dollar
techcrunch: With Highlights, you can choose a special icon that will appear next to the post along with an optional message that points out why the post is important.

Google Blogger URL Redirects Censor International Users
SE Journal: The change, which deploys a country-specific URL to the Blogger platform, will allow Google to censor and remove content on a country-by-country basis similar to the new Twitter policy.

17 Facts About The People Who Waste Time On Facebook
Business Insider: Researchers with the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project conducted a national phone survey of Facebook users and just released a report on the findings.

Social Media Analytics: Relationships with End User Consumers
Beyond Search: Text Analytics News recently partnered with Useful Social Media to publish a series of interviews with experts in the field of Social Media Analytics. The second installment focuses on the relationships between vendors and their end user consumers.

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The integration of social search data is nothing new for Google, but with the release of Google’s new Search Plus Your World (SPYW and also known as Search+) search engine experts and journalists have been raising alarms over privacy and search relevance. Are there new factors for businesses to take into account now that Search+ has become the default search setting for Google?

By Guest Writer Lior Levin

What We Already Know about Google and Google Plus

Google+ has been an important part of helping content rank higher in a Google search long before the controversy over Search+. According to Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land, “Social Search results have, since October 2009, allowed content from people you know to rank higher, if you’re logged in.”

With the rising popularity of Google+, a presence on Google+ can help you rank higher in search results. If customers A and B are friends, but only customer B is following you on Google+, you could appear higher in customer A’s search results because of your common connection with customer B.

Sullivan adds in his article, “Google has previously said that gaining +1s can help improve your ranking for those who have directly +1ed your content, as well as for those they are connected to. In addition, it can show even those who aren’t connected or using +1 an overall count for your page, should it appear for them naturally.” This integration of social search elements hasn’t caused too much of a stir until Search+ added a new wrinkle.

Putting Google+ on Top of Search Results

The key development with Search+ is noted by Erin Everhart of 352 Media Group: “The catch is that it [Search+] only factors in your Google+ social graph, leaving Facebook and Twitter, arguably the more active social networks, out in the cold.” Though more users are ranking content socially through Facebook, Google+ activity, at least for now, seems to have a greater impact on rising in search rankings.

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The Invasion of the Search Result Snatcher: Google+

When preparing this week’s search and social news wrap-ups, we found an endless number of blog posts and articles about Google’s social network Google+.

Google Plus links appear in Google ads, as links on web sites, as invitation to coversations in Google search results, and — above all — as regular, “personalized” search results in Google search.

It is abundantly clear that Google is now willing to do anything to force both searchers and search engine marketing people to establish a presence on Google+. The goal is clearly to turn it into one of the major social sites on the web.

You might say that since Google owns the Google search engine, it must be allowed to do whatever it likes with the search results.

Maybe. What worries us, though, is that this does not make much sense business wise, either.

Here is why: Google’s success is founded on quality.

Google won over long forgotten search engines like AltaVista and Excite because they constantly focused on helping the searcher find what he or she was looking for. AltaVista, for instance, lost because it stopped working on the search algorithm, focusing on building a portal instead.

Now Google is sacrificing the quality of its search result by including links to inferior content on Google+. These links appear above much more relevant pages from Twitter and Facebook.

To me it does not matter if the relevant Google+ pages link to Twitter and Facebook. I do not want to be forced to take a detour via Google+ to get to the most relevant results. Nor do I want to be forced to establish and uphold a company page on Google+ just because Google controls the mighty Google search engine.

It is true that history never repeats itself, but there is something about human hubris that make people do the same mistakes over and over again. By sacrificing quality on the altar of market dominance, Google may — like AltaVista before it — soon find that the searchers go elsewhere.

Ironically, this time it is the old monopolist, Microsoft, who provides the most likely alternative: Bing. Search engines like Duck Duck Go and Blekko may also benefit from the strategic errors of Google.

Here are some of the search related articles we have found interesting lately, including some very interesting posts about Google+ and the quality of Google search results:

The Pandia Search Engine News Wrap-up

Dear Google: Crappy Results Like This Don’t Give The Impression You Care About Search
Danny Sullivan: The debate about what should — and shouldn’t — show in a Google search result for “santorum” has been well-documented, at this point. But I’d like to use this now famous search to illustrate something else: how it appears Google is taking its eye off the ball of being a search engine.

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Here’s this week news wrap-up with stories on social media and social networking.

Twitter Now Able To Censor Tweets, If Required By Law, On A Country-By-Country Basis
Danny Sullivan: So far, Twitter tells me that virtually all of the tweets it has had to pull have been due to complaints filed through the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Like Google, it has already been filing requests it receives to remove content with Chilling Effects.

Greplin: Search your Social Timeline
State of Search: “Personal search engine” Greplin is one of the social search engines which tries to grab a part of social search. It looks through your social accounts to find that one message or topic you lost or couldn’t remember who said it.

10 Things Facebook is doing that will guarantee its future dominance
memeburn: Despite the numerous stories one continues to read about people planning a mass exodus from Facebook, however, the global growth stats continue to boggle the mind month after month, with 1-billion Facebook users starting to look more likely sooner rather than later.

A woman’s world: How social media has changed gaming
memeburn: A recent study conducted by PopCap Games (most famous for Plants vs Zombies and Bejeweled) found that women were the most active gamers on social networking sites, making up over 55% of gamers.

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