The topic of SEO these days typically brings about a deer in headlights mentality. With dynamically adaptive search algorithms and Google working around the clock to separate the wheat from the chaff - even seasoned web marketers treating SEO with caution is understandable. So what can you do to improve some key Google ranking signals today? Here are some interesting ways you can think of improving your organic search rank from Google, others, and us.

1. Social Media: Eat Plus+ Flavored Ice Cream

As far as we know, Google's "social" ranking signals are only generated from Google+ activity - and they are actively indexing this content! Whether it be for reputation management or for improving the social buzz around your brand, getting involved on Google+ is a must for SEO. If you're already on Google+, awesome! Try this from Guy Kawasaki's What the Plus! - instead of creating a traditional Poll, just pose the question as a status update, include instructions to "+1 your choice in the comments below", and add comments below for each of the answer options. You can easily gather the data later but viewing the +1's and in Google's eyes you've got veracious content exploding with interest.

Matt Cutts featured at SMX last month had some interesting things to say about social signals and the antiquation of backlinks - opposed to what many link builders would suppose, according to Matt the number of no-follow links on the web are still in single digit percentages. He goes further to address the when will social be more important than links issue by explaining it's where the momentum is headed but we aren't quite there yet.

In a follow-up presentation from Duane Forrester of Bing and Matt's called The Search Police: Matt & Duane’s Excellent Search Engine Adventure we saw Matt plead the 5th when it came to weighing in on how much Google +1's and Facebook influence PageRank - although Duane conceded that when you are logged social does influence search. The bottom-line, social might not be a huge component of ranking right now - but it will continue to gain influence AND the indirect impact on other important factors like referral visits, bounce rate, and pages viewed are all helped by getting social.

2. URL Structure: Get Technical

There is a great article by Tom Schmitz with some interesting technical tidbits on site architecture and how it can affect search. A few of the points boil down to (besides the root domain) you can count on all search engines treat dashes (-) like spaces, and that's about it.

If you use anything else to delineate your sub-folders & files you're diluting relevancy or giving the search engine some completely unintended signal. Identify a few URLs that you're not thrilled with performance-wise and experiment - optimizing a single page at a time, over time, may be the best way to not become overwhelmed. Create a 301 redirect from the old URL, update your sitemap with webmaster tools, and you're finished. By eliminating these types of special characters you'll be increasing your keyword relevancy which is obviously extremely important when ranking for search.

3. Mobile: Get Responsive

Responsive web design is quickly becoming THE web design catch-phrase of the year - but really as far as Google is concerned they're really looking to see if you're making css media queries to direct the styling of your website to the specific device on which it's being served OR you're redirecting on the server-level to individual websites for mobile and big machine / tablet users.

This is pretty easy to test, below are a mobile and non-mobile search for search optimization - notice nothing changes until result #9 - where #1-#8 are either redirecting to a mobile-specific website or have media queries for handling their layout responsively, then on mobile Blue Fountain Media & HubSpot hop-scotches over the IIS.Net result because it doesn't have either acceptable mobile handling implemented (and they DO).

Building responsive for mobile is important for a number of experience reasons beyond mobile search optimization but if your mobile search performance is lacking and you're months away (or roadblocks behind) a responsive design try adding a few css media queries to your stylesheet and see if you don't get a bump in mobile search rank. If you're B2C don't forget about Internet-enabled non-smart phone users - Google calls them Feature Phones. They don't handle media queries so the recommended handling is branching to a separate URL mobile site.

Example of a media query for smartphones:

@media only screen and (max-width: 640px) { your css styles for mobile only here }

4. Keyword Engineering: Forget About It

Forget about keywords - honestly, forget about them for just one second. Think about how you could clearly define and label your content for exactly what it is - whether it be an article, product, service landing page, or the contact form. Having a solid foundation that is real to your brand and company is important. As Shari Thurow wrote earlier this month on Search Engine Land, it's really more about - 'aboutness'. Instead of directly trying to engineer content to fit an identified 'optimal keyword' make sure you announce as plainly as possible what exactly the content is about. In this way, you'll indirectly improve time on site, decrease bounce rate, and potentially increase backlinkage because visitors get what they expect.

Important -> Keyword identification certainly has its place in on-going content generation strategy, market trending, and opportunity identification - but tweaking the order of keywords in your homepage title just isn't going to suddenly rocket you to #1 search result. Getting exposure in horizontal industries by engaging in a social discussion, establishing a relationship with a vertical non-profit to develop guest blogging opportunities, or expanding your web footprint by creating new content is time much better spent to capitalize on keyword opportunities than re-engineering your current content.

5. Multimedia Search: Image Meta Information

Okay, this isn't a traditional search signal tip - but Google's recently rolled out some pretty hefty changes to their image search interface. They're openly displaying a bunch more data about the images along side the images. Some of this information actually includes the title of the webpage that the image is being served from (not the images title), so properly naming files and labeling images with title and alt-text values corresponding to what's on the page is becoming increasingly important.

Review your website's image files and make sure there aren't any smp_img_342.jpg's lying around or missing meta attributes. If there are opportunities to correlate categories, listing pages, and other non-leaf pages with click enticing images - by all means pull the trigger.

Which one would you click on if you were shopping by image?

These certainly aren't the only things you can do to search optimize your website without disturbing your current success. Have some other great upgrades that won't threaten or erode current search positions? Please let us know in comments or contact us anytime.