Facebook’s Like button promotes online interaction and sharing among a user’s group of “friends.” The Like button is very powerful because people are more likely to act upon recommendations from friends vs. strangers. Like has also become popular as an intuitive public rating system for all web content including videos, blogs and websites. The more likes and tweets your page has, the greater chance you have of going viral. Everyone loves their piece to go viral, but these spurts of fame have a tendency to burn out and die quickly. The weakness of the Like button is that Like offers only small window of visibility, either on a viewer’s news feeds or on their wall. The valuable personalized Likes are quickly buried and whatever positives the Likes once had- disappears. From Facebook’s perspective this is good because it encourages the user to keep posting to get the positive feedback. From the user’s perspective the constant quest for thumbs up can be exhausting.

Facebook’s little thumb needs to pay attention to two positive advantages Google’s +1 has that could potentially leave this hitchhiker in the dust. These are Google’s massive market penetration and the duration of +1’s influence.

The size and diversity of Google’s businesses alone makes Google’s +1 a little darling and a threat to the Like button. Google controls most of the advertising dollars on the Internet through search and they own high traffic sites like Youtube, Blogspot and Google Maps. In addition, they are determined to remain a player in the mobile device market, have recently developed their own browser and new apps are appearing daily. The +1 button will work seamlessly across all things Google and this enhances its value for advertisers, users and businesses.

You can also count on Google incorporating +1 into their Social Media algorithm in addition to Facebook and Twitter. Google is likely to disproportionately weight the +1 and this fact alone will increase +1’s market penetration.

Market duration relies and feeds off of Google’s market penetration. Google’s +1 doesn’t rely on a platform like Facebook to be useful and relevant to a user. Rather, +1s are displayed to a user anytime they use Google search. When a Google user is logged into Google they will be able to see the +1s from their friends along with their search results. Furthermore, this feature cleverly extends to paying Google Adword customers. The contextual placement of +1 is potentially very powerful. For example, let’s say a friend of yours is a horticulturist and he has +1ed public gardens all over the world. The next time you are in St. Louis and want something to do, your “public garden” search will include your friend’s +1 recommendation for Busch Gardens at the top of your search and you are likely to take his recommendation. Some reviewers have seen the “logged into Google requirement” as a limitation of the +1 rating system but this is irrelevant on smart phones and other mobile platforms. Moreover, +1s will potentially increase click through rates. People generally want whatever they think other people want. Google’s inclusion of +1s in Adwords should increase click though rates and dramatically impact Adword real estate.

It’s almost impossible for any webmasters and marketers to keep on top of all the new Internet developments, and it’s tempting to wait until +1 is established before jumping in with both feet. However, we think this is a fantastic idea and are taking the chance that it has legs. Source ranking is something search has never managed effectively and Google’s development of social layers and +1 has the potential to dramatically improve Goggle Search. +1 at the moment is source agnostic but the entire reason social media tags work comes back to the fact that a user will place a higher valuation on information based upon his/her perception of the source’s legitimacy, expertise and knowledge. Some recommendations are just more valuable than others and these are subjective judgments.

Furthermore, the +1 lends itself to the future introduction of a 100-point rating scale and this would finally create a useful Internet rating system. The American Robert Parker made his name and radically changed the world’s wine industry with his introduction of a 100-point scale. Google could easily do the same in the future with the +1.

This was just launched Tuesday, so we hope what we are seeing is phase one. As of today, Google AU is only showing the products if the user clicks on Shopping on the left nav menu. This extra click will not product much traffic, especially this early. On Google US, five shopping results are displayed as part of Universal Search, directly on page one. They have enticing pictures, pricing, reviews stars, and store names. As a preview of the prominent attention we can expect in AU once they put the results mixed in with natural results, I googled ‘vacuum cleaner’ on Google US:

Currently many of the items displayed in Shopping AU are Ebay listings, but we expect that to become more robust as businesses learn how to push the data to Google. We have been assisting our clients with this in anticipation of this day. Google gives priority to the age of the product feed, so the sooner you are participating, the better.   Visit the Google Merchant Center to get instructions on submitting your data.

Only products fed to Google will show up here, so we recommend two immediate actions: get your data feed to google, and set up your product reviews using the hreview microformat John wrote about last week.

Ajax is a great tool for keeping your site speedy, because it lets interactive features operate independently of the page as a whole. What that means is that the user can make a choice by ticking a box on the page and only the part of the page that is applicable to the choice will reload. You might remember the bad old days when a visitor interacting with a page required the entire page to reload. So use Ajax and make your visitors happy.

PHP is an open-source scripting language that outputs HTML. Because it is open source, people are always extending it and adding functionality, and you can do so too if you’re of a mind to. While you don’t have to become an expert on HTML, it’s not a bad idea to have some minor chops with these techniques. If nothing else, it will help you communicate your needs with your web designer more effectively.

The words contained between the <title> and </title> parts of your header are what shows up in the browser address bar when they see the website. For example, if your title tag reads “cool jewelry and accessories” then those words will  appear in the address bar of the browser when you go to your site instead of something like “cooljewelryandaccessories.com.”

Your title tag should contain key terms you want your page to be found for by search engines. That title will show up in bookmarks as well as address bars. Different search engines use different title lengths in your meta description. Google shows 69 characters (spaces included) for a title tag. Yahoo will show up to 72 characters (spaces included) for a page title, unless it’s a PDF, in which case it can be up to 75 characters. Bing shows 65 characters including spaces for page title tags. Ask.com shows 69 characters for a page title.

You can get the best mileage out of your title tags in meta data by including keyword phrases in a short page title of 65 or fewer characters, even though some search engines show more than 65 characters.

Adding text link navigation in a column on the left hand side of your page means it will be one of the first things a search engine crawler reads. These links should include targeted keywords.

Footers are the content at the bottom of a web page that give information about the author, copyright, and navigational links. They should be brief and not crammed with keywords, because this only dilutes the importance of each individual keyword. Footers should use anchor text and link to the most important internal pages. Make sure your footer contains a link to your sitemap.

Internal text links are great for getting your pages crawled. They are simply links placed within your content to other pages of content. The reason they are given weight is because they imply that the link is relevant to the site’s overall content.

Note that these are not “quick fixes” that will rapidly move your site to the top of the first SERP. They are long-term methods that will help your pages organically float upward in the rankings and more importantly, hold their position once they make it onto that first page.