SearchInfluence

As always, we’re proud to feature best-of-the-web stories and practical advice for competing online in our monthly Read This! feature. Check out May’s offerings after the jump!

• 6 Ways to Boost Your Rankings Using Google Authorship

Are you using Google Authorship to get your face in the SERPs and increase your authority? If not, you should look into utilizing this handy feature, which links your G+ account with blog posts you’ve authored. Check out this Search Engine Watch post on six ways to capitalize on your newfound notoriety.

• Mobile Navigation Design & Tutorial

As always, our Read This! feature profiles stories and how-to’s you can’t afford to miss for your business, offering direct and practical advice for competing online. Check out this month’s offerings after the jump!

The Twitter Guide for Small Business

With the advent of its small business ad products, Twitter has published an official 22-page ebook showing you how to “engage with your customers and put Twitter to work for your business.” Look for the PDF link below the video!

Measuring Your Company’s Online Success

A True Anon

Now that we’re all settled into 2012, we still find ourselves catapulting forward through the Information Age. Some have even classified our current place in time as the Personalization Era [sic]. This is a time wherein the information collected about you online can and does tailor your experience on the Internet to your interests and/or demographic.  Your searches, data collected through your online presence (Facebook and other social networking sites), tweets, and other bits and pieces come together to serve as a pool of data that allows search engines and various sites to do a variety of things to assist or appeal to you. Advertising, personalized search results, product recommendations, etc. are chosen specifically for you! This era, in my experience, has found many divided into two larger groups: the Embracer and the Anon.

Optimizing Search Engine Marketing For Seasonal Opportunities — Search Engine Land

If you’re in the business of beach umbrella retail, snowblowing equipment, spring cleaning or other seasonally-related product or service, chances are you’ll be interested in this article explaining how to stay on top of the trends and perfectly time your campaigns to get the most out of the busy season.

Reaching Your Target Market Through Social Media — ProNet Advertising

Engaging your customers and building a brand online is a crucial part of competing in the contemporary business world — read this article to learn more on how to maximize the potential of every part of your social media activity.

Search engines are designed to do one thing — make sense of the various documents found on the Web. Originally using just on-page factors like content and meta information contained in specialized tags, search engines moved to analysis of links in the late 90′s with the advent of the PageRank algorithm. This new method treated links as “votes” for websites, using anchor text and website clout to determine what is relevant to a search query. Recently, though still relying on links as the main source for determining a page’s worth, search engines and other Internet spiders are returning to on-page factors to find information that’s meaningful to users.

“New” On-Page Meta

These “new” on-page factors are the culmination of work dating back to the beginning of the modern Internet. The original diagram showing the basics of how the Web would work devotes much of its space to showing the connections between pages, but one corner lays the foundation for what is now known as the semantic web. This image shows a few of the basic properties in the semantic web: rel=author and other relationship markups, Schema’s breadcrumbs and on-page descriptions, and the hCard microformat.