5 For Friday — Links, Stories & Posts For Your Weekend

September 9th, 2011 by Search Influence Alumni

How Small Businesses Can Use Google Plus — Expand2Web

While Facebook is an excellent resource for small business social media engagement, Google+ is an up-and-comer that as of yet doesn’t allow business profiles. However, hope is on the way: winter of 2011 will yield the first allowed G+ commercial accounts, so if you’re a media-savvy business owner now’s the time to start formulating your strategy. Expand2Web’s Daniela Baker has the scoop on what you should be thinking about in the upcoming months to optimize your establishment’s chances on Google’s mean streets.

Friday Five: Optimizing Content & Visibility with SlideShare — Edelman Digital

In their own Friday Five tradition, the wizards at Edelman share their tips & tricks for using SlideShare, a cutting-edge “YouTube for documents” that offers a platform for information sharing and discussion.

Facebook Debuts Smart Lists: Is Google+ in Trouble? — Search Engine Journal

The G+/FB war continues with Facebook’s institution of “smart lists,” algorithmic sorting that automatically categorizes one’s friends into set groups. In addition to introducing the automatic methods of sorting, the ‘book is also pushing a lesser-known feature that allows one to manually separate out groups for maximum ease of social sharing. Combined with the updated privacy settings of last week, seems like Facebook is gearing up to address Google+’s emphasis on user privacy and share filtering.

Why not updating your Core, Themes & Plugins is Stupid — Yoast

We’re all guilty of it: when the upgrade alert appears on anything from our music players to website modules, it’s tempting to say “not now” and ignore the problem in favor of more immediate concerns. Joost de Valk has a blog up at Yoast warning of the perils of ignoring vital core, theme and plugin updates.

50 Can’t-Fail Techniques for Finding Great Blog Topics — Copyblogger

Finding it hard to crank out blog after blog to keep your site full of fresh content? Use these fifty useful prompts to generate dynamic, juicy topics that will keep the entries coming.