A weekly roundup of the most interesting and useful posts and articles on search / inbound marketing from the past week.

Social Media & Content Marketing

LinkedIn Launches Company Follow Button – Here’s why you should have it and how to get it for your site.

The State of the Twitterverse 2012
Collection of infographics showing the growth of Twitter and what factors cause the most engagement with tweets.

Social Photography: The New Face of Social Media
The explosive growth of Instagram and Pinterest is causing some to declare already 2012 as “The Year of Social Photography.” Some tips on how businesses can take advantage of this movement.

Lay Off the Social Media Experts
Doing social media right for business is not easy. Many businesses will need to outsource for the expertise they don’t have time to accumulate. While the title has been tainted by inexperience amateurs calling themselves “SM experts,” that doesn’t mean it would be wise to ignore real, earned expertise in the field.

Grow Your Google+ Business Page with the Power of Sharing
How to use the power of sharing the content of others as a strategy to build your own following, with emphasis on the particular aspects of Google+ that make sharing extra-powerful there.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

What is the Google+ effect on SEO? Three key posts:
How Google Might Rank User Generated Web Content in Google+ and Other Social Networks – Takes a look at some significant Google patents in recent history that may provide clues to how Google is using signal from Google+ to affect search rankings.
The Google Influence Metric – Google+ SEO expert AJ Kohn traces a string of moves by Google over the past year that seem to lend weight to the influence theories in the post linked above.
Roots of Google+ Showing in Grouptivity Patent Filings – Explores more clues in Google patent filings. Of particular interest is how Google may be using social sharing cues: “Content sharing social reference data includes interactions someone has with web content which result in some peer-to-peer, peer-to-group, or group-to-peer sharing of the address of the content, or a portion of the content itself.”

Is SEO Killing America?
A response to the popular trend of SEO-bashing, pointing out the many positive benefits SEO done properly brings to searchers.

How to Use Internal Linking to Improve Your Website’s SEO
Easy-to-implement but often overlooked techniques that can boost your best content’s search engine rankings.

Paid Search Advertising (PPC)

How to Run Your PPC Accounts Like a Project
There’s a lot to do when managing a paid search advertising account: bid changes, ad testing, keyword research, quality score improvement…the list seems endless. Traditional “to do” lists just don’t cut it. This post shows you how to use good project management practices to get on top of account management.

How to Better Optimize for Mobile Lead Generation
By now you probably know that you should be segmenting your mobile ads to better target them. This post shows you how to do that for the specific purpose of generating leads from mobile ads.

Web Analytics

Measuring Social Media ROI with Google Analytics
Segmenting your Google Analytics with custom profiles to see which social media outlets are sending you real customers.

Log Your Visitors’ Social Network Activity on Your WordPress Blog
This WordPress plugin allows you to track visitors to your blog who were logged in to various social media networks in Google Analytics.

Just for Fun

Social Media Guru

Photo by ESPNHS. Used through a Creative Commons License.