What does Google+ Your Business equal? It’s probably still too early to tell. But in the days of the Panda Algorithm, quality content is king.

Ok, admit it, every once in a while you Google yourself. While going through search engine optimization strategies and hearing about what new practices will make Google’s algorithms twitch, you’re likely to Google your own business, and in a moment of vanity, perhaps you like to see what comes up in the search results when you type in your own name.

Search engine optimization is the process of improving the visibility of a website to search engines. While that is a simple idea, putting SEO concepts to work can seem daunting to a beginner. Luckily there are a number of SEO tutorials to get started.

Here is a list of SEO tutorials for beginners. There are comprehensive guides, as well as shorter quick-start tutorials.

Google has created a service that helps online retailers list and submit products to Google's Product Search, Product Ads, and Commerce Search offerings.

Google’s mobile crawler Googlebot-Mobile has traditionally focused on content designed for feature phones and their extremely limited browsers. Google recently announced, however, a new version of Googlebot-Mobile that crawls using an iPhone user agent, enabling it to discover content designed for smartphones, which are more robust than feature phones.

How etailers manage their social media marketing channel has a growing impact on organic search results. Google and Bing have both incorporated social data into their algorithms to signal content freshness and quality.

"Ask an Expert" is an occasional feature where we ask ecommerce experts questions from online merchants. For this installment, we address a question about hosting videos for search engine optimization purposes.

The quickest path to earning more from an ecommerce site's organic search traffic is to convert more consumers who already go there. I addressed that topic previously, at "SEO: Convert More Before Driving More."

Many SEO strategies focus on driving more visitors. But what use is driving more searchers to a site that can't convert them?

Search engine optimization typically focuses on the trophy terms, the high-volume keyword phrases, because marketers need to drive the highest value with the lowest effort. Unfortunately, those juicy trophy terms are great for brand recognition and customers' initial awareness, but they typically don't convert as well as the less commonly searched long tail phrases.

When ecommerce companies think about content syndication, they typically consider acquiring content that others have written to beef up their own sites. Depending on the goal, placing content from other sites onto your own can be beneficial from a branding, partnership, or reference point of view, but rarely for search engine optimization.

What happens to your strategies when the social media, SEO and eCommerce worlds collide?

Google's so-called "Farmer/Panda" algorithm update rewards original, high-quality site content. Aggregators suffer under Panda, as do ecommerce merchants who rely on generic product descriptions that are not unique to their sites, or who offer poor content generally.

A site's navigational links can help its search engine optimization. Links pass "link popularity," little votes of value, from the linking page to the destination page. In addition, the link's anchor text — the visible text portion of the link — passes a relevance signal. Relevance and value, or quality, are the foundation of SEO.

Working in the organic search industry, I’ve often had large search marketing clients who envied the success of their affiliates, which sometimes outperformed their own in-house search marketing efforts.

For the last several years’ people have questioned how social media can really help businesses, whether it be lead generation or e-commerce. Nobody truly understood what it would mean or the impact it would have in the long term. But in 2011 it has been made clear that Google and Bing have started using social media as a part of their Search Engine Results Page (SERP) ranking algorithm. Google and Bing have relationships with Facebook where they are able to get data from Fan pages and therefor use that to help with their rankings.

Over two years ago, we published an "SEO Report Card" for SolsticeSupply.com, an ecommerce site dedicated to closeout winter goods ranging from skis and snowboards to winter apparel. With a final grade of D+, the review didn't go well for founder Justin Clapick, who requested it. Clapick recently contacted us, again, for a redo — after launching his new Magento Enterprise store.

I'll get right to the point. You can't bolt a couple of pages onto the edge of your ecommece site like a sidecar to a motorcycle and call it search engine optimization.

The key to maintaining search engine friendliness is the ability to quickly change as new strategies are introduced and older ones become irrelevant. Search engine optimization (SEO) is an ever-changing entity that requires constant attention. The actions that generated results six months ago may be completely antiquated today.