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We've written earlier about Grovo, an online video e-learning site that conducts a lot of celebrity interviews. Some of them are more interesting than others. Today they have a new series with Zach Ciperski, the Director of SEO for EliteSEM and also serves as Vice President of CoffeeForLess.com. He has built sites for some major retailers and teaches SEO at New York University, among other places. His series is on How To SEO, and is worth watching if you are still struggling with the basics, or need some help before you go forth and try to hire an SEO specialist. Here is one five-minute segment on making small tweaks to your site.

Google Chrome made a booboo, and now its own company is punishing it. Yesterday, the news broke that bloggers were being paid to use SEO spam tactics to boost the Google Chrome website's page ranking in search. Hundreds of paid articles, many of them totally incoherent, were used to promote Chrome. At least one of them violated Google's policy against paid links. As Google's search guru Matt Cutts wrote in 2009, "paid posts should not affect search engines."

So that was awkward. Fortunately for Google, the infraction could be blamed on Unruly Media, the third-party company Google hired to promote Chrome. Links from the paid posts were supposed to use the rel="nofollow" tag, so they wouldn't affect page rank. At least one blogger didn't, even though Unruly "advised" them to. In order for Google to get out of this mess, it would have to punish itself as it has done to others. Sure enough, Google says it will reduce Chrome's page rank.

This is a message that can't possibly be repeated often enough: Good content trumps SEO. Don't believe me? Fair enough, but how about the head of Google's webspam team? In a short video today on Google's Webmaster Central Channel, Cutts answers a question about SEO practices and whether "poor" sites with bad SEO are penalized by Google.

Google continues the inevitable wallpapering of the Web with the +1 button, adding it to image search today. This makes Google image search into a social affair, highlighting images and displaying annotated recommendations from your +friends. Images will now appear in the +1 tab of Google+ profiles.

This extends the Google+-powered personalization of Google search results into the realm of images. Social search could be the greatest impact of Google+, since the +1 button now affects the way Google search results appear. For anyone logged into his or her Google account, social signals have begun to affect the results of all kinds of Web searches whether users want that or not.

The three most important things for SEO are content, content, and content. To drive that point home, Brafton has put together an infographic that should be hanging on the wall of every marketing department. The "Why Content for SEO?" infographic looks at the effect of Google Panda and how content is converting searches to sales.

Google News is building new ways to highlight great content, such as the <standout> tag announced this weekend, so now is a good time to rethink how to optimize content for the popular news aggregator, which also powers the news features in Google Plus.

A new study produced by Local SEO Guide, PerfectMarket and newsknife has shed some light on the factors that determine rankings on Google News. Among the top 10 factors under publishers' control are keywords in headlines and page titles, strong domain authority, social sharing of articles, and being first to publish. Citation by other sources is also a key factor, as is the uniqueness of the text.

If you're trying to convince the powers that be at your organization that they need formal SEO processes, the folks at MarketingSherpa have your back. According to research analyst Kaci Bower, organizations that have formal processes and good guidelines see big benefits in terms of lead quality and organic traffic conversion rates.

According to Google, query volume has nothing to do with search rankings. But Martin MacDonald isn't buying that, and might have evidence that search volume can affect Google rankings after all.

MacDonald, head of SEO for global media agency OMD (that's this OMD, not the first OMD that comes to mind for Generation X), conducted a little experiment. By creating more search volume than usual for the term "Martin MacDonald SEO," he was able to nudge his personal site up into the first page of Google results. Google also started appending "seo" to searches for Martin MacDonald in its suggest results.

Companies live and die by search engine traffic. It's little wonder that companies pull out all the stops in their Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts, but you can go too far. Not sure where the line is? Mike Glover of Click-Finders lays out 10 "don'ts" to keep from slipping into 'Black Hat' SEO.

What's "Black Hat" SEO? In a nutshell, practices that are designed to deceive search engines and garner Google juice that isn't earned. While nobody (outside of Google) knows exactly what Google uses to rank sites, or what triggers their banhammer to bump sites out of the rankings, Glover gives 10 practices that every business should avoid to be on the safe side.

Google Plus has been live for barely two weeks, but inevitably, online marketers and search engine optimization experts are curious about how the new social product might influence organic search rankings in the future.

Officially, there's no official indication of how Plus will affect SEO, but plenty of speculation and some obvious hints about where things may be headed.