Online Marketing Advice, Tips & Strategies

Tag: Google+

Five Reasons Why Your Business Profile Belongs On Google+ Rather Than Facebook

1. Having your website linked from your Google+ profile gives it search credibility.

Simple fact. Plus if your business sells widgets, and you post to your Google+ account about your widget blog, and your location is known to Google, then when users search for widget merchants in your area, your site or your account will pop up closer to the top.

2. There’s fewer distractions on Google+.

Some users might compare Facebook and disdain the lack of things like having a “favorite music” or “books you’re read” section. But really, what does that do? Google+ also removed games, and has a general lack of gizmos entirely. That’s a good thing. There’s less noise, more room for you, yourself, to shine.

3. Google+ has superior market targeting.

Because Google+ has Communities, Hangouts, and Pages, all of them excellent opportunities to make connections through your product. Keep an eye out for communities that target your market, and be sure to post there. Make a few extra pages detailing your products and services. Host hangouts within your target market’s niche.

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Penguins and Pandas and Pagerank, Oh My!

We’re downright nostalgic for the good old days when SEO work didn’t involve so many animal names. here’s the latest breakdown on Google Panda vs Google Penguin and what they mean to you. It’s a great resource and you should read it carefully, because there’s a lot of half-baked theories and general panic going on out there and this post is a smooth voice of reason.

Let’s try to view the Google Penguin update rationally: Keywords are not dead. Even Google’s own webmaster guidelines advise “Focus on creating useful, information-rich content that uses keywords appropriately and in context.” That’s all you have to do. Deep breaths, everybody. We’ll get through this. Continue reading

Google Ratings Guidelines

SEOMoz modestly states “If you’re looking for SEO secrets, you’ll be disappointed by this post.” Oh, we beg to differ. While it isn’t exactly Earth-shattering or surprising, we found this list of 16 Google Ratings Guidelines to be worth passing along, just because it’s obvious that many of you out there do not know them.

Take for example:

  • Generic Queries Are Never Vital – So why are there so many web entrepreneurs out there fighting tooth and nail over domains like “beer.com” and “vacations.org”? Sorry to break this to you, but most of us expect to find a rather unhelpful domain at a generic.com address, and we’re usually right.
  • Copied Content Can Be Relevant – That’s startling! We’ve had so much bad press about copied content drilled into our skulls that we’re going to avoid it anyway.
  • Ads Without Value Are Spam – Not news to you and I, but breaking headlines to a ton of landing pages out there. We’re guessing they’re all owned by people in third-world countries who haven’t gotten the news.
  • Google Raters Use Firefox – Yay! Not only our favorite browser, but our favorite add-on gets a plug too!

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Will Google+ Lead The Way For Erasing Anonymity On The Web?

Search Engine Land reports on Google’s latest move in its attempt to horn into the social networking banquet, where they’re going to start verifying an account identity. The chatter about this one is, surprisingly, more positive than you’d expect. While there are still concerns about online privacy, it seems that web users are sick of something else even more:

Trolls, scams, spammers, sock-puppets, and general fools using the whole wide world for their personal playground.

It is true that the state of the web as we know it does lend itself to a hostile environment. Take the case of David Mabus, a Canadian who made a career out of sending thousands of threatening emails and IMs to everyone he saw on the web for more than ten years. He has just now been arrested. If you were on any side of an issue opposite him, chances are you were threatened under one of his many accounts.

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How Google+ Could Change The Rules Of the SEO Game

In the film Minority Report, we see that advertising in the future is triggered by iris scanners who identify you by eye pattern and use that to have talking billboards address you by name. Our present is getting closer and closer to that science fiction scenario!

The latest musing on Google+ is over at SEO Chat, which asks How Google Plus Could Change SEO. There’s a list of features which Google+ adds, each of which have the handy side effect of offering more targeted advertising.

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If You Were Google’s CEO For A Day…

A fun bit of engagement over at Matt Cutt’s pad, asking What would you do if you were CEO of Google?. Cutts admits that he’d think in terms of big projects – starry eyed dreamer, and hey, nothing wrong with that. The comments also have a ball with this bit of day-dreaming.

But we’re the boring old practical idealist. In Eric Schmidt‘s shoes, we’d either (a) put even more guns into Android than it has already, or (b) modify a Linux into a desktop OS and push it to compete head-to-head with Microsoft.

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Thinking Like a Google Engineer

How often we, in the web SEO business, chase down every rumor and scrap of information about search engine optimization, especially for Google. How seldom we get it straight from the horse’s mouth. Ok so most SEO consultants will know him, but for those that don’t – may we introduce Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO, a blog by a bona-fide Google engineer.

Chock-full of SEO wisdom, this candid blog should be mandatory reading for every budding web entrepreneur. A great example is the glossary section, with some down-and-dirty dirt on breaking a URL into its component parts, and busting some jargon on algorithms. And note, he doesn’t burble on about meta-tag voodoo and link-exchange witchcraft, he just tells you what’s going on!

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Google Beat – A Video Log For Hot search Topics

In a move that comments on just how important search trends have become in our modern world, Google has launched Google Beat, a video blog reporting on weekly search trends and what they mean.

This is quite an awesome little development, and we’ll be watching the Google Beat YouTube channel to see where this goes.

This is one of those defining moments when it really hits you that you’re living in the 21st century. Twenty years ago, web searches were barely an explored concept. Sixteen years ago, the Google search engine launched. Four years ago, the Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary added the word “google” to their listings. And this year, we have a hostess doing a video segment on the week’s most popular searches, available through a streaming video site.

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