The Pluses of Google+: Benefits for Small Business Owners

As a small business owner, I’m always looking for free and low-cost ways to promote my business online. Social media provides great opportunities to network with potential customers and business partners.

Like many business owners, I first had a Facebook business page, with a growing community of followers. However as time went by and Facebook became a publicly traded company, it changed its free model to a pay-to-play model for business owners. Fair, perhaps, but now my businesses’ reach was limited as a free page.

Google+ offers no such restrictions to businesses or individuals. You can set up a page for yourself or for your business online. When you set up a business page, it also links to local search efforts, which boosts your website’s power to reach a local market – a plus for small business owners.

Google+ operates a little differently from similar social media sites. Instead of merely connecting with potential followers, you can add them to your “circles” and group circles by category. Friends, family, customers, clients, colleagues or other circles can be created so you can send customized messages to each circle rather than blast mass messages out to all.

Like most social media sites, Google+ enables users to share both links to web pages and articles as well as videos and photos. If your products are services benefit from visual marketing, that’s a plus.

Lastly, Google offers a neat feature called “hangouts.” Hangouts connect up to 10 people at a time in a sort of online video conference. You can share videos or even screen captures. Like the rest of the services offered by Google+, it’s free.

Drawbacks to Google+

For all of these wonderful features, are there are any negatives to using Google+? The two biggest drawbacks cited by users include slow adoption (also awareness) among their customers about Google+ itself, and the sheer amount of social media accounts most businesses juggle these days.

Google hasn’t done a lot to promote Google+. Sure, it’s online, and if you have gmail or other Google services you can’t help but notice it. Yet many people still don’t know what it is or why it’s a good idea to be on it. Until more of your friends, customers and acquaintances are using it, it can be hit or miss as to its effectiveness.

Many people are feeling social media burnout these days, and that feeling often extends to businesses. Small business owners juggling several social media profiles can feel overwhelmed posting, liking, sharing and managing their pages.

From a search engine perspective, anything Google does is worth noting – and participating in. While the company is mum about how much, if any, credence is given to companies using their platform for social media; most business owners are playing it safe and hedging their bets, setting up accounts on Google+ to cover their bases. Since it’s free, it’s a good idea to have a Google+ account. Be sure to manage it just as you would any other social media platform, and actively participate as often as you can to cultivate those all-important networking contacts.

Web Design of Palm Beach provides webhosting services, web design and more. Visit us online or call 561.262.5886.

YouTube, the world’s largest video social sharing platform, was purchased by Google in 2006. Since then, it’s evolved as the world’s second largest search engine. It’s second only to Google. Mushroom Networks published an infographic with the following facts about YouTube:

• The site processes 3 billion searches a month – more than all other search engines combined, with the exception of Google itself.
• One out of every two internet users watch YouTube.
• The site greets 1 billion unique visitors each month.
• 100 hours of new videos are uploaded very minute!
• YouTube reaches more adults ages 18 to 34 than any cable network.

Whew! And there are more facts to support the assertion that YouTube may, in fact, be the world’s most widely used search engine – or if not the most widely used search engine, a very close second in the race to be the biggest.

So how can you use this to your online marketing advantage?

• Create a YouTube account, or channel, to start using the site.
• Create short, powerful, original videos about your product or service. If you have a webcam or video camera, you can create them yourself. If not, hire a professional.
• Work your website’s name and URL into the actual video using YouTube’s annotations feature.
• Make sure to tag your video with keywords.
• Create a hyperlink in the video description to your website, and make the link in the first sentence if you can.
• Use the channel description area on YouTube more like an ad or a sales piece than a plain old vanilla description. You want to sell your video just as you’d sell your services; it helps gain more traffic and click throughs.
• Make an original, customized background for your channel on YouTube, and include your website’s domain on the header.

YouTube may possibly be one of the biggest search engines available. It can certainly be used to harness traffic for your website, and that helps boost visits and possible sales.

Web Design of Palm Beach offers affordable, reliable website hosting, website design, search engine optimization consulting and much, much more.  We can help you harness the power of YouTube and other search engines to boost your site traffic. Call us at 561.262.5886 to learn more or speak with a web design expert today.

Important Meta Tags to Know

You don’t necessarily need to know how to write HTML code to create meta tags. When Web Design of Palm Beach creates your website, they will make sure that the important meta tags are completed in your site design to help you with your website traffic. But during the design and development process, you may be asked to provide certain pieces of key information to help us build a great website.

There are two important meta tags to know:

• Meta Description:  The meta description tag provides a brief description of what a web page is about. When someone searches for your site online, it provides the information for search engine results that describes the page. If it’s written well, users may be more inclined to click on the link.
• Meta Title or Title Tag: Although it’s not technically a meta tag, the title tag combines with the meta description field on a page to share the page’s title with website visitors and searchers.

There’s another field that’s still used by Yahoo! but abandoned by most of the other search engines called the meta keywords field. This field is usually populated with a string of keyword phrases separate by commas. Yahoo! still uses this field, but the other major search engines claim they no longer do. It’s a good idea just to include them to be on the safe side.

Basics of Meta Description Tags

There are several best practices for writing meta descriptions or page descriptions that are good to know.

• Write your meta description sentences like advertising copy. It should be specific to the page but juicy enough to entice someone to click the link.
• Avoid duplicating tags on your website. The same tag on every page won’t help, and may hurt, your pages and click throughs.
• Don’t use quotation marks – these cut off your sentence when the search engine displays them!
• Keep them between 150 and 160 characters. Anything longer gets cut off.

If you need help building your website, call us. Web Design of Palm Beach offers affordable, reliable website hosting, website design, search engine optimization consulting and much, much more.  Call us at 561.262.5886 to learn more or speak with a web design expert today.

How Search Engines Work

Search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo! have just one purpose in life: to match someone’s inquiry with the best website to provide the information for their inquiry. They do this by sending out automated programs, called bots or spiders that scour the internet, looking for fresh, new content, whether it’s a web page, a blog post or a PDF document uploaded to a server. The bots or spiders can only read text, so as they peruse your website, they’re looking at both the text on the page and the codes running behind the page. They look for specific words or phrases used frequently and other cues that tells them what the page is about. Then they send that information back to the servers running the search engines for future reference. That information, plus many other online signals, gets fed into the search engine’s computer programs to determine where you web page appears on a search engine results page.

Each search engine uses its own proprietary method of determining how well your web page matches a user’s query when they type a term or phrase into a search engine box. The search engines don’t tell anyone exactly how they calculate the SERPs. Internet marketers and search engine experts have tested, tweaked and studied the major search engines, especially Google, to figure out their best guess as to what makes a page rise in the ranks to the top results on the first page and what sinks them into oblivion.

Five Tips to Get Your Site to Rise in the Ranks

Most search engine optimization experts agree that site owners can take many steps to help boost their website’s rank on the SERPS and consequently, attract more website visitors. There are numerous studies proving that the higher up in the organic or natural (not paid) search a website appears, the more people are likely to click on it. It makes sense; people aren’t likely to dig through several pages of results when they find what they need on the first page.
The following five tips are easy steps you can take now to help your website rise in the ranks. Try them and see how much of a difference it makes!

• Decide what keywords you will target, and make sure they are highly relevant and specific to your website’s information. Use them in the headlines at least once on a page and in the body copy at least a few times. Make sure the back-end codes are tagged with them, too.
• Create fresh content regularly and upload it to your website. Blogs are great for frequent updates, social media shares, and keyword-rich content that search engines love.
• Submit your website to the online directories and search engines! Yes, search engines will find your page eventually, but you can get there more quickly by actually entering your site into their system so that it’s on their radar.
• Build a linking campaign. Inbound links (links pointing INTO your website from other sites) are an extremely effective way of raising a site’s position in the search engine results. Do not swap a link for a link, an action dubbed ‘reciprocal linking’. That worked well years ago, but today it doesn’t work or can actually penalize your website. Instead, try offering some free content such as a worksheet, template, information sheet, how-to video, and other content that website owners will want to link to because it adds value for their customers.
• Repeat these steps and continue to monitor, tweak and update your website’s SEO each month. Many website owners think that search engine optimization is a ‘once and done’ method of marketing. Instead, it’s more like maintenance on a car; it should be done periodically to keep traffic running smoothly!

Web Design of Palm Beach can help with this and other website projects. We offer affordable, reliable website hosting, website design, search engine optimization consulting and much, much more. Call us at 561.262.5886 to learn more or speak with a web design expert today.

After a quick conversation with my client regarding his preferred search terms, I told him to leave it to me. I would see what I could do, with no promises.

Enter Copy Writing Services and Consulting.

I quickly contacted copy-writing expert Jeanne Grunnert of sevenoaksconsulting.com with this small project, explained our goals and proceeded to tackle this head on. Jeanne researched the topic and wrote a new home page for the client. Not only was the new home page optimized with the keyword terms used properly, but it was also readable. It wasn’t like the typical “optimized” copy you see elsewhere that sounds like a robot wrote it. It sounded like one person speaking to another, yet used the keywords well.

After some initial research and several small revisions, we had brand new copy for my client’s homepage.

 Successful Search Engine Results in Just Three Months

After three months, we checked in on our new page, searching for the specific keywords used in the content. Lo and behold, that little home page with almost no previous visibility had risen to the top of the search results, returning listings in the number 2 and 3 positions on the first page of results.

Needless to say my client is happy, and we are happy as well!

There’s More to Effective SEO than Meets the Eye!

There’s more to getting better search engine rankings than simply modifying your content, but this is a good first step. Coupled with proper coding and meta-tagging, you should be well on your way to better rankings, Contact me today to learn more or to inquire about having us create compelling search engine friendly content for your site.

The more important names we should all be aware of and many aren’t are “Old Possum”, Porky, Daffie (as in the duck), Penguin and most recently “Panda”, these are all code names of google updates, the latest being Penguin and Panda. While these monikers may bring to mind images of cute, and harmless creatures, they are names that can easily make or break your online business so be aware!

Googles Panda update aimed to lower the rank of “low-quality sites” or “thin sites”, and return higher-quality sites near the top of the search results.

While the Penguin update was aimed at decreasing search engine rankings of websites that violate Google’s Webmaster Guidelines  by using now declared black-hat SEO techniques, such as keyword stuffing, cloaking, participating in link schemes, deliberate creation of duplicate content, and others.

Content has always been king in the eyes of google and for good reason, but now more than ever this is something to pay attention to. These latest updates shuffled up the SERP’s quite a bit and had many  website owners scrambling to get back into the rankings.

This is where “content marketing” and “copy-writing” services may come in handy, if you don’t have the time, energy, or talent to generate your own relevant and compelling content, consider contacting Web Design of Palm Beach today to get more information on these services.

As part of  my design services all sites created have organic google indexing in mind, without using black-hat tactics, which will ultimately get your site penalized..

In a nutshell here are some of the “do’s and don’t” to be on your way to getting your site indexed. ( keep in mind this is an ever changing landscape and only small portions of the over scope of SEO.)

Do:

• create compelling relevant content.
• commit to continue adding new content via pages or blog posts.
• Think like a potential searcher, what words or keyphrases are they likely to search for??  Use them.
• Keep pages or posts focused on one area and show yourself an the expert in that area.
• Stay clear of  anything non- conventional or under-handed
• Refer to Google’s webmaster tools as a guide
• Use spider/crawler  friendly navigation, such as text links to inner pages.

Don’t: