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Why Create a Google+ Page For Your Business?

Google's "Made With Code" Wants Girls To CodeWhy create a Google+ page?

As we covered in our article about how to maintain your online reputation, it’s important to claim anything associated with your business’ name. Reason being, you control the content and information on those sites. Google gives you the opportunity to add pictures, update information and post news for your business. All that on top of making it easy for your customers to find your business hours, location and contact information.

How to create a Google+ page

There are a few ways to go about this. Odds are that Google has already created a very basic page for your business with the information it could gather from across the internet. All you have to do is to claim your page from Google.

  1. Get signed up with a Google account. If you don’t already you’ll need to set up an account with Google. It’s as easy as setting up an e-mail for yourself.
  2. Finding your business. There is a really good chance that Google has set up a basic Google+ page. Either way you can find out here. You click get started and then search your business here. It will tell you if the business is claimed or not and will let you attach it to your account if it’s not.
  3. Adding or amending your basic information. From here you’ll be able to put in your hours, address, a brief description of your business etc.

If your business is brand new and Google has not started a page for you then you can still create a new page by accessing your Google+ page or the site in step two.

Once you have this complete you can go to your Google+ page and click the drop down menu that says home. Select the section that says places and you can access the Google+ Business Page. Like anything else you should make sure that your Google+ should be branded so it looks like your other social media sites, web site and marketing materials.

 

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Link Building, What Is It?

Link Building, What Is It?There are a lot of things that go into where your page is positioned in search results. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) helps your site get noticed and one aspect of that is Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Arguably one of the most important parts of SEO are links. Both incoming and outgoing links play into your site ranking. But how do we effect these links? The answer is link building.

What is Link Building?

Link Building refers to the process of gaining links to build the popularity of your site. While links aren’t the only thing that determines your placement, they are very important. Think of the search results as a popularity contest and each link as a vote. The more votes you get the more popular you are and the better your ranking.

How Do You Build Links?

There are some easy ways to get links to your site. The easiest is to use any of your partner sites or people you work with regularly to link back to your site. You can also have brand loyal customers link back to your site. Just this week one of our client’s asked us to link to their site, and gave us the HTML code which included a graphic and a link to their site.

It might help to give some sort of incentive in order to accumulate links. You can create a database of site directors and e-mail out links that are relevant to them in hopes that they will link back to you. But keep in mind that the site director won’t post your link on their site and you won’t have loyal followers if you don’t create quality content.

Quality Not Quantity

It’s not just about the quantity of the links when link building; it’s about the quality. Search engines take into account the quality of the sites you are linked on. They believe that quality sites have quality links just as spam sites do not link to quality sites.

Google highly values links from authority sites. Authority sites are websites with high quality content. So quality content = authority site = quality links.

 

 

 

Photo courtesy of cooldesign at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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What is SEM?

What is SEM, search engine marketing?There’s A Lot of Acronyms Out There, What is SEM?

We’ve gone over the difference between SEO and SEM, But what is SEM? Try thinking of SEM (search engine marketing) as a broad term and SEO (search engine optimization) as a specific term. SEM is to marketing as SEO is to public relations. SEM is like an umbrella over different components and SEO is just one of those components.

SEM – Search Engine Marketing

Search engine marketing, or SEM, is marketing specifically tailored to search engines. I know that sounds like a cop out but that’s what it is. SEM is not only SEO but using all the online tools at your disposal to promote your site. Paying for search engine results, link building, blogging and email are some options in SEM.

But SEM is not just about paying to promote your site. There are plenty of options that are non-paid and will results in natural, or organic traffic.

Pay Per Click (PPC)

Think of the results that come up first when you search for something on Google. Those first listings are PPC (pay per click) ads, and online advertising is a key part of many companies SEM. Pay Per Click ads also decorate many other sites, including Facebook, Yahoo!, USAToday.com, ESPN.com and on and on.

Quality Content

Providing relevant, topical and informative content on your site will bring people to the site, and keep bringing them back. Google also rewards quality content. You are the expert in what you do and provide to your customers.

Link Building

Link Building refers to the process of gaining links to build the popularity of your site. While links aren’t the only thing that determines your placement, they are very important. Think of the search results as a popularity contest and each link as a vote. The more votes you get the more popular you are and the better your ranking.

Video

Did you know YouTube is the second largest search engine? People love video. Video is watched on cell phones, social media, web sites, email and blogs. And marketing videos are becoming the best, easiest and fastest way to reach customers.

Email Marketing

First rule in email marketing: it’s not about you. Don’t tell your customers how great you are. Instead tell them about the latest industry news, trends or tools to help them run their company and make money. At the bottom of the email provide an incentive like a coupon or a referral bonus. And use a reputable company like Constant Contact or MailChimp. We had one client that insisted on sending mass distribution emails from her own account with no opt out and no verification that any one had opted in. People complained to the registrar of her site, and they blacklisted her.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics helps you get inside the head of the visitors to your site. Web site performance is easy to measure. Make changes in navigation and content and placement based on what your web site stats show.

So What is SEM?

Bottom line, it’s an ongoing commitment that may use many different components including quality web site content, link building, blogging, PPC, video, email marketing and more. As you start to implement these different options you will discard some and embrace others, depending on your products and services, target audience and results.

 

 

 

Photo courtesy of KROMKRATHOG at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
 

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Having Trouble Creating a YouTube Channel?

Last week we talked about some things to consider before creating your YouTube channel. Now we’re going to go over some of the basics about how to set up your actual channel.

Creating a YouTube Channel

Once you’ve made the decision that creating a YouTube channel is something that could benefit you, the next step is to create a Google account if you don’t already have one. Once you’ve done this you should head over to YouTube and on the top right corner you’ll want to click the sign in button. This will take you to a screen where you can choose subscriptions. You can edit these later so you can skip this step for now.

Make It Yours

Now that you’ve created a blank channel you’ll want to personalize it. You want to use your YouTube Channel as an extension of your brand identity. This means you should select images that are consistent with your online presence as well as use a similar voice when speaking to the views. Your Icon can be changed by clicking the pencil while hovering over it. This redirects you to Google+ in order to edit your image. You’ll need to go back to your YouTube channel and refresh your icon image in order to see it. Next step is to add channel art. You probably guessed right, you can do this by selecting the blue button that says add channel art and uploading a photo.

Next you’ll want to add a description and some links so you can give your audience more ways to connect with you. You can add a description by clicking the about panel. Just tell the viewers what you’re about, nothing too complicated here. You can also add links in the about panel. YouTube will automatically include your Google+ account but you can add other social media sites as well as a custom link for your website.

So you’ve set up your channel but how does it benefit you? We’ll be covering that next.

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