Is Google+ a ghost town on the demise?

"No way!" say's Guy Kawasaki, author of recently released e-book 'What The Plus?' 

According to Kawasaki, Google+ is on the threshold of becoming the largest Social Network ever, and not just because it's another Facebook or Twitter, but simply as part of the Google search engine we use everyday (which is 3 billion times per day by the way!).

To give you an idea of how successful the growth of Users of Google+ was when launched, it took just 24 days to reach 20 million users; whereas Twitter took 1035 days and Facebook took 1152 days.

(FYI new kid on the block - Pinterest - which celebrates its first birthday in May, has already reached 11 million users in roughly 300 days.)

As of February 2012, Google+ hit 100 million users, Twitter had 500 million and Facebook users numbered 845 million users.

'What the Plus?' is now available for download from Guy Kawasaki's website www.whattheplus.com      

 

Many thanks to those brave revolutionaries who joined us to take on our Social Media Revolution information session.

We taught them how to increase sales by marketing with Social Media and how tools such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ can work for business.

Our Social Media for Business workshop answered many questions and reassured our clients about connecting with their customers.

Social Media has been attributed with starting revolutions, bringing down governments and changing the way we think, buy and communicate with each other in ways not seen ever.

We were delighted to share this uprising with all those in our session. 

View all our photo's here

Google just launched Google+, their answer to Facebook.

Our thinking is that the success of this new social network relies heavily on Google's 200M+ pre-existing Gmail Users that even then may still not ensure it's success (remember 'Wave'?).

For more info check out the Google promo video below, take a guided tour or this story at Mashable.com that comments on new features that are very un-Facebook.

Yes, you read it right - what on earth is 'on page seo'?

I have had this blog post in my head for a while now, and couldn't think of really clear cut example to describe how this helps your site ranking until now.

And it happened with one of our latest launches. Yay!

We had a site launch on Monday and 3 days later they are on page one of Google for their target key word searches.

How did this happen so fast!

3 simple steps

When we build a site we focus on 3 simple things to get your site noticed and ranking high inside Google lickety split!

1. Appropriate Page Title tags and Heading tags
2. Good key words that fit with your business
3. On page SEO - search engine optimisation.

I have spoken about the top 2 in the past - but what does number 3 mean?

If your site is about Chocolate Cake, then you would mention the words Chocolate and Cake alot - right?

Of course you would!

What is your key message?

You would be surprised at the number of clients who can find it hard to get to the heart of what their key pages are really about.

Well, if your site was about lighting and lights, I bet you would use those words quite regularly in your website copy. This is exactly what happened with B and B Lighting.
 
Have a look at their site - looks great, a clean and simple design, loaded with lighting goodies and just look at their lead in copy for the home page.  The team at B and B Lighting really focussed on what their business and website is all about!

You might need to have a different 'on page SEO' focus for various landing points at your site - ask yourself the question - if I had to summarise this page into 3 words - what would they be.

If you can't keep your page to a simple theme - then create a new page.

If you are confused about your key message - what will Google make of it! Or a potential customer?

It doesn't get much simpler than that - and really that is what it is all about.

If they can do it - so can you!  Call us now to discuss how we can get your site ranking better using the tools you already have.

How to get your customers to convert

Any sales process has a variety of methods to get the customer to convert, to commit, to open up the wallet!

What should you be doing at your website to trigger the same response?

Know your customer

Many businesses still make the mistake of thinking a website is just a brochure 'on the internet' for products and that it will magically just work!. They create it, leave it, and wonder why it’s not generating any traffic, let alone converting visitors.

It’s impossible to make an entire website relevant to everyone that visits. Instead, businesses should tailor separate sections of the website to what their customers will be interested in.

We are working on a site right now with 2 distinct audiences, teenage girls and their mothers. Our challenge in the design and structure is to meet those 2 different targets and we are guided by what our client tells us about what she undeerstands of her market.

Who are your customers and what are they looking for?

How do you segment them, it could be age, it could be demographic, it could be desires and goals, it could be needs and wants. Your answers will determine the content that will be on key landing pages of your site.

What do you want people to do when they get to a page?

You need to be clear about what it is you want visitors to do when they arrive on a page. Clear Calls to Action are critical for the key pages of your site - in fact all p-ages should have some kind of call to action on them - a point to reading and acting on the information.

Be mindful what the 'conversion' might be  - is it a order, a booking form, email subscription - what is the action you want to see happen?

K.I.S.S - Keep it simple stupid

We also advise our clients against making call's to action too hard - yes, you need to get information and you need to segment details - but don't make it a burden - you have about 10 seconds to get them to respond.  If your form or process is confusing or long winded - you can forget it. Just get the bare facts - you can grab the rest of the information in a more personal follow-up.

Analyse

Finally, pay attention to how your visitors respond to your triggers, review your weekly reports and then collate your monthly data. For more in-depth analysis, talk to us about Google Analytics and how this tool can provide additional information to support your sales methods.

We have quite a few clients who are now using our Pulsar Package coupled with ongoing Customer Care to really understand what is occurring with visits and traffic and assist with getting more clients 'over the line'

Well maybe that is a slight exaggeration - but Blogs are a powerful method of improving your website's ranking within google and make your entire website a more attractive and enticing option for viewers.

Here are a few reason's why!

Blogging gives your products and services personality. People like to do business with people they like. By reading your blog posts they get an idea of the kind of business that you are, how you do things and your style.  This personal aspect of blogging is one of it's most powerful characteristics.

Blogging is entertaining. Yes, blogging can be great fun. You might think that your products and services are a little dull, but someone, somewhere is interested in what you have to say! Particularly if your industry is a topic in the media at any given time -  Got something to say? Just say it. Invite comments from your readers, get a conversation going with your viewers, this enhances your credibility and encourages vital word of mouth!

Blogging encourages community. It's all about content - fast, useful and entertaining content that people enjoy reading. A recent example from our own client base involved Lordan's Saddlery blogging about the dramatic horse rescues during the QLD floods. This one little article generation huge interest and traffic for them - people interested in horses are likely to be interested in saddles!

Blogging is inexpensive. If you already use our email marketing tool, then you already can have access to our blog tool for free! Yep - just contact us and we will set up your blog TODAY! If you don't have email marketing and would like to get started with a blog, talk to us today about implementing a blog at your site! Our blog tool is fully integrated with your other website tools, so everything is all kept together making web administration a dream!

Search engines love blogs! It is said in many SEO forums that Google staff are great bloggers and subsequently Google spiders and indexes blogs more frequently that normal web sites. This may just be a rumour, but if you blog regularly there's a good chance Google and the other major search engines will spider your blog at the same interval looking for your new content. In additinal our tools are activing pushing your content to Google and BING each day, letting them know that more content has been created!

So what are you waiting for, get Blogging today!

I have included a list of Top 10 Tips for beginning bloggers and our Customer Support Team are happy to integrate and get you going today!

Like every year, 2010 had it's high's & low's - watch the year in review as searched on Google or dive deeper on specific events using the Google Zeitgeist  

That got your attention!

Or Search Engine Optimisation - in a nutshell.

How does google (and other search engines) find and list my page?

Believe it or not, this can be a simple process, if you understand how search engines view and rank websites - you can modify your site to make sure that it covers off the basics before you try more advanced techniques to improve your site ranking, but more importantly visits and conversions.

There are two aspects of search engines to understand before jumping in. The first is how spiders work. The second is how search engines figure out what pages relate to which keywords and phrases.

What are spiders?

Search engines collect data about a website by sending an 'spider' or 'bot' to visit the site and copy its content which is stored in the search engine's database. These spiders are designed to follow links from one page to the next - which is one reason one links are so powerful, including internal linkages. This is a huge job as you can imagine and is a continuous process that builds search engine databases so that their size is measured in the tens of billions.

Spiders are designed to read site content like you read newspapers. Starting in the top left hand corner, a spider will read site content line by line from left to right. If a spider encounters a link it can follow, it will record that link and send another bot to copy and record data found on the page the link leads to. The spider will proceed through the site until it records everything it can possible find there.

So as I have said before in previous blogs, words matter! What you say, how you say it and how you reference it are very important.

One of the most important basic SEO tips is to provide clear paths for spiders to follow from point A to point Z in your website. This is easily accomplished by providing easy to follow text links directed to the most important pages on the site in the navigation menu or simply at the bottom of each page. For a complex site with many pages, have a text based site map is a very important tool to further cement your website linkages with search engines.  The name of your navigation links also needs to be an important consideration.

Site content and how this is read

Search engines are supposed to provide their users with lists of pages that relate to the search query people enter in their search box. Search engines need to determine which of billions of pages is the best fit with to match with your search phrase. In order to do this, the search engine needs to know your site relates to those words.

There are a few elements, a search engine looks at when examining a page, I am going to outline a few here - but in our SEO basics training session this month, I will be covering in more detail how to use these elements in the context of our content management tools. After the URL of a site, a search spider records the site title. It also examines the description meta tag. Both of these elements are found in the "head" section of the source code.

Titles should be written using the strongest keyword targets as the foundation. Some titles are written using two or three basic two-keyword phrases. A key to writing a good title is to remember that human readers will see the title as the reference link on the search engine results page. Don't overload your title with keyword phrases. Concentrate on the strongest keywords that best describe the topic of the page content. You can have different page title structures to suit different pages

The description meta tag is also important. Search engines use it to gather information on the topic or theme of the page. A well written description is phrased in two or three complete sentences with the strongest keyword phrases woven into each sentence. As with the title tag, some search engines will display the description on the search results pages, generally using it in whole or in part to provide the text that appears under the reference link.

Keywords are not used as widely as they have been in the past, mainly due to abuse by webmasters, filling sites with irrelevant keywords.

After reading information found in the "head" section of the source code, spiders continue on to examine site content.

Good content is the most important aspect of search engine optimization. The easiest and most basic SEO rule is search engine spiders can be relied upon to read basic body text 100% of the time. By providing a search engine spider with basic text content, you offer the engines information in the easiest format for them to read. So groovy flash based content is a big NO NO!

Keep content simple and as a guide, use one page to cover off the 1 topic. If you find yourself speaking about multiple topics, this can be confusing for search engines ( it can also be confusing for viewers!) Split your content into different pages, to better suit the key themes of the page.

Training opportunities

We have 1 place left in our in-house SEO basics course this month, so get in quick!

If you miss out, we may be able to run an extra session in November depending on demand.

In 2011 we intend to focuss heavily on SEO and SEM strategies for our clients, so there will be plenty of opportunities to
participate in addition sessions in the new year.


Questions? Talk to us now!

With thanks to the Seach Engine Guide - The search engine guide for Small Business

In an effort to meet the needs of the Google webmaster (tools) a detailed description of your business can appear within Google Maps and subsequently assist with yet another way to be found online.

A quick trip to www.google.com/local/add/ will introduce you to the concept (or watch the video).



To see how you can appear, check out our entry.

How to improve my website's visibility online.

Our second in-house training session was held at our office recently outlining some key features of google to help build relevancy and page ranking for you website.

About 15 clients of bosweb systems crammed into our boardroom to go over key tips relating to the Google Search engine and to learn what small steps can be taken right now via their content management system to return better search results for their web address.

We also took the opportunity to highlight our new product tools, that will really help power our clients online businesses to new heights.

These information sessions will become regular bi-monthly activites, look out for your invitation!