3 Great Tips for Creating A Google Places Business Listing

The folks at Google are constantly putting out great content to help business owners get the most out of their services. I’ve mentioned before how important it is to have a Google Places account if you own a brick-and-mortar business. Especially since Google has integrated Local Search (ie Google Places) into it’s organic search listings when someone searches in a specific location or has location based search turned on.

Once you create your Google Places account, I’d suggest signing up for their newsletter so you can be sure to get the inside scoop from the source. For example, I stumbled onto this great article today: Tips for creating a free business listing in Google Places: Business listing titles – Google Small Business

Search is trending towards more personalized, localized, relevant results on an individual user by user level. If your business is location based, I’d be sure to follow Google’s guidelines for creating a winning Google Places page.

Web Safe Font Expansion

There’s a New Serif in Town

Back in the day, when you were having a website designed (or designing one), you were limited in the “web safe” fonts you could incorporate into your site design.  This meant a lot of Arial and Times New Roman.  Schweet… Well, times have changed–for the better.  More and more folks are creating web safe font libraries which can add the art of typography (not to mention creativity, dimension and some life) to your site.

One such library is Google’s Web Safe Fonts.  Google reported recently that it now serves up nearly 50 million daily requests across 800,000 unique websites at a growth rate of almost 30% per month.  What does that mean?  It’s time to send Times New Roman packin’. So long old friend. We’re gonna miss ya. NOT.

The only caveat in this otherwise blissful new world of more typography and less bandwidth hogging text-in-image crap is that not all browsers support it. So if you are still using that old version of IE, do yourself (and the world) a favor and downlaod Firefox. Here are a list of browsers compatible with the Google Web Safe Fonts:

• Google Chrome: version 4.249.4+

• Mozilla Firefox: version: 3.5+

• Apple Safari: version 3.1+

• Opera: version 10.5+

• Microsoft Internet Explorer: version 6+

Mobile: Android 2.2+ and iOS 4.2+ (iPhone, iPad, iPod). There are other web safe font collections out there.  Be sure you ask your web designer/developer to incorporate them into your design.  (I’m considering an entire site re-code myself).  Let the typography nerds dance in the street!  Go forth and enjoy serifs!

Adding an XML Sitemap to Your Site

An XML Sitemap is essentially a text based URL road map of your website that search engines can use to more easily index your website and the pages within it more intelligently and accurately.  Adding a Sitemap does not necessarily mean that your site will be  indexed but it is recommended by Google (which is reason enough for me to include it). XML Sitemaps are a URL inclusion tool, unlike robot.txt files which are URL exclusion or exception tools.  Together they help you organize your site so that it is optimized for search engine spiders who crawl your site.

XML Sitemaps for HTML/CSS based sites

In order to add an XML Sitemap to a traditional html/css based website (not built on a CMS) you will need access to the domain root folder of your site.  This may be best left to your web design/development company, web marketing consultant, or SEO provider.  If you feel comfortable creating a XML Sitemap for your site, and have ftp access to your site’s root folder, there are several tools( a Google search returned 23,300,000 results for [free xml sitemap]) for creating an XML Sitemap.  For ease of use, I generally use http://www.xml-sitemaps.com.  If you are really feeling froggy and want to write your own XML Sitemap, there are resources for this as well, including http://sitemaps.org/protocol.php.

It should be noted that when setting up your XML Sitemap, you type in the web address as it is being optimized.  For example, http://your_site_name.com  may not be the same as http://www.your_site_name.com.  Check with your SEO consultant or web developer to see which URL is being optimized for (the other should 301 redirect) and be sure to create your Sitemap around that web address.

XML Sitemaps for WordPress

If your site is one of the many websites now being built on the WordPress format, installing an XML Sitemap can happen right from the admin panel.  The Google XML Sitemap plugin can be activated in a couple of clicks.  Adding plugins use to be a pain, but with the improvements to the WordPress CMS, you can now search for the plug-in under the ‘Plugins’ tab in your admin panel, and then install the plugin without ever leaving your admin panel. (Just make sure to read and follow the on screen instructions).

Other CMS systems have similar functionality, allowing you to add an XML Sitemap fairly easily.

For the more advanced users, there are certain criteria (like modification date, update frequency, priority, etc) which can be added in the XML file.  These criteria are optional.  For an explanation of the XML tag definitions you can go here.

In summary, an XML Sitemap is an great way to help search engine spiders organize your URLs for inclusion in their search engines.  All of the major search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo!) support XML Sitemaps.

Too nerdy?  I try to provide important information for small to mid-sized business owners to help them improve their online marketing initiatives.  Let me know if this post was helpful for you.

Get More Out of Local SEO

The difference between having a website and having a website that works depends on several factors including site design, usability and SEO. Here are 5 tips for improving your local SEO to generate more traffic to your website.

1. For SEO keywords, it pays to think local. Too many company attempt to go broad with the keywords they optimize for and then wonder why those keywords don’t generate any traffic. Area specific keywords tend to generate more specific searchers who are looking for you. Even if you sell something around the country or the world, starting with targeted areas may make it easier for you to break into certain markets.

2. Don’t just focus on your rankings in the search engines. It’s great to see that you are on page 1 of Google for certain keywords, but the real metric to measure is traffic. Many SEO companies send ranking reports for the keywords they optimize for, but don’t take the time to explain what is happening behind the numbers. Ranking reports and keyword reports should be used in tandem with Analytics (Google Analytics is free and should be on every business owners website) to determine which keywords are actually driving traffic and converting customers. If you are on page one for a keyword that never gets searched, how much good is that doing for your business?

3. Google Places is growing in importance. Google recently melded their Places listings with their other Organic listings, giving them more weight among searchers who are looking for something area specific. No small business with a brick and mortar location should be without a Google Places page.

4. Encourage feedback from your clients. If you own a brick and mortar business,encourage customers to give your reviews and feedback online. There are a bunch of ways to do this, including Yelp, foursquare and Google Places (which now has a very convenient app that allows you to rate places while you are there)

5. Social Media sites drive traffic. A component of SEO is PR or Page Rank. Creating social media profiles give your business website inbound links and helps create a higher PR. More than that, if you engage on social media channels, you can post links to blogs and other relevant/timely information on your site and can drive real local traffic. You can also use analytics built into some social media tools (bit.ly and Hootsuite) to gauge consumer interest on your topic.

So maybe it pays to Think Local about your SEO strategy.

9 out of 10 Internet Users Now Use Social Media

The 2010 U.S. Digital Year In Review, produced by comScore, was released today. comScore is an online leader in digital marketing analysis and online user behavior that’s been around since 1999.

There’s all sorts of interesting analysis in this report about the much talked about increase in online consumer spending habits, local/group buying site’s (Groupon, Living Social) exponential growth, and a steady decrease in email usage among all the young folks (the boomer’s and older are the only group’s who showed an increase in email use). But what really caught my eye was the social media trends. Everyone knows it’s a hot topic, here’s what comScore’s report said:

“Social Networking Continues Growth in 2010 as One of the Web’s Top Activities
Social networking continued to gain momentum throughout 2010, with 9 out of every 10 U.S. Internet users now visiting a social networking site each month. Social networking sites accounted for 12 percent
of all time spent online in 2010 with the average Internet user spending more than 4.5 hours on these
sites each month. Globally, social networking accounts for 15.6 percent of online time among those age
15 and older. Among this same age population, social networking accounts for 14.4 percent of
Americans’ online time. It is clear that social networking has become an integral part of the fabric of the
Internet and one that is increasingly becoming integrated into the experience of so many different
activities online.”

So wait. Only 1 in 10 people AREN’T using a social networking site if they use the internet? That’s hard to believe until I think of the countless people I see on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn that I NEVER thought would be there. People are inherently social, guess it makes sense. There’s probably an opportunity or two here, right?

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