Google+ Local

The greatest potential Google+ provides for small businesses may be within Google+ Local.

Google+ Local is an internal search platform within Google+ that is specifically designed for businesses. This platform is ideal for small businesses as it levels the playing field for them as far as showing up in a search engine results page (SERP). This allows small businesses that may not have the budget or time to implement SEO strategies, to be competitive in these Google+ Local SERPs by ranking through a system based more off their reviews and number of reviews. Here is an example of what one of these SERPs would look like with the query “Boise Pizza”:

As you can see, Flying Pie Pizzaria is ranking the highest with 180 reviews and an overall score of 24. This means that a company with even the smallest budget can rank well in a Google+ Local SERP by simply being active on Google+ and providing excellent service. By clicking on these links a user will be sent to the corresponding business’ Google+ page which provides more information such as phone number, email, website, etc. Also, a giant map which shows the company’s exact location is included as a cover photo for this Google+ page.

You can also see from the above image that a Google map is also included next to the search results. This is an added benefit which further displays the potential of Google+ for small businesses.

Seamless Integration

Another reason that Google+ shows promise as an effective marketing tool for small businesses is the seamless integration it exhibits through Google’s many wonderful products.

As noted before, when a potential customer does a search within Google+ Local they are provided with results and a Google map that shows the location of each result. This can not only drive organic traffic to the company’s site, but also actual foot traffic to the company itself. This is an incredibly valuable asset as it makes it easy for the customer to find exactly where the business is.

This integration between Google+ and Google maps is vastly important as it makes things easy for the customer. For instance, if a potential customer was using Yelp to help them select a local business, they would get the reviews from Yelp and then use a separate program (most likely Google Maps) to find that business’ location. Google+ Local eliminates this extra step which makes things easy for the customer, and anything that makes it easier for a potential customer to find your business, is good for business.

Targeted Messaging

Another advantage of Google+ for small businesses is the ability to target small, segmented audiences.

This is possible through the “Circles” feature on Google+. Google+ allows its users to separate their contacts and followers into different categories or “circles”. This provides a great opportunity for small businesses as they can divide their target audience into various market segments. Google+ allows users to choose which circles they want share each individual post with and who will or will not see the post. This is ideal for sharing targeted messages and content to specific demographic segments.

Google Hangouts

Google hangouts are another reason Google+ can potentially be a powerful marketing tool for small businesses or companies.

Google hangouts provide small businesses with some unique opportunities. For one, these hangouts give companies an inexpensive (free) way to meet. Not only is this feature free, but it also saves on traveling costs associated with setting up meetings in person. Co-workers can meet face-to-face to brainstorm or even work on Google Docs together simultaneously.

Hangouts also give small businesses a unique avenue to communicate and engage with their customers through. Companies can host hangouts to provide open forums where they can answer consumer questions in real time, face-to-face. It also provides a more personal platform to announce product launches or grand openings of new buildings. These hangouts offer a level of personal interaction that is only achievable through Google+.

Drawbacks

While there is great potential for Google+ as an effective tool for small businesses, it is not without some minor shortcomings. The biggest downside to Google+ is that is relatively new and because of this it does not have as many users as a more established social media network like Facebook. However, Google+ continues to grow all the time as it recently passed Twitter to become the second largest social network.

Also, because Google+ is still in its beginning stages, Google is continuously toying with it to see what works and what doesn’t work. This means that it is not guaranteed that features like Google+ Local won’t undergo drastic changes or even be removed altogether.

Google+ is a work in progress and it still has some minor issues which are typical of any new product. However, as Google continues to hammer out the details and remedy problems, Google+ is emerging as quality social media platform with massive potential. This potential can be especially realized by small businesses as Google+ provides many benefits and unique opportunities for these companies.

Andrew Dennis is a writer at the link building company Page One Power based in Boise, Idaho. When he’s not writing about social media marketing and SEO, he enjoys battling opponents on the racquetball court.

There is a service available that you can go to, and you can actually copy and paste the URL of your post to that service, and it will ping for you. It’s called Pingler.com.

The awesome thing about Pingler is that they list all of their ping services, so if you were just going to go to Pingler you’d put in your title, your URL, the category that it’s in, this little captcha code, and then go ahead and hit ping. It takes a few minutes, you leave the window open, and it will ping all these services

Now, since all of these ping services are already listed, what you can do is you can copy them, Command + C, and then go over to your WordPress dashboard: Whatever-URL/wpadmin, log in, then down under settings, the settings tab on the left, you are going to go to “writing,” and if you scroll down on “writing” you’ll see oh, look, update ping services, so this has ping service already integrated in WordPress.

Go ahead and hit enter and go to the next slide, and then paste with Command + V, and what that’ll do, if you save changes, is it will set up your WordPress blog so that anytime anytime you post a new post or a new page, it’ll automatically ping all of these different ping services. So that’s really all there is to it. A great trick, really simple, just two seconds of copy and paste, but it’s going to save you a lot of time as opposed to having to go out to Pingler every time you want to ping something, and that’s it!

Instead of losing viewers and watching traffic decrease, you can take steps to determine where you are struggling and work to remedy the situation. To truly understand the decline in traffic, performing a search result audit can reveal the root cause and offer a roadmap to eventually see numbers spike.

The following checklist can help you identify potential issues and find a solution:

Analytics Tracking

• A simple mistake while updating files with the tracking code could lead to alterations in analytics tracking. While this is a quick fix, it happens surprisingly often. You can use a tool such as the Google Analytics Debugger (from Google) to ensure that your tracking code is set up correctly.

More Competition

• A competitor’s website could have recently changed, performing better than your site and moving higher in search rankings. Competitors may also be engaging in negative SEO which occurs when a competitor automates a series of spammy links at your website. Conducting routine industry search audits can help you identify any competitors encroaching on your search traffic.

Website Redesign

• Have you recently overhauled your website design? With any redesign, there’s a strong chance that links will change. If they have changed, you have to inform the search engines by migrating or redirecting these links. A redesign is the perfect time to review your current website optimization, record it, and ensure that all new pages are optimized for search.

Out-of-date Content

• While including evergreen content and topics that are relevant to the industry will help content stay valuable, pages can still become outdated. Monitoring each page’s individual analytics can help you find the content that either needs to be updated or replaced all together. It’s also possible that viewers may not be drawn in by the content that you are currently publishing. Staying on top of trends and consuming industry articles will help you stay current. While you’re reading trend pieces, engaging in the comments section of those blogs and linking back to a relevant article on your site is an alternative way to drive viewers to your site.

Changes in Search Engine Algorithms

• There’s a chance that your website was negatively impacted by a major algorithmic update. Google and other search engines are continuously adjusting search algorithms to help weed out lower-quality websites and show only the most helpful results. In the past, Google has given more weight to specific types of content, such as images or videos which can affect how much traffic you receive. In this case, take notice of content that is receiving more traffic and consider creating more of that type. For example, if video is favored, include one in the next piece of content you post.

Ranking Penalties

• Search engine optimization is a tricky game and participating in shady SEO tactics to increase rankings will almost always lead to being caught. You can be penalized for manipulating links, cloaking, keyword stuffing content, hiding text or using malware. If you do lose a top page ranking due to over-optimization, it’s time to take a good look at best practices and revise your strategy.

After reviewing this checklist and identifying areas to improve, you should begin to see changes in search results within a few weeks. As search engines re-crawl and re-analyze your site, the new signals paired with each page based on your updates will be used for future ranking.

This is a guest contribution from Darryl Stevens, CEO of Digitech Web Design and SEO, an Austin-based firm that handles website design, search engine optimization campaigns, and online marketing for small businesses.

Go to wp-admin, log into the back end of your site, and under here under settings, the settings tab you can hover, scroll over, and click on permalinks. Right now any permalinks that you have on your website are going to look like this default. So the page would be: questions mark, p=123 or some baloney like that. The problem with that is that it doesn’t have any keywords in it, and Google just sees some random garble which is not good for SEO.

Keyword Focused URLs

You want keywords in the URL string, especially if you have a site for which you’re trying to rank a number of different pages rather than just the home page which has become really an effective way of ranking sites, and it gives you a lot broader spread to make your website rank. So, it’s real easy to change the structure though.

If you have a website that is going to be content heavy, and it’s going to have a lot of posts, and there is a potential that some of the posts might even have the same name, what you can do is you can put month and year and name, so let’s put the year and the month and the name, or you can just have the year if you wanted to take the other parts out

For almost every site that we do we want to have those keywords because we’re going to use keywords to name our pages as close to the URL as possible. So we’ll change the structure to a postname structure, and I’ll show you here and just automatically switch it. You can enter this code manually if you want, but WordPress is set up now to where that’s all you’ve got to do. So go ahead and “save changes,” and then if you have a page that you’ve created there’s already a sample page.

This is just a blank website, and you view that page, then there is your permalink structure right there. That’s a very pretty URL. So going back here if you were to create a new page, and you just type in “new page.”

Then automatically WordPress is going to give you a URL string, and it has a nice URL structure for the permalink, and if you want, you can change this. If you want to have the page title be something different, than what’s in the permalink, sure, go for it, change it. Then you just publish that page, and you can see again you’ve got your URL, the basic URL, the root, and then this nice, keyword-friendly URL string, and that’s all there is to it.

Skimping on Homepage Content

Having a gorgeous, conversion-focused signup or trial page is hugely important for software firms. Unfortunately, most don’t go beyond that. If they do have text, it’s concise, poorly optimized descriptors about what their software does. While this is great for landing pages, making Google get down and boogie requires more than pretty images and sales verbiage. Implement header tags properly and add 250-300 words of keyword-focused content to remedy the problem. Don’t like the way your header tags look? Any web designer worth their chops can edit your CSS for a quick fix.

Duplicating Content

The concept of duplicate content and what businesses should avoid is still debated, to date. Every website is going to have interior pages in one form or another, but when you have numerous pages of the same website copy on your own website, the search engines often can’t determine which page to rank for the queries you’re targeting. Audit your website copy for duplicate pages, eliminate anything you don’t want searchers landing on, and make it a no-brainer for search engines to place you above your competition.

Poor Keyword Research

For Software companies with an in-house employee handling website optimization, ensuring that you’ve researched and identified a robust array of relevant keywords is crucial. Even if your software only addresses a single need in the market, there are handfuls of broad—and often incorrect—ways potential clients will search for what you offer.

Theoretical example:

Your firm provides a software application that helps business owners with employee retention and plan advancement opportunities (talent management software). There are easily thousands of business owners and managers who’ll end up searching for “human resources software” and similar variations when that’s not what they actually need. Spend time researching similar keywords and capture more clients who may not be exactly sure what they’re looking for.

Overusing Anchor Text

Link building is the lifeblood of any successful SEO campaign, especially in highly-competitive markets like software. I’ve seen at least 50 software companies who only build links—whether through press releases or blog posting—on the 3 or 4 basic variations of their products’ general category.

Example:

• Human resources software
• HR software
• HR management software
• Human resource management software

Not only is this unnatural, it’s a search engine penalty waiting to happen. Additionally, it neglects the large pool of potential clients that aren’t executing direct searches for that. Unique variations of anchor text will not only help your firm’s overall link profile, but attract additional searchers who might not be aware they need your solution.

Ignoring the Long Tail

Even if your company has little interest in running a fully-scaled pay per click campaign, leveraging paid search to discover what search queries triggered your ad can yield an incredibly useful list of long-tail search terms. This list of keywords—regardless of how substantial—can be leveraged for link building, general SEO efforts, or ideas for your company blog. Additionally, long-tail search traffic converts better, despite being lower in volume. Even if you despise setting up PPC campaigns, spending a bit of time and money on paid search can yield great returns in other aspects of your business’ online marketing efforts.

Addressing these common errors can substantially improve the effectiveness and simplicity of your online marketing efforts. These are simple enough to be rolled out over a week or so and effective enough to yield significant leaps in search placements based on the time spent.

Is your company leveraging innovative strategies to improve search placements and online marketing results? Show with our readers in the comments below.

Ever wondered what goes into a logo? Our boys over at Tasty Placement just finished a genius study on the fonts and colors from the planet’s largest consumer brands. If you’re developing a logo, be sure to scope this fresh infographic before making any hard decisions.

Infographic authored by TastyPlacement, an Austin SEO and web design agency. To view the original post, click here.

My favorite place to get themes is Theme Forest. They’ve got a ton of themes. The code for their themes is validated, you can see buyer ratings from whoever else has purchased a theme, and you can see how many times it’s been purchased. If you’re new at this, and you want to make sure something has all the bugs worked out, look for something that has a ton of purchases, somewhere from 500 to 2,000 and up.

I try to pick stuff that has less purchases because I want my sites to look a little different. I usually go and change the code anyway, but starting from something new or edgy can make a difference in the final product.

Once you find a theme that looks good, you’re going to get an account, sign in, and go ahead and purchase the theme with “buy now” with your PayPal account or pre-paid credit. Then we download the theme, and once that downloads, we are going to extract it, and upload via FTP (File Transfer Protocol).

I can show you guys how to, how to upload a theme from within the wp-admin, which is not very tough, but we can go over it real quick while that’s downloading. You go to appearance on the left side, on the tab, and then themes, and then you just go to “install themes,” and you can click upload, and you can find the zip file. There’s going to be one that’s actually within the first extracted file that you’ll use, and I’ll show you what it looks like.

Go ahead and extract by using an archive utility that’s probably already installed on your computer. Inside that folder there will be yet another zip file, and this is the one you want. This is the internal one because the photoshop files, plugins, manual, and all the other files that you may or may not need later are not part of the basic theme installation.

So what you would do if you were going to install it this way, choose the file, click “install theme.” This is does or doesn’t work. Sometimes there are little glitches and stuff breaks, so if that happens, or if you’re like me and just want to avoid that step altogether, you can install the FTP which is good to know how to do anyway.

So we already have that theme, we already know where it is, and we’re going to have to extract this theme anyway. We extracted the main download file, but this is the actual theme file. We can look in there and look, those are all the theme files right there, the individual theme files.

Next you need an FTP client, such as FileZilla, that allows you to move stuff from your local drive to your hosted website.

To log in you need to fill out the information as follows:

For your host, that’s the URL of your website minus the http and the www., so you have .com, .net., .org, whatever, but at the beginning you just start with the beginning of your URL whatever’s after the www.

Your user name and password will be sent to you from HostGator or whoever your host may be, and then once you’ve got that you go ahead and connect, and since we already have WordPress installed, this is the root right here, public HTML, that’s basically the start of your site, there’s no sub-folder, there’s no anything else, so everything that we have, we have WordPress installed on the root, so it’s on the root URL, the domain, and we’ve already got all of our files in here for WordPress.

The theme files are going to be inside of wp-content and then themes, so these are your default themes, 2011, 2010, and 2012. They are all in there. Now, from our local drive we find the theme which we extracted from that zip file.

So all you need to do is you can click the transfer button, or just drag the whole folder and drop it right there, and that will move over all the files. That will be a lot of files, so it’s going to take a minute for all of them to get over to the site. That’s all you’re really going to need to do right now with FileZilla.

You probably want to save that downloaded theme somewhere on your hard drive, and then once that upload finishes you’ll be able to activate your theme.

Now that the new theme is in WordPress, look under the Appearance tab and then themes from within the WordPress admin area, the place you log into with /wp-admin. All you have to do now is click activate, and this is a blank site, so I am not really worried about it messing anything up. Then you navigate to your URL, hit refresh, and lookie there! The new theme is up.

It won’t be quite perfect yet because it’s got their information in there, and hasn’t really been set up, but for the setup and how you actually put all the different elements in, you just go through the theme setup files.

There’s always a read-me that will probably take you to an index page that will have walkthrough on how to do all the setup, and this theme is great because it’s already got some stuff in there for you, so you can just replace the information, and that will make it really easy on you as far as setting up the them.

Check out more of our Website Optimization Tutorials.

cPanel logins are going to be sent to you in an email whenever you set up your hosting account. We usually use HostGator, but whoever you use is going to be the almost the same if you have a hosting company that offers a cPanel. If they don’t, you should find yourself a new hosting company.

Logging Into cPanel

Navigate to exampledomain.com/cPanel in the address bar, or you can use the link that they send you in the startup email. If your domain name servers haven’t transferred over yet, that link will be all you can use.

Just for your information, “:2083″ is the same as “/cpanel” and they mean the same thing in the world of the web.

What you’re going to do is put in your username and your password, and go ahead and login. When you login with HostGator it’s going to give you these extra popups to help you get started. You don’t need those because we’re going to show you how to do it right here.

Go ahead and scroll down the list of items and select something called Fantastico Deluxe. It’s an awesome script software will help you really easily install WordPress. WordPress is pretty easy to install anyway, but with Fantastico it is unbelievably easy.

Installing WordPRess

Click WordPress in the left sidebar, and then click “new installation.” We haven’t installed anything else so far, and this is going to create a database for us as well. In some of these install scripts they’ll have you in a subdirectory by default, but we don’t want it in directory. We want our website to be on the root which means located on the domain itself rather than in a subfolder.

Setting Up Usernames and Admin Info

Now for admin access data. Don’t use “admin” as your username. That’s the most common username that hackers look for because in a lot of installations, admin is there by default. Admin nickname you can leave blank. For “admin email” you’re going to want to put in your email address, whichever one you want, and notifications from your website will be sent there.

You can set up an email address here in cPanel as well, but you’ll want to set it up an email before getting to the installation here for maximum efficiency, or you can easily change the email address through the WordPRess backend later.

Back to the installation. Enter in your site name and your description (you can change those later as well) and then go ahead and click “install WordPress.” All right, so once you’ve clicked install, it’s going to take you to a screen where you click finish installation, and it’ll take you to another screen, and then that’s going to give you a link to your website/wpadmin, and /wpadmin is what you use to login to the back end of your WordPress site.

So that’s going to bring up a screen where you can enter that username and password to get in the back end of WordPress and will show you here the basic installation of your WordPress site is up. Once it’s up and running we’ll have a basic page and a basic post already up along with the basic structure for WordPress. You can go in and change the theme at this point and begin setting up the site, but we’ll cover those in other videos.

This tutorial discusses how to connect you website hosting account with your domain name. We’ll use GoDaddy as the domain name registrar and HostGator as the hosting provider for this example.

So, for this tutorial we are going to talk about how to set your namservers once you’ve already set up hosting and you already have a domain name. First and foremost go to your domain name registrar. In this case it’s GoDaddy.com. I have an account there. I like their auctions feature, so I use GoDaddy pretty extensively.

Click “Log Into My Account.” You’re going to enter your customer number and your password. Once you’ve logged in you’re going to click the button, “My Account,” and “My Account” will give you a screen that has your name and your customer number and some options. What we want is the domains option, so click “Launch,” and that will bring you up a list of domains, and I just blocked most of them out in the video, but you’re going to click on the domain you want.

If you only have one, it’s going to be the only one there. Otherwise click your particular domain, and it will bring you to a screen that has a nameservers tab, and it’ll have a dropdown that says “set nameservers.” Go ahead and click that, and that’s going to bring up a screen with a couple fields.

You’ll check, “Yes, I have specific nameservers for my domains,” and your hosting company which, if you watched the last tutorial is going to be HostGator, which will have sent you two nameservers.

You put the first one in for nameserver1 and the second one in for nameserver2. What this does is it actually points, with this bit of code, the domain towards the hosting account, connecting the two, and it’s going to take probably 24 hours for this to actually work out, sometimes faster, I mean I’ve had it work in as little as 30 minutes, but it can take up to three days, so you want to get this done as soon as you get your hosting set up, go on here, set up your nameservers, click “okay,” and that’s all there is to it. For more on DNS and how it works, check out Wikipedia on the subject. Or click here to get back to the Website Optimization Tutorials Section.

All right! So in this tutorial we’re going to talk about how to buy a web hosting account, and we’ve had a lot of clients ask us, “who’s the best hosting provider,” and for almost everybody we use HostGator.com. We have a link on our site to HostGator.

The good thing about HostGator is their customer service is absolutely spectacular. It’s the best in the business. You’re always going to get somebody quickly on the phone to take care of your issues, and they’re usually very smart and very responsive. In addition to that, HostGator never goes down. I have never had issues with it. Websites always load fast on HostGator. If you’re running a WordPress site, HostGator is great because the plugins that WordPress needs to cache information which means to serve pages quickly all work with HostGator hosting. Your webmaster will also love HostGator because it has the cPanel with easy installation for WordPress, and other content management systems.

So, once you’re at HostGator.com, you’re going to want to click “view web hosting plans.” If you’re just a regular small business you can probably go with the hatchling plan. We put most people on the hatchling plan. Buy 12 months’ worth of hosting and go from there. We do sometimes use a business plan for some clients it’s a little bit more expensive; almost three times as much, but with the business plan you’ll see you get a private SSL and IP address. The toll-free number that they offer is basically worthless, so I wouldn’t even think about that, but you do get unlimited bandwidth and disk space, and you can add additional domains.

You’re not necessarily going to want to add additional domains to the same account if you have two business in the same niche or industry, but anyways we’ll go ahead and go to hatchling and click order now. So what you’re going to do is go ahead and enter your domain name, an existing domain that you have. I just bought a domain name for a client, and I’ll go ahead and put it in there. If you don’t have a domain name yourself already, you can go through HostGator, but generally speaking I use GoDaddy for domains because I already have an account, all my domains are through them, so that’s the way I go about it.

Once you’ve got that in there you’re going to select your billing cycle. Twelve months is usually where I start. If you know you’re going to have the website for three years, select 36 months. Month to month is a lot more expensive, I wouldn’t recommend it. Then enter user name, security pin, billing information, etc.

Then as far as “add sitelock” it’s not necessary, “SEO gears,” “Jumpstart,” are not really going to benefit you, and “Go Moby,” you don’t need this either because if you’ve got a webmaster working on your site, or even if you don’t, the way that you’re going to create a mobile website is going to be completely different than what’s offered here through HostGator.

So basically all you need to do is fill out this top part of information. You don’t need the site lock. See that you’ve read and agreed to the terms and conditions, and then create an account.

That’s all there is to it. In the next video we’ll talk about how to connect your domain, if you bought it through GoDaddy or another registrar, to your hosting account. Click here for more website optimization tutorials.