If in the past you haven’t really seen how social networking websites can help your business then I understand why you might be sceptical about Google+. After all Google has tried social networking before with Google Buzz and Google Wave.

This Time It’s Different

When searching for products and services on Google you have probably noticed that sometimes you will get personalised results (most of the time this is when you are logged in). We have seen this start a long time before Google+ and we will see this happen more and more in the future.

With the recent Google Algorithm update “Search Plus Your World” when someone is logged into Google+ they are getting personalised search results depending on their information together with the information of people in their Circles. We are also starting to see Google+ results appearing in search engine results when searchers are not logged into Google+.

With the knowledge that Google is making algorithm changes to support Google+ it is our opinion that you should have a Google+ account and a Google+ Page if you want to take advantage of the increasing integration we will see between search engine ranking results and G+.

Luckily we have something we prepared earlier to help you Create a Google+ Account. Also if you follow these instructions and create an account on Google then add Jan Klin to your Circles we will add you to our VIP Circle where we have just included tutorial that will show you how to effectively set up a Google+ Business Page.

Another Great Reason To Set Up a Google+ Page

At the moment you can search for a company on Google and find their Facebook page. Companies put a lot of effort into Facebook apart from just adding a page companies are constantly updating their status, engaging with Friends etc… But all of this extra involvement stays on Facebook. With Google+ this extra work that you put in will not only help you engage with people in your circles but will also appear in Google search results which is a great bonus.

This is just the start and Google+ already seems to be combining the best of LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook into one platform.

We’re also looking forward to the PPC structure that Google are sure to add to Google+.

So Create a Google+ Account, add us to your Circles, create your business page and Google+ your world.

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We have discussed the virtues of blogging and social media in the context of online marketing before. This site is a great example of how to do it successfully.

An early adopter of Twitter, Blogging and Social Media – this site has good rankings, a Page Rank of 4 and over 2,000 backlinks and is less than 18 months old.

Have a look at a really good blog implementation at http://blog.winetravelguides.com/ and you could learn something about wine and travel at the same time.

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Here in the UK internet users watch an average of 117.7 videos per month (that’s 161 million hours of video content per month! – according to ComScore – Video Metrix – Sept 16th 08)

If you have video content, or want to create videos to promote your products and services, its worth spending a little time to ensure your content gets ranked well for search. Because it relatively new its nowhere near as competitive as you might think.

There are two scenarios – you may want to host your videos on YouTube and the many other video hosting sites (YouTube is tops with 44%, Google video second – then a string of others – see below). Alternativley you may want to host the videos yourself – or indeed both. There are guidelines for both scenarios below:-

1. On your own site

- dedicate a page to each video

- ensure there is lots of textual content around the video describing it and including important keyphrase repetitions (as standard SEO). You could ideally use a keyphrase rich transcript of the video

-ensure the video url contains the target keyphrase

- ensure the video filename contains the target keyphrase

- where possible add metadata (via your video editing software) – title, description etc as standard SEO

- ensure the web page the video is on is also optimised – title, description etc as standard SEO (ensure the words ‘video’, ‘clip’ etc are included in the keyphrase targets)

-In addition, ideally…..

-include a few anchor text rich links from your own webpages and external sites

-include a RSS facility

use a sitemap – see Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Introducing Video Sitemaps

2. On YouTube and other external video sites

-ensure video is tagged with relevant keywords

- ensure it is in the most appropriate category

-overdub the video with your domain name

- ensure you include a clickable domain name back to your site

-ensure the title and description include your target keyphrases (you can use Youtube to see what the most popular phrases are in your category)

-Ideally get a couple of friends to ‘rate’ your video – ratings (good or bad) have a strong impact on rankings

-YouTube is the most popular but Google video, Brightcove and Metacafe are also very popular. You could use Tubemogul to submit to all major video hosting platforms

… Finally, for both on-site and externally hosted, you could get references to relevant blogs to increase the exposure and the links

There’s more info here http://www.webproworld.com/video-seo/76914-video-optimization-tips.html

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We will build you a blog integrated within your domain and in addition we’ll ensure your articles and blog posts are included in all the major social bookmarking sites and blog directories.

WHAT ARE THE ADVANTAGES?

In short, its a great way to increase your web site traffic AND improve your search engine rankings (Full details and the background to this and the benefits are included here)

What we’ll do for you:

The Blog will use WordPress technology – the most effective blogging platform for features and SEO compliance

The blog will match your website design – so your visitors will have the same look and feel between your blog and your site, and will be able to seamlessly navigate between the two.

We’ll set up your blog with a series of categories and other content areas specific to your needs (It can include video and image content)

Options will include – calendar, blogroll, keyword clouds, comment feature, trackbacks

We’ll ensure a RSS subscription and social bookmarking options are included.

We’ll provide telephone assistance to get it working well for you

Every month we bookmark your article or blog post to 6 social bookmarking sites
(This could be the same article or blog post or a new one created by you)

We’ll ensure that the article gets ‘tagged’ correctly with the relevant keywords – so people doing keyword searches at these sites will find your link

In addition we’ll ensure you are included in all the major Blog directories

NEED MORE INFORMATION?

please call Jan Klin on 01928 788100 or email at jan@janklin.com

YOUR INVESTMENT

£495 plus £95 per month – plus vat

NOTE: If you decide you dont want a blog, but still want all the advantages of social bookmarking, we can replace the blog production with ‘article’ production. What this means is that we would create a keyword/backlink rich article for you, include it in a relevant place on your website and apply the social bookmarking process to it.

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Each of the items discussed here – blogs, links, social bookmarking – are very important items in themselves for increasing your website traffic, but used together in a coherent way, it really is a case of one plus one plus one equals five (or maybe even seven!).

So, lets discuss them one by one, then we’ll show how to interlink them into a coherent online strategy.

BLOGGING

The benefits of blogging are well understood – but I’m going to repeat them nevertheless:-

-Firstly, from an online marketing perspective, what you want is a blog which is part of your domain and integrated in your site. That is, not externally hosted but actually a part of your site. (WordPress.org is what we use for our clients).

The reason for this is that the search engines will see this as part of your site (eg www.yourdomain.com/blog) – so the links into it (good blogs will always attract links naturally) will count towards your Google Page Rank. Also if you are regularly adding new content to your website search engines will see this as a positive factor.

- As already stated providing you offer value added content on your blog (educational information about your industry, your services, recent legislation; tools and useful articles people can use to help with their business etc – there’s no shortage really) you will attract links naturally which will bring visitors directly and add to your Google Page Rank.

(Incidentally, another neat idea is to create ‘product reviews’ where you can objectively discuss the pros and cons of specific products, allow customers to comment -moderated of course – with a link back to the specific product on the website)

-Also your blog, by definition, will be text and keyword rich so naturally disposed to getting good rankings (many people find their blog ranks higher than their main website) and the major blogging platforms – WordPress, Typepad etc – automatically generate metadata in a search engine optimised format.

- The final point is that RSS sign up to your blog and social bookmarking options are a standard part of the technology, and these two items again are great tools for automatically keeping you in touch with your clients and prospects and increasing your web visibility.

So, in short, blogs are good for you. They will increase you search engine rankings and increase your direct traffic. But read on….
(Incidentally if you dont have the time to set one up your self we can do it for you – Blogs and Social Bookmarking Service)

SOCIAL BOOKMARKING

What is social bookmarking? Its very similar to using bookmarks in your browser for sites you want to remember – the difference is its web based so everyone can see your ‘favourites’ and you can see everyone elses.

There are many different social bookmarking sites, all with their own features and quirks. Some of the more famous ones are del.icio.us and Digg, in fact you can see the top 30 here.

Digg allows you to rate articles and the more highly rated the article becomes the higher it rises in the rankings. Del.icio.us is different again in what it does – the important thing is its other people providing comments on your articles/blogs.

So how will this help with your web traffic and how can you go about exploting these sites?

There are two ways, the first relates to search engine optimisation (SEO). The fact that you have links from these sites to your blog will have an impact on its (and your websites) rankings. (NB Some of these sites – not many as it happens – use ‘nofollow’ in the link meaning that the google spider will not follow and therefore not pass on any ‘link juice’. So if this is you sole purpose in using them then you need to use ones which dont use ‘nofollow’. There’s a list here.)

The other reason of course is that they will drive traffic directly. These are very popular sites – the top 10 account for around 20 million visitors per month so having visibilty on them is a great way to generate visitors to your site/blog. Tagging your articles/posts with the correct keywords will enable searchers at these sites to find your link directly.

An example of how this works can be seen on this blog – you’ll see lower down you have the opportunity to ‘bookmark’ this article through several of the important bookmarking sites. If you did this my blog would get more visibility and an all important link.

BRINGING IT ALL TOGETHER

So, imagine having links from these sites to your own. It will help boost your search engine rankings and also bring additional direct traffic.

The process to implement this is quite straightforward:-

1. Build a blog (integrated with your website)
2. Write useful articles/content for your blog
3. Encourage people to ‘bookmark’ you – like I do in this blog
4. And…(very important!)….Get someone (eg us) to ‘bookmark’ your blog articles with all the major sites.

If you dont want to do it yourselves we can do any, or all, of this for you in a very SEO advantageous way:-

Here are the details of the service we offer – Blogs and Social Bookmarking Service

Either way you should get it done – it will make a big difference to your online marketing.

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What that means is that by moving from page 2 to page 1, in broad terms, you will increase your visits twenty fold! – and in some cases much more particularly if you can get into the top 5 positions.

I’ve also noticed there are an awful lot of websites on page 2 which just shouldnt be there. They should be on page 1. I’ll give you an example in a moment but the point I want to make is that if you are on page 2 for some of your important keyphrases, it may be that you have to do very little to get elevated to the first page. There are some factors to look at below to help you assess this but first an example.

Do a Google search for ‘ground source heat pumps’ (incidentally – if you go to ‘Google Trends’ you’ll see this term has been rapidly growing in importance over the last 12 months). You’ll see that www.gshp.org.uk – The Ground Source Heat Pumps Association – is languishing half way down page 2 (surely they cant want to be there given that their sole reason for being is to inform people about heat pumps!).

What they have got going for them is lots of inbound links (177), represented by a Google Page Rank of 5 and their domain is around 4 years old. Basically all the essentials to get a good ranking. We used to say if you have a PR 4 some basic on-page SEO is all you need to get a top 3 ranking. Its not quite as simple as that nowadays but you would certainly expect to quite easily move this site to page 1 with some basic on-page SEO. In fact that’s all they need to do – get properly structured tags (they dont even have a meta description and keyword tag!), get a few more paragraphs of text with a few more repetitions of the keyphrase in question. Possibly a few anchor text based links from some other of their pages and that should be it. It’ll certainly be enough to get them to page 1 and possibly in the top 5. Two hours work at most.

So the important factors, if this is something which you are affected by:-

1. Check you backlinks and Page Rank – If you have a PR 3 or above then, generally this is enough to get on to page 1 If…..
2. You domain is at least two years old, and….
3. you have at least 250 words of text on your ranked page.

If you satisfy these 3 points it should be just a matter of tweaking your meta tags (see Lesson 6 and Lesson 7) adding a paragraph or two of text and repeating the keyphrase a few times. Possible adding a few anchor text based links from other pages.

Obviously each case is different and so much depends on the degree of competition, but in 9 times out of 10 cases this is all we have to do for our clients.

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The other is that with Google Universal Search images will quite often appear in the main search results….

People like to see what they buy before they buy, particularly in the research phase, so there are good ecommerce reasons why you want your images will be found. Also having an image of yours appear in the google results maximises click throughs – it stands out from the rest and often dominates the maximum click through positions in the search listings.

How to carry out Image SEO

There are a few important things you can do to ensure your images get found, here are the main ones:-

- ensure the image file includes the target keyphrases in the filename (ideally a .jpg file rather than gifs which are for graphics with limited colour ranges)

- ensure your filenames are descriptive and naturally include the target keyphrase(s) (make sure words are separated with hyphens NOT underscores)

-Associate an ‘alt’ tag with the image – again a keyword rich description rather than keyword stuffing.

- Set up a Google sitemap specifically for the images and ensure search engines have access to your image folder

- Ideally links to the images should include keyword rich anchor text

-Ideally have the image on your webpage surrounded by some contextually relevant keyword rich text. Or at the very least a keyword rich description next to the image on the page.

In addition to this of course you’ll want to ensure the metadata on the web page the image appears on is optimised and in particular ensure that the word ‘image’ and ‘photo’ appear in the TITLE tag as many people will use these words when searching.

Best wishes with it.

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How it works
As most of you know the Google ‘Page Rank’ of a specific page is a major factor leading to the high rankings of a specific phrase and the web page associated with it. (A crude measure of this is the green Page Rank indicator you can see at the top of your browser). Here’s an example of a high PR (9)on the BBC site:-

The factors leading to the Page Rank of a page are the links coming into that page (both external links and also links from internal pages) and also links OUT of that page. Its a bit like the leaky bucket analogy used in marketing, but specifically here the quest is to maximise the inflow of link juice and minimise the outflow.

Maximising the inflow obviously involved increasing the backlinks to the page and also finding internal pages which can be used to link to the target page in an appropriate way.

Minimising the outflow involves using the ‘nofollow’ tag. There’s a good article on the nofollow tag here where you can also see examples of how its structured. Essentially you are just telling the spider NOT to pass any link juice out to the linked pages. (Human viewers can still follow the link of course its just that the spiders wont).

What sort of links is this relevant to?

Obviously there are some pages you want to pass link juice to but many you dont – including the obvious ‘terms and conditions’, ‘about us’, sign up forms etc.

We’re experimenting with this at the moment and so far the results are encouraging. Here’s more detail on it Page Rank Sculpting and here’s a good example – SeoMoz example.

Give it a shot – you have nothing to lose and only better ranked pages to gain.

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Again the return was down to the power of Google Base. You can see the search example below for ‘ricoh copiers’ (click to enlarge the image) and the little shopping bag icon indicating the snippet has come from G Base.

This ‘top of Google’ result was delivered within one week of the website going live (it took around 2 weeks to build) and was responsible for – along with similar searches – the whole cost of the web project being offset within 2 weeks of going live. That represents a staggering return on investment. I cant give you the actual figures for the obvious commercial confidentiality reasons, but I think you can see that moving into pure profit after a couple of weeks if pretty impressive stuff.

Its quite a simple website as you can see below (click to enlarge the image).

Essentially its just of collection of very good product landing pages, with good calls to action with traffic driven from Google Base. So, if you’ve got products to sell get them on Google base and ensure you drive people through to relevant and well constructed product pages. You cant fail to generate business.

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Google Webmaster Central to the Rescue!

We now have a neat solution to this problem – at Google Webmaster Central (GWC) you can now tell Google where you want your rankings. Just go to ‘Tools’ then ‘set geographic target’- see below. Of course you’ll need to register with GWC first – which is free – and which holds many other advantages.
(Click on the image to enlarge)

Some Other Useful Stuff you can do at GWC

You can see the details above but particularly useful is the ‘crawl diagnostics’ feature, and the ‘statistics’ which shows you amongst other things the top keyphrases you are getting found on.

Another problem in the past has been getting to know where your inbound links are coming from – the ‘link’ command at Google is notoriously unreliable, but now through GWT you can get a full and accurate summary of all links coming into your site.

The ‘sitemap’ facility is a good way to communicate to Google your web pages to ensure they all get spidered. Anyway, register and hava a play – its really useful.

Helping International SEO

It also provides a neat solution to the issue of getting rankings from different countries through the same site. Here’s an example:-

Lets say your site is www.yoursite.com and you are looking for rankings in the UK. Lets say you have some translated French pages, German pages and US specific pages on your site through which you want to attract relevant keyword searchers from people searching in those countries.

You can use subdomains for these pages (eg www.francais.yoursite.com) or folders (eg www.yoursite.com/german) and either way you can use the ‘set geographic target’ facility to properly inform google where you want search results from for these pages. That is, you can tell google that specific parts of your site need to attract traffic from different areas.
If you want more detail on this here’s a video clip at the GWC official blog.

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