You Are Properly Using Google Places; Right?

Having your business listed in Google places is extremely valuable
for increasing your visibility and your page ranking in a Google
search. There are several things you should do in order to help
increase your Google Places ranking.

Google recently reconfigured the way they rank pages. If they
think the person doing the search is trying to find a local business they
will automatically put the Google Places results at the top of the
search page. If your business isn’t listed in Google Places you will not
show up in that list. Therefore, make sure you have your Google
Places page set up.

Once you have created your page you should do as much as possible to
make  your page rank higher than your competition’s Google Places
rankings.

Here are a few things you can do to help create a positive Google Places ranking.

1. Have a 100% complete profile. If you took enough time to fill out all
the information you should get much further along than those who
don’t fill out the profile. That’s common since.

2. Upload photos and videos [If you have them] to your places page. Make
sure your favorite photo is the first one you upload. This picture will be
used as a profile photo that people can actually see when your place
shows up in a Google search. Here is an example of what the
places search results will look like when it displays your photos.

3. Get reviews! This is extremely important! First of all, don’t write your
own reviews. Most of the time it is obvious that they aren’t genuine. Take a
look sometime at someone who has a lot of reviews and look at the
dates they are posted. Some businesses will suddenly have a boost of
reviews all on the same day or within a period of a few days. Then the
reviews stop coming in. Those almost always turn out to be the
company writing reviews on itself.

If you have a quality business it shouldn’t be hard to ask a few of your
top customers or clients to write a short review for you. Asking 10
people to write a review for you will significantly improve your
ranking and credibility. You could even offer an incentive to get your
favorite customers to write for you.

4. Use Google Posts. Using Google Posts is like using the status
update for Facebook. You are able to enter as many as 160 characters of
text and publish it with your places page. If you have something going
on make sure to use the Google Posts option to let people know about
it. Also, consider using keywords to add to your industry relevance.

5. Have a well designed website. If your website is built well for search
engine optimization purposes you will seem important to Google. This will
of course be helpful for your places ranking when someone is
searching for a local business.

6. Add a description for your company. This is a short description but it
is an excellent place to add the most relevant keywords for your
industry.

7. Properly categorize your places page. There is a section that allows
you to categorize your business. If you own an ice cream business and
don’t categorize it as ice cream it may be difficult to get your page to
show up in an ice cream business search. Make sure to categorize your
business properly.

There are some more strategies and aspects to successfully using Google
Places but I think the seven points listed above are perhaps the most
important things to be taken advantage of.

I hope this helps and please feel free to leave comments and suggestions
to this post!

Thanks for reading,

~Joshua Lyons

3 Important Things to Check on Your Website

I don’t know much about html and programming, but I can tell if my
company website is designed to get the attention of Google and other
search engines.

I’ve noticed that a lot of websites are built to appear attractive to
visitors but ignore hidden aspects that make search engines happy.

Here are some steps my company took to increase our page rankings
on some various search terms. We now rank number one in almost
every search that people use to find us.

Go to your website and right-click on the background. In the tab that
appears you will see an option to click on “View Source (V).” Click that
option.

There are three things in that crazy maze of letters, numbers, and
symbols that you need to find.

Meta Descriptions

1. Look for where it says
<META NAME=”description” CONTENT= towards
the top of the window. This is the description of
the website that Google displays in the Google
search. This is the first thing people will read
about who you are and what you offer. This is
very important because the keywords people
are using to find you should be in that
description. That will help google give your page a
higher ranking. If you leave this section blank
Google will make up a meta description for
you. It’s better to make your own description using the keywords you
want. The meta description should be no more than about 160
characters long and should be written in readable sentences and not just
a list of keywords. People will read your meta so be careful as you
craft it.

Meta Keywords

2. Look for <META NAME=”keywords” CONTENT=. This should be very
close to where it has the description. This is the place where you want to
add the keywords that are most relevant to your site. You don’t have
to list them in sentence form like you do for the description. Just
add some keywords or phrases which are separated by commas. Most
people recommend that you have somewhere from four to nine keywords
or phrases. Choose your keywords well. I would recommend using
Google AdWords to find the best keywords for your site. One good idea I
read was to include your city as a keyword. Don’t just include the products or
services you offer.

Meta Alts & Titles

3. The last place to look for is a little more tricky than the first
two. You will need to find the part of the page that says “<body….” If you
have a picture in the body of your website you will also see some text that
says “<img….” After are the last two places you want to pay some
attention to. Each time you have an image in your website there will be alt
and title names available to the image. You could think of alts and titles as
very brief descriptions you can give to your photos. Again, you
want to use keywords that are associated with the page. By adding
alts and titles to each image you can give Google and other search
engines more opportunities to see what your page is about. The more
you can describe your page to the search engines the better.

These three steps are focused on making keywords for the search engines
to see.

I would strongly suggest looking at your website to see if you
have individual descriptions for each page, individual keywords for
each page, and unique alts and titles for each image in your site.

If your site isn’t taking advantage of these SEO methods you should
come up with descriptions, keywords, alts, and titles and ask your
webmaster to include them in your site.

Give it a few days for the search engines to take a look (crawl) your
page. Once this is done I suspect your page ranking will improve.

I hope this helps and if you have any questions or anything to add
feel free to leave a comment.

Thanks for reading!

~Joshua Lyons

Cheat Your Tweets – Become More Popular

I wrote a while back about what type of content you should
use for your tweets. Since that posting I’ve come up with some valuable info I really want to share.

You want to provide interesting info but you can only find so much
info related to your industry. I would suggest
using interesting content that is not just industry related. For example,
use animal trivia for your facts, something you find interesting for
your tips, humor for your quotes and Darwin awards for your
links. Just make sure to include your
name and keywords before the rest of the tweet.

Here are some examples of interesting tweets that could help
you with your ranking but aren’t industry related.

·    Joshua Lyons: social media – Did you know that mosquitoes have
47 teeth?!! #animals #facts #mosquitoes

·    Joshua Lyons: consultation ~Simpsons “Don’t worry, getting eaten by a crocodile is like falling asleep, in a giant blender.” #quotes #funny #Simpsons

Try to leave enough room at the end of the tweet so that  people can easily retweet you.

I’ve noticed that this has worked much better for me because this type of information is more popular with the followers and it is easier to find random information than it is to find industry related
information.

Just don’t forget to use your keywords.

Thanks for reading,

~Joshua Lyons

Here is a link to my other Twitter content posting.

 

Why You Shouldn’t Let Everyone Follow You

Let’s pretend you own a high-end women’s sunglasses store. A mysterious yet magical man comes up to you and tells you he will drive some traffic to your store. You can either have a flood of traffic in one day but cannot
select the traffic demographic or you can have a custom picked list of fashionable women, but would have to wait a whole week. Which would you choose?

Obviously you would choose the second option. Why spend time selling expensive women’s glasses to a crowd of men, children, homeless and uninterested people?

This same principle is true with using Twitter.

If you are wanting to have a successful Twitter campaign you need to locate your primary target audience and find out how to effectively communicate with them.

You want to have as many followers on Twitter as possible but there are some key points to remember.

1. If you follow too many people at once you could appear as a spammer. Limit yourself to no more than 1oo followers a day.
2. You want to keep the follower/following ratio close. Not more than a 10% difference.

Takeing a little extra time to find your target market is well worth the effort.

Develop a quality following.

1. Go to Twellow and follow your target audience. Follow 50-100 people a day.
2. Know your key audience so that you can craft tweets that will be of interest to your followers and will likely be retweeted.

The benefits:

1. Get Google and Bing to index your tweets more often by having your followers retweet your keywords they like.
2. You can effectively monitor your followers (target market) and get to understand their needs and wants. [You can’t do this if your followers are not in your target market.]
3. Increase your brand awareness and get more customers.

Final tip: Lead your Twitter followers to your Facebook account. Facebook is where you can build the strongest relationship with them. Think of Twitter as a business card and Facebook as a one-on-one dinner.

Happy follower hunting!

Thanks for reading,

~Joshua Lyons

Twitter Tips – Things You Should Know

“If excellence is an option why settle for anything less.” by Mike Gorman. If you are going to use Twitter you should use it with excellence. Here are some tips that can make the difference between mediocre Twitter use and excellent Twitter use.

• Make sure your bio includes keywords. Google looks for keywords in the bio. Because of this you should try to include as many keywords as possible in this section.

• You can create a custom Twitter landing page to prevent people from seeing a bunch of random 140 character tweets. You may have great content on your news feed, but the first impression a potential customer gets should be controlled. You are able to ensure that your first time visitors will see what you want them to see by creating a custom Twitter page. This is the same principle that can be found from the “Don’t let people see your Facebook wall!” post.

• Make every follower you get count. Don’t get followers just for the sake of getting followers. Get followers that can benefit you. This could include industry peers, customers or some other specific niche audience.

• Use a profile photo. People relate better with humans than they do with inanimate objects and logos. Do you want to relate well with your audience? Use a human face for your avatar.

• Use Twellow to find your target audience. Twellow is the “yellow pages” of Twitter.

• A word of warning, don’t become follow happy. If you follow too many people too quickly your account could become suspended. You are thought to be spamming “If you have followed a large amount of users in a short amount of time;” by Twitter.com.

• How not to get suspended – The Twitter Rules

• Putting a Twitter feed on your website can help with your website search engine optimization.

• Here’s a link to get a twitter widget

• Here’s a video about Twitter and website SEO

I hope these tips help you  as you develop your Twitter presence.

Good luck with your tweeting and on Friday I’ll explain the importance of custom selecting your social media followers and fans.

Thanks for reading,

~Joshua Lyons