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

7 Timeless Blogging Tips

Here are seven blogging tips that should be followed.

1. Post frequently.
The more often you post the more readers you will have. As people
read your blog you will grow a following. This will establish your
credibility and will show search engines that people have an interest in

Seven Tips

you and what you have to say.

2. Post on a schedule.
Select the best days for you to post new content. By having set times your readers will begin to establish a routine for when they will check your blog. Don’t make your readers take guesses as to whether or not you might have new information.

3. Vary your paragraph lengths.
Seeing a giant block of text can be daunting for some people when they know they have to read through the whole thing to get to the end. Vary  the length so as to subconsciously convince your readers that your content is varied and interesting.

4. Write content because you want to write it; not because you
have to write it.
If you are writing a blog entry because your on a schedule you might as well stop blogging. When you write something that you don’t have a passion for, your readers will pick up on that. Your readers will find your
post uninteresting and even boring. Write with passion and take the necessary
time to find information worth writing about.

5. Make the reader ask “what” at the end of each line.
Here is a link to a post that covers this issue. “Do Your Readers Lose Interest?”

6. Submit your blog to IMAutomator.com and other
bookmarking sites.
Let other sites develop backlinks to your blog. This will show the search engines that your site is valued by the public. This helps with SEO.

7. Share your blog post on your appropriate social
media platforms.
Tell your friends and followers that you have a new post. Ask them to check
it out and give you feedback. This will increase your blog traffic and will
give you valuable comments on what you wrote.

Good luck with your blogging and I hope this helps.

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.

 

Use Keyword or Kiss Your Business Good Bye

If you don’t know how to use keywords your business will die. This is because
keywords are vital to getting your site seen on the internet.

Prehaps the best way to get traffic to your site is by understanding and
using search engine optimisation (SEO).

Search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo look at titles, bios, and articles for keywords. Keywords are used to show the reader and the search engines what the website or article is about.

The first thing to do is find out what the best keywords for your industry are. If you go to Google keywords you can enter
keywords to see how popular they are or you can enter a competitor’s website URL to see what people type in Google to find them. This could
be extremely valuable! The top keywords you see are
the keywords you should consider using for your website, blog and articles.

Whether you are using Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, a website or you are writing articles it is important to know and use your keywords.

By including keywords in your titles, bios, and content you can tell the search engines what your site is about.

When people search your keywords your site will appear! As you drive more traffic to your sites you will get a higher page ranking. The higher your ranking the more traffic you will get to the site.

Here are some more sites about SEO if you would like some more reading.
SEO Article
Keyword Article

Good luck on your search for and implementation of outstanding keywords!

I hope this helps,

~Joshua Lyons

P.S. Feel free to add some feedback in the comment box if you found this to be helpful or have anything to add.
Thanks.

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

Schedule Your Tweets in Advance

It’s important to tweet relevant information as much as possible, but sometimes it is hard to find the time to login to Twitter and type your tweets. You can overcome this problem by typing and scheduling all the tweets you want at your convenience. This can be done by going through a website called Hootsuite. The following is an explanation of how to set up Hootsuite and schedule your tweets:

1. Go to Hootsuite.com
2. Click on Sign up now
3. Select Basic free (Unless you want to purchase a different plan)
4. Fill in some basic account info.
5. Click Create
6. Select your style
7. Allow Hootsuite to connect to your Twitter account.

After connecting with Twitter you will be directed to the settings window. If you wish to explore this page you may but it’s not necessary at this point.

After closing this window you will see an owl in the upper left corner of the site. Beside that owl is a text box. Type your message in the box.

If you wish to add a link to your text you can make a shorter URL by pasting the original URL in the shrink box and clicking shrink. This will give you more characters to use for your tweet. [You are limited to 140 characters per tweet]

Now, click on the calendar icon between the shrink and send now buttons. You can select your date and time and then click okay.

Make sure your Twitter profile picture on the right of the text box is selected and click schedule.

Congratulations! You have finished setting up your Hootsuite account and can now type and schedule all the tweets you want at your convenience.

I hope this helps you as your business launches into the realm of tweets.

I look forward to sharing with you again next Wednesday.

Thanks for reading,

~Joshua Lyons

Tweet Content: What Your Business Should be Tweeting

You want to have great content that will make your appear to be an expert in your field and will also be of great interest to your readers. First I’m going to give you some tips on getting great content to share. Then I will explain how to make your tweets benefit you.

One tweet should include a tip that could benefit your customers.

Example – If I’m in the signage industry I would tweet that “You should avoid pressure washing your car if it has vinyl lettering on the side.”

One tweet should include a quote that would be of interest to your reader.

Almost everyone in my target audience is employed. Therefore I use quotes that involve work. The quote will have to be short enough to include both the name of the author and the quote itself.

One tweet should be a link to an article or video.

This could be a link to a relevant article or maybe a video. It should lead the reader to something interesting to read or watch.

One tweet should lead your reader to an interesting fact.

If you’re in the movie industry you might tweet that “Today is Brad Pitts’ birthday.”

These tweets are of course not set in stone. It’s rather challenging to find a ton of interesting facts for the signage industry. It may be much easier and just as interesting to tweet a link to the “Pic of the Day.” (Photos of the best or funniest signs made)

Spend a few hours at the beginning of each month and select tips, quotes, articles/videos, facts and/or something else of interest.

Now that you have selected your tweets you can sit back and just post them each day.

Every now and then you will see something interesting that you think could be a good tweet. Feel free to go to Twitter and tweet it. It never hurts to share good information. Just don’t try so hard to post something that you start posting junk. Don’t post stupid content just for the sake of posting something.

How to make your tweets benefit you:

You want to make sure that every tweet has you business name and a keyword that you want to be associated with. This is key!

For example: “Signage Company Name: Vinyl lettering: Vehicle wrap tip: You should avoid pressure washing your car if it has vinyl lettering.”

Personally I don’t care about the tip. I care that my name is in the tweet along with keywords. (Vinyl lettering and Vehicle wrap) The reason for the tip is to get my audience to retweet my name next to some keywords. This is what Google is looking for. It wants to see that people are interested in what I have to say.

I hope this helps you feel more comfortable with what to tweet and I hope it helps you with your Google rankings.

Thanks for reading,

~Joshua Lyons

How Many Times Should I Tweet Each Day?

Yes, Twitter is valuable because it can make your Google ranking go up, but how often should you tweet?

I would recommend tweeting four times each day. You may tweet more if you have enough content to do so.

I would suggest breaking your tweets down by times of the day.

• First tweet should be in the early morning – The new day in the US begins in the Eastern Time zone. There are a lot of people in New England and I want them to read my tweet when they start their day.
• Second tweet should be before lunch – People get a break for lunch and check their Twitter. I want them to see what I have to say during lunch.
• Third tweet should be shortly before people get off work – Many of the people in your audience will check their Twitter/e-mail before getting off work. For this reason it is good to have your tweet waiting for them before they get off work.
• The fourth tweet should be around dinner time – People are home and checking their Twitter. They can now read what you have to say in the comfort of their own home.

If you want to tweet more you can but make sure you have content WORTH tweeting. Nobody will give a glance to your tweets if they know you are going to waste their time.

Question & Answer Time!

• Q: What type of content do you tweet?
• A: I’ll tell you on Friday.
• Q: How do you find the time to tweet so often during the day and what if you are too busy to tweet during those times?
• A: I will tell you on Monday.

I’m really looking forward to sharing the next two blogs with you.

Thanks for reading,

~Joshua Lyons