Search Engine Optimization and Duplicate Content
Avoid duplicate content on your website at all costs or risk being heavily penalized by search engines like Google, or even blacklisted and completely removed from the search engine’s index. This means don’t copy content from another website and put it on your own and try to avoid putting the exact same content on multiple pages on your website.
(Read more…)
Google Fonts Gives Web Designers Variety
For years, designers have complained of only being allowed to use Times New Roman, Arial, Verdana, or Courier as marketers and web developers forced the usage of web-friendly fonts for usability and search engine optimization. The idea of these four fonts being known as the web-friendly fonts is quickly becoming extinct.
Google+ Launches Business Pages
The Google+ social network has finally launched their Business Pages where companies can now create their own profiles, similar to Facebook pages. While still in its infancy, Google+ Pages allows a company to include a brief description of themselves, their website, photos, contact info, gain followers, and send status updates to those followers.
While this just seems like a splash-in-the-pan compared to all the features Facebook Pages offered, businesses should setup a Google+ Page because more features will be rolled out in the next year and these pages will become part of Google’s search algorithm. In other words, there will be a positive SEO value to setting up a page and doing so sooner may keep your business ahead of the competition.
One thing to keep in mind is that Google+ Pages can only have one administrator at this time, so make sure the right person sets up the account for your company.
Here’s an introductory video from Google:
Google+ Shows Promise but Where’s the Support for Businesses?
Google rolled out it’s social networking equivalent to Facebook, called Google+, this summer and the initial features look promising. Google+ organizes your Friends into Circles, or custom named groups that you can add your contacts to. Many Facebook users have become Friends with family members, work colleagues, old high school buddies, etc. and find it challenging to update their statuses with personal opinions or photos knowing that they might risk one of their co-workers seeing private messages. Google+’s Circles enables you to organize each of your contacts into a different category and choose which updates and content those people see.
Google+ has done a great job of implementing a system that is easy to use and navigate. Even though the system has nowhere near the number of features that Facebook has, it’s a great start and it seems that updating certain things is easier to find compared to having to dig through menus in Facebook.
Now What?
After experimenting with Google+, the common reaction has been “Now what?”.
The big piece of the puzzle missing from Google+ is the ability for users to setup Pages for their Businesses, Organizations, Bands, Political Groups, etc. and for users to be able to follow those pages that they are interested in. Businesses have been itching to include their brands on Google+ but Google has been slow to respond.
In early July, Google announced that business accounts would be coming soon but then followed up with a message several days later asking businesses to stop making new accounts. This past week, several of the most popular companies who were able to setup Google+ Pages were removed without warning, including Mashable and Sesame Street.
Google should have probably waited in rolling out Google+ until the capabilities to add businesses to the system was ready. We have become so accustom to services on the Internet being accessible immediately and on demand that we don’t have the patience to wait for, what seems like a basic system, to be implemented. Google should have recognized this.
Still, Google will have all of these tools for businesses shortly and will continue to integrate their services with Google+, such as Maps, Places, and Calendars. Most importantly, the features on Google+ will tie back into search results since, after all, Google is all about “Search”!
Including Youtube In Your Online Marketing Strategies
Often overlooked by many small to medium sized businesses is the important role that Youtube can play in developing your online marketing strategies. Numbers recently released by Comscore show that Google sites (which includes Youtube) had over 143 unique viewers in the month of March 2011. Consumers are actively using video sites in the process of deciding weather to purchase certain products, services, plan trips, plan events, and much more.
The first thing you should do for your business to create a video presence is setup a Youtube channel. This enables you to group all of your videos together in one place and also provides an area where you can built your brand through Youtube by entering company profile information and customizing some basic design and colour settings.
Once you’ve done this, here are a few additional tips to keep in mind:
Number of Video Views
The element that determines the placement for the relevance of searches of your video is the number of views. This measurement is used over the number of links. What this means is distribution of your video is important in order to increase the number of views. Use outlets such as posting a video to your Facebook page, embedding a video into your website, or encouraging an industry related blog to post your video. By having your video appear on multiple websites with related content, this will inevitably help increase viewership.
Links in the Description
When you add a link to the description field of a Youtube video, it automatically becomes an active, clickable link (must include the http://). However, Youtube adds nofollow to all links in the description field, effectively making the link of no benefit to improving a your site’s search engine ranking. It is still a good strategy though to add links as it does encourage users to click through to your website, especially since the content of the video should be relevant to the content on your website.
Simple Ideas Are Effective
A lot of people think that creating a video for their company is a huge ordeal that involves getting the right lighting, having the right people interviewed, and including the highest quality images and music that enhance their products and services. This does not have to be the case.
As an example, if you are renting out cabins on a lake, how about including a “virtual tour” on your website where you film views of several rooms in the cabin by holding a video camera and slowly rotating around. Embedding a video like this on your website will surely leave a much larger impression about your cabin on potential customers than just a long text description.
Some other examples might be videos that help answer frequently asked questons, like how to start a BBQ, how to setup a tent, or how to change your password on your home security system. Simple videos like these can often be the most effective.
Statistics for your Videos
Youtube provides a whole bunch of statistics on your uploaded videos which they call Insight Statistics. You should monitor these statistics, looking at things like Demographics and Engagements that will help you better understand what your audience is looking for.
With these tips in mind, you will be able to grow your Youtube presence overtime which, in return, will provide a positive benefit for your online marketing strategies as a whole.
Optimizing Your Website for Speed: SEO for CSS and Javascript Files
Back in April 2010, Google posted an article to their blog that discussed how speed matters in web search rankings. Programmers have generally been obsessed with load times and efficient code, however the online marketing world has pushed websites to use heavy graphic designs, animations, and programmers have had to create long CSS and Javascript files in order to meet this marketing design demands.
Besides ensuring that all your graphics are optimized and mark-up (HTML) is well structured and minimal, you can speed up the load time of your website by compressing CSS and Javascript files. Since these files are purely text, their compression ratios allow them to be reduced by over 90% in file size, thus speeding up the time it takes to load your website.
I found that FiftyFourEleven had the best tutorial called The Definitive Post on Gzipping Your CSS. Essentially, you use a combination of PHP and an htaccess file to compress your CSS or Javascript files before being downloaded to a site visitor’s browser.
Of course, SEO items such as having relevant keywords in your content, user-friendly URLs, well optimized Page Titles, etc. are much more important at this time, however this might be a good tip for sites looking to get a slight edge and a jump into improving their website’s speed.
Responding to Negative Online Feedback
Here are some tips for dealing with negative online feedback:
The Best Offense is a Good Defense
Encouraging customer comments on industry specific sites and in common web directories, such as Google Places, should be part of your online marketing strategy. Staying on the offence by doing a bit of work on this each month and getting positive feedback can save you a lot of hassle in the long run when you do get a negative feedback.
In addition, Google displays its comments in their search results and there is no doubt that positive and negative feedback on your company factors into search engine optimization. With this in mind, include online comments and feedback as part of your online strategy before somebody leaves you a negative response and you find yourself behind the 8-ball.
Tags: google, google comments, negative feedback, Social Media, user feedback
Posted in Google, Online Marketing Strategy, SEO | No Comments »