Posting a blog isn’t as simple as writing your content and hitting the publish button, there are many other things to keep in mind if you want your post to reach as many readers as possible. How the search engines will index your post, how social media services will display your post, and other features, like categorizing and tagging, are just some of the ways to help potential visitors find your content. (Read more…)
Last week, I attended the Learn With Google For Publishers day-event in Los Angeles put on by the Adsense team. I had previously attended 2 Adsense In Your City events and found them to be useful, mainly the 20 minute sit-down given by a Google representative to look through and optimize my site. However, I felt like these previous events just touched on the basics and was hoping to get more tips and insight into the Adsense system. (Read more…)
Facebook has been collecting information about its users, their businesses, their likes, and their social connections for years and the mounds of data they have accumulated are about to be put to use with Graph Search. (Read more…)
While the Google+ social network doesn’t currently have the popularity that Facebook and Twitter do, there are still many good reasons to setup your business’ page, especially with Google’s search results giving more prominence to Google+ Pages. Part of optimizing your Google+ page is making sure you use appropriately sized graphics. The 2 key graphics to be added and their image dimensions are: (Read more…)
Creating a Custom Tab for your business is fairly easy, the difficult part is setting it up in Facebook, getting through their documentation and screen settings, and ensuring you have the minimum requirements. The Custom Tab appears on the Facebook page as a small thumbnail graphic and can be used for a variety of things like display custom content, scripts that import RSS feeds, Forms, or just about anything.
I created an Enewsletter Signup Form as a Tab on this Facebook Page.
On March 30, 2012, all Facebook Pages changes to the new Timeline format. The new look and feel changes your Page considerably but it gives you the option of adding in a Canvas Photo to the top of your Page to attract more attention and customize the look of your page. To help you prepare, we have listed the photo dimensions for the Canvas Photo and your Facebook Icon below:
Branding your company’s Twitter page can easily be done by simply adding a background image to your Twitter Account in the Settings. However, getting the dimensions right so it displays nicely can be tricky, especially with all the different screen sizes and mobile devices being used online today. (Read more…)
Whenever you share a link on Facebook or you paste a link into your status update, you’ll notice that it displays a title and sometimes a description and photo. To change what information is displayed when a page on your website is displayed involves using Open Graph, or simply placing a number of Meta Tags in the <head></head> of each page on your website with customized content to display in Facebook. (Read more…)
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”!
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.
