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Google Places for Your Service Industry

May 23, 2012 by Basil Puglisi Leave a Comment

An innovative business known as PlumberSEO.net has found a way to use Google Places for service industry networking. While they specialize in working with HVAC contractors and Plumbers, PlumberSEO helps those in their industry take their businesses to the next level with effective online marketing with social media, SEO, map optimization and many other internet marketing tools.

Find a Plumber and More

It used to be that when you were looking for a plumber, electrician, roofer, or any other type of service contractor, you picked up the yellow pages and almost always went with the one that had the most impressive ad, the most credentials, and the most well-known company brand name. In today’s world, very few people still use this traditional method of printed resources, instead, they head to the web to look for the best options for service contractors in their area. One of the ways in which Google has made this search easier for consumers is by adding Google Places.

Check out this quick video to get familiar with Google Places if you require a bit more in-depth understanding.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TpZan96KHOM]

Now when people look for service contractors in their area, they commonly head to Bing, Yahoo, Google, or other favored search engines as well as to social media sites where they may ask friends or family if they can suggest a contractor in the area.

A recent survey of 2,000 consumers revealed the 86% of the surveyed use the internet to find local business, 74% of those cited search engines as where they go when seeking a local retail or service industry contractor.

Local businesses that are not showing up on page one of search engines are missing major opportunities to grow their business as most people tend to decide their choice in contractors from page one of search engine results.

How to Manage Google Places

Google Places isn’t without its own flaws. However, most of these are user related and may just require a bit more of an in-depth understanding of how Google Places works. If you have had any issues you may want to check out this video for some helpful tips if you find you need help troubleshooting.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/user/GooglePlaces]

In addition, be sure to check out how to Optimizing Your Google Places Page to get the best results for your business.

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Author:

@BasilPuglisi is the Executive Director and Publisher for Digital Brand Marketing Education (dbmei.com). Basil C. Puglisi is also the President of Puglisi Consulting Group, Inc. A Digital Brand Marketing Consultancy that manages professional and personal branding for Fortune 500 CEOs, Hedge Fund Managers and Small Business Owners.

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Google Started Changing the Way Search Results are Shown

April 11, 2012 by Basil Puglisi Leave a Comment

Every time Google changes the algorithms of its search engine, it sends shivers down the spines of many who rely on that calculation to get a better placement on the search engine’s result page (SERP). That is why Google is very careful and secretive when a change like that is coming. But Amit Singhal, the top Google Search executive, confirmed recently they are working on something big.

What they are trying to do, he said, is for the search to work more like we humans understand the world. By cross referencing millions of entities that Google has been collecting in the past few years, the new search engine algorithms will attempt to understand the context of the query and give direct answers instead of sending you to a website to find out by yourself.

For example: If you ask what the deepest 10 lakes in the US are? Today, you are getting results based on the keywords and a list of websites talking about lakes, but not the exact answer to your question. In the future the first thing that will appear is a direct answer to your query. You can see it already happening with the “best guess” results. Type in “who is the chancellor of Germany” and see what you get.

Another example: If you ask information about a place, Lake Eerie for instance. Today you get all the websites that have anything to do with the lake. In the future, first you will get all the information Google has collected about the lake: depth, location, altitude, average temp and so on.

Google and Metaweb Tech

A little more than a year ago Google purchased a start-up company called Metaweb Technologies. The company had an index of 12 million entities; movies, books, companies and celebrities. (For the sake of comparison, Wikipedia has 3.5 million English entries.) Amit Singhal said that since this acquisition they have expended the index to 200 million by developing “extraction algorithms” that can organize data in a semantic way from around the web.

What would it do to the listings on the first page if a large amount of information will appear first? A person who was briefed on Google’s change says it may impact directly the results of 10%-20% of the queries. There are billions of queries performed each day.

Google hopes that with the new search results, people will spend more time on their page and see more relevant ads, but it is still unclear how it would impact the ads which appear beside the search results. People familiar with the project say the changes will appear in the next few months. Amit Singhal says it will be rolled out slowly and will be a year-long process.

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Why Blogs Matter More than Ever for SEO

April 4, 2012 by Basil Puglisi 3 Comments

I recently showed a college student a blog post I was working on, and he asked me what percentage of the content I dedicated to keyword phrases. He had taken a course in SEO, and he understood keyword density. So do I. But even as an SEO copywriter, it’s not really something that I take into account when writing content anymore.
Rather than give him a percentage, I explained to him that the number of times a keyword is placed within an article isn’t as important as it used be. Yes, keywords still play a big role, but the quality of the content has become a more critical factor in getting higher search results. That’s where blogs come into play.
The Rise of the Blog
Back in the day (1990s to early 2000s), blogs weren’t as widely accepted as they are now. Saying you had a blog was like telling people that you’re kind of a geek and you really like to talk about yourself. Last May, eMarketer reported that 53.5% of Internet users would read blogs in 2011. That’s 122.6 million blog readers. Today, blogs have become an effective way for people to share their opinions; stay updated on news, trends and topics that interest them; and have ongoing conversations with others who share those opinions and interests. For businesses, blogs have become a necessary tool for reaching customers on a higher level and improving SEO.
The rising value of blog content has not gone unnoticed when it comes to search results – Google wants to put the content that people read in front of them, and right now, that means blogs.
Keep Your Content Fresh and Relevant
Google favors new, fresh content, and in today’s fast-paced market, content can get outdated pretty quickly. Maintaining a continually updated blog on your company website allows you to keep adding new content to your site without having to completely rework product or service pages. In addition, the content must contain valuable information – Google Panda updates now put low-quality content created solely for link building at the bottom of search results.
Guest Blog, Guest Blog, Guest Blog
Writing guest posts on other blogs has a number of benefits, one of which includes SEO value. Guest posts often allow back links to your blog and website within your blogger bio. Good relationships with authoritative bloggers can be incredibly valuable for SEO, especially if the blogs have high page ranks, as Google is impressed by link quality and diversity. Networking also helps establish your own blog as an authority in your niche.
Social Sharing
The better quality the content, the more it’s shared through social media. Google recognizes social sharing, such as tweets, retweets, Facebook likes and Google +1’s. Internet users are much quicker to share a blog post, rather than a website page, through Twitter. With the rise of Pinterest, blogs that post quality images are also being shared more, resulting in increased traffic and higher search rankings.
Do you have a blog? Are you using it to improve your SEO strategy?
Author:

Jacqui MacKenzie is a writer for Straight North, one of the leading Internet marketing companies in Chicago. She writes for a wide range of clients, from providers of GPS for vehicle tracking to broadcasting equipment specialists. Check out the Straight North blog! @ straightnorth

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The Path Less Taken: Google+

March 26, 2012 by Basil Puglisi 2 Comments

We’ve all heard about Google+; but to be quite honest, Google’s social network seemed to fizzle out after its release. It’s certainly no Facebook or Twitter, but that hasn’t stopped several major marketers from switching gears lately to focus on Google+. But why? Not only is Google+ no Twitter and Facebook, but February reports showed that the average Google+ user spends a total of 3 minutes on the site monthly. This compared to Facebook’s 405 minute average and Pinterest’s and Tumbler’s 100 minute average demonstrates Google+’s deceptive shortcoming . However, the reason marketers are turning their attention to this social networking platform is because Google+ is imperative in the world of social media and SEO, and here’ why.

Social Web Experience

Google+ is so much more than a social network as it gives users something new: a complete social web experience. Unlike Facebook and Twitter, Google+ implements all of the services of Google into its social network: we’re talking Google Voice, Google Shopping, location filtered Google Search Engine Results, Google Video, photo sharing, and the list goes on. Google+ isn’t just about connecting with friends, it’s about connecting with the world. And in that connection, users share their personal and commercial experiences with the world, offering market researchers huge opportunities. And because Google+ is more than a social network, it is attractive and convenient to users. According to Google-plus.com, this is evident by the fact that by January 2012 Google+ was boasting 90 million active users worldwide, making it the 4th largest social networking platform in the world; and of course, one must take into account that this success comes only 6 months after the social network’s beta version was released.

Impact on the World of SEO

Two things make Google+ more important in the world of SEO than any other social network. First, because sharing and endorsing commercial items is both convenient and appealing to users, they are driven to participate; they this by utilizing Google+’s “+1” button. Through this utilization, users not only share public endorsement of products, services, websites, and the like on Google+ and websites, but through Google’s search engine; user’s Google+ friend’s +1 recommendations, if relevant, show up in their Google searches. Not to mention that the +1 button has been implemented into all results on Google’s search engine result pages; this is a big deal considering that Google holds more than 66 percent of the search engine market share, according to searchengineland.com.
Second, because everywhere we look features the +1 button, this means something big to SEO. Think about it. Google operates the majority of the search engine market. Millions of people flock to Google to query searches every day. Google+ and Google+1s directly affect SEO. Google owns Google+. Therefore it isn’t a far leap to assume that Google will give Google+ more weight in its algorithms than other social networks. So, put quite bluntly, anyone hoping to utilize SEO is completely and hopelessly dependent on Google and its secret algorithms.
Author:
Amber Paley is a guest post and article writer bringing to us information on why many marketers are turning their attention to Google+. Outraged by the prevalence of elder abuse in the U.S., Amber spends much of her professional life writing educational articles to help those affected by elder abuse find a good nursing home abuse lawyer. Amber’s social profile can be found at http://about.me/amberpaley
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Google Started Changing the Way Search Results are Shown

March 19, 2012 by Basil Puglisi Leave a Comment

Image representing Google as depicted in Crunc... — Image via CrunchBase

That is why Google is very careful and secretive when a change like that is coming. But Amit Singhal, the top Google Search executive, confirmed recently they are working on something big.

What they are trying to do, Amit said, is for the search to work more like we humans understand the world. By cross referencing millions of entities that Google has been collecting in the past few years, the new search engine algorithms will attempt to understand the context of the query and give direct answers instead of sending you to a website to find out by yourself.

Image representing Metaweb Technologies as dep... — Image via CrunchBase

People familiar with the project say the changes will appear in the next few months. Amit Singhal says it will be rolled out slowly and will be a year-long process.

Author:

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The New Social Marketing Strategy with Google+

February 1, 2012 by Basil Puglisi 6 Comments

As a marketer, your social profile must be thriving on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. But the important question is, ‘Is it thriving over Google+?’ I can assure you that most of you will answer in the negative. However, it is not too late. Grab a business page over at Google+ as soon as you finish reading this.
Google is smart and knows how to beat down its competitors. When Google+ was launched, none had the slightest idea that it will be used as a cutting edge in the market by Google. Yes, Google has merged the search engine and the social network as one. This attempt by Google can be described as ‘Social Searching’.

Search + Your World

It is the new Search plus Your World (Search plus Your World) I am talking about. When you do a Google search, being logged into your Google+ account, you will find that results are being personalized to match your taste. Let us consider that you are searching for ‘body building tips’ and if one of your friends within your circle has written about it then it will be shown to you in the search results. Seems good eh? Here comes the truth.
Google, in the name of personalizing your searches, is forcing the results of Google+ under your throat. How? Let me explain in a more elaborate manner. Suppose you wish to know about a certain brand or celebrity and you would like to give a search over Google. In the search results you will notice that the brand’ or celebrity’s Google+ profile is given preference. Now, do you understand what Google is up to? Yes, it is competing with other social networks taking advantage of its search engine.
Google gives less importance to other social network’s posts and therefore the more urgency in getting your business page over Google+ as soon as possible. A business page over Google+ will help people find your business over search results. However, just a page is not sufficient to boost your business to the required level. Here is one of my social marketing ideas that you can incorporate in your business page over Google+.

Ways to Win at Google +

It is more likely that Google+ posts are to be shown in the search results. Include the keyword in the title as well as the body of the post so that it will help the Google bots to index it and show over the search results. Here comes an added advantage to you as a marketer by including the keyword in posts. Instead of explaining it let me show you with a theoretical example.
Let us consider that you have a blog/website dealing with ‘Diet’ and you wish to optimize a certain article or page for a keyword. When doing a keyword search over any keyword tool you find the keyword ‘diet foods’ has high volume of search and with lesser competition. On the other hand the keyword ‘safe weight loss’ has the same value as ‘diet foods’ to a certain extent. Confused, you optimize your content for the keyword ‘diet foods’ and therefore leave the keyword ‘safe weight loss’.
After posting the article (optimized for ‘diet foods’) over your site, you generally share it to social networks by just pasting the link and allowing the social network to grab the first five lines of the content. In case of Google+ you can try the other way around. The article which was written around ‘Diet Foods’ can also be written around ‘Safe weight loss’, though the latter keyword cannot compensate wholly but it can at least be used as introducer to the content. Yes, write a title and a short description around the keyword ‘safe weight loss’ and manually paste it to the Google+. Later you can include the link of your content and let the social network have its way with it.

What are the Pros?

What is the advantage of doing this extra work? Let me remind you again that Google is going to crawl every post in Google+ and therefore your post which has a short description given by you manually as well as the short description which Google + has indexed for you over its network are both going to be shown over search result. Irrespective of whether a user searches for ‘diet foods’ or ‘safe weight loss’, the chances of your post appearing in the search result will increase.
The odd of the post being shown to the users increases if the user is within your circle. Therefore, it is better that you start focusing on Google+. At the same time do not abandon your audience over other network, because who knows what the future of social marketing will be.

Before I can wrap up, some of you might know that Google provides the ability of depersonalizing your search results. Yes, it’s true. But how many of you will depersonalize your search results and opt for a more global search? Maybe some of us would depersonalize the searches and would like a pure Google search. Will the common user care to do it? I do not think so. When most users find what they are searching for, none will care to depersonalize their search results.
Author:
Richie Richardson is a Social Marketing Expert and SEO Analyst. You can reach him over his blog www.zarrylyms.com where he discusses on current issues regarding Social Marketing, Branding, Affiliate Marketing, SEO and B2B.
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