Google Places – Does Google know about your business?

Tags

connecting your business, google business places, google map, google maps, google places

Google Places is all about connecting your business with local customers. As Google say themselves, 97% of consumers search for businesses near to them online.  Even if you don’t a website, having your business on Google Places makes complete business sense.

As with most Google Services, Google Places is completely free so apart from your time (and really not much is needed to set it up) your wallet is not going to be out of pocket. Quite the reverse actually as if done effectively your Google Places listing could greatly increase customers to your business.

If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, try putting the words Takeaways Beverley or Takeaways YourTown into Google. You should get something like this:

The red markers on the Google Map shows the business listings from Google Places (likely to be the most well ranked takeaway outlets in Beverley for these keywords). In the search results list it puts a link to each of those with a marker. Or you can click on the map to find out more information about these businesses including links to find them, contact details, photos and reviews.  You can instantly see why Google Places has great potential.

Registering is easy. All you need is a Google account and if you don’t have one registering is a simple process. If you’re not sure if you have a Google account, you will have one if you can access any of the other Google Services like Google Analytics, Google Reader, Gmail or Blogger or even You Tube.

Tip: I find that using Chrome (my fav browser) it won’t let me pick a category while filling in the form, so I would suggest using Firefox, IE or some other one instead to register with Google Places.

Once you’ve logged in or registered at www.google.com/placesforbusiness, Google will then take you though a handful of steps to list your business:

• Select your Country and type in your main business telephone number.
• It will then do one of two things. The most likely is that it will bring up a page for you to fill in with all your business details. However I have found on a couple of occasions it will bring up a listing with your number. If this is your business, you can claim it into your Google Places account by verifying it is your business. Read on to find out how.
• Fill in the details as requested. Pick as many categories (max 5) as you can find to match your business. And make sure you use as many of those 200 characters as possible in the Description field to describe your business! And use your keywords (click here to read a post about finding your business keywords). Make it an accurate but not boastful description because as we know Google likes things to be real!)
• When finished press the Submit button.

Google will want to validate your listing (to keep out the riff raff!) It will either want to call, text or post you a verification number. Do what suits you best. Just be aware if you choose the post method, they will send a postcard that looks very much like junk mail so keep an eye out for it. It can take a couple of weeks. You will need to login again once you get the verification code and type it into the verification field.

Customers will be able to add their reviews to your business and you can post status updates and offers to customers via your Google Places account as well. As it is a Google product, in my experience it makes sense to make the most of it!

So just to recap, why should you join Google Places?

• Customers can more easily find you without knowing your business name.
• The nature of a Google search means it is fast replacing traditional telephone directory listings.
• It is free advertising.
• It is linked to Google Maps so can help your business appear on the first page for local business searches.
• As it is linked, Smart phone mobile users can search for your type of business using Google Maps.
• Customers are able to easily leave reviews and recommendations of your business which help your listing to move up in the rankings.
• You are able to put your website address, contact details, business information, photos and video’s in your listing.

Here’s a link to how Google suggest you Optimise your listing to help customers find your business on Google Places and here’s a link to their quality guidelines to using a Google Places page.

Twitter: What is #Follow Friday #followfriday

Tags

#ff, #followfriday, follow friday, twitter

You may have seen Twitter posts that mention #ff or #followfriday – so the story goes it was originally a Twitter social convention  started by Twitter member @micah to introduce interesting people he was following to those following him.

The idea caught on and now you will find many tweeters posting #ff updates on Friday. It might be that they are thanking fellow tweeters for retweets or they’ve been particularly interesting or they are great mates or they’ve provided great conversation or whatever

It’s just a nice little way to appreciate your twitter followers and those you’re following.

And often when you’re new to Twitter it can be difficult to find good people to follow – being a very busy place and crammed with lots of noise and fluff. But I have found my looking at the #ff of the people in my tweeter feed, I can find some great new people to follow.

A #followfriday tweet will look something like this:

#followfriday @three60ruralpr @wossy @stephenfry

or

#ff @urbanchickenuk @theangelshare @sellmywedding

How to use #followfriday effectively:

1. Keep an eye out for #followfriday in the tweets you receive and check them out

2. Write your own once in a while, perhaps keeping the list to 2-3 members

3. Use Twitter Search to see who else is being recommended in #followfriday

If you are following someone brilliant and they happen to use #ff you could find yourself with several more interesting people/businesses to follow yourself. And it’s so nice when people start to #ff you!

How to create a Facebook business page

Tags

facebook, facebook business pages

You might have come across companies using Facebook business pages, liked the idea and wondered ‘how on earth do I get one of these’ as there are no obvious buttons to click to set one up.

Why should you have one? A Facebook business page is a fantastic tool for business because it places your company right at the heart of the world’s most popular social network, it will help your business connect and engage with customers, meet new ones and will help spread your business message via the friend network. Plus the search engines love them.

Similar to a personal profile page, you’ll be able to post status updates on your wall telling your ‘fans’ about developments in your service/product offering, provide insight into the people behind the ‘brand’, engage in conversation and light banter.  You’ll be able to post company information, links to websites, pages and blogs, post pictures and videos, ask questions via discussions and announce events.  It’s like having your very own mobile broadcast vehicle that zips around the world.  Best of all because your Facebook business page is ‘opt-in’ your group of fans will be dedicated to your cause.

So how do you go about setting one up?

The first thing to get your head around is that any Facebook business page needs to be created within a personal Facebook profile page.

As Susan Payton in her Mashable post says ‘Facebook Pages are different than profiles. You have a profile for you, Jane Doe, but your business can’t have a profile — it can have a Page. A Page is a place to house all the pertinent information about your company.’

And initially the person that ‘own’ the profile page is the person that administrates it. It’s a good idea at this point to consider carefully who should take this role.  For those of us with small businesses that is an easy decision to make as it’s normally just ‘us’ but for a larger company some thought must be given to who will control the profile page.

So to get started…

1. If you haven’t already, join and register with Facebook at www.facebook.com.

2. Once logged in scroll to the very bottom of the page and on the bottom navigation menu click on ‘Advertising’.

3. Then click on the Pages button near the top.

4. Then click on the Create a Page green button.

5. Fill in the form, selecting the options that best suit your business.  Please make sure that you’re not in violation of any Facebook terms or policies, click on the link to read if necessary. Press Create Page when ready.

6. You’ve done all the hard work now you can add information to your page.  If you click on ‘Edit Information’ you’ll be able to add basic and detailed information about your company, like websites, company overview (perhaps copy and paste some information from your own website). Post a welcome to our business page message in your status, perhaps mention what your intentions are with the page.  Write something in the little text box to the left-hand side, think of it as your calling card so make it engaging and appealing.  Click on the little + button on the main navigation and add the menu tabs for photos, links, events and so forth, utilise whatever suits your business.

7. If you click on the ‘edit page’ link on the left-hand side menu, you’ll be taken to the settings for your page and this is where you can set permissions on who can post what.  Click the little pencil to get to the edit menu’s for each of the options.

8. When you are ready, click on the Publish this Page button to make it go live – the TELL people about it (see consideration 4 below).

Other considerations:

• To log back into your Facebook business page (when you want to update it), first login to the profile you used to set up the page.  Then look to the bottom of the browser window and click on the little green and blue F icon on the Applications Menu, this will take you to Ads and Pages, where you will click on Pages, then View Page.  And off you go.

• A very useful application to have is Memorable Web Addresses, look on the page settings page (see point 7 above) for applications, click link and browse the applications. You’re looking for a Facebook Business Application and this particular one allows you to have an easy to remember personalised web address for your Facebook business page. There are plenty of other applications that you can append to your page, just make sure they add value to your audience.

• On the settings page, you can add other administrators.

• You aren’t able to ‘share the page’ with all of your friends directly however you could post the link on your blog, link to it on your website, put the link in your email signature, post it on twitter and your personal Facebook status, mention it in client email mailshots – just tell people about it and if you keep it relevant, professional and updated people will come.

Examples of businesses using Facebook business pages

The New York Times

STA Travel

Wiggly Wigglers

Innocent Drinks

Spencer & Young Artists

katproductions (me) – http://companies.to/katproductions/

It may appear a little daunting at first to set up your Facebook business page especially when in this day and age we’re so used to getting something instantly at a click of a button but will be so worth it for your business!

Other useful sources of related information for Facebook business pages:

http://www.davechaffey.com/blog/online-pr/using-facebook-for-marketing-10-company-examples/

http://www.facebook.com/advertising/?pages

http://feedfront.com/archives/article002156

http://mashable.com/2009/09/22/facebook-pages-guide/

http://mashable.com/category/facebook/

The how’s and why’s of backlinks and SEO

Tags

backlinking, backlinks, inbound links, incoming links, pagerank, reciprocal links

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is about more than having a good set of keywords on your website.  Backlinks are an absolutely vital way of letting the search engines know about your site, thus affecting your search engine rankings and sadly it’s something that many website owners are unaware of.

Backlinks, often referred to as inbound links, are links from another website back to yours.  For example, having my website address (URL) on this blog (see blogroll to the right) is providing an inbound link back to my own website.  The search engines use a website’s backlinks as one indication of its’ popularity and credibility and this therefore affects that website’s search engine ranking.

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is about more than having a good set of keywords on your website.  Backlinks are an absolutely vital way of letting the search engines know about your site, thus affecting your search engine rankings and sadly it’s something that many website owners are unaware of.

Backlinks, often referred to as inbound links, are links from another website back to yours.  For example, having my website address (URL) on this blog (see blogroll to the left) is providing an inbound link back to my own website at katproductions (as is this link).  The search engines use a website’s backlinks as one indication of its’ popularity and credibility which ultimately affects that website’s search engine ranking.

Many factors determine the value of backlinks to your website search engine ranking but the best backlinks come from other established websites that are relevant to your own industry and credible themselves. And it also helps if the page that your weblink is on has a good ‘PageRank‘.

“PageRank is a link analysis algorithm, named after Larry Page, used by the Google Internet search engine that assigns a numerical weighting…” to each webpage, it is what Google uses to determine the importance of your webpages. Wikipedia

The theory goes that having your backlink on a page with a high PageRank will give that link to your website a higher weighted value therefore helping push up your search engine rankings for that page. However, if that highly PageRanked page has many backlinks on it to other websites it can effectively dilute its value, almost like it has to share out the value of its PageRank amongst all the links on its’ page.  You can find out more about this here and here as it can get fairly complicated.

All we need to know is that another website’s PageRank can add value to your inbound link.

If you want to find out what the PageRank’s are for the pages on your site either install the Google PageRank toolbar onto your browser or try this tool, Whats my PageRank,  I can’t be sure exactly how accurate it is but for the sites I tested it seemed accurate enough.

How do I find out how many backlinks my website has?

Most search engines provide a method for determining the number of backlinks that your website has.  For instance on Google, try typing link:websitename.co.uk into the search box. Google seems to show much less backlinks than another search like Yahoo.  Try Yahoo’s Site Explorer by typing your web address, http://www.webname.co.uk into the field at the top, then click on the Explore URL button. This seems to show the largest number of backlinks back to your site.

If you’ve installed Google’s PageRank toolbar and click on the PageRank icon while on any webpage, then select BackLinks from the drop down menu, it will show you Google’s list of backlinks for that page.

Another nice little online tool is Backlink Watch. This tells you how many backlinks your site has, what the anchor text is on each backlink, and how many other external links (to other pages or websites) there are on that particular webpage. Speaking of anchor text, this is the text that the link is behind, the most commonly used anchor text for a link is ‘click here’.  If you do a search for the words ‘click here’ it will show you all the websites that use this anchor text.  It doesn’t mean anything to anyone but shows you the power of having keyword driven anchor text.  So for example, if possible rather than have someone put ‘click here for katproductions’, see if it can be ‘click here for web design services from katproductions’. That way your backlink is working hardest for you.

It’s true you can pay to have backlinks created for your website. Although, I would be wary about anyone offering to get your business hundreds of backlinks in a short period of time.  The worst case scenario is that your web address ends up on hundreds of purpose built ‘link farms’ that the search engines don’t like and potentially your website could be penalised for, that is to have your search engine rankings severly compromised or worse still totally removed.

However, in saying that there are many good search engine optimisation companies around who will create a backlinking strategy for your business and who have dedicated staff finding suitable and valuable backlinks for your website.  It seems that the search engines value a more organic growth of backlinks and are likely to be suspicious if your backlinks increase hugely and suddenly overnight.

How do I get backlinks to my site?

First and most importantly make sure your website has quality content that people want to link to. After all there is no point going to all this trouble just to have people leave as soon as they arrive!

Then to get backlinks I suggest using a variety of sources.  First make sure that you’ve submitted yourself to the Google and Yahoo search engines.  Then do a couple of searches to find some credible website directories like DMOZ, Thomson Local and so on.  Many of these will allow you to register your business free of charge.  Then try putting some of your keywords/key phrases into a search engine and see which websites your competitors are listed on or even try your competitors’s web address using the ‘link’ techniques mentioned above. Find out whether you should be or can be listed on these as well. Or it may be that your business works with other similar or complimentary businesses and there may be opportunities to have your web address on their websites. Though beware of having too many reciprocal links, sometimes they can end up effectively cancelling each out out.

These days it is quite common practice to use social networking type websites to help with your backlinking.  For example, submitting online articles, a Facebook Business Page, a business blog, a Twitter account or a social bookmarking account, like Digg or Delicious, will allow you to create a profile about yourself and/or your business thus providing the link back to your business website.  And providing that you actually make use of these accounts, it can be an extremely successful way of telling the search engines that you are most definitely in business! Plus there are many many other benefits in utilising these as well – but that’s another blog post!

In addition to having your own accounts with social networking sites, it is also very useful from a backlinking point of view to read other related blogs, facebook pages, twitter accounts, forums and so forth and post comments on these.  As well as this adding another backlink for your website, and providing you post geniune comments (and not blatant hard-sell ‘come to my website’ type messages) you will also better your own online credibility within your industry, and you might even have a bit of fun or learn something new doing so.

It is a win-win situation.

More information:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backlink

http://www.goarticles.com/cgi-bin/showa.cgi?C=1151743

http://www.webconfs.com/how-to-build-backlinks-article-16.php

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66356

So what’s Twitter all about?

Tags

twitter

As a recent newbie to the world of Twitter, it has not taken me long to realise its huge potential for business.  And I’m not just talking about corporate business either.  Only two weeks in, and as a small business owner myself I’ve already found some extremely useful people and businesses to ‘follow’ and I’m being ‘followed’ by others.  So what does it all mean?

Twitter is known as a micro-blogging application and in simple terms this means it allows people to post comments on what they’re doing directly to the web.  At first I imagined this to be full of people simply telling the world what they’d had for breakfast and how deep the snow was in their part of the woods.  A bit like a Facebook status (more about that in another blog).  And all in only 140 characters.

But it’s so much more than this and the opportunities for conversation with others is endless.  Over the past two weeks, I have followed conversations between other web designers, picking up industry trend information and design tips.  As a follower of a fantastic design magazine I have been sent incredible links to online resources and web design freebies, and I’ve been able to ask questions directed at my peers and receive valuable feedback.  And because it’s not an email, all this has been delivered in a very direct, straight to the point fashion – perfect for someone with not enough hours in the day (like myself).

As well, I been able to listen to the witty and brilliant rambles of Stephen Fry @stephenfry, receive insights into the life of Jonathan Ross @wossy and find the most delicious savoury pancake recipe from Jamie Oliver @jamie_oliver.  A girl’s gotta have some fun!

Many of these things I could have found by searching on Google but the point is I didn’t have to! Plus at some stage in the near future, I hope that I’ll be able to pass relevant information and links onto my own followers – customers and other web design folk alike!

Just think how this could benefit your business. Twitter provides a means to create a personal and mutually rewarding conversation between you and your customers, you and your suppliers, well you and the world at large. You have all the control AND IT’S FREE. (And be warned possibly addictive).

Of course there is an etiquette to it just like with email, the most important is absolutely NO blatant sales pitches. And as well there is a method to its madness, a simple Twitter guide is provided here courtesy of Sometimespace.  Oh, and like anything online be sensible about your privacy.

By adding your own website address to your Twitter profile page, then adding your Twitter link to your website, you’ve got another credible and relevant inbound link to your website for the search engines to follow.  It’s an excellent way to boost your online optimisation efforts.

What have you got to lose, join Twitter and have a play.  Make sure you pick a username that has some meaning to your business, do a simple search to find others in your industry, follow a few people for a while and see what happens.  Just like blogging to begin with, it may feel a little strange but practice makes perfect.

Follow katproductions @katproductions

kia ora

Finally I’ve found 5 mins to get my blog started.  I’m hoping it will provide a space to put some ideas out there for small business owners in helping to make the very best of their web presence.  Small things that cost very little but a squidge of time that will help small business websites attract the right visitors.  The plan is to try all these things myself to see if they work, in an effort not to waste anyone’s precious time.  Good luck!