Google Plus Instant Upload is a little Big Brother but very cool. Okay, so I have to admit I was a little freaked out by this at first…
Google Plus’s instant upload is really simple. All you have to do is download the Google Plus app onto your Android phone. The default setting for the app is has Instant Upload enabled. So, that’s all the set up that is required. Then all you do is snap pictures on your phone as your normally would and they automatically get uploaded to your Google + account. So, the next time you sign into the account you will have the option of whether you want to share the picture with your circles or not. Watch my demo below…
If you are worried about privacy or you don’t want to use Instant Upload it’s really easy to disable. Just follow the steps below.
1. Go to the Google+ App on your phone
2. Press Menu
3. Go to Settings
4. Scroll down to Instant Upload
5. Uncheck the box so that it no longer has a green check mark
You can also open up your Instant Upload settings from here to check on upload statuses, upload existing photos, decide whether you just want photos uploaded instantly or video too, turn off instant upload while roaming etc.
Whether you are celebrating it’s arrival or wishing it away because you don’t want to keep track of yet another social network, Google Plus is here. We will soon find out whether it is here to stay or a quick fad, but my guess is that this is the real deal. If you haven’t had the chance to join yet make sure to go check it out. And, If you are like me and you are thinking HOLY COW there is so much to learn and read.. Here are a few resources I found helpful gathered all in one place.
What is Google Plus and How Do I Use It:
How to Get Started With Google Plus: This is a great guide to getting started on Google + it gives great info and screenshots, but it’s a little less overwhelming than the Google Plus Collaborative Doc (below).
Google Plus a Collaborative Document: This is literally a guide to using Google Plus. The Table of Contents lays out the document so that you can jump around and learn about the areas that you need help with. This is probably the most in depth and useful guide I have come across.
The Google Plus Cheat Sheet: Exactly what it sounds like, a cheat sheet or glossary of terms on how to use Google Plus and what things mean…So, in case you don’t have the time (or patience) to go through the doc above.
How to: Get Your Own Google+ Vanity URL: Since Google Plus doesn’t offer vanity URL’s as of now for fear of spammers figuring out millions of Google+ users email account information, gplus.to has created a small app that makes it easy to create your own Vanity URL to make it easy to share your Google Plus Profile with your friends.
How to Get Google+ On My Phone:
Get Google+ On Your iPhone! And iOS App was released today making it possible for iPhone users to get Google Plus on their iPhones. It’s been available since the beginning on Android phones and all you need to do is go to the Droid Market, to download your Google+ app for Free.
How To Use Google Plus for Business/Marketing:
10 Things CMOs Need to Know About Google+ Chris Brogan compares Google+ to the launch of Facebook and the leap people made from Myspace to Facebook. Giving reasons such as Google is the King of Search so they will probably have their social network affect search, they are starting up business pages, it’s connections with gmail and other Google tools you already use and it’s fast growth in it’s first two weeks of it’s launch he thinks it’s the next BIG thing!
Google + Now Part of Google Analytics: You can now track your social interaction as well on your Google Analytics by adding a bit of code to your sites. Currently this tracks Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus. There isn’t a code yet to track LinkedIn interactions.
The more I research, explore, play and use Google + the more I like it. It’s incredibly connected, dynamic and the uses are endless. For example…
It recognizes when I take a picture with my Android, and then without me uploading or doing anything it is already in my photos on Google Plus asking me if I want to share it.
My new Tag line: Google Plus… It’s So Smart, It’s Spooky!
I’m sure by now you have heard talk about Google’s new Plus One button. It’s a button that you can add to your website/pages, ad, or blog pages that will allow users to essentially recommend your page or content. The idea is very similar to retweeting or Facebook’s “Like” button except instead of sharing the page with others via a social network, it will show up as a recommendation in someone’s search results on Google.
When your friends are signed into their Google accounts and try to search for a specific topic, say “shoes” for example, they will be able to see if any of there friends recommended that particular URL in the search as something worth there while to look at. Google uses the example of searching for a movie. “You can always get a review from a professional critic, but wouldn’t it mean more to get a review from a friend that has your same taste in movies?”
If you are in Google and you are not signed into your account or if you don’t have anyone you know that +1′d something you are searching for, instead of seeing names of those that recommended the site, you will just see the aggregated number of folks that have +1′d it.
The theory behind all of this is that you are more likely to click on a search result that you trust, and you are more likely to trust something that others or friends have recommended.
Google hasn’t stated for sure yet whether this will have baring on the page’s ranking, however they have hinted that they are always updating their algorithm’s and therefore it may be a way to help your search results. Just like linking back and forth between sites allows for some of the trust from that site to be passed on to you and help your ranking, the +1 Button is a way for a person to pass a little trust your way.
Because the +1 Button may help traffic it can’t hurt to add it to your sites, ads, etc. Here’s how you do it, just grab a snippet of code and add it to whichever pages you think it will be most effective. See the screenshot below…
I don’t think it can hurt to add it to your sites. However, at this point I haven’t seen a lot of traction with this button. If it starts to get big I will definitely put some more energy into it, but for right now it’s on the list of things to watch.
I just got back from a radio interview where they asked for my Top 5 Blogging Tips. Since I’m a strong supporter of business blogs, and our own web marketing blog generates so much search engine traffic, I figured I’d share those tips here on the Maine SEO Blog.
Own Your Own Domain Name
Make sure that you own your own domain name for your blog. That means you want to blog at mycompany.com/blog or mycompanyblog.com, but notmycompany.typepad.com or mycompany.wordpress.com. Two reasons for this:
When you blog on a domain owned by someone else (i.e., wordpress.com or blogspot.com) you’re building up trust for that domain, not for your own. Why would you want to blog for the man when you can blog for yourself?
If you ever need to change platforms (we did a couple of years back, moving from TypePad to WordPress) you will lose all of your inbound links if you didn’t first establish your own domain name. All those links to mycompany.typepad.com/whatever? They don’t get to come with you.
Blog so That the Search Engines Can Find You
That means starting with a keyword analysis to determine what keyword phrases your audience is using at the search engines. Then using those keywords in your blog post title, headers, in the first sentence or two, and sprinkled throughout your post. Also drop them in your meta-description, meta-keywords, tags, categories and alt-tags.
Create Keyword-Rich Links Back to Your Website
For many of us, a blog is the place where we establish our credibility and engage with our audience, while our website is where we do our sales. If this is the case for you, you should link your keywords in your blog post to appropriate pages on your website. For example, if you wanted to promote your web design skills you might blog about the top 10 web design mistakes and then link the words website design to the page on your website where you talk about your mad design skills.
Engage Your Audience On and Off Your Blog
If someone takes the time to comment on one of your posts (unless their “name” is SEO India, Whiter Teeth, or Natural Cialis) then you should respond to their comments. Likewise, you should be active in social networking on sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn as applicable for your business, and engage your network; ask questions, answer queries, and promote their stuff as well. They will be more receptive and interested when you post a link to your most recent post.
Be Patient and Persistant
Blogging is not like PPC ads on Google; you don’t get page one results from day one. Instead, it takes time to succeed. I’d recommend 2 – 3 posts a week for six months before you start to get the results you’re looking for. Although that may seem daunting, those posts continue to drive new qualified leads to your site for as long as you have your blog. I have posts from 2006 that still bring in hundreds of new visitors every month. Now that’s return on investment.
We’re trying to decide whether we should set up a business blog or do pay-per-click advertising. Which will provide a better return on investment?
–Marketing in Maine
Dear Marketing,
We’ve never recommended putting all your eggs in one basket, be they proverbial or free range. Both blogs–which help with your organic search rankings–and pay-per-click (PPC) ads–which appear on page one–can help deliver qualified traffic to your website.
One way to look at this is the difference between cooking in an aluminum pan vs. a cast-iron pan. The aluminum pan heats up quicker, but it also cools off quicker.
PPC advertising is a lot like that aluminum pan. If you need to get page one results on Google or Bing, you just need to pay them and your ads will start running immediately. Same day results. That’s fantastic for sites that may not otherwise do well in the organic results, such as new sites or sites that rely heavily on Flash.
However, the moment you stop paying them–whether because you hit your daily budget or you’ve decided that PPC is no longer for you–that traffic stops just as quickly. You’ll get no more benefit out of the money and time you’ve invested.
Compare this to blogging: you may not enjoy much search engine visibility for the first few months of your blogging and you’ll be putting in a lot of work…we’d recommend 2 – 3 keyword-rich posts a week of 300 words or more. However, once you’ve established your blog and built up trust and inbound links, your blog stays hot like a cast-iron pan.
In reviewing the top ten traffic generating posts this month at our web marketing blog, five of the posts are at least a year or two old, the oldest one was written in 2006! Five years later and it’s still pulling in hundreds of new visitors each month…that’s a much better payoff than most PPC campaigns in our opinion.
So, if your budget allows it, we might recommend setting up a small budget for PPC, but develop develop a business blog for your long term success.
This post is the first (hopefully of many) by our own Dave Cousins to appear on the Maine SEO blog. Enjoy!
Professional athletes have the ability to surprise, anger, and leave you awestruck, depending on who you’re rooting for. Roger Federer is an example of a professional athlete who carries himself with grace, with no true peer. Called the greatest tennis player of all time by many of the all time greats, he has won more major tennis championships than anyone. He’s in dozens of highlight videos, leaving fans and opponents gasping at effortless genius of shots he executes. Don’t try this at home:
So what does this have to do with your website? There is a surprising, yet simple, correlation between your online presence and how great athletes like Federer become great.
1. Work hard, train hard
In order to succeed in a sport, you need to have purposeful practice. The evidence against the “natural athlete” or “God given talent” is outlined in the book Bounce: Mozart, Federer, Picasso, Beckham, and the Science of Success written by Matthew Syed. No great athlete or artist arrived in his or her place among the greats without hours of practice.Online, you have to be working on page titles and writing blog posts. You should have a social media campaign, using Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Do research on your competition and see what they’re doing. Look for new ideas and opportunities to market your business online. Attend seminars and classes that are about building success online.Is this going to yield instant results? No. It is with purposeful (forward focused, non-monotonous) practice that you will find success, which means….
2. Get a good coach
Every great athlete has a great coach behind them to tell them what they’re doing wrong, and what they’re doing right. Federer is the greatest tennis player ever, yet he still has a coach. A great online marketing and SEO company can give you the information you need to help shape your blog posts, improve your page titles and help you use social media to make your company visible.
3. Stop being scared of failure
Every athlete fails. It’s called losing. Many athletes are scared of asking for help or getting coaching because someone will tell them what they’re doing wrong. You can’t let that hinder your willingness to change what’s “working”. If your website is getting great traffic, yet you’re not creating sales, that’s not success. You (and your online presence “coach”) have to take a look at your audience, your website, and your message.With changes to your online marketing campaign, there will be moments where traffic drops, but are you gaining more business through outside influences, such as guest blog posts or a twitter account? As long as more people are either coming through the door, contacting you more or your scope of influence increases, the campaign is working.
4. Stop being scared of success
There have been many athletes who were scared to succeed. Strange, right? Scared to win? They were scared at what people around them thought, that their original peers wouldn’t look at them the same way, or that the commitment would be too great.It works the same online. What if I have more business than my company can handle? What if I have to be in front of the computer all day to manage this? How many more hours will I have to put in? I won’t have any time to run my business! The message is simple and straight-forward:If you want to be an amateur, do what you love as a hobby in your spare time. If you want to be a professional, be prepared to work because no one comes to watch someone who is simply average.
If you can follow these rules, you should see growth in your online marketing campaign. With time, it will get easier and soon you’ll have your fan base growing like a great athlete’s.
Dave Cousins is one of the web developers at flyte new media. He is also a certified tennis professional with the Professional Tennis Registry and owner of Portland Racket Stringing, having been a tennis instructor for 22 years. He is Roger Federer’s bitch.
Over the past month or so, I wrote about the four steps to getting the most SEO bang for your buck. Here they all are, finished, and packaged with a nice little bow!
1. Research keywords: How do you find out what your audience is searching for online? Start with free tools, and get some insights into what all of the numbers actually mean.
3. Measure success: It’s not just about measuring rankings, but also traffic, errors, and incoming links too. Get some quick tips and free tools to start measuring!
4. Rinse and Repeat: Sure, you’ve researched, optimized, and measured; but you’re not done yet! It’s time to get rid of what isn’t working and get better at what is!
Unfortunately, a website can’t just be set up for success then left to rake in millions. In order to get the most search engine visibility, you must constantly change, grow, and adapt to the web. To take it a step further, from a business perspective, it may look like you have a ton of revenue coming in, but maybe your profit margin could use a little TLC.
Website
Use your rankings to make sure you’re doing well for your keywords and use Google Analytics to make sure people are actually using those keywords to find your website. If they don’t match up? Start by making sure your keywords are used frequently enough on the page. Think about where else you can incorporate those keywords – without stuffing.
Maybe you need to revisit the keywords you optimized for and make sure your target audience is using those terms! Or maybe it’s just about using your…
Blog
Do you see through Google Analytics that some particular posts were incredibly popular? Why reinvent the wheel with completely new content when you can create similar blogposts based on popular posts?!
Your blog is one of the easiest places to test. Check for keywords and referrers after every post to see what’s working and what’s not. Take it a step further by investigating which types of posts – or even keywords – convert visitors into customers.
Social media
At the end of the day, we want social media to actually do something for us. For most businesses, that’s going to be driving people back to your website.
Check Google Analytics to see if visitors are coming from Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. If not? Try making the post a little more exciting and interesting so that people click the link. Still not getting the traffic you’re looking for? Maybe you just need to reevaluate whether your audience uses that space or not.
It’s critical to measure rankings to make sure you’re doing well on the search for the keywords you’ve optimized your website and/or blog for. However, it’s pointless to measure your rankings if you don’t know if people are actually coming to your website using those keywords. Sure, you may rank well for certain keywords – like your brand name – but if no one is using those keywords to find you, then ranking #1 is useless!
I recommend using a tool like Raven Tools to measure rankings. Unfortunately, it is a paid service, but there are a ton of other great features beyond getting rankings.
Google Analytics
To make sure visitors are coming to your website using the keywords you’ve optimized for, use a tool like Google Analytics. Using the search engine and keyword reports, you can quickly see what keywords visitors use when they come to your website. Don’t see the ones you want to be seeing? Go back and try to optimize for them again.
Google Webmaster Tools
Installing Google Webmaster Tools is one more way to be proactive about your website. Sure, you’ll get some statistics including crawl rates, incoming links, and even keywords; but what’s really helpful are the error messages. Before you find out from a customer or visitor that you have broken links on your website, you can find out from Webmaster Tools first.
Incoming Links
Even though search engines are a bit secretive, you can find out how many incoming links from a number of sources, including:
Google Webmaster Tools – I mentioned it already, and you’ll see some of the most powerful incoming links to your site. The number of incoming links, however, is lower than the actual number of links.
Yahoo Site Explorer – Slightly more accurate, but destined to disintegrate (thanks to the Bing/Yahoo merger), this is another great (free!) tool.
Open Site Explorer – A paid tool from SEOmoz. OSE is by far the most accurate tool I’ve seen and a great resource for a competitive link analysis too!
There are a ton of other measurement tools out there, but these are the major ones. Next time, we’ll talk about the final step in getting the most SEO bang for your buck: repeat.
Your website is obviously going to be one of the most important places for your keywords. A few key things to remember:
Optimize page-by-page. Your homepage is going to include a lot of your bigger keywords and act as an umbrella page. Deeper pages are going to get more and more specific.
Keyword usage is dependent on the length of whatever space we’re talking about. If you only have 200 words on a page, don’t use a given keyword more than 2 times. If you have closer to 500 words, you can use the keyword 3 or maybe 4 times.
It’s about balance. Optimizing for keywords should never trump writing for your audience. Make sure your copy still makes sense for your users.
Where to put your keywords on the website:
Title tag – Front load your most important keywords, and don’t use a keyword more than twice here. Include your company name last and your location, if you have a brick-and-mortar location.
Domain/URL – If you have an established domain/URL, don’t change it! But if you’re just building your site, keep your keywords in mind.
Navigation – We all need About and Contact pages, and while they aren’t necessarily keyword rich, they’re necessary. For other page names, make sure you don’t stuff your keywords.
Meta-description – Not only good for a marketing message, but also a great spot for keywords.
Header – Be careful here: describe the page without stuffing your keywords. And remember: you can have more than one header tag on a page!
Links – Google (and your users, for that matter) don’t understand what happens when you “click here” or “learn more”. Make sure you link keyword rich phrases to other pages on your website.
Copy – Of course! Include your keywords – and very importantly, variations of them – in the copy.
Blog
Your blog provides a huge opportunity to target niche sets of keywords. By default, your Content Management System (CMS) may offer different setups, but typically all blogs will offer the following:
Each new blogpost is a new web page. Therefore, you have one more opportunity to rank well at the search engines.
The title of your post is also the title tag of the page (unless it’s overridden by a plugin), so make it keyword rich.
You can further optimize by applying categories and tags to your posts.
Blogposts are great link bait; for as we all know: the more (relevant) incoming links, the better.
Social Media
Use the keyword analysis you did to uncover terms to use on your social profiles, too!
On Facebook, branded keywords will certainly help people find you; but make sure you also use keywords within posts. Searches on Facebook could cause your fan page to come up in the results!
Twitter yields a larger opportunity: with tools like Twitter search, Twellow, NearbyTweets, and more, you have the opportunity to be found by people using your
On LinkedIn, use your keywords in your profile, especially in your profile heading. Participate in Groups and the Answers section that also use those keywords.
Articles
Don’t forget to use your keywords in any articles or guest posts you write. Many of the same rules will apply from the website/blog, but also remember that you can apply categories when submitting your articles. Also, don’t forget to include a keyword rich link back to your website!
