Cathy Stucker - The Idea Lady

Attract Customers and Make Yourself Famous

3 Steps to Claim and Optimize Google Places for Business Page

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google-placesSince the implementation of Google+, Google has made drastic changes to the way businesses set up their Google Places page (now known as Google Places for Business), while adding a social aspect for businesses to participate in by creating a Google+ Local page (Google’s equivalent to a Facebook business page).

If a search phrase is recognized as a local search by Google then the search engine will display business pages that provide that service or product in the searcher’s local area. Google is getting much better at recognizing what’s a local search even without stating the city in the search phrase. Google picks up on your location and attempts to best serve the searcher’s intent. For instance, if you’re located in St. Louis and search “Plumber,” that is a good enough indication for Google provide the searcher with local results in the St. Louis area.

So, how do businesses go about creating and optimizing their Google Places Business page? Well, the following is a 5 step plan to create and optimize your GP Business page. [Read more…]

SEO Tips from Google

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gseo.jpgWant to get better search engine rankings for your web site? Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of improving your site to make it more accessible and attractive to the search engines, while also making sure it is useful to human visitors.

According to comScore, of the five major search engines, Google accounted for 63.1% of the searches conducted in October, 2008. That is more than three times the number of searches at Yahoo!, the second-ranked search engine. That means that most most SEO is aimed at Google, because a high ranking in Google can deliver lots of qualified visitors to your site. Of course, other search engines use criteria that are similar to Google’s, so if  you rank well in one, you may rank well in others, too.

Fortunately, Google wants to help us help them index our sites. Although they are quite protective of the inner-workings of the ranking process, they do provide clues that can make indexing by Google easier and more thorough, which may elevate your site’s rankings.

Here area few of my favorite Google resources to help you optimize your site: [Read more…]

Does Google Send You Too Much Traffic?

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search-the-web.jpgIt seems that everyone wants to be #1 in Google, and get the traffic goodness that flows from that. Even if you are not at the top of the search engine rankings, you may find that you get a large percentage of your visitors from Google. That is not necessarily a good thing.

There is nothing wrong with getting a lot of visitors referred to your site by Google. However, if those visitors represent 30%, 40% or more of the traffic you receive, you need a new plan. If the Google algorithm changes, or Google penalizes your site for some reason, you will see a dramatic drop in visitors–and the income they produce.

Start by taking a look at your web site statistics. How do people come to your site? There are three general ways: search engines, links from other sites, and direct entry.

Chances are, most of your search engine traffic comes from Google. Obviously, you do not want to receive fewer referrals from them. Instead, you should diversify so that you receive more visitors from other sources. Let’s say you are getting 1000 visitors a day to your site, and Google sends 40% (400) of them. Other search engines account for 20% (200), links another 20% (200) and direct traffic (type-ins, bookmarks, clicks from email) the final 20% (200).

If you could generate an additional 300 visits a day on average from sources other than Google, you not only have a 30% increase in traffic, you have reduced Google’s percentage of traffic referrals from 40% to 30%, making you less dependent on the traffic from Google. Even if you see an increase in Google referrals and the percentage of traffic they refer to you stays at 40%, the overall increase in the number of visitors will help to insulate you from any changes affecting future Google referrals.

Does increasing your traffic this way sound impossible? It is not. Although it probably will not happen overnight, it can be done with a few simple steps. Here are some ways to do that:

Optimize areas of your site for other major search engines, such as Yahoo! and Windows Live. Although all search engines look for some of the same things when ranking sites, each has their own algorithms and weighting and generates different results. You can learn more about optimizing for all of the search engines at http://www.SEOSmarts.com/

Get lots of links. The search engines all like to see lots of quality links to your site, so getting more links will help your rankings. But the links also bring more people to your site, and that is the more important result in this context. Look for ways to get one-way links from authority sites and quality sites in your topic area.

Get active in social media. My logs show visitors coming to my site through Twitter, StumbleUpon, Facebook and other social media sites where I have a presence.

Encourage people to bookmark your site. That can mean saving it to their Favorites, or on a social bookmarking site such as delicious.

Ask visitors to sign up for your RSS feed or email updates. If your site generates an RSS feed (as all blogs and many other sites do) use a service such as Feedburner to offer visitors ways to be notified when new articles appear on your site.

Start an email list. Use a service such as Aweber to collect email addresses and send a newsletter from time to time. Include links to recent articles and other resources on your site to encourage readers to click through. I find that sending a newsletter results in a traffic spike at my site every time.

Add new content frequently to encourage visitors to return often. Tools such as bookmarking, RSS and email newsletters are great at reminding visitors to return to your site, but you have to give them a reason to do so. When you update your site regularly, visitors will come back to see what is new.

Implementing some or all of the above ideas will get more visitors to your web site and make you less dependent on Google for traffic. Get started now and you can see results within days or weeks.

Watch for my upcoming series on specific way to get more incoming links and bring more people to your website or blog. Subscribe now, via RSS or email, so you don’t miss a thing!