Why add Google Street View for your business?
Quite simply, it provides additional visibility for your company on Google Search, Google+ and Google Maps. It invites your potential customers to a virtual sneak peek of your place of business. High resolution, 360 degree images are taken by a professional photographer in your city, at a convenient time for you. You can discuss what your needs are with the photographer and what images you want of the exterior and interior of your establishment. Once approved, the images are posted after only a few weeks and the photo rights belong to your business, not the photographer. Google Street View can also be easily embedded on your website via Google Maps API or HTML. Numerous case studies have demonstrated that Street View has substantially increased foot traffic to businesses. Read more about Google Street View.
Google’s New Planning Tool: Databoard for Research Insights
Google recently launched a new tool to help marketers create meaningful and insightful infographics for clients. Based on the statistics compiled from completed Google research, marketers can easily build presentations with the information provided. Topics vary from Youtube marketing data to understanding mobile search by consumers.
At the moment, only 8 studies are available meaning that content is limited however we hope to see more added soon. Also, though you can easily share your nicely designed infographic via social networks and email, Google hasn’t made it easy to save it as a file!
Here’s an example of an infographic regarding the impact of a non-profit organization’s online presence on potential donors. It was pulled together in less than 10 minutes.
Try it out and let us know what you think.
Linking is Still Queen
Almost 10 years ago, I wrote a piece called “Linking is Queen”. The article discussed how linking is essential to the health of a website, but that content was still “King”.
Skip to 2013 and the only thing that has changed is the way we link. There is no longer any need to solicit links, though it would not hurt to solicit them from appropriate sites (such as clients and suppliers). Links today come directly from a viewpoint of popularity. If you are popular, you get discussed and linked to in social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, and more. This in turn makes your site, your brand, and/or yourself a deemed authority on the subject in question.
So how do you become popular? The answer is the same as it ever was: “Content is King”. Write original, valuable content, and people will discuss it, share it, Tweet it, and make your article or website the most popular one around. You can use tricks like link bait, but that is just another way of confirming to “write content that people want to share”. It all comes down to: good content generates good links.
So what is good content? Good content is both unique AND adds value to a website.
- It is not offered anywhere else
- It is an original solution to people’s problems
- Is either interesting, surprising, and/or has a practical use
If you want your content to spread, it should trigger one of the 3 A’s: Anxiety, Awe, or Anger.
Unique content without value may in fact harm your site’s authority. So don’t regurgitate old ideas, be creative and initiate new concepts. That is how you will make it to the top.
So, in a decade, everything has changed, and nothing has changed. Content and links are still the King and Queen that dominate search engine landscape.
Don’t forget to pledge your allegiance.
by Shawn Campbell – February 8, 2013 – www.RedCarpetWeb.com
Hootsuite – Social Media Management Tool Review
I use Hootsuite as my social media management tool and though I’m pretty satisfied with it, there are of course a few things that I think they can improve on. To get right to the point, here goes:
What I really like about Hootsuite:
- I can easily import my networks such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and have access to a bevy of apps such as Wordpress, Instagram and Constant Contact for email marketing.
- I have the ability to schedule my messages whatever day or time I want in my timezone (instead of using Facebook’s old school scheduling tool) and I can see my scheduled content organized in Hootsuite’s Publisher.
- I can create streams to scan my client’s competition and see what they are posting about and can also add hashtags to search keywords related to my client’s industry.
- Hootsuite provides easier management amongst teams so that anyone can use their own account to log in and be accountable for any interaction they instigate.
- I also think their support team is on the ball with answering requests (it would be pretty terrible if they weren’t, considering…)
- At a reasonable monthly add-on fee of $29, I subscribe to Hootsuite University, have become officially certified and all with a nice badge to use for our company website.
- I have unlimited access to training videos and industry experts providing tips on various industries and how they handle social media.
The nitty gritty of what I don’t like?
- I can’t tag people or pages in any posts or comments I make, which means that I have to go to Facebook.com if I want to make my post more engaging, or in other words, be more social! However, to defend Hootsuite, this is apparently an issue of Facebook’s API not allowing them to provide this option.
- I’m not able to create a stream of my Newsfeed, which is unfortunate because I can’t share or interact with any pages my client has liked.
These (seemingly) small issues are actually quite important on the grand scheme of things because the whole point of social media is to be able to interact with your peers on a regular basis and the goal of using Hootsuite is to be able to use all of your social networks in one place. Hopefully, by the time that someone from Hootsuite reads this, they’ll have moved my recommendations up the ladder in their Feedback Forum.
There are many other major aspects of Hootsuite I didn’t discuss such as reporting and pricing but let’s keep that for a subsequent post.
What about you? What are your initial impressions and experiences with Hootsuite?
2012 Year In Review: Important Shifts In Google SEO
by Tom Schmitz -Nov 23, 2012
This is a great review of changes in Google that affect ranking over the past 12 months. A must read for web developers. See article.