A big change was announced by Google within the last 24 hours.

Google rolled out a seemingly small search engine ‘tweak’ that’s going to fundamentally change the way we search.

How?  The short explanation: They are more effectively integrating YouTube and Google+ into your search results provided you’re signed into a Google Account.

What does it do?  Google has now changed how they present search engine results to the average browser.

As Google says on their website:

“We’re transforming Google into a search engine that
understands not only content, but also people and
relationships. We began this transformation with
Social Search, and today we’re taking another big
step in this direction by introducing three new features:

1. Personal Results, which enable you to find information just for
you, such as Google+ photos and posts–both your own and
those shared specifically with you, that only you will be able to
see on your results page;

2. Profiles in Search, both in autocomplete and results, which
enable you to immediately find people you’re close to or might
be interested in following; and,

3. People and Pages, which help you find people profiles and
Google+ pages related to a specific topic or area of interest,
and enable you to follow them with just a few clicks. Because
behind most every query is a community.

Together, these features combine to create Search plus Your
World. Search is simply better with your world in it, and we’re
just getting started.”

Here’s the full post on the Official Google Blog:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/01/search-plus-your-world.html

So what does this mean for your SEO efforts?  Are backlinks dead?

Absolutely not!

Any change of this sort opens up new opportunities, and yes, there will be winners and losers.

But this should have little impact on most small-to-medium-sized businesses in the short term.  In fact, this update will assist with integrating your existing social media into your ‘regular’ (non-social) search.

But it would be foolhardy to pass up the opportunity to develop your social media presence, especially on Google+ and Youtube, if you haven’t already.

SEO is constantly changing.  If you want to continue to rank well with Google, then you need to stay in front of that change.

So embrace the change and make the best of it by strengthening your social media presence, especially if you’re in a business where there is a significant social aspect to your marketing.

There are probably going to be times when you need to record your screen.  (No, we’re not talking about just a screen capture.  To do that, all you have to do is press your ‘Prt Scr’ key to copy the screen to the Clipboard, then Paste it into a document or graphics program like Paint.)  This allows you to record video and sound, if you like, just like someone is looking over your shoulder.

Clients have needed to share what is happening on their screens, for instance, and as they say, a picture is certainly worth a thousand words.

Fortunately, there are some free and easy-to-use tools out there for handling this.  The one I use is called Jing and you’ll find it here:

http://www.techsmith.com/jing

I like it but there’s another tool that appears to be very similar and it comes highly recommended by others:

http://screencast-o-matic.com/

Of course each of them has a premium version, but you don’t need it to do most anything discussed here.  If you decide to upgrade though for the added features, it surely won’t break the bank as they cost no more than $15/year.

What I recommend is to pick one, try it out and you’ll be hooked.  Then if you need a tool for recording what you’re doing, you’re good to go.  You can use it for:

• tech support (to help others or to pass your info to others helping you)
• creating short tutorials to train employees or contractors how you want something handled
• marketing to promote your business

If you know me, I’m not one for sensational headlines just for the sake of publicity.  So I chose this headline because this guy makes a strong case for exactly that.   If you’re a small business owner considering doing business with Groupon, you owe it to yourself to understand more about this potential business partner – and that’s what they are, in a sense.  (Disclaimer here:  I started my own Groupon competitor, a ‘daily deal’ site called Long Beach Deal of the Day
that I haven’t promoted heavily thus far, but that’s because my consulting business has kept me so busy, NOT because of competition from Groupon.  So trust me, envy or ‘sour grapes’ is not the motivation for this post.  It’s only that I want my fellow small-business owners to be aware of what risks are posed by dealing with this leviathan.)

Groupon has what everyone understands by now is a very lucrative business model.  But this is the first time I’ve seen anyone break down exactly what they’re doing.  And he does it now with espionage or stealth; he simply reads their own legal agreements and talks with merchants who’ve done business with them.    Speaking of legal agreements, he even dedicates another article to breaking down the legalese in their contract.    This is priceless, by the way, because most of us don’t keep a lawyer on retainer to review our legal agreements, even though we sign them all the time.  Please be very careful before you sign one of these.  He makes a strong case for the agreement being written strongly in Groupon’s favor.

He calls them essentially a loan shark.  Strong words, I know, especially for this darling of the tech investment community.  But please withold judgment till you read the very strong case he makes.  It’s almost enough to make me want to put some real effort into promoting my own daily deal site just to give local merchants a decent alternative to these guys.

There is a lot of confusion, misinformation and plain ignorance among local business owners about the value of local search.  We’ve been meaning to put something together on this when we discovered a very good article by SEO consultant Vanessa Fox on restaurants and local search.   The short answer is ‘yes’, whether they’re in Long Beach, Chicago or Timbuktu.  What follows applies not only to restaurants but many, if not most, other types of local businesses.

As a local business owner, why should you care?  For starters, there are just too many good tools out there, many of them free, that can leverage the power of your listing information.  Listings are business directory listings that many companies maintain on the Web.  Examples include those that started with paper only, like the Yellow Pages, and others that are a creature of the Web, such as Google, Yahoo, Bing, and of course, Yelp.

There are literally hundreds of these directories, most of them free to use.  They aggregate information from a variety of sources so that they can be useful to people who use them to search.  That means if your business information is out there in one directory, it’s usually picked up by the rest of them.

Since many, if not most, of these directories use scraper technology (automation) to collect that information, it can be inaccurate or incomplete without anyone knowing it.  If it’s your business that’s affected, you want to know about it.  And the directories welcome your input in making the information as accurate as possible.  In fact, they usually allow you to update it free of charge.  That’s called ‘claiming your listing’.

Of all the listings you should be concerned about, Google Places probably has the most clout (partly owing to the fact that Google is the most popular search engine and guess which directory shows up in a Google local search?  Just type in the city and business sector you’re in, for instance ‘long beach restaurant’, and see what comes up.

Those little red bubbles you see in the accompanying screenshot, every one of them is either put there by Google or by the business creating an entry for themselves (which is also free). They do not mean that business has a website.  Virtually every one of them starts out as an entry by Google scraped from information they collected somewhere on the Web.  Then, if it’s claimed by the business owner – who must prove they are the rightful owner – it can be updated.  This not only allows you to correct or update information but also enhance your listing to make it more informative, not only to human visitors but also to the search engine ‘spiders’ that crawl the Web collecting all that information they display in search results.

Knowing the right terms to put in the listing to get it to rank well (come up toward the top) in search engine results is beyond the scope of this article.  Suffice to say that just editing the content on your free Google Places listing can help your ranking substantially.  If you want to know more, contact us.

This article has gone on long enough already.  Please check on the restaurant article mentioned above to see all the reasons even a business like a restaurant would want to control their listings.   Every business we know of could use more exposure.  Just make sure it’s good exposure by controlling the content.  Start with the free directory listings mentioned in this article.  This is especially true if you don’t have a website as your listings ARE your web presence.

Having a hard time trying to figure out what to write on your Facebook page?  Or concerned maybe you’re too serious?  This could help: 

To view this post content, please Like it on Facebook!

Whether you do video marketing or not, if you’ve ever wondered how video actually works, this terrific graphic and the accompanying article (but who reads anymore ) explains it well.

To view this post content, please Like it on Facebook!

This makes it clear just how incredibly complex the process is.  Now, maybe you’ll be a bit more understanding if the video has hiccups when it’s running or when you’re uploading a new one.  Still, isn’t it marvelous how well it does work?  If you have a product or service that you want to promote, video marketing is a great tool, no matter how complex this looks.  Whether you’re in Long Beach or elsewhere, we’ll be glad to explain how you can get started.

Even if you know you are providing a valuable service to your customers or clients, it’s always nice to hear others endorse your efforts.  We’ve been preaching that ‘content is king’ and ‘quality is queen’ for years now.  Recently, an endorsement of our approach came from an unexpected source.  But let me set the stage first.

If you’re trying to get traffic to your website, you can buy it, tweak for it or earn it.  Bought traffic includes things like PPC (pay per click).  Tweaking it amounts to SEO (search engine optimization), both on-page and off-page.  Then, when I say ‘earn it’, I mean you can produce real content – articles or blog posts.  Yes, it takes time and effort.  But it does pay off, big-time.  The momentum builds rather slowly – over weeks or months – as your content gets indexed by the search engines, then shows up in organic searches, then gets read by others, who visit your site and hopefully buy what you’re offering.

I received a video from Andrew Lock.  He offers an entertaining presentation of useful free business advice he puts out weekly; see below the video to sign up.  In the video, he interviewed Shelby Larson who has been doing a more modest form of what we do for at Local Web Science for a few years now.  She has no connection to us – for all I know, she doesn’t even know we exist.  But she describes a similar approach to ours, defends it with the same reasoning we use and also tells what results clients should expect.  Since our approach is more aggressive and comprehensive than hers, it’s reasonable to expect us to also achieve faster and better results than they do.  The interview starts at 8:55 and the part I’m talking about starts at 16:30 -

Shelby Larson interview video

So it’s nice to have an independent endorsement of our methods for getting more traffic to your website.  In fact, what better endorsement than to build your business based on the model, as she has?  And clearly it’s thriving, as is our business, because we offer such a great value to struggling businesses desperate for more customers and clients.  When times are tough, ROI is more important than ever, and is harder to achieve.  Affordable, effective promotion of your business via Internet traffic provides the highest ROI you’ll find.

Warning:  This is R-rated and might be offensive to some because of the characters portrayed.

While it has to do with affiliate marketing, I pass it along for the entertainment value.  It sure is trying sometimes to deal with Google, so ya gotta lighten up occasionally. If you’re not familiar with the term, the Slap refers to Google (rather arbitrarily, it seems) deciding, without warning, that your site doesn’t meet their standards, so they delist you. You suddenly disappear from the radar of their search engine, effectively killing all traffic to that site. It’s not fun, and it’s hard to get any answers out of Google explaining what they didn’t like. Still, some patterns have been observed, and it’s on the basis of this that the story in this video was created. It’s ironic that Google makes billions off commercial uses of their products, yet they seem to have a love/hate relationship with the very people who are making them money – and trying to make some for themselves. (Some have said the same about eBay. But that’s for another video some other time.)

We don’t risk the Slap with the sites we build for you, but we also don’t get a lot of direct feedback from ‘the beast’. That makes the value of what we do that much greater because we have figured out – some say ‘reverse engineered ‘ – the right things to feed Google to get your site ranked high and fast.

If you’re in the Long Beach, CA area, we are fortunate to have THINK Communications

800-610-6717

The prices are excellent and so is the service.  I got 2-sided color glossy finish heavy card stock (sorry, don’t know the weight) – 1000 for $20!  And for just $7.44 more I got them delivered to my door by THINK!  Heck, at those prices you can afford to buy them even if you don’t live nearby and have them shipped to you.  And unlike Vista and the other companies offering ‘free’ biz cards, these are on high-quality glossy stock and DON’T have the company’s logo on them.

I have NO financial interest in this company.  Just passing along a tip about a great service offering.

One more thing:  The special is only good through March according to their website so don’t delay.  And check out their deals on postcards and other products.