With the start of Google+ your Google Profile is more important than ever. I’ve seen lots of Google Profiles that were broken in one or more ways recently when trying to find out who the people are who put me in their circles. Also
my name is by no means easy to remember, so I had to optimise my profile as well.
Let me tell you the most important ways to optimise your Google profile.
One of the few products Google doesn’t offer yet*
It seems Google wants to inundate us with new tools, products and services these days. Is this a way to divert attention away from all the bad news about antitrust lawsuits, the FTC and the like? I don’t know. In any case, there are lots of new tools to test.
Many of these will have a huge impact on search and the Web as a whole in future.
Others mights seem less noteworthy at first, but they underscore the long term Google strategy which focuses on social, mobile and HTML5 among others.
Either way, I assume that every business person has to know about these tools, as there are plenty of opportunities here and in some cases also pitfalls.
Last week I was busy upgrading our Facebook advertising account from ‘personal’ to ‘business’, which turned out to be quite an arduous task. To be honest, there aren’t many differences in terms of features, but you do get access to a Facebook representative and you can also apply for credit, which is certainly a better deal than making daily payments through PayPal.
When I set about moving campaigns from my personal account to the business account, little did I realise how far behind Facebook’s Power Editor tool is when compared to the more familiar Adwords Editor. To start with, the Power Editor tool is not a downloadable application and therefore the speed of navigation and editing is quite poor, especially if you are moving large chunks of ad creative across accounts. Also, I found it quite discriminating that the Power Editor tool can only be accessed on the Google Chrome web browser. However, Facebook do promise that they will dole out a version that can be accessed using all the major web browsers very soon.
As advertisers, it is imperative that we familiarise ourselves with the Power Editor tool, as Facebook plan to phase out the Bulk Uploader tool by the end of this month. I must confess that the Facebook Power Editor tool is a massive improvement compared to its clunky predecessor, the Bulk Uploader tool. It’s extremely useful if you are creating campaigns from scratch as opposed to moving existing campaigns that are large in size to another account. However, some of the benefits of the Power Editor tool according to Facebook are:
It’s still early days for the Power Editor tool and Facebook employ some of the world’s smartest people, so I’m confident that the tool will get better as time progress. For the time being though, I’d really like to hear some of your thoughts on the Power Editor tool if you have had any prior experience of using it.
Google +1 for websites is here for a few days, and while some people are still (or again) skeptical, there are quite a lot of webmasters who have adopted the + 1 button almost immediately. The SEO industry has been especially quick to include the buttons. I am among them, while I still don’t use the Facebook like.
I’m not going to shout hooray because Google finally released a button, but nonetheless I can see that it’s the best and the hitherto most important attempt by Google at entering the social media arena. Most others failed miserably and Google has learned some lessons it seems.
The ease of use, for instance, and the quick announcement that the +1 votes will count as a ranking factor, are good signs that +1 will still be here a year from now.
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ROI or Return On Investment is on everyone’s lips these days. It’s become so widespread that you could call it a buzz word now. Although its meaning gets a bit diluted, I have to admit that I use it sometimes outside its strict sense myself.
Originally ROI meant the extra monetary return, while increasingly it may mean any value that you get back for something you invest in, be it time, effort or money.
With SEO, and especially social media, ROI has become very fuzzy.
Everyone wants it but it’s not so obvious, so more and more people come up with their own notion of how the actual ROI of SEO and social media might look, and how you can measure it.
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There are numerous ways of using Twitter for everything from business to fun. The key to using Twitter effectively is the use of tools. Without tools, Twitter can be overwhelming and difficult to fathom. There are numerous tools that allow you to sift through this massive resource of latest news, links and gossip.
So what are the Twitter tools that really make a difference for advanced Twitter users?
I selected just the best of them: 30+ Twitter tools that are most useful right now. Most of these tools have been around for years so they have a sound business model. They simplify manifold tasks but have one thing in common: you must be aware of these tools if you’re serious about Twitter participation.
A few weeks ago Shark SEO posted an intriguing experiment about multiple meta descriptions. To be more exact, he experimented with adding more than one meta description into a single meta description tag.
One or more actual meta descriptions would exceed the meta description display character limit of approx. 165 characters. Why would you want to do it? Well, usually search users are seeking more than one aspect of your site or service. Thus it would be an advantage to serve all of them the perfect meta description.
Expanding on this concept, I wanted to test whether you can add more than one or multiple meta description tags.
I wondered whether Google would accept more than one meta description tag. Also, I wanted to find out which one it would take – the first one?
In the test performed by Shark SEO, both descriptions contained in one tag could be triggered to appear in the search snippet depending on the keyphrase used in the search query. Would it be the case here as well?
By now I’m quite weary of the manifold failed attempts by Google to enter the social media arena. We had:
to name just the most known failed or abandoned Google social media services. As with most of the previous offerings, last week’s Google +1 started in a clumsy beta or rather alpha version. I didn’t even want to test it at first, but then all the search and SEO publications frantically reported about it so I felt compelled to give it a try.
I encountered many difficulties, and it took me two hours just to “get it”.
Google +1 is way too complicated right now and it was quite buggy when I tried it over recent days. The Google +1 page itself redirected me to 404 pages in German (I’m in Germany) despite browser and Google preferences.
When Google +1 finally worked for me, I tried to use it extensively but to no avail. Nobody has noticed my +1s it seems, and I barely see any by others.
Still, everybody is writing about it and the list of resources is already huge. Furthermore, there are high profile people in the SEO industry who actually suggest we jump into it. So to provide a more objective resource, I decided to compile the links and to enable you to make your own choices.
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