SEO

On 10 January 2012, Google announced the rollout of Search Plus Your World.

This is the next stage of integrating search and social. Read Google’s announcement at the link above for the full story, but essentially logged in Google users will start to see private results and posts by people in your Google+ circles.

A lot of people in the online marketing space are up in arms about it. After taking a few days to process the changes and read various opinions, I’d like to add to the conversation by looking at the issues a little deeper. To do this we’ll have to take off our blogger or marketer hat and view it from others’ perspectives.
Google’s Perspective
Forget asking whether Google is good or evil and look at it from their point of view…

If you’re Google, you would see Facebook incrementally taking control over large chunks of the general public’s time online. Not just with Facebook.com and Facebook games, but with deep integration in websites, through things like comments or logging in using Facebook’s protocol. Facebook, being a walled garden, has access to enormous amounts of data invisible to Google.

Microsoft, with Bing, much of Yahoo!, its Windows desktop systems and now Windows Mobile also control an enormous amount of data that Google doesn’t have access to.

Data, for a company like Google is worth its figurative weight in gold. With it, Google can understand user behavior, test new products, track changes to current products and keep an eye on browsing habits. Starving Google of data is like us having a cut in oxygen. Not good.

Think of it another way – Facebook, Microsoft & Apple all have their own universe where users visit. Take away Android & Google+ (both pretty recent products) and what does Google have? Um… a place where people go to look for stuff…? A bit of email & some document software? If people figure out they can find what they’re looking for just as easily on one of the platforms they spend most of their time on, Google is up a certain creek without a certain paddle.

That’s why Google’s pushing so hard to create a virtual universe for people to “live” in, so to speak.
Everyday User’s Perspective
Think how the Search Plus Your World would look to an everyday user…

Because Google+ is very new and still quite unfamiliar for most people, I’ll substitute it

Full article at Purpose Of Seek In Addition Your World

For some inexplicable reason, “blogging” seems to be a taboo word to a lot of business owners. I’ll often suggest it as part of an ongoing business building strategy and the business owner will jump like I just zapped him or her with 1,000 volts of electricity!

People say things like:

“But I’m a businessman, not a writer”.
“Everyone knows you can’t make money running a blog”.
“Only hippies blog”.
“I don’t have time for that nonsense”.

It baffles me how people can still think this way. But I guess a lot of business people are still to get on “this internet thing”, so I shouldn’t be too surprised.

Let me put it to you this way:
If you’re not running a blog as part of your overall online business strategy, you should probably close your business now and get a job.
Bold statement? Yep

Care to prove me wrong? Didn’t think so

To paraphrase Blaise Pascal’s Wager:

If I’m wrong and it doesn’t make a difference to your business long term, what have you got to lose? A few hours that you would have spent watching TV or on Facebook.
If I’m right, what do you have to gain? Prosperity in a grand new world.
Come to your own conclusion.

As I’ve said before, both social and search marketing are transforming into a single entity. The pinnacle of that combined entity is blogging. It builds your home base, provides ample content to build your authority on Facebook and Twitter and generally builds the “I’ve Seen You Out There” factor.

Blogging, no matter your business, should be the focal point of all your marketing. It’s one of the easiest and best ways of distinguishing yourself from your competition and building your market dominance.

You might say “but I don’t have anything to write”. Yes you do. You’re an expert in your field aren’t you? Or at least pretty damn good at what you do? If you aren’t, you better get good at it or again, go get a job.

The way the world is going, the people who are really good at what they do will be successful, while everyone else will work for them.

My sister had really bad warts that no skin specialists could cure her of. After years of painful treatments she finally went to a great doctor who was

Read more about this at Blog Or Even Into Receivership

If you are just starting to market your product or services online, I highly recommend you focus first on building these properties:
Build a Blog
Running a blog properly can build your authority and promote your brand like nothing ever. I recommend posting as often as you can, as long as the quality doesn’t suffer. Regular, quality posts give people a reason to keep coming back to the site. A blog can also be thought of as an eNewsletter that people actually read because they can subscribe to the feed and receive the new posts when they are published… you know what, just head over to the Friday Traffic Report for this great article on why you should run a blog. Jack explains it better than I could, maybe because he’s one of the recognized blogging leaders.

As you can see from my archives, I’m a huge fan of WordPress and recommend you get a self hosted wordpress blog. I use Godaddy for hosting (get good discounts here). I also highly recommend you spend the money to get the Thesis Theme. I’ve tried using the free templates and customizing them to suit and even though I’m fairly good at CSS, Html and Php, I’ve wasted so much time that is worth a lot more than the $80 or so that Thesis costs. I’ll be changing this blog over to Thesis in the next few days and I wish I’d done it ages ago when I first heard of Thesis.
Twitter
If you don’t have a twitter account, go and sign up now for free at twitter.com. It’s ok, I’ll wait … Now you’re back, we’ll go through why you just did that…

Twitter is a powerful social communication medium. People can follow you and receive your status updates (140 characters per update). It is the best tool available now to easily keep people up to date with what you are doing, your take on the world and resources you think people can use as well as interact with your audience, find new resources and get ideas for new

Full article at Primary 3 Places To Kickstart Your Online Presence