Google made some major changes today to its home page. As business professionals, its time to look at these changes and adjust our strategies accordingly. Here’s a great video that explains the new features.
As an SEO consultant, I am looking at these changes closely and making adjustments. Here are some adjustments that I think that you should put into action immediately:
The huge buzzword going forward with anyone’s web presence is diversity. It’s no longer acceptable to just have a website. You need to have the Twitter presence, the Facebook presence, blogs, press releases and images.
Go ahead and Google something and let’s go through this one by one:
The first new thing you will see is the images section. Images is a no brainer. Use the proper tags and file names for the images on your site and those will show up quickly in Google Images.
After images is the videos section. It’s quite easy to get ranked in videos too. Just get some good videos out there related to your business. Don’t do commercials. It’s a lot better to make the video on a how to topic related to your field. Here’s a short video that I did about web videos for SEO.
Next, there’s maps. Pretty simple. Get your business into Google Maps if you haven’t already.
Under that is news. Put out a press release every now and then and you will appear in news.
Then, we have shopping. If you have a physical product that you can ship, definitely get it added to Google’s shopping area. Here’s a link on how to do that.
After shopping is a very underutilized section, Google Books. Get some articles written and convert them to pdf and upload those to Google Books. As far as I can tell there’s not a minimum page length requirement for the book. As a side benefit, Google will also pay you Adsense royalties for ads appearing next to your book. I just added a couple items to Google Books and it’s a very simple process.
After books is the blogs area. Pretty simple there. Get a blog and keep it updated and you will be all set.
After blogs is updates. Keep your Twitter, Linkedin and Facebook accounts up to date. Link it to your blog with one of the many tools available like Twitterfeed.
Finally, there’s discussions. Go into a forum every now and then and submit some content. It will be extremely valuable here. Yahoo Answers is another goldmine for help in getting your discussions ranked.
Follow these tips and you will get found. As always if you need help in any of these areas, we are just a phone call or email away.
Carlos was able to affordably transform my web site from "just being there" to getting me to the top of important search engines in just a couple of weeks. My leads have improved dramatically!!
