Exact Google plus Profile Pages SEO Optimization Process

Google+ is all about the personal branding, and they insist that you use your real name for your profile. If you want to use a business name, blog name, or keywords, save it for your Google+ Page.

Meta Description: You’re Name – Your Headline + Your Occupation

The Meta description for your Google+ profile is a combination of different pieces of your profile information including:

• Your name followed by your headline.
• Your occupation.
• Your current employer.

Those items are followed by your introduction text, but by this point you're usually well beyond the 160 character mark. Make sure that the first 160 characters count by writing a great headline and occupation title. Also make sure those areas are set to be seen by anyone on the web.

Do follow Links: Everywhere

From what I can tell, the links within the introduction content as well as the ones under other profiles, contributor to, and recommended links are all do follow. So don’t shy away from anchor text as this is a premier Google property. Just make sure the profile still sounds good and doesn't look like a big link farm.

SEO Elements of the Google+ Page

When it comes to the customizable SEO elements of the Google+ pages, they are about the same as the personal profiles. One exception is that there isn't an occupation or current employer field in the pages (or at least not for products or brands). Hence your Meta description will be your page's name, headline, and then the introduction text.

Are You Optimizing Your Website for Mobile and Tablet Devices

Is your site optimized for the mobile and tablet generation? There’s no such thing as being lost in the woods anymore thanks to mobile and tablet technology, which gives consumers the power to directly connect from the palm of their hands. This means your site has to visually evolve as technology shrinks. Here’s how you minimize your site while maximizing your search ability

Smarterphone, Smarterconsumer, Smartersite

Having a mobile version of your site gives you the advantage of reaching the instant consumer. In 2011, we’re no longer sitting at our desks waiting for a page to load; we can be anywhere when pages load. That’s why it’s crucial you make sure your site is available in the mobile world, and optimized properly for optimal searching and customer-site connection. Here’s how you do it:

• A) Google AdWords now lets you search keywords that are specific to mobile devices, helping you narrow down exactly what words you need to use to reach the instant consumer.
• Take the same SEO formula used for classic site optimization and optimize your mobile site – use your mobile keywords to create your meta titles, title tags, and headers.
• Don’t overload your reader. Keep your content short and simple, make sure images are smaller to help give the instant consumer the best mobile experience possible.
• Make sure fonts are nice and clear, and important direction buttons are bigger. Remember this is all being viewed on a small screen.

To help make sure the instant consumer lands on the mobile version of your site when they’re strolling down the street reading their smartphone, you have to do some quick website revamping to turn your site from computer-friendly to mobile-friendly.
Most sites have two URLs: one for mobile and one for computer. The SEO advantage to having a mobile version of your site is that Google now has a designated bot that crawls around looking for mobile versions of classic sites to index.
This means you have two pages of the same site indexed as one. This is a huge advantage for you because it means that if your mobile and classic site is optimized properly, you’re even more searchable.


Mobile To-Do Guide
Here are three key things you need to do right now to make your site mobile-friendly:

1. Optimize for Mobile: Know The Basics

• Make content visually appealing for limited screen viewing by using CSS in your coding. Reduce the image sizes and ensure fonts and content are simple enough to quickly scan and understand.
• Optimize your content and images by including the keywords found in your Google AdWords mobile search, and strategically sprinkle them throughout your pages. Best practice is to avoid using any ads – it’s hard enough to see your content.

Quick tip: If your site is e-commerce based, get an app developed. An app gives you the competitive edge you need to keep your customer from browsing the web and looking at your competition; instead it places them directly in your virtual store via your app.

2. Consider Your Design Options: Google Transcode and Mobile Subdomain

• Google Transcode: Using Google’s configuration tool to transcode your site from classic HTML to mobile HTML won’t give your user a unified experience. When you get Google to the do work you risk having images and content resized in unattractive ways, duplicate content/error pages, and overall bad user experience. How do you avoid this? Make a mobile subdomain.
• Mobile Sub domain: Make a subdomain specifically for your mobile site. You can do this by creating a subdomain txt files. This is a key factor for search direction and indexing. Having one distinct mobile URL keeps your mobile optimization from interfering with your classic optimization (keeping the same experience on the small screen), and allows the GoogleBot Mobile to visit and index the mobile version for mobile searches.

Quick tip: Avoid using Flash, Java, Ajax and Frames. Instead try XHTML (WAP 2.0), cHTML (iMode) or WML (WAP 1.2).

3. Mobile Preview: Don’t Be Fooled

• Run your site through WSC Mobile to ensure it is mobile-friendly and test, test, test it on multiple browsers and devices.

Quick tip: Not everyone has made the switch to a smartphone; there are still a number of users using classic phones. You’ve got to make sure your site looks good no matter what screen it’s on. Rethink your coding and design options, and look into apps.

The Rise of the Tablet

Now that we’ve covered why you need a mobile version of your site, let’s switch our minds over to tablets. Tablets are quickly replacing laptops and televisions – they’re lighter and easier to pack, making them more attractive for people on-the-go.
The top four ways consumers use tablets are:

• Organizing recreational activities
• Online shopping
• Reading news or blogs
• Social networking

Unlike the majority of mobiles, tablets rely mostly on Wi-Fi and 3G for connectivity. Making your site tablet-friendly means you’ve got to make it fast. Optimizing your site for tablet means you’ve got to make it familiar and simple.
Here’s what you need to think about:

• Offering your site in classic and mobile versions gives you the upper hand if the user is using an iPad. Remember iPads don’t use Flash. If you have Flash content on your site, simply redirect the user to the mobile version, and everyone’s happy. Also consider making your site in HTML5.
• If your site is primarily e-commerce based have an application developed that directly connects your products to the instant consumer in one tap. Apps easily store all your information in one place and remove the annoyance of waiting for a page to load. They also make the paying experience more enjoyable. The only disadvantage to an app is: it’s not picked up in organic search results.
• Having a content heavy site is great but it can be time consuming and irritating to scroll down for what seems like forever. Avoid this consumer pet peeve by including “Previous” and “Next” buttons for easy content navigation.

Tablet To-Do

Here’s a top 10 list of what you need to do right now to make your site tablet friendly:

1. Limit duplicate content by changing CSS so it’s optimized for tablet viewing.
2. No Flash, you’re good. Flash, make sure there’s a redirection to your mobile site from the tablet.
3. Don’t overwhelm visitors with scrolling fever - include “Previous” and “Next” buttons to help guide them through your content and web pages.
4. Consider creating an app for e-commerce pages and information storage to help avoid irritation and slow loading time.
5. Optimize check-out process for visitors by using cookies, postal codes, and PayPal.
6. Make it touchable: use HTML5 and CSS3 to create scrolling and horizontal navigation to put all content on one page, not giving the visitor a tab-attack.
7. Adding CSS to increase the size of buttons on your page to make your site more attractive and user-friendly from the tablet perspective. No one really wants to zoom in that close.
8. Offer downloadable content by creating PDF versions of your sites content or important information. This also gives them the option to store your content for future reading.
9. Remember the 5 viewing angles: Vertical and landscape in both mobile and tablet, and the straight desktop view. Take advantage of the viewing options available.
10. Test, Test, Test – test to make sure it’s good to go and makes a returning impression.

Devices might be getting smaller, but search opportunities and consumer-to-site connection is expanding. You now have indexing for mobile sites, instant purchasing and sharing, and individually developed apps that remove users from the browser and place them directly into a niche online store, keeping their attention focused on the most important goal: conversion.
It’s no secret that we’re moving away from our computer desks and looking for answers on the small screen – is your site ready?

Google Guidelines for Image Publication

 If you really want to rank on first page of search engine than it’s so important to follow Google image publication guideline before you publish image on you website. With image search, just as with web search, Google's goal is to provide the best and most relevant search results to our users. Following the best practices listed below (as well as our usual Webmaster Guidelines) will increase the likelihood that your images will be returned in those search results.

Few basic rules that search engine Google like

Avoid embedding important text inside images

Avoid embedding important text in images for elements like page headings and menu items because not all users can access them. To ensure maximum accessibility of your important text based content, keep it in regular HTML

Tell as much as you can about the image

 Give your images detailed, informative filenames

The filename can give Google clues about the subject matter of the image. Try to make your filename a good description of the subject matter of the image. For example, my-new-black-kitten.jpg is a lot more informative thanIMG00023.JPG. Descriptive filenames can also be useful to users: If we're unable to find suitable text in the page on which we found the image, we'll use the filename as the image's snippet in our search results.

The alt attribute is used to describe the contents of an image file. It's important for several reasons:

It provides Google with useful information about the subject matter of the image. We use this information to help determine the best image to return for a user's query.

Many people-for example, users with visual impairments, or people using screen readers or who have low-bandwidth connections—may not be able to see images on web pages. Descriptive alt text provides these users with important information.

Not so good:

Better:

Best:

To be avoided

dog pup pups puppies doggies pups litter puppies dog retriever

 labrador wolfhound setter pointer puppy jack russell terrier

puppies dog food cheap dogfood puppy food"/>

Filling alt attributes with keywords ("keyword stuffing") results in a negative user experience, and may cause your site to be perceived as spam. Instead, focus on creating useful, information-rich content that uses keywords appropriately and in context. We recommend testing your content by using a text-only browser such as Lynx.

Anchor text

External anchor text (the text pages use to link to your site) reflects how other people view your pages. While typically webmasters can't control how other sites link to theirs, you can make sure that anchor text you use within your own site is useful, descriptive, and relevant. This improves the user experience and helps the user understand the link's destination. For example, you might link to a page of vacation photos like this: Photos of our June 2008 trip to Ireland.

Provide good context for your image

The page the image is on, and the content around the image (including any captions or image titles), provide search engines with important information about the subject matter of your image. For example, if you have a picture of a polar bear on a page about home-grown tomatoes, you'll be sending a confused message to the search engines about the subject matter of polarbear.jpg.

Wherever possible, it's a good idea to make sure that images are placed near the relevant text. In addition, we recommend providing good, descriptive titles and captions for your images.

Think about the best ways to protect your images

Because images are often copied by users, Google often finds multiple copies of the same image online. We use many different signals to identify the original source of the image, and you can help by providing us with as much information as you can. In addition, the information you give about an image tells us about its content and subject matter.

Webmasters are often concerned about the unauthorized use of their images. If you prevent users from using your images on their site, or linking to your images, you'll prevent people from using your bandwidth, but you are also limiting the potential audience for your images and reducing their discoverability by search engines.

One solution is to allow other people to use your images, but require attribution and a link back to your own site. There are several ways you can do this. For example, you can:

• Make your images available under a license that requires attribution, such as a Creative Commons license that requires attribution.
• Provide a HTML snippet that other people can use to embed your image on their page while providing attribution. This snippet can include both the link to the image and a link to the source page on your site.

Similarly, some people add copyright text, watermarks, or other information to their images. This kind of information won't impact your image's performance in search results, and does help photographers claim credit for their work and deter unknown usage. However, if a feature such as watermarking reduces the user-perceived quality of your image or your image's thumbnail, users may click it less often in search results.

If you don't want search engines to crawl your images, we recommend using a robots.txt file to block access to your images.

Create a great user experience

Great image content is an excellent way to build traffic to your site. We recommend that when publishing images, you think carefully about creating the best user experience you can.

• Good-quality photos appeal to users more than blurry, unclear images. In addition, other webmasters are much more likely to link to a good-quality image, which can increase visits to your site. Crisp, sharp images will also appear better in the thumbnail versions we display in our search results, and may therefore be more likely to be clicked on by users.
• Even if your image appears on several pages on your site, consider creating a standalone landing page for each image, where you can gather all its related information. If you do this, be sure to provide unique information—such as descriptive titles and captions—on each page. You could also enable comments, discussions, or ratings for each picture.
• Not all users scroll to the bottom of a page, so consider putting your images high up on the page where it can be immediately seen.
• Consider structuring your directories so that similar images are saved together. For example, you might have one directory for thumbnails and another for full-size images; or you could create separate directories for each category of images (for example, you could create separate directories for Hawaii, Ghana, and Ireland under your Travel directory). If your site contains adult images, we recommend storing these in one or more directories separate from the rest of the images on your site.
• Specify a width and height for all images. A web browser can begin to render a page even before images are downloaded, provided that it knows the dimensions to wrap non-replaceable elements around. Specifying these dimensions can speed up page loading and improve the user experience. For more information about optimizing your images, see Optimizing Web Graphics on the site Let's Make the Web Faster.

With image search, just as with web search, our goal is to provide the best and most relevant search results to our users. Following the best practices listed above will increase the likelihood that your images will be returned in those search results.

Make Your Email Newsletter a Must-Read for Your Customers

At first the decision to publish a newsletter looks easy: "My competitors have newsletters; therefore, I need one." Theirs come out monthly, so yours needs to be monthly. Theirs is HTML-based, so yours needs to look the same.

Many first-time newsletter publishers make this mistake. But launching a newsletter because your competition has one is not the right reason to publish one.
It takes time, money and energy to produce a newsletter that people look forward to reading, enjoy and are willing to pass on to their friends and colleagues. Before you make this commitment, you should have a mission for the newsletter and a plan for creating it on a regular basis.

The Mission

A newsletter can be promotional or marketing oriented, informative or relationship building. Regardless of the mission you choose, you should let the reader know your intentions about the direction of the publication and stick to that plan. Consistency is important. If you promise news and information, don't bore the reader with sales promotions. If, on the other hand, the plan is to send out a relationship-building newsletter 11 months of the year and then publish a promotional one come spring, let readers know it’s coming.

The Content

Readers are looking for timely, practical, useful information. If a company increased profits by 320 percent over the same time last year, that’s news! News can also be promotional. Do you have a new service or product coming to market, or a seasonal item? Then it makes sense to publish the newsletter at that appropriate time.
You can also use the newsletter to build relationships with clients. For example, if calls are coming in about specific problems with a product, then discuss the problem and solution in the upcoming newsletter. This is a win-win situation. Customers are grateful that someone is looking after their best interests and the number of support calls will certainly drop.
Your newsletter can be informative. You can discuss how a new technology may affect your customers’ or prospects’ business. Give them honest information about how this improvement helps them deliver better service or generate more revenue.
Another way to pique readers' interest is to write two- and three-part stories. It's a good way to keep people coming back for more, and sometimes information just cannot be crammed into one issue. Don’t be restrictive. Give the information the space it deserves.

Making Email Newsletters More Social

The Frequency

Now that you've determined you have enough news and information to share, decide how often you to publish. Newsletters need to come out on some schedule so people can anticipate receiving them. If you publish too often, the reader’s interest will wane or they will start considering you spam, even if they willingly signed up for the newsletter. Newsletters can also drain resources. Writing articles can take enormous energy, and sometimes newsletter editors find themselves trapped in a format they must "feed." Keep it simple and newsworthy.
A good approach is to start out slowly. Make sure there is time allocated to produce the newsletter and it’s a good read. Perhaps start out quarterly and then move to bimonthly. People rarely complain about receiving useful news too often.

The Metrics

One of the best advantages email newsletters have over their printed compatriots is metrics. When you mail a paper newsletter, it's impossible to find out if it went straight into the recycle bin or if the recipient loved it so much they photocopied it and passed it on to numerous friends. Email newsletter services, however, offer many useful metrics. You can find out how many people received the email, how many "bounced" because of a bad email address, how many people opened the newsletter, how many forwarded it to friends, and more. These services also handle your unsubscribe requests, ensuring you are following the law when people request to opt out of your newsletter.

Do You Know What Clicks With Your Email Newsletter Readers?

And because of the importance of these metrics and the unsubscribe process, finding a good email service provider -- Constant Contact and iContact are two popular choices -- is a crucial step in the creation of your email newsletter.

Serving the Reader

Finally, know your reader base. Don’t take them for granted. Find out what they are interested in knowing or learning. Invite readers to respond. Ask for their opinion. Let the reader get to know the editor of the newsletter. A person should let their personality show through the writing. It is much easier to build a relationship if each party shares information about themselves.
Respect their time: If a newsletter cannot be read within five minutes, it’s destined for the trash folder. It hurts, but it’s the truth. Busy people segment their time with five minutes for this and 10 minutes for that. A good newsletter fits into that window.

Important SEO Tool for website optimization

1. Compete Site Analytics- Compete gives you accurate data of monthly unique visitors to a website. This is extremely useful for competitive analysis of competitors, and also sizing up a prospective clients site for an SEO proposal. We have found it to be very accurate when we compare with Google analytics, or AWstats.


2. Google analytics- Every serious SEO or webmaster needs to be running Google free analytics software on their sites. The point of SEO is not rankings, or page rank its visitors! Stop guessing and start making statistically informed SEO decisions so that your effort can go into the things that are paying off.

3. SEOQuake Toolbar- This Firefox plugin is one of my favorite SEO tools at a glance I can see a site Page Rank, backlinks, Alexa ranking, domain age, and keyword density. The best part is it’s free.

4. Multiple Datacenter Search- Honestly Google does so much in the way of personalized search, geolocation, etc. that it can be hard to get the straight dope on where your ranking. The multiple datacenter search will show you search results for multiple google data centers so you can get a better feel for your rankings.

5. Wordtracker Firefox Plugin- If your like me you love Firefox for all the great extensions! One such extension is the Wordtracker Firefox Plugin you can see search volumes for search phrases on the fly without leaving your current page. Not as accurate as Google but great for naming Blog posts and making quick keyword decisions.

6. Google Keywords- The best overall free keyword research tool in my opinion. You can quickly be given hundreds of keyword suggesstions by entering keyword phrases, or by entering yours or competitors web address. This tool will show you monthly search volumes for each key word or phrase, and all suggested keywords can be exported to csv.

7. 301 Redirect Checker- 301 are useful for two reasons first so that search engines don’t see http://yoursite.com and www.yoursite.com as two sites. Also if a page moves the page rank can be reassigned to the new page through a 301 redirect. Make sure 301 redirects are set up correctly with this tool.

8. Yahoo Siteexplorer- Google notoriously under reports backlinks, and only gives you a sampling. With site explorer you can see what backlinks you have, and even better you can see competitors backlinks, and use those sites in your link building efforts. The best part is that it will export to a tab separated values file that can used in Excel.

9. XML Sitemap Generator- XML sitemaps are important to get your pages quickly indexed in a few minutes this tool will index your site up to 500 pages, and generate an xml sitemap. Be sure and sign up with Google Webmaster, Yahoo Site Explorer, and Bing Webmaster Center to tell these services the location of your sitemap.

10. Google Position Checker- With this tool you can see what position you rank in Google for a particular keyword up to the first 1,000 results.

Bonus! Backlink Builder- This tool searches your submitted keywords for sites that accept links directories etc.