Jeremy Blanton

How Is Google+ Affecting Your Site’s Search Engine Optimization

Google+ the social network of search engine giant Google is quickly becoming a force to be reckoned with. Over the past few weeks I’ve been studying more and more on the benefits of Google+ for my clients as well as ways to use the most benefits from the platform. One thing I knew was important was to set up your Google Authorship, but I didn’t realize all the SEO benefits until reading a post by Bill Gassett and why REALTORS® need Google+.

In that post it mentions that using Google+ can sometimes help your site to get indexed faster than traditional ways simply by setting up your Google Authorship. So, I decided to put it to the test on a brand new Custom WordPress Site I am building for a real estate agent. The domain is brand new, was only purchased on February 13th, 2013, so it is less than a month old. I connected the domain to hosting and installed WordPress around February 20th. So, as of the time of writing this post, the site has been live two weeks to the day.

As we all know, one of the things that Google loves is content and the number of pages of content a site has can be a huge factor into how your site ranks. This is why I always urge my real estate clients to consider implementing a good IDX (home search function) that can be fully integrated into their site instead of just inserting one from another site via <iframe> as it can generate thousands of pages of unique content simply based off the homes currently for sale in a market.

Eight days ago the subdomain was created for the home search function of this site. Then, on Tuesday of this week (yesterday) I connected Google Authorship to this site to test Bill’s theory. I checked beforehand to see how many pages Google had already indexed of this site. The number of pages seen at this time was 26, zero from the subdomain. I then had a few phone calls to make and my weekly social media radio show.

Approximately 4 hours after connecting Google Authorship to both the main domain and also the subdomain, the number of pages indexed on the site went from 26 to 752 pages! I’ve connected this same IDX platform to many sites in the past, but never have I seen it index this quickly. The normal time it takes to get those pages to index is around 4-6 weeks. Not 4 hours!

Time To Stop Ignoring Google+

If you have been like me and completely ignoring Google+ the past few months as you feel it is just another social network to waste time on and distract you from business, it might be time to take another look into the benefits it can bring to the search engine optimization side alone of your site. In addition to the obvious SEO benefits mentioned above, you also can benefit greatly from the social search side of connecting to others on Google+.

The more I have thought about Google+ the more it makes sense to me how it is only going to continue to grow in power. Think about it, every single person who uses Gmail as their email provider, every single Google apps account, and every single YouTube account are already integrated into Google+. Millions and millions of new users are being somewhat forced into the social network each and every month.

In addition, Google is continually integrating Google+ more into each of these platforms to make users pay attention to their social network. Unlike previous attempts at social networks like Buzz and Wave, it seems that Google+ is surviving. As for me, my goal is to start spending more time over on Google+, continue exploring all the benefits it possesses and take advantage of all of those. If we haven’t connected yet on Google+, let’s make sure to fix that now!

What Should I Do Now?

The first thing I would suggest is log in and look at your profile. Is it completed? Do you have your profile picture in? Is the photo of you? If it is your dog, a logo, or something else, change it now. Google authorship does not want those types of images. They want a photo that clearly shows your face. If you have blank spots on your profile, fill it out neatly and completely.

The second thing you need to do is make sure you have your Google Authorship connected properly. Connecting is easy if your Google+ profile email is on the same domain as your site, if not, here’s the steps to set up Google Authorship. If you need help getting this connected, I can help, just contact me.

Once your profile and authorship is all set up, then get on Google+ and start connecting with others. Start circling people you know and forming those connections. The more people that connect with you, the greater your social reach will be. But, don’t just circle everyone, make sure you start engaging with them just like you do on other social networks. Which leads me to the final step, start using it regularly and engaging in conversations.

If you begin doing this, you can see a great increase in your site traffic and overall search engine rankings.

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Some Effective Facebook Ads Just Need Good Timing

Facebook For Business

I get asked fairly regularly during my coaching calls with clients how to run Facebook Ads that are effective and will bring a return to their business without breaking their bank account. Some of the ways you accomplish this can take some really intricate work.

A good amount of strategy can also be involved in targeting a group of people in which the target market is not too large, but also not so small that you don’t get many leads. I’ve spent hours and sometimes even days in the past just setting up my ad, target market, and budget just to run a Facebook ad for a few hours.

While I’ve spent that amount of time before, I also learned long ago that not all ads need to have that much thought put into them to be effective. Sometimes, you just need a good idea, and then wait for good timing. I ran an ad a while back that I literally spent about two minutes creating and it was one of the best ads I’ve ever put together.

The ad was designed for me to turn it live whenever there would be an outtage by one of my big competitors blog services. I would simply monitor the social networks for someone to say “Ugh! ****** is down again!” and I would then start my Facebook ad running. I’d let it run a few hours while the competitor had problems and when I saw those complaints slow down, I’d simply turn off my ad.

During that brief few hour span, I would watch my ad get clicked on a few hundred times driving several leads my way just because the users of the other platform were in complete frustration of a product they were paying good money for that wouldn’t perform like it should leaving both them and clients stranded.

Here’s a few simple things to consider when making a good Facebook ad:

What Problem Does Your Facebook Ad Solve?

The first step to getting an effective Facebook ad would be to create a title & text for your ad that is going to either fix a current issue people are facing, or offer a product that will help make something easier for your target audience to accomplish. As you can see from the text I used in my former ad, the problem I was wanting to address was blogs that were down. I then offered a solution using the term WordPress that would be known by most of the people who would see the ad on Facebook.

Is Your Image A Good Representation?

Now, here’s where I see a lot of A/B testing taking place that can really help to tweak an ad to be more effective. In my case, I just went looking for an image of someone that looked angry and that would catch the attention of people on Facebook. A quick search over at MorgueFile found the angry looking man and I had my picture. I probably could have found other images and done some A/B testing to see if others would bring better results, but I was really happy with what I was already receiving so I didn’t test any more.

Advanced Target Marketing

This is the area where most people miss it. I could have run this ad and targeted the 163 million people on Facebook in the USA. But I didn’t need that. My target audience in this example was chosen in under thirty seconds. I simply targeted a precise interest: The fans of their Facebook page. I figured the most likely people to not only be using the product but also on Facebook would be those who are fans of their Facebook page.

In that box, you can type in not only things people may be interested in like Dancing, Golfing, or Music, but you can also type in specific things like a Facebook page. I added the name of their Facebook page and I had a great segment to target of around 15,000 people. This type of targeting will bring you great results.

Once you have all of this you are almost ready to run your ad. Just a few more things to consider before you go live.

Squeeze Them Hard

Before you go and waste tons of money on an ad that just drives people to the home page of your site or your Facebook page, make sure you drive traffic to a landing page that will result in some sort of action taking place by the person clicking. For example, one I ran with this ad would give people to check out my WordPress Starter Package. I could write a whole post on squeeze pages for your Facebook Ads, but my friend Mike already wrote one that sums up Facebook squeeze pages pretty well.

It’s All In Timing

So in closing, sometimes the most effective Facebook ads are not the ones you have tested and researched for days and weeks. Sometimes it might just be having a good idea that you run at the right times focused on the right audience.

What Is Your Online Shelf Life?

Social Media Advisors

Social media is beginning to play more of a role in the online marketing of your business if done correctly. Unfortunately though, too many times we get distracted by social media tools that end up becoming our main focus for our business online. Which is why one of the topics I love to speak on the most is the importance of your website, or online home base.

What’s Does The Expiration Label Say?

A study done by URL shortening service bit.ly shared that on average, the shelf life for most links shared on either Twitter or Facebook is around 3 hours. That means that most content you would share on social networks will only survive around 3 hours before it loses it’s power.

So, before you begin building a strategy of using a Facebook page as the hub for your business, consider the fact that if you aren’t constantly updating this page every few hours, you are not getting your message, your product or service out in front of consumers. Sure, you could set up a bunch of scheduled post updates and monitor things all day long, but is that the most effective way to run your business? Personally I’m not a fan of things with such a short expiration date.

Push Versus Pull

While Social Networks have the ability to grow a huge community of followers, the only source of traffic is that social network. So, if you have 2,000 followers on Twitter, your audience is just those 2,000 people unless you get lucky enough for someone to re-tweet you. Facebook, is pretty much the same way, your content getting shared beyond your sphere is dependent on a viewer sharing it for you. So, you must keep pushing the content in hopes your sphere will also push it beyond your page to others.

While some think this may be the absolute best way to run your online presence, I prefer going with a pull process instead of pushing. What I mean, is that I prefer focusing my time and effort on creating content on my actual website that I own. That way, I can drive my Twitter followers, my Facebook Fans, LinkedIn connections, G+ Circles and other social connections to my site. But, in addition to pushing that traffic to a site, I also can pull in traffic, a new sphere of potential clients and more all through the search engines.

Take a look at this chart showing traffic sources driving visitors to my site:

As you can see in comparison to all other sources of site traffic, Google alone is sending over 68% of the traffic to my site. This traffic are visitors who are typing phrases into the search engine looking for answers and finding my site in the results. You can see Facebook, Twitter and YouTube do a good job of driving traffic to my site, but they are not anywhere near the amount of traffic that comes from search engines. This traffic is being pulled in by me writing content they find instead of me pushing something down their social streams.

To make sure it wasn’t just my site that had these types of proportions of traffic, I then decided to look at the data for a few of my clients that I work with closely as their social media advisor to see what their traffic source breakdown looked like.

Take a look at the charts below that represents sources of traffic to two of my clients sites:

As you can see, both of these clients had almost the same identical percentage breakdown of traffic sources into their site. While social networks push a good amount of traffic to their site, they cannot compete with the amount that is pulled in from Google and other search engines.

Creating A Lifetime Warranty

When you focus your online marketing efforts on creating good content on your own site and not hours on Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking strategies you can create content that can last a lifetime. When you begin to blog or create pages of content, you need to make sure you are answering the questions that your readers want answered. For example, a post I wrote in June 2011 on Tracking Your Images Through Google has consistently remained one of the top viewed posts on my site.

In fact, this past month it received more traffic than even the home page of my site. Other posts that I wrote on another site back when selling real estate over four years ago still to this day generate leads and make my phone ring. This work is the kinds of work that you only need to do once and you can reap the rewards from it for years to come. The beautiful part is that if I begin to notice a slip in my rankins, I simply write another post on that subject, link back to the well ranking post and it will start to climb back up.

I don’t spend buckets of money each month on Google Sponsored Ad Placements, or on other Pay-Per-Click campaigns. I simply find terms applicable to my business and then generate content that helps my site to rank on page one of Google for those terms. While it may take my site a little longer to garner the results I want, the big difference between ranking organically and with PPC is that the minute I stop paying for an ad campaign (PPC), I also lose any source of traffic and leads as my site will disappear off of the first page of SERPS. If you start paying again, you come back up and the minute you stop, you drop again. Personally, I’m not a fan of my site acting like a yo-yo.

If you rank organically for a term and don’t do it through shortcuts, you shouldn’t ever see a sudden dip in how your site ranks on certain keywords. You may from time to time see things drop maybe one or two places. This is more than likely caused by your site sitting dormant or a change in Google’s algorithm that determines how things should be ranked.

When this happens, if you simply go back, write some new content, link to the page that was ranking well and possibly give that well ranking page a slight content refresh, you should be able to climb right back up the search engine ladder. In essence what I have done is created content that can generate leads for a lifetime versus a social network in which you must continuously feed new material to reach that audience.

What Is Your Online Shelf Life?

In closing I want to leave you with this question: What is the shelf life of your online presence? Is it something you are building to last forever, or is it something that spoils faster than a loaf of bread?

Feel free to contact me if your website has been lacking and we can discuss strategies to turn it into a long time source of revenue to your business.

How To Get Custom WordPress Menu Links To Open In New Window

WordPress Tutorials

There are times when you may want to add a link into your WordPress menu that is not a page in your site. Since I build a bunch of Custom WordPress Sites for those in the real estate industry, they sometimes want to link to a home search function that they already own on a different domain. But, when someone clicks on the link, they end up leaving their site and going some other place.

However, if the custom menu link opens in a new window/tab, then your site is still there on another tab. On the normal links you place in a page or post, you would simply add a short piece of HTML of target=_blank into your link. The only problem is that inside WordPress menus, you cannot add any HTML. So how do you accomplish this? I’m glad you asked.

Here’s a quick tutorial to walk you through it quickly & easily.

I hope this helps. Make sure to check some of my other WordPress tutorials to help you customize your WordPress site even more. And as always, if you need help creating or designing your own Custom WordPress site, do not hesitate to contact me.