Google Caffeine Officially Annouced

admin    google     alpharetta seo, facebook, google caffeine, Social Media, twitter

Google has officially announced the launch of caffeine their new search index. There has been a buzz around for a while that caffeine was being launched and Google told us a while back that they were testing out caffeine in various markets. It looks like it now official as you can see on their blog with the official launch of Google caffeine.

So what does the launch of the new index mean to you and me. As you can tell Google is pushing hard to pull as much content as they can and they are going to index it faster. If you have a static web site than you may be in trouble but if you have a blog on your site or are continually adding new web pages to your website you will be just fine. This also means you will see  a lot of the social media sites such as facebook, twitter, and youtube showing up in your search results more now than ever.

Remember the saying that content is king? Well this has been true in the past and will continue to be very important. If you do not have a content strategy now is the time to create one. My first recommendation would be to add a blog to your website and decide to populate it with new content. Make a blog part of you site so that it sits in a sub-directory so it would like this www.mysite.com/blog. Do not put it in a sub-domain or put your blog on an external site such as wordpress or blogger. I recommend wordpress because it has tons of free plug-ins and it is really seo friendly.

Consistently add new articles to your blog or website and if you have a company with several employees make them part of the content team and let them contribute articles to your site. If you are adding new content to your site every month or so you are missing the point and you need to schedule time in your week to add as much content to the site as you can.

Go ahead and add a facebook business page and a twitter account if have not already done it and when you post new content to your website
link back to the content. Since Google and the other search engines are constantly crawling facebook and twitter this will insure that the new content has been picked up by Google. If Google knows that your new content exist than the better your chances are that it will rank.

The caffeine update can be a good thing and help you with traffic to your website if understand what Google wants and serve it to them. Websites that are consistently add new and relevant content to their site will get all the Google love that they can stand.

Need help with your search engine marketing strategy drop us a line and schedule a consultation.

Social Media Marketing For Your Business

admin    Social Media     facebook, maketing for business, Social Media, twitter, youtube

If you go back 3 to 4 years ago using social media for business purposes was almost unheard of as a marketing avenue. Fast forward to today and most progressive  businesses realize that social media is here to stay and can be a great way to drive traffic to their website and can be great for branding. As part of their marketing they are using sites such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and the list goes on and on. In fact social media is so popular that Facebook has passed Google as the most visited site on the internet.

If you are still skeptical about about the value of social media here are some stats for you to consider.

• The percentage of Facebook users who login on a daily basis is 50% and they spend a minimum of 55 minutes per day on the site.

• Twitter has 18 million users with an average of 600 tweets per second.

• YouTube had over 91 million unique visitors in the month of March 2010.

To give you some more stats that back up the fact the social media is now a major player in marketing your company. In January 2010 Facebook passed Yahoo and was only second to Google in regards to visitors. Based on visitors to Facebook in a week compared to last year the number increased by a whooping 185%. As I mentioned earlier Facebook now has passed Google for total visitors.

When you take a look at the numbers and utilize the selling power of social media when it comes to business marketing it has become a must in todays market. Using social media effectively is more than setting up accounts and hoping that people find your company, you need to jump and engage in the conversations. As with any type of selling and business in general people tend to buy from people they like and trust. Using social media can set your company apart from other businesses by building your brand becoming an expert in your field.

If you decide to add social media to your marketing efforts try not to only promote your business in every post or tweet. Get your followers or friends to communicate with you by adding interactive polls, games, or quizzes to your pages to get people to spend more time on your site. Repost interesting information from other users that are interesting  and relevant.

Social media is here to stay and using it to market yourself or your business is a cost effective way to find new prospects and customers. If you have not dipped your toes in the social media world now is a perfect time to give it a shot.