One more reason to keep on tweeting. Bing just added tweets on its news search results pages. Now when you conduct searches on Bing News, you will see realtime Twitter updates related to your search query.
Below is a recent search for the term “exercise program”:
Notice the tweets on the bottom right under Public updates for exercise program. They are a continuous stream. You can pause and restart them. You can also click through to the direct Twitter page and any links inside the tweet. If you click on More updates under the stream, you will be directed to additional search results on Bing’s Social Search, which you can filter for just Twitter, Facebook or All.
Over the last few months, Google has been making it easier for users to find local businesses on their mobile devices. Last month it released the Google Places iPhone App. This month, it has launched an “open now” search filter –available on Droid and iPhone in the US – so your results only show currently opened businesses. These hours are based on a business’ Google Places Listing – just one more reason to make sure your listing is complete and accurate.
Droid and iPhone mobile users can also filter their Google Places search by star ratings and distance as well as enjoy some additional enhanced features – images, reviews from around the web, and larger buttons to click to view a map or directly call a business.
With continuous Google Places Mobile App improvements we can’t stress enough the importance of robust Google Places Listings.
Last week Google held its ThinkMobile event. The statistical insights it provided highlighted how big and powerful mobile search is and how much bigger it will become. As mentioned above, Google reported a 400% increase in the number of mobile searches in the last year. In fact, they say currently about 20% of its searches are mobile searches.
As Google showed, the stats are even more powerful for local businesses.
Slide from Google ThinkMobile Event
And the demand for smart phones is ever increasing. In took only 17 hours for Verizon iPhone pre-orders to sell out. Analysts estimate that Apple will sell 9 million to 12 million iPhones on Verizon’s network alone this year. Add to that, Nielson’s estimate that by the end of 2011, 1 in 2 Americans will have a smart phone
Why do I need a mobile website is no longer really the question. The real question today is “How quickly can I create one?”
Clients with home businesses often ask if they can use a PO Box as their address in the Google Places listing. The short answer – not a good idea.
Google has seemed to waffle back and forth in this area. When Google Maps was first created, businesses without a brick and mortar address could not create a business listing because the Google Map was unable to display a listing without a pinpoint address. Then Google Maps started incorporating business listings from data partners and began showing a floating dot, rather than a pinpoint, to represent those businesses with no “actual” address – but that information had to come from data partners rather than a listing.
When confronted with how businesses with no brick and mortar address could get on Google Maps back in 2008, the Google Earth VP suggested that those businesses get a PO Box. Hence, people started doing so. Acknowledging that not all businesses have brick and mortar addresses, in April 2010, Google rolled out the ability to add service areas to your listing AND hide your address.
“Google Places is meant to facilitate customer interaction with brick-and-mortar businesses and service providers. Therefore, the business owner or employee who is officially authorized to represent their particular business location must have a physical address in order to comply with our guidelines.”
Some of those listings have been removed and some have not. But there are plenty of Google Places Help questions out there regarding people being penalized for using a P.O. Box as an address.
What are your options? Some places let you get a P.O. Box that is not listed as a P.O. Box address, but rather as a suite number. Use your home address but don’t display it. Try to partner with another business to use their address – but remember that there cannot be two businesses at the same address so you would need to have a suite number.
Can I use a PO Box as my google places address?
If you want your Google Places listing to be shown, DON’T use a P.O. Box!
Yesterday, Google announced that a Google Places App is now available for the iPhone. This App lets you quickly search for places nearby, just like local search on google.com – but while you’re on the move. Google gives you some popular search categories to choose from and allows you to customize the list by adding your own favorite searches.
The Google Places for iPhone App also helps you make an informed decision by integrating Google Hotpot, which is a recommendation engine that displays reviews and ratings of local businesses/establishments.
Google is making local search easier while people are mobile – looking for a nearby restaurant to stop and eat, the closest gas station, a good cup of coffee. Want them to find you in their search? Make sure you have a complete and optimized Google Places listing for your business. The iPhone already has a huge market with ATT. Imagine how much larger that market will get when Verizon starts selling the iPhone next month!
If you have a website, you should be using an XML Sitemap to help improve your Internet visibility. What is an XML Sitemap? It is a simple, effective way for you to give the search engines a list of all the URLs you want them to crawl and index. If the search engines don’t find your site or specific pages on it, your prospects won’t either!
Brief highlights of the importance of an XML Sitemap
1. Although adding a URL to the Sitemap file does not guarantee that a URL will be crawled or indexed, it can result in pages that the search engines had not yet discovered or indexed get crawled or indexed.
2. XML Sitemaps can help pages that are on the search engines’ supplemental index make it to the main index.
3. You can use these Sitemaps to let the search engines know how often a page is changed to improve crawl rate.
4. You can alert the search engines to any changes/additions to your site
5. The additional URLs you provide help increase crawl coverage and crawl speed.
6. The verification and registration of an XML Sitemap can give the search engines the credibility that they desire.
7. In all, XML Sitemaps can help improve visibility and rankings.
8. Best of all – they are FREE
There are a few things to keep in mind. It is important to use the correct canonical version of your URL (i.e. www vs. non-www.) and that you load the XML Sitemap in the highest-level directory you want the search engines to crawl. Don’t include multiple URLs that point to identical content, simply pagination pages and low value pages. And make sure that none of the URLs you include contain tracking parameters.
Start 2011 off right. Check with your web developer to see if they created an XML Sitemap for you. If not, ask them to do so right away!
Similar to Google tags, the brand new Yext Advertising allows you to highlight your business listings with a – yellow tag. But unlike Google Tags – which are simply seen on Google – when you advertise with Yext, your highlighted listing can appear on multiple search engines including Yahoo, Yelp, MapQuest, Superpages, Citysearch, Yellowbook, WhitePages and many more.
You can create custom messages such as coupons, specials, new products or services, and more. And you control/update your tag on all of Yext’s partner search engines from one dashboard – quite a time saver.
The power of Yext advertising
According to Yext’s website, “recent studies performed on Google search results showed that businesses highlighted with a Google Tag received more than twice the attraction from prospective customers. Through special partnerships, Yext now offers you a new way to advertise your business listings on leading local search sites.”
The cost is $99.95 per month. Although this is four times the cost of Google Tags, your listing is showing on more places. You can try it out free for 7 days.
While we don’t think Yext Tags are going to replace Google Local Search, they are another affordable way to expand your web presence.
If you want to keep your social media connections at your fingertips, then RockMelt is the perfect browser for you. It makes the Internet a personal experience. As soon as you log on, your Facebook friends, bookmarks, feeds, and more are right in front of you.
RockMelt is built for sharing. Your Facebook friends are in a bar on the left of the page. You can browse with them, share with them, all in one interface. Your news feeds and web streams are on the right. This right bar is like a live bookmark because you will receive notifications when your favorite feeds or streams are updated. Search is in the middle. The big share button on top of the page makes it easy to share everything.
But do you want to share everything? RockMelt is built on a cloud so you can access it from anywhere, but that also means all of your information is hanging overhead. The browser pulls all of your information together and tracks it. Google keeps track of your history as well, but they don’t use your Facebook ID to log into the browser. Will Facebook start using this information?
It is also fast, as it is built on Chromium, the same open source browser that Google’s Chrome is built on. It is currently in beta. Check it out.
First Bing threw its hat in the ring. Now Blekko is joining. Are these “B” players or can they really compete with Google? As we know, Bing – a direct competitor of Google – is gaining users since its initial launch, but is still quite far behind the search engine giant. Blekko, on the other hand is different. It is not trying to take over the number one search engine spot.
Then What is Blekko?
Blekko is a search engine that allows you to search for results based on a particular viewpoint or category. For example, if you were looking for information on the recent mid-term elections from a conservative viewpoint you can quickly narrow down your search. How? With “slashtags”. You would simply type in your search query like this:
2010 midterm election results /conservative
Want to know the latest buzz on a particular celebrity? Type in their name /gossip and hit enter.
Just put in your search terms followed by the slash and the viewpoint or category you want and Blekko narrows down the results for you. Blekko currently maintains over 250 slashtags, including blogs, news, gossip, green, even chocolate. These slashtags are really a collection of relevant topic websites. You can even create your own slashtag and make it public or private. Blekko’s goal is to identify the best 50 websites on the Internet for the top 100,000 search categories.
How Does Blekko determine what websites to show and in what order?
Unlike Google or Bing, Blekko is pretty transparent with how it determines its rankings. It tells you the final algorithm score for a website and why the site ranks as it does. You can really dig down deep into its decision process. This is such a comprehensive topic that it needs to be addressed it a separate post! Stay tuned.
Suffice it to say that for deep, driven or truly targeted research, Blekko really has something to offer.
Will Place Search on Google Affect Your SEO Efforts?
Yesterday Google introduced a new type of local search result. Place Search organizes information around local places to help searchers more easily make comparisons. Previously when you did a local search, you would see the local results from Google Places at the top of the page next to a pushpin map. Now the map is in the right column above the AdWords ads and the results are included in or above the regular organic search results, marked with red pins – which helps your listing jump out from the rest.
Place Search results will appear automatically when Google predicts a searcher is looking for local information, i.e., “chinese restaurants new york city”. Google has also made it easy to start a local search – just click on the “Places” icon in the left panel of the search results page. If a local web search doesn’t yield you the results you want, click on places and you just might find what you were looking for.
One very important thing to note, Google does not seem to be consistent with how it is displaying these new results. We did our own test. Some searches yielded one “result” per business, which incorporated a regular result with a Google Places result with links to both the website and the Places listing. This combined result is included in the 10 results per page. The problem with this is you are not being displayed twice, as you may have been in the past. Other searches yielded the old format with a 1 or 2 or 7 pack listing separated from the regular results so that you could appear twice on a page. Not sure how Google is determining what to show and how.
In any event, if you haven’t created a Google Places listing you need to now more than ever! Write On Point is here to help if you need us.
