When I last talked about Google Plus, I remarked on filling out one’s profile and developing relationships with others. It has a nice platform for conversing, similar to that of Facebook, but the conversations tend to be more business-like in nature. I also find photos look pleasing on Google+ – many photographers have taken to the platform, especially since, unlike Facebook, the terms of service do not want to claim your photos.

Since that time, Google+ has updated its logo to the bright red with the small g+. The platform also added pages for business. Last week brought a new change:
Google Search Plus.

Game Changer – Google Search Plus

Praveen has a review and some great images of how Google Search Plus looks on his site. You can go to Google now and see it in action for your own searches.

I’ve seen some complain about the new Google search – some are threatening to switch to Bing. My feeling, however, is just know that you can turn it on and off. I put the on and off buttons on the right side of this paragraph to show how the on and off buttons appear on my browser.

Get the Google+ Code for Your Own Site

First of all, if you don’t yet have the +1 button on your posts, here’s the code for the +1 button. There are also WordPress plugins for the +1 button. You want to give your readers the opportunity to vote on your posts.

Finally, learn about Google Authorship. Google has a method for verifying whether you actually wrote a post. This is matched up with your Google profile. You can learn a way to set up the code on Steve Hippel’s post. If you want a more detailed method for setting up the code on your author.php, you can check out Yoast’s post on Google Authorship. I used Yoast’s version, because it allowed me to have separate Google profile links on guest post pages. One small detail with Google+ profile links on guest post pages: in order for these to be verified by Google, the guest blogger would need to have a link back to your blog on their Google+ About page. Not likely if they have only written one guest post. There is now a WordPress plugin for Google Authorship. Whatever method you use, you should check that it is working using Google Webmaster Rich Snippets.

Have you taken out the time to set up Google Authorship on your site? With the new search changes, it might bring you even more clicks to your blog posts.

How to Set Up a Twitter Profile was one of the popular posts on Websites for Small Biz this fall. It is important for those running a small business, a non-profit organization or a blog to spend time carefully setting up a Twitter account in order to get valuable interactions on Twitter.

Ease of a Facebook Business Page introduces the mechanics of setting up a page (as opposed to a profile) on Facebook. Ideas on how to engage one’s readers and keep interest is part of this post.

Responsive Web Design is a new trend in web building that is here to stay, because mobile usage is increasing (people are reading or trying to read your blog posts on their mobile phones) and platforms like iPads are becoming more relevant. Is your website ready for mobile?

Error 404 pages can add fun and increase the message of your brand on your website. Learn how various websites use Error 404 pages.

Display Information Without Being Overly Geeky is a post about slideshows, photo galleries, infographics, friendly photos, interviews and videos. How many different ways can you display information, and are you keeping the readers interested?

10 Ideas for SEO of Your Small Biz Website presents keywords, title tags, alt tags, site maps, commenting and more as ways to search engine optimize your small business website.

Strictly speaking, New Jersey on Twitter by Profession is a page, but it is one of the most popular on Websites for Small Biz. If you are doing business in New Jersey, this might be a valuable way to figure out who to follow in New Jersey and make valuable contacts.

2011 was a good year for building websites and for building the blog Websites for Small Biz. I’ve enjoyed all the guest posts and interviews. May the new year of 2012 bring lots of new, innovative ideas on how to expand small businesses with marketing, well-built websites, networking, and lots of good blog post sharing!

Possible guest topics for Websites for Small Biz: design, photography, networking, marketing, CSS, SEO, blogging, Twitter, writing, WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, business, Facebook

I have been fortunate to have a few guest bloggers on this blog. Here is a list of the wonderful souls writers who contributed guests posts to this blog:

Praveen Rajarro: 5 Quick Improvements for Your Blog and
SEO for Bing – the Queen of Search Engines
Harry Glazer: What Promo Products Suit Your Company Best?
Emily Seuss: How to Land Your First Freelance Client
Ben Hook: SEM Options for Small Business – Testing the Waters

I have also interviewed bloggers and business people:

Hannah Katsman: Blogging, Careers, Making Money, Making Friends
Interview with Janice Tomich of Calculated Presentations
Interview with Julie Weishaar, Marketing Specialist
Interview with Freakin’ Flamingo
Social Media at Rutgers with Greg Jarboe
Interview with Raritan Air Water Power Service

Taking a page from Praveen, I have decided the time has come to write up a guest post page – this page includes 1) guidelines if you would like to submit a guest post to Websites for Small Biz and 2) how you can go about asking me to write a guest post for your blog. Please visit the guest post page.

Topics for this blog should be technical, social-media or business-oriented. Benefits include new audience, incoming links from this blog to yours, and lots of applause from me. Would you like to be a guest blogger?

WordPress SEO

WordPress SEO by Yoast can be useful to anyone interesting in maximizing the search engine optimization of a site. You can fine tune each post with a focus keyword, helping you to tailor your post as you write it. It comes with XML sitemaps, RSS enhancements, and more goodies for working on search engine optimization. For more on WordPress SEO, read http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/.

Here’s one example of how it works. The screenshot below is how the plugin box looks on this post.

We are going to fill in those three empty boxes: Focus Keyword, SEO Title, and Meta Description. But first, what’s that in red? Whenever you see something in red, pay attention. It seems our default title for this post is too long, by a whopping 18 characters. Using the handy SEO Title tool, I click on Generate SEO title, and now I can create a new title. The tool gives me the same title that I have now, but now I can edit it. And do so, creating a new title that is not too long this time:

Now I write up a meta-description in the box provided. This is a paragraph with keywords of 140 characters or less. I also try out focus keywords – they can be adjacent words that show up in your content.

I save my draft, and the next screen has two pieces of valuable information:

It seems my meta-description is too long, and I don’t have the focus keyword in the meta-description. I fix those, and I am ready with my post. Two notes: I did take out the words ‘two’ and ‘and’ from the URL to make it shorter and more to the point by clicking the Edit button on the Permalink line, right below the title. Also, you can probably come up with a better keyword than plugins – I would suggest aiming for what’s known as a long-tail keyword, which is usually is at least three words together. Maybe I could have gone with ‘WordPress SEO’ as my focus keyword.

If any of this is confusing, my suggestion is to try the plugin. It will become more apparent as you experiment with the WordPress SEO plugin.

NextGen Gallery

Do you have an image rich site? Do you want to be able to display your images in a variety of ways? Would you like to be able to upload images in bulk or one by one, manage your photos in galleries and albums, sort them as needed and tag them as well? NextGen Gallery has all these features. Here’s an example that I did on my photo blog:

You can learn more about the NextGen Gallery on the NextGen Gallery website.

Have you used either of these plugins?

What Are Keywords?

Keywords are the words or phrases that a user types into a search engine to find links of interest. For example, if someone wants to find ways to buy oat milk, one might try “oat milk buy” or “purchase oatmilk” or “Pacific oat milk.”

Where To Place Keywords?

• Permalinks – you can change your permalink for a post to keywords only
• Title Tags
• h1, h2, h3, h4 tags
• Anchor Text – this means the text of a link
• Alt attributes in img tags

But don’t overdo it. Too many keywords will look like a robot wrote your text instead of a human talking to a human.

Keywords in Permalinks – use hyphens to separate.

If you are setting up your permalink with keywords, use key-words instead of key_words, hyphens instead of underscores. See Are hyphens or underscores better word separators?

How to Find More Keywords for Your Site?

These are just a few:

• Google AdWords Keyword Tool
• WordTracker
• Google Webmaster Tools
• Brainstorm. Use a thesaurus. Ask others to brainstorm, too.

Keywords Can Teach You About Your Competition.

Google (try Bing, too) your favorite keywords to learn who your competition is and how they are presenting similar information.

Where are they placing their keywords? What platform are they using for their site? Do they have images with keywords? What is in their title tags?

What is a Long Tail Keyword?

Why are long tail keywords important to your site? Let’s say you are selling auto insurance. If you try to get a top rating for auto insurance, you will have tons of competition. However, if someone types in a longer string of keywords, such as “auto insurance claims new jersey shore,” you will have fewer competitors. Using search engine optimization and social media, you have more of a chance at a high rating than if you optimize only for “auto insurance.”

Learn more on these posts:

• Guru Guide to Keyword Research
• Building Campaigns Around Key Words and Phrases: SEO, Marketing, Social Media
• 6 Keyword Research Mistakes You Might be Making

Thank you to everyone who participated in the keyword image poll.

Whenever you make a change to a permalink, you risk losing the search engine listings you have for a post. Also, if anyone has linked to that particular page or post, the link now goes to a missing page. The solution is: redirection.

What is a Permalink?

First, what is a permalink? See the WordPress Codex:

Permalinks are the permanent URLs to your individual weblog posts, as well as categories and other lists of weblog postings. A permalink is what another weblogger will use to link to your article (or section), or how you might send a link to your story in an e-mail message. The URL to each post should be permanent, and never change — hence permalink.

This is an ugly permalink: http://example.com?p=1234

When do you need to do redirection?

1 – Let’s say you decide to change your permalink structure. (Why would I change the permalink structure?) You might want to move to pretty urls, for example, or to a structure with numbers instead of postname. Again, you don’t want to lose the incoming links from search engines or other pages.

2 – You decide to emphasize keywords in your permalinks. Let’s say you wrote a post called: Have Fun in the Sun. But you realized after publishing the post, you really want to sell sunscreen. So you changed the links from have-fun-in-the-sun to sunscreen-sun. You now need redirection to tell search engines to connect their listings to the new permalink.

3 – You change platforms (from plain HTML to WordPress; from Drupal to WordPress; from WordPress to Drupal) or you change the domain url. Your urls change, but you can salvage old incoming links with redirection.

How Does One Redirect a Permalink?

It used to be one had to use .htaccess for redirection.
If you use WordPress, you can use Redirection Plugin.
Drupal has various redirection modules.
Joomla has several redirection plugins.

Have you had experience with redirecting links?

Emily Seuss presents my guest post on blogging and color theory – why you should know some color theory when you are setting up a blog or a website. I like to think of this as the dos and don’ts of color; if you choose some awkward color combination, you may lose some customers. Likewise if your clothes clash at an interview, you may not get the job.

Generating Traffic for Your Blog

Praveen lists more ways to generate traffic for your site, such as write a how-to article or leave comments on other blogs. I warned him that contests may get you traffic temporarily, but after the party is over, did anyone read your “real” posts?

How Google’s +1 Icon Will Change Search

It seems everyone is talking about Google+ these days – what will it mean? To your business, to social media, to marketing, to Facebook? Debra Askanase is one step ahead of the game as she talks about the icon added to websites a few weeks before Google+ was released. She shows how the icon will change how searches look for individuals.

Responsibilities of SEO Have Been Upgraded

On the Daily SEO blog, I appreciated the long list of SEO responsibilities – site accessibility, content strategy, link building, search verticals, social media promotion, reputation tracking, keyword research, content creation, new search protocols, community management, social network outreach and local optimization. How these have grown since the 1999 list! If you are just starting out learning about search engine optimization, read my post Intro to SEO.

What informative posts did you find this week?

Every bloggers’ initial objective is to get crawled by Google as it is taken for granted in the blogosphere that more than 80% of your “organic” traffic comes from the “King of Search Engines” – Google. Have you ever given a thought about the other search engines which have equally effective and efficient crawling bots and spiders which can index your pages in a competitive manner as compared to Google? Would it not be a welcome idea to properly index and optimize your website to gain that other 20% of traffic? Search engines from Yahoo & Microsoft Bing have been in the play together with Google in this immensely crowded blogging world. Though experts have always opined that Google is leading the web, it does make one take a step back and retrospect the chances of increasing their website visibility with other search engines as well.

In this post, I would like to concentrate on the “MS Bing Flavor” of optimizing a website and what are those initial steps one needs to be aware of to get properly indexed by the Microsoft engine. Here goes:

1. Website Submission – For any search engine to crawl your website, the foremost step is to submit your site to them. Of course, for Google, there are many ways to get faster access to those spiders, like Digg, for example. However, you can access the below URL to submit your site and leave it a day or two for those crawling bots to come all over your pages.
Submit Your Site Here – http://www.bing.com/webmaster/SubmitSitePage.aspx

2. Verify @ Bing Webmaster – Similar to the Google Webmaster tool, you need to access the Bing Webmaster Central (http://www.bing.com/webmaster) to verify that your website is properly submitted. Also, while you are at it, submit all your site-maps(including the image and video site-maps) to the webmaster.

3. XML Site-map Plug-in – Some of the older versions of the plug-in do not support Bing. Ensure that you upgrade your plug-in to “Notify Bing” of your site-map changes.

4. Microsoft Silver-light 4 – The new updated Bing Webmaster uses Silverlight4 and is thus able to give you more information about your site from as long as 6 months ago and also tell you details about crawl statistics, errors, click-thrus, keyword relevance and much more.

Google SEO vs Bing SEO – With the hand-shake happening between Yahoo and Bing to work together and share resources in an attempt to capture the online web market that Google has dominated for years, it is time to concentrate on Bing SEO as well. It is a fact now that both Yahoo and Bing are using BING search engine for their search results, which means, if you search on Yahoo or on Bing, the search engine used is of Bing and the same results are displayed on both. But how is this relevant to us bloggers you may ask!! – If you have good ranking on Yahoo, and not as well on Bing, then you can kiss those Yahoo rankings goodbye, because now, what matters is your Bing ranking alone for both these search engines. Now that the immediate necessity has dawned upon you, here is a very good video by WebProNews that speaks about the differences in Google SEO and Bing SEO -

More WebProNews Videos

Some Bing SEO Tips that I learned from the video and also reading them on Bing journals are below, hope you find them useful enough to start working on them if you haven’t already.

1. Age of Domain – As with any search engine, Bing emphasizes the importance of the age of your website, the older it is, the better the chances of high visibility and easy crawling. If you have just created your website, all you need to do is, submit your site to Bing and wait patiently for it to crawl.

2. Content Originality – Are you a true blogger with original content and unique writing skills? Do you have many such posts in your website that has relevant search keywords? Then your site is most suitable for Bing to get you your share of traffic. Bing somehow relates and compares blog contents and it is easy for them to identify the nature of your blog by analyzing the post contents.

3. Keywords & Meta Tags – Google does rely heavily on keywords and meta tags, but Bing takes this a notch higher by stating that it promotes “phrased keywords” like “Online Casino Games” or “Make Money by Blogging”.

4. Back-links & Outbound Links – Relevant Backlinks to your site from well established renowned websites is highly recommended by Bing, it pays when you have an inbound link to your website from a website of high rating(doesn’t have to mean a high Google PR). Outbound links to healthy websites brings more weightage to your site from Bing, hence you need to link well in your site and also at the same time, promote your website on others as well.

5. Custom Permalink – Bing strongly advises bloggers to use human readable names for your pages. By default WordPress gives random numbers to your posts like “?p=12″ which has to be modified to a meaningful post name like “best-practices”. This can be achieved by customizing your Permalink structure as can be read in this post – http://www.dailymorningcoffee.com/best-practices-for-seo.

Focus on Bing SEO? – Having said all this, what should a blogger really focus upon? Google or Bing SEO? Obviously both of them are two different species of search engines, one not depending on the other’s rank or rating. Personally I feel it is time to start paying attention to Bing in addition to Google ranking. Improving your Bing search traffic to around 5 to 6% will drastically improve your rankings and “organic” traffic.

But at the very end all that matters to attract and retain your visitors is Content & Originality of your posts. Do you think you will incorporate these pointers in your site and try to see how it improves your site performance? Have you got any other useful hints on Bing SEO practices? Do share your thoughts about the same. Thanks for reading.

Fireworks in Asbury Park 2010, photo by Leora Wenger

1. So really, don’t use just /%postname%/ as your permalink structure.

“I used /%postname%/ as my permalink structure on CSS-Tricks for a long time. I have lots of Pages. My site went down. I changed my permalink structure to begin with a number. Now it’s fine.“

– Please note this was someone who had many *pages.* The article’s commentators seem to recommend in general using a numeric part in your url, such as post_id or year. This post called WordPress Permalinks for SEO and Speed explains even more on the permalinks issue.

2. 5 Best Practices for SEO

Praveen, who writes the blog Daily Morning Coffee, will be a guest on this blog later this week. I hope you will come back and read about search engine submission; Google isn’t the only fish in the sea.

3. GoDaddy got bought. Will life get better for those who own domains via GoDaddy? Stay tuned. Your guess is as good as mine.

Happy 4th of July to all those who celebrate.

Google Analytics is a great, free tool for tracking visitors to your site. One can look at various sections of Google Analytics to learn who is visiting what and from where on your site. In this post, you can learn about some of the key areas of the Google Analytics and how I used Google Analytics to learn more about the upsurge in a website’s visitors.

Last month I wrote about changes I made to New Jersey Playrounds. Let’s revisit the statistics and see how the site is doing:

Wow, now that’s a move up! 20,598 this month compared to only 3,105 last month. Is this because it is summer and people want to get out into playgrounds? Or another reason?

Let’s look at visits from one year ago:

Ah, so that tells us that visits often go up in June. Is there anything new going on this June, besides the new code edits?

If you look at the section called content, you will see that the most visited page is no longer the home page. It is a page on fireworks in New Jersey. What does this tell you? If you post timely, useful information on your site (and you already have a good number of followers on social media sites like Facebook), you may get a surge of visitors.

But the fireworks page wasn’t posted until June 13th. So what about our code edits? Did they help as well? One can get a clue by doing a nifty comparison of dates. In Google Analytics, you can choose the dates you want to view. Click on the dates in the upper right hand corner and then check Compare to Past. Here is a view of dates from the end of May compared to the beginning of June:

I can’t know for sure, but after I made code edits, the site visits did rise.

Here are a few good places to look for clues about visitors:
1) Content Section – you can use view Content by Title if your permalinks are not yet easy to read keywords.
2) Traffic Sources – did you Tweet a post or put in on your Facebook business page? Find out if people visited from those sources.
3) Compare dates, Compare to Past – I’ve used this a lot in this post and the previous post on NJPlaygrounds.

Have you set up Google Analytics for your site? Has it helped you understand your traffic?