Ever since Google opened its doors to its flag ship social network Google plus on the 20^th of September 2011  people have been signing up and getting involved in there thousands, and surprisingly enough Google plus has now surpassed the social giant twitter in January 2013 with a whopping 500 million users.

Google has tried their hand at social before and failed miserably but as with any good business they have dusted themselves off and tried again. I must admit Google plus is definitely one of my favorite social networks if not my favorite, its usability and capabilities in my opinion far surpass the likes of twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. The platform allows users to control everything from one account without the need to create 2 or more for personal and business like Facebook and twitter. However 1 question that has been on everyone’s lips of late is “How the hell do I make it work for my business”? Well that’s where Teknet marketing comes to your rescue, over the next couple of posts we will be delving in to G plus and showing you the do’s and don’ts and uncovered gems that make Google plus a must for business.

How to get your business started with Google Plus

If you have not yet set up your G+ page I have created this brief video to help you on your way Click Here.

Ok, so now we have our page set up how do we start attracting new potential clients to your business page? First of all we need to ensure we know what content we are going to be distributing through this channel and who to. I would personally take a little time to research competitors, not to copycat what they are doing but to see what content gets more interactions and comments. This will allow you to then begin putting the frame work together for your content marketing strategy, which we will talk about in more depth in later posts.

One of the first ways to increase visibility to your G plus page is to invite current connections, Google gives you the option to import your email list, this can either be personal contacts or business contacts and obviously I’d choose the later.

Your Circles

Now that we have some contacts within our business page we can start creating our circles and organising our contacts. This is extremely useful and helps organise the content you wish to see and distribute. For instance if you are a selling a service such as an accountant it would make sense to set up circles such as current clients, industry leaders, competitors and prospects. The reason for this is Google allows you to share updates with particular circles, so you can now tailor your content to suit.

For instance you may want to advise current clients that its approaching the end of the financial year and time is running out to get the books in order, you may want to advise prospects on different ways they can help save on tax or how best to manage cash flow and then you can use the industry leaders circle to keep up to date with industry news and also begin networking with others that have complimentary services for your business.

That’s all for this post, but in the next post we will get into how to start attracting new people into your page and also discuss how to put together a content strategy for your Google plus business page.

Before I applied for a job here at Teknet I was working my way through a series of dead end jobs. I have worked in a big name supermarket and also in the distribution centre of an internet retail giant, however, I had never heard of SEO.

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is not a well known industry to many, moreover, many businesses will not know to look into SEO unless they are approached by an Agency such as Teknet. Although it is a little-known and opinionated business, the results you can achieve through SEO are astounding.

When I first started at Teknet I had no idea about SEO, I didn’t know how to complete a website audit or provide backlink analysis. In the past 5 months I have dedicated a great deal of my free time into learning about SEO techniques and how best to help our clients and I’m happy to say that, with the help of my colleagues, I am now proficient in many aspects of the job.

There is one thing I do not like about the SEO industry. I cannot stand that there are businesses out there that take the money from their clients pockets and provide them with no results, they don’t put in the hard work or the long hours that are sometimes necessary in this business. This annoyance is probably the reason I am so happy at Teknet, I work from 9:00 am until 5:00 pm, however, that is just the time that I can clock out, if a client needs work finishing or there is something that I can finish that may improve their rankings then I will stay and I will complete the work.

I must say that before Teknet I had never really enjoyed any of my jobs. I regularly dreaded the thought of clocking in and then longed to clock out. At Teknet I take personal pride from the rankings that our clients achieve and although I haven’t yet had a customer facing role in the business, I do look forward to being able to let business owners know the steps I have taken to improve their website and their search engine rankings.

As I previously mentioned, SEO is a business that revolves around opinion and tactics; my opinion is that every client that comes through the door should and will get the rankings they desire and my tactics are anything and everything to get them there.

The creators of Ateronon, the only clinically proven lycopene supplement, have created a slick new website.

The firm have enjoyed success in the marketing of their miracle one-a-day supplement and are now looking to push themselves in the on-line world.

CBR Motors are a very interesting new client with over 15 years experience in motor body repairs and also prestige/wedding car hire.

As they increase their operations they are looking to get more conversions through their website.

One of our new clients, a company specialising in used forklifts and a proven 30 year track record has launched their new site.

They are looking for us to grow their website traffic and also put the finishing touches on their site.

I currently have two clients that operate in the same vertical market however in totally unrelated ways, this is rare situation where they could seriously help one another with relevant traffic and sales, so the question is how best to bring the two together.

Banner Advertising.

Both operate ‘paid for’ banner advertising schemes on their sites, so it would be very easy just to tell them about each other and let them take out adverts on each other’s sites, they will both generate relevant traffic to each other through the adverts and as the sites and services are so related and extremely cost effective I am certain that they would both make money from additional traffic generated through the adverts. The problem with this approach is that both will be paying the other to advertise on the sites and this advertising payment is likely to mount up over time and will impact on the overall profitability of the relationship. Not only this but Google has ways to identify both affiliate and advertorial type links by the tracking systems used to monitor the traffic, and it ignores them all! This means that they have no value at all in terms of SEO or natural ‘SERP’ positioning. In this scenario both clients may try it for a while and then give up as it was not profitable enough to continue with.

Partnership.

The second option is far more interesting as far as I am concerned, we get both parties to promote each other’s site for free as part of a partnership agreement, I know this sounds a little illogical but bear with me on this one, if both site’s agree to promote each other in blogs, news articles and untracked banner adverts in key positions on the sites we get the following effects.

• Firstly there will be a much larger proportion of overall traffic will be shared as all the chat in blogs and news articles will inflate the trust to the user thus encouraging a far higher amount of traffic to follow the links.
• Secondly, because all inter site links will be valid for SEO, both sites will see a boost in their natural rankings and organic traffic, Google is also very keen to see highly relevant sites linking in this way J.
• Finally and most importantly, as they are not spending on advertising with each other, there are no additional marketing costs involved to improve organic traffic, increase sales and improve overall search positioning! It’s a no brainer really!

Sometimes great business is not about trying to make a quick profit by any means possible, in some cases it will be far more profitable to join forces with relevant businesses to refer traffic and boost rankings, this approach will be far more profitable for all parties in the long run and therefore make businesses far more likely to succeed.

Which way would you go if we gave you the same options? That’s why our clients come to us, and stay with us! Why don’t you see what we could do for you?

Julian Salmon
MD
Teknet Marketing

In 2013 it is critical to know what things are important “on your website” in order to help ensure it gets good rankings in the search engine results pages (SERPS) of the various search engines.  The techniques that you employ to help this along are known as “Onsite SEO” and are a vital practice to study.

What sort of Onsite techniques should you be doing?

Well, if you’ve been experiencing problems with existing websites that have been affected by Google’s Panda and Penguin updates then you will be more acutely aware of the need to have your sites ranking again. Click here to read more »

During 2011 and 2012 Google made some major updates to their search engine algorithms.  These two updates were given the names of Panda and Penguin.  Panda was created to deal with poor content and Penguin was created to deal with spammy linking practices.

In the past, webmasters were able to “game” their way to the top of search engines by creating “average” content and shooting hundreds or thousands of links to those pages using software and services found online.  They could get away with writing short amounts of content and generally make the page unappealing to visitors (but the site owners could still get their sites to page 1 using all manner of techniques).

Eventually Google found out and gathered mountains of data.

The resulting algorithm updates from February 24^th 2011 onwards literally changed the face of search engine optimization techniques that had long been the backbone of SEO services for years.  It was originally called the farmer update as it dealt with so called content farms and link farms that dealt with poor quality content.

Now you simply cannot get your page ranked in the same way. It takes a lot more work.  SEO has evolved into something completely new.  These days you have to write content that is truly engaging to the reader, and it has to be content that specifically answers their direct query (the phrase they typed into the search box on Google).

Relevance is critical!

If your web page doesn’t directly answer their query then chances are your web page will not show up on page 1 in the results page.  If someone searches for “how to knit a Red sweater” then your web page must talk “exclusively” about how to knit a Red sweater.

Your web page can also include a few related phrases, for example “Red sweater benefits” or “why a Red sweater looks cuter than a Green sweater”.  If your page talks about “the benefits of Blue knitted socks” then this is a definite “no no” and is not going to help.

With regards to the techniques used by webmaster to game their sites to the top, Google eventually caught on and released it’s Penguin update on April 24^th 2012.  The reasons and causes are not entirely understood but webmasters believe that a variety of things such as using “exact match domains” (i.e. “www.redknittedsweaters.com” might have been the domain name for a site dealing with red knitted sweaters).

In the past this was a way to gain extra traction and rankings, even if your site content was poor.

Webmasters where also aggressively using the same keyword(phrase) that people were typing into Google (for example “how to knit a Red sweater” – and using this same “anchor text” when writing articles that were placed on other sites and linked back to the main site.

So it all starts with content.  Make it as helpful as possible and you stand a chance.  Google is recognizing quality over spam, and about time too!

123Shelving are part of the Amvar storage solutions group and specialise in shelving solutions for any business’ needs.

From plastic to aluminium you will find something to suit your needs through their site.

123Lockers are a company specialising  in locker and storage solutions suitable for many uses from commercial to workplace.

Being part of Amvar storage solutions puts them in good stead with a proven background in the industry. We hope to increase their enquiries through the site and improve the visibility of their site to allow more people to view their products.