Tom Pimental : Web Creative

Now when you create a location-based page for your local business, users can “check-in” when they are there further exposing your business to their network. You can even buy ads based on “Places”. Small businesses should try to allocate at least some of their day to fostering these types of programs. They’re very low maintenance and have a big potential upside given the size of Facebook’s network. Facebook Places is another great tool for small business marketers.

Google has been really focused on the under-served SMB market creating both easy-to-use promotional tools, but also offering services like corporate Gmail and Google Apps to help small businesses focus on their work and not how to do their work. That’s why it makes a lot of sense for them to launch a Google Small Business Blog.

There’s not a lot there now, but I expect Google to highlight products and enhancements that can help your small business grow. This is definitely a site every small business owner should add to their reading list.

Google continues to help small local businesses reach their customers. Their enhancements and continued expansion of Google Places significantly increases the potential exposure of local businesses. Now, with Google Tags, they’ve made it easy for small businesses to add specials, coupons and other advertisements to Goolge Maps and local search results.

With Google Tags, you can maintain weekly specials or do “real-time” coupons all for $25 per month. Add this tothe free promotion offered by Google Places and this gives small businesses an incredibly powerful and cost effective tool to find new customers.

As I’ve stated here several times before there are good and bad SEO practices. The good people at Datadial have put together an infographic that highlights SEO best practices and the “blackhat” techniques you should avoid at all costs.

Click the image below to see the full graphic.

So in case you couldn’t tell by the last 4 posts, I was pretty busy in March/April. In addition to launching 4 new sites, I also found a new job. Leaving IDG was difficult—5+ years of history and an incredible group of people made the decision to leave very difficult, but I was ready for a change of scenery (and business model).

Care.com is a 4 year-old startup based in Waltham, MA that’s taking the care needs world by storm :). Whether looking for a baby sitter, pet sitter, elderly care or a housekeeper (and more), Care.com can really help. I’ve already used the site to find a housekeeper to come in twice a month and help around the house. They’re much more affordable than you think!

Once again, Google confirms they do not use the keywords meta tag. They also reinforce the fact that if you write good/useful (read: not keyword injected) description meta tags, they will use it in search results.

In my last post (“SEO: A Cautionary Tale“) I pointed out questionable tactics that some “SEO Experts” employ. However, there are some best practices that make your site easier to index and most of them can be done by you, free of charge.

1) Create a Google Webmaster Account: Use Google’s free webmaster tools to optimize your site’s searchability. You can also use this tool to submit a sitemap (a list of all the pages on your site) which ensures search engines have access to all of your content. Don’t forget about Bing’s and Yahoo’s webmaster tools too.

2) Sign up for Google Local Business: If you’re a local business, the major search engines now offer enhanced business listings (often for free) which appear at the top of local search results. Google, Bing and Yahoo all have these types of listings and you should make sure your company is listed with them.

3) Read Google’s SEO Starter Guide: This is an incredible resource, directly from Google, which details the various web design/layout techniques including URL patters, header tags, unique titles and meta descriptions, etc that help Google index your site.

4) Write good content and make your website useful: There’s no substitute for simply making a good, useful website. If you make a website that people enjoy, they will reward you with quality links which will eventually lead to your site being listed where it belongs in Google.

When it comes to your search engine rankings you need to be honest with yourself. Do a search for your most sought after keyword for your business and there are likely millions of results. Now add a state or even a city to that term and there are still probably 10s of thousands of results. Anyone making promises that they can get you to the top of these lists are likely full of it, but the tactics above should at least setup you site so it can be crawled effectively by search engines.

Having spent the better part of my professional career in online media, I’m acutely aware of the seduction of SEO. Countless unsolicited emails have graced my inbox touting higher rankings, mounds of traffic and never-ending revenue. But time after time, the only things that ever seem to work are good content, good layouts and quality external links—all things “SEO experts” cannot deliver.

Google’s own SEO Starter Guide states, “Creating compelling and useful content will likely influence your website more than any of the other factors discussed here.” What does this mean? Simply write content for your audience, not search engines, and Google will find you because people will notice your high quality content, products and services and link to them from their Facebook, Twitter and blog pages.

So the next time you receive an unsolicited email from a self-proclaimed “SEO Expert” keep an eye out for these scam warning signs:

1) Promises of increased rankings: No one, except a developer at Google or other search engine, has the power to physically better your search ranking. If someone makes this promise, get it in writing and get a good lawyer.

2) Any references to increasing your external links: External links should be earned, not bought/scammed. Anyone can go out and spam forums and blog comments to artificially increase your external link counts. You’d be better off spending your money on graffiti artists to spray paint your URL on a bridge as Google looks at the quality and context of the link to your page over the volume of them.

3) Keyword optimization: Keyword stuffing is one of the worst things you can do. Don’t force keywords into your meta data and site copy in the hopes of attracting searchers, because if your site is solely optimized for search engines, you’ll leave your users confused and clicking the back button to get to your competitor’s search listing.

4) Your description or keywords meta tag are not “optimized”: “SEO Experts” love to use free tools to “analyze” your site’s “search friendliness” and use those official-looking reports to scare you into doing business with them. Google’s own Matt Cutts has stated that Google does not use the keywords meta tag. Description tags are important, but again they should follow the rule of “write good content” and avoid reusing too many of the same keywords.

5) Quick turnarounds: Changes you make to your site can take 6 months or more to propagate through search results. If anyone is touting a quick fix, they’re probably doing things like keyword stuffing, link baiting, etc, which Google will eventually penalize you for.

6) External links: It’s no secret that external links (links on other sites to your site) play a big role in how well your site ranks. However, these links should be obtained over time by writing good content, providing exceptional service and generally having a useful website. Some firms will plaster your site all over forums and fake directories, but when it comes to links, quality always trumps quantity.

Take it from me, one small business owner to another, SEO can be a silver bullet, but Google owns the gun that fires it.

Google Analytics now allows up to 5 custom variables to be set per page. This is a significant improvement and will make Google Analytics a much more attractive option to medium to large web business.

5 is still a bit limiting (Omniture allows up to 50), but overcomes a major blocker to using Google Analytics in the past. Interestingly, Google Analytics allows 3 different types of custom metrics: Page-level, Session-level and Visitor-level Custom Variables.

To test these out, I created a page name custom variable on each page. But more advanced implementations could include tracking by author, site section, logged in status, etc. Google Analytics just changed the game again with custom variables.

My day job as IDG Enterprise’s Director of Product Development can be pretty rewarding at times. Especially when a talented team can put out something as impressive as TechDispenser–a tool that lets you to create custom newsletters from over 700 sources spanning 200 technology topics. Designers, producers, developers, marketers and more all came together to launch a product that pushes the boundaries of IDG’s comfort level and I couldn’t have been more impressed.

It was an honor to work with the talented group behind TechDispenser and I hope that my efforts going forward can help justify all of the amazing work they’ve done.