In the last few months, Google has updated Panda, changed their major properties to a unified look, grabbed 44% of global online advertising, opened a music service, put Android on a stick, activated 500,000 phones a day, made improvements to Google+ and plans to short-circuit websites and industries.
Whew….
Of course, to put this all in perspective, what did people search for the most on Google in 2011? Sigh.
No, this isn’t an advertisement for Little Guy Creation’s SEO work. This is about how you, personally, can help influence your website’s search rankings.
That’s right. If you have a Google+ account, you can contribute to your own success.
Google+ is Google’s social media service. And it’s more and more tied into the search results – much moreso than Facebook or Twitter (though these are still places you want your business to be found.)
Now, the article linked above is TWO MONTHS old as of this writing. Imagine if you had already been promoting your business with Google+ while your competitors don’t even realize how far they are falling behind you.
If this is the exciting news to you that it should be, then go to Google+ and get started.
The Google+1 button… have you seen it? It’s next to every single line in your Google searches.
You’d better believe that the more visitors +1 your website results, the better your website will immediately start to rank.
Did you know that you can have a Google business listing on their Maps? If you have one set up, then good for you. You’ve probably included your business address, phone and website – plus you might be able to include videos, pictures and area of service.
And did you know that there are limits to what you can include or claim? If you offer fitness classes at a gym, you can’t claim that as your business location if you don’t own the gym, even though that might be perfectly reasonable.
All of this is very important for your business as businesses with those listings may be displayed more prominently in the future.
Google is staying busy. They have improved search support, improved search results by serving up the newest available results, potentially launching a music service and brought Google+ to 40 million users.
Google also made fan pages for Google+ users to create. So your Google+ social media page will be linked with your business’s fan page which will inevitably be linked to your Places page (Maps) – you can be sure to see better results in search rankings over time because of it all.
And this is all just the tip of the iceberg. Google is continually working on improving everything. For example, just look at some maps improvements that they are working on and other improvements to services like Google Analytics and adding channels to YouTube.
The real kickers are the things that you are affected by just as a casual Google user and have no idea about. There are wheels within wheels of competition that shape what results you see in search rankings. And will Google buy Yahoo along with all its other purchases?