Comparing the Google +1 to Facebook’s “Like” button is like comparing Superman to John Doe. Instead of showing friends online that you are just interested in something or someone, Google+ has combined web searches and individual circles to formulate personalized search results.

The Google network exposes websites with +1’s as much as three times more than sites that do not. By adding the +1 icon to your personal site, the header of your business website, and/or products you sell will drive in more clicks. Naturally, this will create more business. How does this work? The more +1’s a website has, the more visible they are within search engines. The +1 icon is poised to become the “gold stamp of approval” for searchers everywhere.

Basically, a Google +1 is going to affect a site within Google search rankings. This is very important to know for people that want to be searchable on the web. An immediate implement of the +1 icon is something I can’t stress enough. You can find these icons and instructions on how to add them to your blog or website by clicking here.

A +1 is the new and improved testimonial. If viewers enjoyed your site or the service you provided, there is no doubt that they will share that with their friends. In this multitasking day and age, the majority of people can’t have more than a few tabs open at a time. No one really wants to hear why Aunt Betsy love’s an apple pie recipe, we just want to know if she liked it! Now Aunt Betsy will just click the +1 to share to the world how much she liked eating that pie.

If you are still not totally sure if you understand Google +1, it’s okay! Google states that +1 is a simple idea. Here is a simple example, Brian was doing a search and +1’d a hotel he stayed at earlier that year. Later, his friend Sara was searching for a hotel in the same location and noticed her friend Brian +1’d one of the hotels on her results page. (Photo example below)



(Photo provided by Google Adwords)

Don’t you think Sara is going to look into this hotel knowing that someone she knows enjoyed their stay there? It’s a no brainer that +1 will become the most powerful virtual recommendation.
+1 is still quite new and slowly being revealed online every day. If we start using the +1 and let friends and family know about the usefulness, it will slowly but surely gain popularity. After all, wouldn’t we rather receive advice from someone we know? Google has developed a way to connect everyone around us to do just that.

A Project like The Retro Baby is like giving your designer a free pass to Disney World. It’s not everyday you have a website that lets your designers imagination run wild. Our team and client could not have more more thrilled to see the completed custom artwork that can be found in every nook and cranny of the site.

From paper to digital, the details were spot on. Look at what a little color can do to bring these professional pieces to life.

Results in:

Total Searches: 9,038,794
Total Clicks: 4,926,623

Click Rank1: 2,075,765
Click Rank2: 586,100 = 3.5x less than ^
Click Rank3: 418,643 = 1.4x less than ^
Click Rank4: 298,532 = 1.4x less than ^
Click Rank5: 242,169 = 1.2x less than ^
Click Rank6: 199,541 = 1.2x less than ^
Click Rank7: 168,080 = 1.2x less than ^
Click Rank8: 148,489 = 1.1x less than ^
Click Rank9: 140,356 = 1.05x less than ^
Click Rank10: 147,551 = 1.05x more than ^

This means that you’ll get 3 1/2 times more traffic being #1 as opposed to #2, and the visitors do a virtual nose dive on their downward spiral to the bottom of page 1. Still a little confused? Let me put those statistics in another way:

Searcher Click Statistics:

Click Rank1: 2,075,765 42.13%
Click Rank2: 586,100 11.90%
Click Rank3: 418,643 8.50%
Click Rank4: 298,532 6.06%
Click Rank5: 242,169 4.92%
Click Rank6: 199,541 4.05%
Click Rank7: 168,080 3.41%
Click Rank8: 148,489 3.01%
Click Rank9: 140,356 2.85%
Click Rank10: 147,551 2.99%

Here are the subsequent page statistics:

1st page: 4,425,226 89.82%
2nd page: 501,397 10.18%

So 42.13% of searchers are clicking number one. That’s almost half. The next highest position #2 is only 11.90%. You will also notice that only 10% of people click through to page 2. So page two and anywhere after that start to become useless positions. You will get ~12x more traffic from the #1 spot to the #5 spot. It just gets worst any lower than that.

Forget being #2. If your SEO guy is happy with #2 you might want to search for another SEO guy. It pays to be King of the Hill.

The latest statistic by Forrester Research indicates that an average 71% of shopping carts are abandoned before finishing checkout. That is over 7 in 10 users and the result is an estimated 18 billion in losses. The numbers should not be taken lightly, but shockingly few are doing anything about it. According to Listrak only 13% of the top 500 online retails are attempting to recover abandoned shopping carts. Listrak claims it has helped its customers gain 20-35% back from decreases in abandoned shopping carts. What steps can your business take right now to see increases like that?

First, some easy and effective steps to implement

1. Tracking is Huge – Identify where the problem areas are

If you’ve gotten this far in the article then the assumption is that you’re already tracking your visitors. However, if you haven’t yet then scoot on over to google.com/analytics and get some free, reliable tracking. You may already be tracking, but are you sure that you’re tracking the steps through checkout? It’s important to know what steps your customers are getting bottle-necked at. You could find, for example, that shipping is the major bounce-point and you can explore cheaper shipping options.

1. 48% Look for Trust Marks First – Help your customers trust you

A recent study by Econsultancy polled two thousand UK online shoppers at various steps of checkout to identify their reason for leaving. Amazingly, nearly half claimed they were looking for trust symbols. Trust symbols are symbols like the BBB, secure shopping (lock icon), and MacAfee Site Secure can help insure legitimacy. Also make sure you have your SSL certificate and it is up to date. They also have EV (extended validation) SSL certificates which turn the browsers bar green or have another visual indicator of the additional level of security depending on the browser.

1. Clear Contact Details – Make your contact information visible

The study by Econsultancy also found that 48% of people abandoned their carts because they could not find clear contact details. Contact details are probably the easiest change to implement. If you are a legitimate shopping cart company then you probably already have your phone number, an e-mail address, and maybe even a live chat. If they are hidden out of site on a contact page or in a tiny unassuming area in the site’s footer then why not move them to the top of the page? Or put them right into your checkout process. This will ease any concerns of consumers of being taken by a fly-by-night company.

1. Clearly State Your Return Policy

Display your return policy for your products especially if you’re return policy is a money back guarantee. If you’re return policy is less friendly you may still want to put a link to your return policy page so viewers can clearly see what they’re options are in the event that they don’t like or don’t want the product.

1. Intuitive Checkout Process

Can your visitor find their way through the checkout process or are they not sure what to do next and leaving the site out of frustration?  Internet users are notoriously easily distracted. Make sure your continue buttons are big, bold, and bright. Also make sure they are more visually emphasized than other buttons that might take them away from the checkout process. Check out this tool, by AttentionWizard (free trial), to analyze a visual heat map of your checkout pages. This shows what elements on the page will be looked at first and which elements may be missed from a visual standpoint.

Here are some potentially harder steps to implement, but can yield great results.

1. Shipping Costs – Lower your shipping rates

Lowering shipping rates will decrease shopping cart abandonment. Everyone’s bottom line is different, but a Forrester Research study showed that 44% of online shoppers abandon their carts because of shipping costs. If it fits the budget you might want to offer a cheaper or free shipping option. If you have an option of free shipping over $x already in place then this would be a great time to remind visitors that they only have to spend $y to reach your free shipping price.

1. Not Ready to Purchase – If you customer is not ready then let them save.

The Forrester Research study also indicates that 41% of shoppers were not ready to purchase at the moment they left a cart. While there is not much you can do if they are not ready to purchase you can entice them to come back later. Options for “save cart” and “e-mail cart” can help. In fact, 24% of surveyed said they were attempting to save products in their cart for later.

1. Offer Guest Checkout

The 7^th highest option with 14% of respondents of the Forrester study claimed they left the shopping cart because they didn’t want to sign up for another web site. Guest checkouts are very common today. Many users expect this option. Also many of the shopping cart software out there have an easy built in option.

When all else fails and they abandon their shopping cart there are still more options.

1. Be #1, #2, and #3

Since 27% of polled shoppers indicated they wanted to compare prices on other sites why not be all of the competitors? Although it is the hardest item on this list to achieve it can also yield the best results. If your #1 for your term on Google you must assume there are some people who are going to #2 and #3 and possibly further down the list to compare prices. Since small, niche, keyword-targeted domains are working the best to get to the top spots then if you create multiple sites which don’t appear to be connected then you can be in more than one top spot on Google. You can even vary prices slightly and offer say, free shipping, on one of the sites. This greatly improves your chances of a sale in the case of price comparisons (assuming they price compare on the same search engine). It’s more attainable then you would probably think especially if you are already intensely search engine marketing.

1. Re-marketing Campaigns – Don’t ever give up on a sale

The big guys like Amazon.com, Buy.com and Newegg.com, just to name a few, have been doing some amazing things in cart abandonment remarketing. If you leave your shopping cart abandoned with a fancy red sweater then you might see a picture of that red sweater on a totally unrelated site. Since they display their ads on so many 3^rd party sites all over the internet if you visit a site that has an Amazon.com ad, for example, you will see a picture of that fancy red sweater you left in your shopping cart. Clicking on it will bring you right back to your shopping cart so you can finish your purchase. You may not have the advertising budget (or budget in general) to reach these people on your advertising network but there are still remarketing options. If you have a shopping cart, look for extensions or plugins for “shopping cart abandonment”. Listrak makes an extension for the popular cart Magento. There are also many other extensions for the various other canned shopping carts out there. They can send an e-mail to users who have passed the email step. You can offer them a deal, free shipping or just remind them a week / month later. If all attempts to get them to purchase on the spot fail then try to re-capture that lead.

Considering there are over 300 million searches per day and 60% of them are in one way or another tied to local search results. This simple free tip to help your business listing is something  you should probably be looking into.

You will notice that our name is Tranquil Blue web design co. We use keywords in our name to gather people searching for keywords. Since Google receives a lot of submissions for listings it doesn’t trust all listings are legitimate. Google and other local search engines check each others’ listings for accuracy. So if your listing exists in Google, Yahoo, Bing, Yelp, and many more. Then Google assumes your listing is correct. Also it double checks that all of the information is the same on other engines. The more local sites it can verify your information on the more Google trusts your listing. So it is beneficial to get your listing with the same exact info on many local engines. And don’t forget to use your top keyword.

Here’s What You Can Do. And It’s Free!

Sign up at:
Bing Maps
CitySearch
DexKnows.com Advertiser Sign Up Not sure if you can get a free listing here
Google Local Business Center
Local.com Free Business Listing

Superpages.com Free Listing
Yahoo Local Free Business Listing
Yellowpages.com Create A Listing

Data Suppliers to Other Search Engines and Directories
IBeginSource.com
InfoGroup (formerly InfoUSA)
Localeze.com Manage Your Business Listing

Popular Customer Review Sites
AllPages.com
Insider Pages
Kudzu.com Basic Profile
MagicYellow.com Add Your Business
Merchant Circle
SuperPages
Yelp

Have you noticed a +1 icon when doing your day to day on the web? Google has taken a large step into social media with Google+. Now, instead of sharing things with a large and unknown group of people, you’re getting search results that begin with recommendations from the people in your Google+ Circles.

The Google +1 is more than just a Facebook “like” or a Twitter #hashtag. Instead of showing you are interested, Google+ has integrated searches and circles to create a finely knit result page.

The bottom line is the more Google +1s you have. The better you will rank in Google.

But I’m a Business Do I Need +1?

We all know it’s great for Aston Kutcher or someone’s favorite product, but what about your business? More then likely it’s not that glamorous. If someone +1’s your business, the next time people in their Circles searches a keyword relating to your company, yours will be on the first page of Google. A bright +1 will appear under your company allowing the person to see their friend(s) recommend your services. +1’s are a perfect way to build community and referrals for your business. So yes, you should be interested as a business.

Get more google+ followers

Get the +1 for your site is easy.

Websites with a +1 button receive as much as three times more exposure on the Google+ network. Add the +1 icon to your blogs, the top of your site, and products.

Click here to get create a +1 for your site.

Connect through other social networks

Link your site wherever possible through other social networks. Hyperlink text by using a call to action such as: +1 our page

Blog Commenting

Comment on blogs and in the website section use a link to your business. If they like your work, viewers will easily be able to +1 your business.

Deliver an exceptional experience

If your business can truly seek out and create fans it’s a no brainer that they will hit the +1. Engage with your community. Show clients new and old you’re listening to them by clicking +1 on their Google+ status’s and links. In turn you will Get more google+ followers

Turn your customers and friends into fans.

The more friends you have, the better your chances will be that some of these friends will join your fan page. Just ask!

+1’s the new age testimonial.

If clients and customers enjoyed your services and/or products, there is a good chance they want their circles to know! Create a thank you email and link to your site to +1.

Follow Up Emails

After you complete a customer’s job or after they buy their product send them a link to the product or service and ask them to click the +1 if they were satisified.

Talk and Blog about +1

Educate clients about Google+ and the +1. Most people are still unsure what it actually does. Get the word out by mentioning your business is using the Google +1 through blog posts and everyday conversation. Ask them to +1 your site to test out Google +1.

+1 is still quite new and unused. Just take some time to educate people around you.  Everyone loves recommendations from friends and Google is letting you know what they think. You can help them get more google+ followers while building your own google+ following. =)

You may have heard the buzz around Google+ and the infamous Google+1. It was introduced only a few months ago, April 1^st to be exact, and has been dubbed a “Facebook killer”. It’s a small +1 button or icon that can be found on search results. You can also integrate it into your web pages (quite easily I might add). Once clicked upon it tells Google that you like that particular page or search listing. So it essentially gives Google your “vote” for a particular web page. Since Google revolves their business model on giving searchers the results that are “voted” best. You can imagine how this will help your web site to come up a bit higher than other web sites. And if that wasn’t good enough there’s more benefit. Each +1 is front page displayed on a Google user’s profile for all of their friends to see (which could be thousands). Good recommendations, as you might already know, are some of the best types of advertising. That makes these very positive posts. And can you guess what the best part is? It’s totally free.

Since this is tied already into Google’s network of sites. Google receives this vote instantly. Other votes, like Facebook’s “like” button, must be discovered by Google’s search engine crawlers. These crawlers scan the web tirelessly looking for content, but if it doesn’t find your “like” or “vote” then your Google results can’t have any positive impact. Also it weights these likes or “votes” based on the pages they are on. So Google may not give someone’s Facebook “like” or Digg.com’s “digg” very much value at all. With Google+1 your rating is passed directly to Google for processing. One other thing to note is that it doesn’t appear as much of a social media or techy / nerdy installation. It has Google’s all ages and all industries feel. Unlike some of these networks out there that are associated with the tech world or younger generation like Foursquare, Gowalla, Redit and Digg. It has some clear advantages.

How to implement

Integrate Google’s Plus 1 in Your Site is extremely easy. You just copy and paste one line of code into the any page. Google does the rest. You will notice Google’s webmaster tools has reporting for your current +1 status.

There are some potential pitfalls

As with anything that relates to Google’s search results. They will eventually be manipulated. There are already web sites selling Google +1s. One site was selling 1000 +1s for $250. Claiming they are all real users and would be delivered in one week. Abuse by your competitors could give them an unfair advantage especially before Google works out good methods for identifying cheaters.

Conclusion

So… What are you waiting for? As with all internet trends you must strike while the iron is hot! Get in first and you will have an advantage. The later you get in the more you will have to play catch up. And no one likes to come in last place.

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If you’re not familiar with Google Adwords it’s the paid spots at the top of Google’s results page. They have a slightly different color background and they are also listed on the right hand side. These keyword spots are bidded out to the highest bidder. This can be expensive to test new keywords to see their effectiveness. You can use this and 5 credit cards (if you have them) to get $500 in free keyword advertising to do some testing on keyword effectiveness. If you gain more income then $500 on these 5 tests then your keyword is worth pursuing in either Adwords marketing or in organic Search Engine Marketing.

Update:
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Update Again:

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In the following four SEO factors, we will examine the top results for the term “personal injury lawyer”. Surprisingly, the cost per click on Google Adwords is over $20 for each click! It has 550,000 searches last month. Imagine that monthly Google Adwords Bill! So you can be sure they did the best SEO practices to get to the top free spots in Google. They have used top SEO experts to get to their web site to the top for this valuable term. I will explain how not to overlook these simple rules and how to increase site ranking.

#1 Poor Content

Many sites suffer from poor content. While Flash animations and loads of images may be visually enticing, you will notice the top ranking sites actually fill there site with text. It’s recommended to have at least 500-1000 words of content per page.

The top 5 listings for the highly desirable keyword “personal injury lawyer” have the following word counts: 664, 265, 1910, 1477, and 600 respectively. So if your content is like many sites out there with very few words of text. You might want to add up your word count and see how you compare. FYI your keywords are most effective in the 150 words closest to the top of the page. All of these top results conform to this rule.

#2 No inbound links/Poor Quality Links

Inbound links are the most important and influential ranking factor. As you might already know, Google uses a sort of voting system to rank terms. If you were to search for our example term, “personal injury lawyer,” you will find there are 12.5 million web pages with that term in it. So which one should Google put as #1? One of the ways Google decides is by using inbound links as “votes” for your site. If more sites link in with the search term then Google moves the site towards the top.

Our top 5 sites have a lot of other sites linking in. According to MagesticSEO.com’s tools, the number of links in the top 5 sites are; 47k, 360mil, 233mil, 6k, and 4k. Now that’s a lot of links. To get such a desirable term you can see they’ve gone to great lengths to make sure they have plenty of links to their site. So you might want to get out there and start begging for links from other web sites!

Since Google knows how SEO experts are trying to artificially move their listings by building links they have begun phasing out poor quality links. Google has devalued links that it deems un-worthy. Your links should be on quality web sites from real webmasters. Poor quality links are from sites that are computer generated or have no real value. Google has a sophisticated method of determining these sites. You can usually identify poor sites by noticing that the sites content doesn’t make much sense or is not to one particular topic. For example, a site about web design is talking about casinos, mortgage rates, and free guitar lessons. If you know the webmaster is a regular person and the content is on topic, chances are the site is not a spam site in Google’s eyes.

#3 Poor Keyword Optimization

There are certain areas to feature your keyword in a page to make it more attractive to Google. To put it simply there are certain spots where Google would like to see your keyword for your site to rank higher. If your keywords are not in the right spots you simply will not rank for that keyword. It should be in the title tag, meta description, alt image tag, heading tag, and bold.

You can test your web site with sites such as SEOMoz’s On-Page Report Card or websitegrader.com. The top 5 sites followed this rule by these percentages respectively: 75%, 95%, 95%, 95%, and 95% (as determined by SEOMoz’s tool).

#4 Lack of Keyword Research

Many web sites don’t perform as well as they would like because of poor keyword research. Your first stop would be getting the proper terms to target.  Focus on targeting 2-3 keywords that meet two qualifications: Search volume (amount of potential visitors) and Keyword effectiveness (amount of visitors that will turn into sales).

Search volume is relatively easy to calculate. There are a number of search volume estimators. I prefer the tool by the source, Google. The Google Keyword Tool easily tells you the amount of searches from last month. If you’re trying to decide whether to target “personal injury lawyer” or “personal injury law firm” you can test using Google’s tool.  You will notice “personal injury lawyer” has 673,000 searches where as “personal injury law firm” only gets 135,000 monthly searches. That’s almost 5 times as many searches for the previous term.

The other requirement in keyword research is the keyword effectiveness. This depends on how much you’re willing to put into your SEO campaign to try to get to #1 ranking and how much each lead is worth to your business. For example, in our sample terms you might want to go with the lesser search volume term because maybe that term fits your target audience better. The search volume becomes less relevant if you’re not converting visitors into sales. If the first term has 10,000 searches per month and the second term has 5,000 searches per month it seems obvious to target term one. But if term two converts into sales three times better then term one then it actually makes more sense to target the term with the lower search volume.

If you’re working with an SEO company you might want to bring up these points with them. If you’re doing your own search engine marketing then I hope none of these points were missed. If some were missed on a previous job, don’t forget there is always time to get your SEO back on the right track. Happy SEOing!

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