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Make Sure You Are Fully Integrated With Google+

I’ve recently read a great article found at SiteProNews on Google+ website integration and wanted to point it out to you as it really has some great tips on how to fully integrate your site with Google+.

Here are the tips in a nutshell, but please make sure to read the full article as it is chock full of excellent easy to do tips.

  1. Make sure to add a great headshot of yourself to your Google+ profile. It will be shown in search results. Use an image 250 pixels wide by 250 pixels tall.
  2. Turn on the ability for others to see your +1’s in your Google+ profile. (Read the article for the easy steps.) You can only do this on your personal page not a business page.
  3. Cross link your Google+ profile and website. This is a crucial step and make sure to read the article carefully about the re=”author” attribute as this is what gives you the Google+ juice that you want and need for SEO.
  4. Consider using a head tag link reference to your personal Google+ page.

The big kicker is that it is really hard to juice up your Google+ Business page. Google+ is really set up to link and cross link to your personal profile. Business pages are really an after thought at this point which hopefully will change as Google+ realizes its full organic placement and SEO potential.

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HootSuite Adds Yammer to Networks List

HootSuite - Social Media ManagementHootSuite has recently added Google+ to its linkable social networks and now has just added Yammer as well.

Yammer is a business-related social network. Businesses like IBM are using Yammer for interaction between employees. With popularity growing, some are considering Yammer as a new place to network similar to LinkedIn. For now I haven’t heard many clients asking for Yammer updates but it is a social network worth taking a look at, and now especially since you can schedule updates to Yammer using HootSuite.

Yammer is free to use but does have paid models as well. You can find more out about Yammer by visiting their website. Yammer states “Whether it’s for teams to collaborate on projects, company-wide collaboration to accelerate your business, or an intranet replacement that connects your enterprise, Yammer provides  a variety of pricing plans to meet your needs.” Pricing goes from free to $5 a month and then to $15 per user per month.

As for HootSuite, I love the product and like that they are staying up-to-date in regards to which social networks to integrate with their platform. You can try HootSuite for free or move to one of their paid programs. Just click the image above to find out more about HootSuite and their pricing. If you buy their upgraded program, they’ll buy us lunch at McDonald’s.

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Errors Google Reports About Your Website Crawl Explained

Michael Wyszomierski of the Google Search Quality Team talks about errors that Google will report to you in the Webmaster Control Panel about the crawl and indexing of your website.

My Comments

There are two types of crawl errors they are site errors and specific URL errors.

Site errors means that the Googlebot cannot access your website and are usually from an item listed in your robots.txt file. You should give these errors top priority for fast resolution.

The most common URL is a “not found” error. This means that a page may be missing from your site or the URL changed and your sitemap.xml file should be updated to remove the triggering of these error messages.

Having specific URL errors on your site is completely natural and nothing to worry about, but best practices should include a review and clean up periodically of these problems.

The crawl errors are more important. Although a crawl error can be caused when your server is not available due to a glitch or network error, they should be investigated to make sure that your site is not blocking the crawl by search engine robots. You may even need to get with your web host if server errors happen frequently.

 

 

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Messages in the Google Webmaster Control Panel

Daniel Seef from Google talks about the Message Center in the Google Webmaster Control Panel in this excellent and informative video.

My Comments

Google provides messages about issues that impact your search results. Additionally they provide helpful tips on how you can improve the indexing of your website.