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March e-Newsletter is Posted

In this month’s issue we have two great articles on Google Maps you will want to check out.

The Secret to Getting Google Maps Placement

I am starting to see a few trends in Google Maps that can be leveraged for placement and wanted to share them with you. It is important to note that I am not seeing this specific trend appear across all market sectors for all of the searches that I have done, but have seen them in many cases. I consider the information noteworthy.

First, it is important to note that not all businesses will really consider a great position in Google Maps valuable. However, if you sell services and products in a location specific area, Google Maps placement can be crucial to your business’ success. Some types of businesses that will generally want or need excellent Google Maps placement are restaurants, dentists, pest control firms, lawyers, plumbers, roofers, and local brick and mortar stores. Read more…

Getting Service Reviews for Google Maps

If Google Maps placement is valuable to your business it is time to get busy soliciting customer reviews. Google appears to be pulling reviews from these sites and several others: FlipKey.com (for real estate services), CitySearch.com (for restaurants and services), Maps.Google.com, Insiderpages.com (for restaurants and services), Judysbook.com, Tripadvisor.com, Superpages.com, Menuism.com (for restaurants), and others.

Google used to show reviews from Yelp.com, but after their deal to buy Yelp.com fell through Google does not appear to be showing reviews from Yelp. In fact, Yelp didn’t come up in a single review I saw as I did my research.

Reviews that you capture yourself by email or direct solicitation and post on your website are not considered by Google. The reviews must be on a third party website or on your Google Maps page itself. Read more…

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We Be Gaming Now!

Well my husband and I finally broke down and bought our kids a Playstation 3. We don’t have it yet, it is due in this week as the entire state of Maryland was sold out and we had to order it on Amazon. In the meantime we are dropping a ton of cash on buying games getting ready. In the future this should be a whole new topic – game reviews for parents, but in the meantime we are all looking forward to plugging in and powering up.

We decided to buy a Playstation 3 over the XBox 360 mainly due to the free online game access and the integrated Blue-Ray disk player that the Playstation has. My older son who is 20 is an accomplished gamer on all the systems, Wii, XBox, and Playstation and he said that the free online access was for him also the big reason he likes the Playstation as well and recommended it to us.

My husband and I originally started out to buy a Wii, but when we saw the graphics of the Wii compared to the Playstation and XBox there was simply no comparison. The Wii uses about 460 dpi and the Playstation and XBox about 1260. That’s a big difference in visual graphics!

The clincher for us was when we saw the Gods of War demo and the graphics were so life like it knocked our socks off. So stay tuned in the weeks and months to come as I play these new games and then pass on my candid, unvarnished, unpaid, for parent reviews.

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Article Syndication – Does It Work for Link Building Today?

I have to say that since Google really changed the way they count links I have been incredibly careful with not encouraging link bait articles as it has appeared that Google has devalued many of the links incurred this way. However I do want to share a new strategy with you that IS working for link building.

Currently we are using Google Knoll, American Chronicle, and www.GoArticles.com for several clients and post copies of their best topical blog posts there as well as on their blog. I was worried initially that this would not be a workable link-building strategy but have now been proved wrong with over three months of statistical data accumulated showing a positive trend in link building and documented referral traffic.

Here’s what we do. We select the top blog posts and then select two a week to post to Google Knoll, American Chronicle, and GoArticles.com. Since doing this for the last three months we have seen a slow but steady increase in links that Google is recording in the Webmaster Control panel. Additionally we have been able to see consistent referrals coming in from these three sites.

That is excellent news for building organic placement as link building with articles has always been an excellent approach but has been hampered with Google’s new link evaluation. The bottom line is that not all article sites will be good choices to focus on, but consider the top three that we have selected for your link building strategy as well.

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How to Add Our RSS Feed to Your News Reader

I’ve had a few blog visitors ask this question recently and want to share with you a few ways and ideas on RSS news feed readers.

First, you can access our feed by clicking the orange icon in your browser’s tool far near the “Home” button. When you click the feed, you will see that we have several RSS feeds you can subscribe to. Select one from the drop down and click. A new page will open which shows the address of our RSS news feed and also the content of the news feed. Depending on your RSS news feed reader you will add the address into it directly. Just grab the address from the address bar.

If you use IE 8, when you click the RSS news feed link, you can click subscribe right on the page and then access our news feed without even coming to our blog site. You access your subscribed feeds from a place near the IE 8 browser favorites bar.

If you want to start using RSS feeds but don’t know a good RSS news feed reader, I would recommend www.My.MSN.com. I used to love www.My.Live.com but it has been retired. To add our feed to www.My.MSN.com, you will need to set up an account (it is free) and then click “add content” near the top of your new account page. Then pasted in  my RSS feed address in the box subscribe to feed.

I read about 40 news feeds daily using www.My.MSN.com and am able to read the first paragraph or so from within the reader and can click in to read the full article if I want. Using a news feed reader I can scan volumes of content from sites that I monitor and then read only what I want very quickly. RSS news feed readers allow you to review a lot of content in a very short period of time.