nick roshon's thoughts about digital advertising, seo, and social media

In my latest iCrossing Great Finds blog post, I talk about the newly launched Google+ Pages, and how brands can optimize them for better visibility. If you own a business of any kind, now is the time to join Google+ and create a Page for your business – I hope this post is helpful to you in the initial setup of your page and making sure its findable by your customers & supporters.

Chances are you have started to create a Google+ Page or plan on creating one very soon. And chances are that you want your Google+ Page to be visible. Here are some quick tips to make sure your Google+ Page is findable in search engines and will contribute to your website’s overall SEO visibility.

Google+ Page Optimization Quick Tips

* Use your official business name. Your business name will also be your Page Title, which is an important ranking factor. However, do not insert keywords unless they are part of your official, trademarked name.

* Make sure you pre-populate your page with content before announcing it to your fans on other networks. That way, they’re more likely to add you to their Google+ Circles when they get to your page.

* Include your core generic keywords in your tagline if appropriate.

* Fill out as many of the fields as you can, and be sure to include various types of media (text, photos, video, etc.) so that search engines see a rich experience when they crawl your page.

Read more: http://greatfinds.icrossing.com/how-to-make-your-google-brand-page-more-visible/

In my latest post on the iCrossing Great Finds blog, I talk about how a partnership between Firefox & Bing could lead to a substantial gain in search market share for Bing, as well as a huge money maker for Firefox. Check out a short excerpt below, then head over to the Great Finds blog to read more!

Brands that invest in search engine marketing pay close attention to the market share of search engines like Google and Bing to inform their search spend. Hence search practitioners closely review monthly market share reports like this one – a process akin to watching grass grow given that market shares change by a fraction of a percent at most each month.

But recently a partnership with Yahoo! allowed Bing to increase its market share significantly (although mostly at the expense of Yahoo!). Soon Mozilla’s Firefox may force marketers to re-examine their search spend. A contract between Firefox and Google – which makes Google the default search engine for the Firefox browser – is set to expire in November 2011.

If Bing takes advantage of this situation by supplanting Google as the default Firefox browser, Bing could end up owning about 40 percent of the search market.

Read more over at Great Finds

Over at the iCrossing Great Finds blog I talk about a recent Live Chat with Google’s Matt Cutts, and some takeways that search marketers can use to learn more about SEO as well as become better communicators with Google. Check out the brief excerpt below, then head over to the iCrossing blog for more!

Today Matt Cutts, head of Google’s webspam team, hosted the first-ever live broadcast ofGoogle Webmaster Central on YouTube. For those of us lucky enough to be able to tune into the broadcast (it was announced on short notice), Matt shared some great takeaways about search engine optimization (SEO), how to communicate with Matt Cutts, and Google in general. Here are some takeaways about Matt, Google, and SEO.

Read more…