October 2011 Newsletter

In This Issue:

Random Free Hosting Site

We'd like to congratulate Barrel Designs for being the winner of this month's free site hosting. At the beginning of each month we will call up our own site's homepage. Whomever's site is the featured site when the page loads will get FREE hosting of one domain for one month. It's just our way of saying thank you.

Get Your Google Places Listing Found

1. Be Consistent in Your Address and Phone Number - When Google's bot visits your site, it reads "123 Austin Street" as something different than "123 Austin St." It's best to use the post office's official listing.

2. Use a Local Phone Number - Show your local number as your primary phone and show the toll-free number as an additional one. Remember, Google is trying to show "local" results and using your local number with a local area code helps.

3. Get Consistent in How You List Your Company Name - If your company name is "Romantic Bed and Breakfast"  don't show "Romantic Bed and Breakfast" in one place, then in another place put "Romantic B&B". Just like with addresses and phone numbers, the search engines may think those are two different companies.

4. Fill in Your Web site's URL - Lots of persons miss this all the time. And if your site shows as www.yoursite.com/, don't list it in your Places page as www.yoursite.com . That tiny difference can be a problem.

5. Post Reviews - Posting reviews from happy customers is one of the most powerful things you can do to get your "Places" page ranked well. Encourage your customers to find your Places page and then write a review. Reviews on your Places page are particularly important in pushing it to the top of the search results, which gets you more clicks. Plus, it helps build credibility so you get more clicks to your site.

6. Get Citations - Citations are mentions of your site in other places and directories, such as Superpages.com, Yelp, Citysearch, your Chamber of Commerce listing, and other directory-type places you ought to get yourself listed in. Every time you get listed some place and get a citation, you beef up your importance with Google, which helps your site attain a higher rankings.

7. Post Photographs and Videos - Pictures and videos are appealing to your visitors and Google loves them. So take full advantage of the ability to post them on your Places page. It's just as important there as it is on your Web site.

The above suggestion can be done by anyone, even people without a lot of technical knowledge. Of course, you can outsource the task to HUEY Productions to save you time.

How To Use Testimonials

If the testimonial is not really difficult to understand it is best to leave a testimonial in the person's originally submitted text. In most cases the reader can see if the testimonial has bee edited and will put less faith in what it says.

It's best to include the person's full real name and other relevant data, such as their company and job position, or location and age. The idea is to make the comment as meaningful and credible as possible to those who will be reading it.

Post small snippets of testimonials where they will support best your company's message.

Use bold font on the part of the sentences you want to draw visitor attention to.

Encourage additional testimonials interacting with customers. If someone says something nice about you, ask right then and there if you could use their words as a testimonial. See if you have any reviews on Yelp.com or other online review sites, and if you do, also bring those into your site.

And don't forget to encourage persons to submit photos or videos as they hold more weight than does written testimonials.

Old Article Worth Seeing Again

Survey Monkey

Wish you could easily survey your customers or guests and see what kind of experience they had at your business? Survey Monkey offers a free limited account that stores 100 responses. Survey Monkey is an easy-to-use tool for the creation of online surveys. Its primary strength is its intuitive Web interface, which makes it easy for even non-technical folks to create surveys and export collected data.

It’s easy to use and very flexible—especially when creating questions and accessing survey results.