Are you Googley? No matter what area of business you are in, being Googley can help differentiate you from your competitors, at least according to “What Would Google Do?” by Jeff Jarvis.

In the book, Jarvis examines how Google operates and its core values: creation, openness, connections, uniqueness, collaboration, invention and keeping it simple. In previous podcasts I talked about Googlefying your business – that series was more focused on utilizing the many platforms Google has created to help you operate more effectively and efficiently in many ways. But by becoming what Jarvis called “Googley” a company is in essence taking the core values that Google has employed to better serve their clients. Whether or not you like Google (good reads: “Google Whacked” and “When Google Owns You”) some of the core values Jarvis outlines in his book should be fundamental in any business.

Fundamental values:

• Listen and monitor – What are customers saying about you and your competition? Where are they saying it?
• Collaborate and link – What do you do best? Focus on that and refine it. Make quality the one thing you do then collaborate and link with others who have different specializations. Linking to other bloggers helps you get found and increases your Google (or Bing) juice.
• Join and distribute – Your audience will likely not come to you, so go to them. Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, YouTube…if this is where they spend their time, it’s also where you need to spend yours. Engage, interact and find out what they want. Think about how you can utilize these platforms, like Foursquare, in a different way beyond a special deal for the “mayor.” If you are a restaurant owner or chef, is there room for collaboration with other restaurants to develop a Foursquare-specific deal?
• Innovate – As Jarvis points out in his book, Google employs a 20 percent rule in which technical employees are encouraged to use 20 percent of their time innovating and working on new ideas, products and businesses. It has spawned many of the new ideas and features that come out of Google. Jarvis recommends spending time each week researching, learning, experimenting and inventing.

Get out there and join your audience, the conversation could be taking place without you. Create, and make it easy for your customers to share you or your product with their friends online. Remember, contributing, creating and linking will make you more searchable. Lastly, innovate! It will likely be one of the most liberating things you do in business.

Resources:
1. “Five steps to a Googlier you”
2. “What Would Google Do?”

Question of the week:
Do you implement the 20 percent rule? If so, has it spawned any great ideas that you’ve tested?

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Is your site the top listed in Google search results? Or is it buried in the fifth “O” of Gooooogle? There are a few good practices you can implement to influence Google’s algorithm and improve where you land in search engine result page (SERP).

This post will concentrate on two key influencers of search results – relevance and authority – and how to impact them – that is if you don’t hire someone that specializes in search engine optimization (SEO). Keep in mind, there are many schools of thought on SEO tactics, but a good, searchable site starts with great content and structure. For a more basic overview refer to “Googlefying Your Business: Understanding Google Basics.”

1. Relevance (on-page SEO) – determines how closely a given Web page matches the search term. This is where keywords, tags, attributes, content and anchor text become important.

• Keywords – determine which keywords are relevant to your industry and which are being searched the most. Refer to your Google Analytics and Webmaster accounts for some insight on the words searchers are using to find you and include them throughout your site.
• Page Title – this appears at the top of the browser window and as the link in search engine results page (SERP). It helps Google determine the content of the page and helps searchers determine whether or not to click on your link. Be sure to use descriptive keywords.
• Page Description – information about the page or a snippet about what the searcher will find on the page. While meta descriptions won’t impact page ranking, good descriptions will make searchers more likely to click on your page.
• URLs – Again this is where rich keywords can be used to impact SEO and your click-through-rate. Also be sure to customize your URLs to match the page. For example, for an “About Us” page, the URL should read http://example.com/AboutUs.
• Images – Google doesn’t read images, so if you do use them, use an “ALT” attribute to include a few words of readable, descriptive text.
• Content – Create useful, relevant information. Sites rich with information will naturally use more keywords and potentially gain more inbound links.

2. Authority (off-page SEO) – This is another element that can influence Google’s algorithm. Some might argue it is the primary influencer. It is a measurement based on the number of inbound links on your page from other pages and their authority – not all inbound links are created equal. How do you build your authority?

• Interact – get out there and post to other blogs. Don’t spam, but offer thoughtful responses to blogs you are already reading and that interest you. Once you post your comment a trackback will be created.
• Blog – the more thought-provoking, useful content you create, the more comments and references you are likely to receive.
• Anchor text – this is the visible, clickable text in a hyperlink that usually gives the user a relevant description of the link’s destination. Using relevant keywords as anchor text can help with search results.

There are countless ways to impact SEO, but this should give you a good base to start from. I’m curious what SEO tactics have been used? What has been successful? What hasn’t worked?

For the audio interview click the play button below, and for the video podcast visit

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Are you being found on Google? If not, how can you be sure that you are? After you’ve run your site through Websitegrader.com, created Google Webmaster and Analytics accounts, and submitted your URL and Sitemap to the major search engines, understanding the basics of how Google works can help you improve where you show up in search results.

As part two of this four-part series on “Googlefying Your Business,” this post will cover a brief anatomy of Google. While Google uses an intricate algorithm to determine search ranking, there a few key components to improving your search results:

• Crawling – this is how the Googlebot discovers new and updated pages to be added to the Google index. Google regularly crawls the web – a process that can be enhanced by providing your Sitemap data to the search engine – and detects links on each page of the sites it visits. It adds these links to its list of pages to crawl. More inbound links can equal more crawls. In other words, the more sites you have linking back to or referencing your site the better.
• Indexing – the Googlebot reads every page it crawls and compiles an index of the words and their location on these pages. When a search is conducted Google looks through the billions of pages in its index and delivers the best result based on relevance and authority. This is also where keywords come into play. Key content tags and attributes like Title tags and ALT attributes are all processed. To help ensure the site is indexed you can also manually add it to Google.
• Serving results – when a search is conducted, Google searches its index for matching pages and returns, or serves, the most relevant results. Relevancy is based on hundreds of factors, but a couple important factors are keywords and incoming links from other pages. Simply put, each link to a page on your site from another site can help improve your site’s search-ability. We’ll delve a little deeper into affecting search results in the next blog. In the meantime, visit Google’s Webmaster Guidelines for a few tips.

With these three components, and a basic understanding of how Google works, you can begin to think about how to improve your site and increase your ranking. If you’ve recently gone through this process, what did you find to work the best? Feel free to share any tips or tools.

If you are serious about improving your SEO, I recommend contacting an SEO specialist. For more tips and tricks checkout Chuck Reynold’s blog at rYnoweb. Another good read Inbound Marketing by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah.

For the audio interview click the play button below, and for the video podcast visit JetPack Radio.

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