Get on Page One of Google Search Results

…EIGHT Separate Ways

Google “Everything” (also referred to as “blended search results”, or “universal search”) provides companies with several opportunities to appear on the first page of natural search results. The days of search results pages (SRPs) being limited to text links are ancient history. SRPs now includes a variety of results, from tweets to images and videos. We encourage you not to limit yourself to just one link presence on the first page, but to go for as many listings as possible. The larger your presence on that first page, the better your click-through rate (CTR) and brand recall will be.

We’ve compiled a list of eight opportunities for landing on page one of SRPs for your keywords that are relevant to most business types, together with a “Cliff’s Notes” version of key points on how…

Ad:Tech, Facebook and Earnings: Things Are Looking Up

More Big News in Web, Mobile and Social Marketing

It’s been another big week in Silicon Valley. The annual Ad:Tech San Francisco Conference is wrapping up today after playing host to 12,000 visitors and a huge range of exhibitors anxious to show off the ways in which they’re innovating across traditional, online, search and mobile advertising.

At the same time, Facebook kicked off its Developers’ Conference, called F8, also in the Bay Area. Like Twitter’s conference last week, the gathering is for third-party developers of applications that live on Facebook itself and across its growing ecosystem. Founder Mark Zuckerberg (pictured above, at the opening of F8 on April 21, 2010) announced a stunning array of changes and new initiatives that will directly affect the nearly 500 million people who visit the site each month.

But wait, there’s more: Google, Apple and…

Twitter’s Big Week

New Announcements Abound at the Chirp Developer Conference

Twitter is suddenly more all over the news than usual. So what’s all buzz?

Turns out, lot’s of things.

First, let’s start with the big event: today was the first day of Twitter’s inaugural developers’ conference called Chirp. This is a gathering of just under 100 geeks at San Francisco’s Palace of Fine Arts who build applications that rely on Twitter feeds (or APIs) to provide a Twitter-related service to end-users (that would be you and me.) Company co-Founder and CEO, Evan Williams said that developers using the Twitter API make about three billion calls a day into the service.

These applications make it easier for individuals and businesses to, for instance, send tweets from their desktops or mobile devices across multiple accounts (Seesmic or TweetDeck), or to send pictures via Twitter (TwitPic), or…

Aardvark, an Awesome Wave and a Good Buzz

Google’s Social Revolution

Last week’s announcement of Google’s (relatively small) acquisition of Aardvark, the real-time social Q&A start-up, received a fair amount of buzz.  Which was on top of the abundant buzz generated by Google’s release of Google Buzz.  Which, of course, follows last year’s buzz about Google Wave.

Though Wave, a social collaboration tool, is kind of uber-geeky and not particularly intuitive, Google Buzz draws on a now well-known metaphor: the news feed.  And while it has generated some early heat around privacy issues, Google Buzz (in its most current form – they’ve been updating it nearly daily in response to user reactions) draws on your Gmail and chat contacts to form an instant social graph.  That graph enables you to stay connected with your contacts in much the same way you would via Facebook or Twitter (or, more accurately, FriendFeed before…

Social Media Marketing Part 2: Social Media Avenues

Or: What Goes Where?

In Part One of our Social Media Marketing Series, we covered the fundamentals.  What follows is a checklist of great social sites to leverage along with how to get it going and the content you can put into each spot:

If you haven’t done it already, create a Facebook Page for your business (type “Facebook Pages” into the search box when in your personal Facebook account page to find the section, and then click on the “+ Create Page” button to get started).  Once this is done, the obvious next step is to get people to become “Fans” of your business:

- Ask all of your friends and family

- Run a contest to past customers, complementary businesses, or local organizations to get some fans

- Offer a promotional rate to Facebook fans

- Promote your Page in your…