Top 10 Google Search Features for Your Business

The people at Google are truly inspired! They are evolving their search engine into something that can be an incredibly powerful tool for business. There are a zillion things that Google can do for different parts of your business and in this post, I will highlight the top 10 Google search tools that will help your supply chain.

Since Google is just a click away, I think it's a very useful for everybody involved in the supply chain to be aware of how much easier it can make their lives. Everybody from traffic managers, to purchasing people, to accounting people and customer service will likely need to reference what Google can do during the course of the week. There are a lot of people who don't even know all of Google's capabilities. So without further ado, here is your:

12 Favorite and Little Known Tips for LinkedIn

Most business professionals are on LinkedIn at this point. LinkedIn tells us that:

• LinkedIn has over 70 million members in over 200 countries.

• A new member joins LinkedIn approximately every second, and
about half of our members are outside the U.S.

• Executives from all Fortune 500 companies are LinkedIn members.

To me that states clearly that if you have almost ANY kind of business and are prospecting, LI will be a good resource for you. But just setting up a profile and dabbling once a week or so is not going to do much for your prospecting efforts. Below are a few tips that not many folks know about, but are powerful techniques for increasing your visibility and maximizing that "inbound marketing" that Social Media is known for.

1. Create 3 saved searches. If you are doing a search on a company, person, industry or whatever, save your searches. At the top where you see the number of records in your search you'll see a "save this search" button - you get 3 if you are at the basic level. LI will send you a weekly email, if you want, to get updates to your search.

2. Recommendations are important, so ask for them. But make it easy. I first call or email my contact and ask if they will recommend me. If so, write the recommendatíon yourself - so you are sure that you are sending the right message. Be sure to talk about the problems you solved - that's really the point, isn't it?

3. Use the Question and Answer area to gain more visibility on the Internet. On the question that you answer you will see a "share this" with a drop down menu. You can email your network, Digg it, Bookmark the question on Delicious, or use the link provided in your answer and link to one of your blog posts, or somewhere else on your site to pull in traffic.

4. Join groups that are in line with your business, your objectives or your hoped for job. Fish where the fish are. The more "on target" the group, the more valuable the content they provide, and the networking opportunities will be.

5. Use groups to expand your network, but be selective. In the groups tabs, you will see "Groups Directory". Select that and on the next page use Search Groups, selecting "other" from the drop down categories menu. Join the groups that interest you. Once you are a member, you will have access to the members in that group. Try connecting with the ones that make sense. You might evaluate based on the size of their network, the type of company or industry they are in or how much interaction they have had with the group.

6. Did you know you can export your connections? Go to "Contacts." Then "Connections. " At the bottom of your Connections box is "Export Connections. " Export the connections and import them into your preferred address book. Do this frequently so you are consolidating all of your contacts in one spot (might be Outlook, Act, Salesforce).

7. Refer to both the LinkedIn Learning Center and their blog. The Learning Center is full of great tutorials and the blog has info on updated and new features with full explanations.

8. For better and more valued networking, when you invite someone to join your network, don't use the canned LinkedIn message. Say something about who you are and why you want to connect with that person.

9. To really maximize your profile, find one or two LinkedIn specialists (Google that phrase, or check Amazon for authors) and look up their profile. Study carefully and learn by example.

10. Be creative about how you use the Answers section. It can be used to ask for solutions to problems, for resources, for vendors, for processes. But it can also be used to find good connections, or find other groups you may want to join, to deliver information on your products or services, IF it provides an answer to the question. Sometimes you've got the perfect solution!

11. You can share a group with your connections - more value added to your community. When you are in a specific group, on the Overview tab you will see an option to "share group" and you can send an email to 50 of your connections.

12. Don't hop over the "People You May Know" suggestions that appears in the upper right corner of your home page. Expand the box and start connecting with people on an ongoing basis. This is a great way to widen your circle.

LinkedIn is a powerful tool for almost any social media objective - branding, lead generation, or job searching. Invest some time in learning the finer points - you will be glad you did.

By Elyse Tager

SEO Tips to Double Rankings, Traffic and Conversion

The only thing better than one search result in the top 3 positions in Google is two search results from a double ranking. This SEO tip works by pushing a competitor off the first page, broadening your websites keyword funnel and thereby doubling traffic and conversions.

Two Results are Better than One

I read somewhere that 87% of search engine traffic for a given keyword is allocated from occupying the Number 1 position in the search engine results page. If you understand SEO, then this post will share a quick method to double your SERP positions and to improve the likelihood of keyword conversions - once you have reached the Mecca for a specific search term.

SEO is predicated on one simple premise, rankings; in order for SEO to be effective, it must produce ranking on the first page in search engines.

Not only is this the crowning achievement of search engine optimization, but once you achieve a top 10 position, then you can pull other keywords into the spotlight as a result of strategic linking. We often refer to this as the buddy system for lateral linking.

Search engine algorithms pay particular attention to individual pages capable of offsetting all of the other inconsistencies of a competitor's web pages and deem one page worthy above all others for any given search term.

Obviously the metrics are unique for each market, keyword or niche, but the reality is the same, once a top 3 or more importantly Number 1 or Number 1, 2 and 3 positions are present in Google. I have mentioned before, the fastest way to get a top 10 position in Google is to get a link from a website already ranking in the top 10 for that keyword.

It does not matter if that link is provided from your website or another website, rankings are by the page and there is a daisy-chain effect of linking pages together that fuses the pages through a dynamic give and take relationship (based on citation). This citation can provide the algorithmic equivalents of trust needed for the newly linked page to jump in line past others duking it out for that keyword.

Depending on the competitiveness of the keyword or key phrase and the thresholds inherent to the barrier to entry; the time required to initiate a campaign, create all of the necessary content, inbound links and citation from other web 2.0 properties, RSS feeds and social bookmarking sites divided by the amount of time you invest managing or outsourcing the various components involved determine your profitability and return on investment.

With this in mind, from a tactical perspective, it's better to leverage the SERP positioning you already have than to look outside of your website for off page ranking factors. If you understand the power of a Number 1 position, then you can replicate this next simple SEO tip.

Identify all current Number 1 positions in Google for keywords.

Validate they still exist.

Use Keyword Research to find "related keywords" based on the Number 1 ranking Link from the page that ranks to a new page (using similar anchor text or overlapping keywords to promote the new page).

Let the new page get indexed, then check the SERPs.

Identify: My favorite tool for this is SEM Rush, but if you don't want to use this, there are other programs out there, or even Google webmaster tools can show you your website's top ranking SERP positions when you log in.

Either way, this is your base, so, identify the keywords which could represent hub status for your SEO campaign and pass along the power of ranking to other pages in your website.

Validate: Check to see if you still hold the Number 1 position, even a top 3 will do, but this tactic works better if you are at the helm of a particular search phrase.

Keyword Research: You should be able to gauge whether or not the keyword is profitable for you based on the frequency of hits and the type of traffic you garner as a result. You can always look through Google Analytics or whichever analytics package you have to assess the keywords that represent the highest percentage of traffic to your website.

Once you know what those keywords are, then use keyword research to find stemmed semantic variations that also fall under the same category or keyword cluster. Those related keywords will become the new focal point for step 4 - linking.

Linking: The closer the shingles (groups of keywords) the more effective this technique is. You can call this padding the search results (if you use similar exact match titles, tags or content), or you can pass this ranking factor along to help synonymous terms.

Simply go back and edit the page ranking in the Number 1 position and add a link to the new target page (with the keyword you intend the target page to rank for as the anchor text). Then, the authority from the page in the Number 1 position will gróup the new page under its umbrella and pull that page into the spotlight.

When the new page gets crawled and the old page reveals the connectivity between the two, typically a double SERP position occurs or a double position accompanied by jump links, breadcrumbs or the [+] with additional search results for that keyword appear in Google to showcase the degree of relevance your website has for the said term.

You can then build additional deep links from other sites or addition internal links to the newly dubbed page. As a result, you should see buoyancy for other pages for multiple keyword variations related to the parent keyword cluster.

With this simple tip you can double your conversions by increasing your website's semantic array of keywords. Obviously you will know which keywords and traffic is most lucrative for your business model, but this technique is priceless for creating controlled keyword stemming if you understand the implications underlying its premise.