The Signs of Business

This will hopefully get you and your business started on taking advantage of all the things that Google offers for free. They have some amazing tools to help your website be more useful to the people who visit which, in turn, will make your website more attractive to search engines.

Let’s get started:

1. Gmail – Get a gmail account if you don’t already have one – you’ll need this later. Gmail
2. Log in – Go to google.com and make sure you are logged in using your previously created Gmail account. Click the ‘My Account’ link at the top right of your screen.
3. You will now see a listing of popular google services. As you use different services this list will be updated with the ones you use most often. You can access all the services by clicking the ‘More >’ link near the bottom of the page.
4. Local Business Center – Click the big ol’ ‘Add new business’ button and follow the instructions. You can upload pics, videos, add coupons. This will get you listed next to the map when someone performs a localized search.
5. Analytics – Your business has a website, right? Do you know how many people come to your website, what they do when they are on your website and when they leave? Google Analytics is the mechanism with which to track all of that. And it draws pretty pictures because words are so tedious. This will involve adding a bit of code to your website but the online documentation is pretty good. If you need help, send me an email.
6. Webmaster Tools – This is different than Analytics in that it will tell you how your site is accessed by Google’s spiders. The useful information that it tells is invalid or missing Meta tags, crawl errors, crawl stats. And this is where you Submit a Sitemap. You should always submit a sitemap. Read Google’s docs on how to create a sitemap, where it needs to be and where to upload it. A list of automatic sitemap creators has been kindly supplied by Google here. My favorite is GSiteCrawler though I haven’t tried them all.

This should be enough for starters. Spend some time making your Local Business Listing as filled out as you can make it. Add the coupons, upload pics and video.

Other things I like are ‘Blogger’ (duh), ‘Calendar’, and ‘Picasa’. ‘SketchUp’ and ‘Orkut’ and ‘Groups’ all sound very interesting and will be investigated in the near future.

Yahoo and Bing.com have some similar functionality but they are far more limited.