Some suggestions on how to get yourself or your business on to the front page of the search engines.
If you have not done so before, try Googling my name, Jerad Hill. All you see is me. If you Google Jerad Hill Studios, all you see is me and websites that I have profiles on. If you search for Website Design in Modesto, you will find me in a few different places.
Now that you have done those searches you are probably wondering how much time it took me to get listed on all of those website and set up those profiles. I want to tell you that it is easy to find these websites, easy to set up a profile and from there the search engines will crawl them and find you.
There is an amazing new website out there that allows you to search your username on all of the popular social networks, blog sites, photo sharing, video sharing and many other websites. Why would you want to do this? So you can make sure that your name or business name is on all of those websites. You are probably wondering why you need to be on all of those websites. The answer is that you really don’t. I am on almost all of them and I honestly only log into the majority of them if I need to change something like the URL to my website or an image. Otherwise I just use a select few of them.
The website is called http://friendscall.me
At Friendscall.me you type in your username and it goes out and searches all of the popular social webs to see if you have an account and if your username is available. You can then click on the link and register an account. With each account you can place your name or business name, an image, a URL link to your website, and a brief description about you or your business. The search engines crawl this information and display it. If you are having a hard time getting your website on the front page of Google but your Twitter account made it to the front page, who cares. Let them click on your Twitter account and then click on the link to your website. Friendscall.Me will show you a ton of websites you can register on and I suggest you put an account on as many of them as you can. This will take up some of your time, if you are fast you could get accounts set up on all of these websites in one day. If you really don’t have the time, then get your assistant to do it.
Updating all of these profiles at once. Like any good person you will worry about having an empty profile on many of these accounts. How on earth are you going to post content to all of these websites? It would be impossible to pull off if you have to log into each one, one by one. There has to be a better way. In fact there is…
HelloTxt.Com – http://hellotxt.com – Hellotxt allows you to update multiple social web accounts all at once. This is how I maintain a personality on all of these social webs and still manage to get work done and have a life with out my wife wanting to kill me. The first step is to create a Hellotxt account, the second step is to enter the login and passwords for all of your social web accounts, the final step is to enter your message and hit send. Hellotxt works from your computer and your wireless phone. You can share anything from specials you have going on to what it is you plan to do with your weekend. Really it does not matter to much so long as you have a presence on these websites and you don’t have to do it very often. It will not take over your life. I promise that.
As a professional in your industry you get all sorts of information sent to you that is interesting. This content you may even put into newsletters that you send off to your clients from time to time. This content is also something you can forward onto these social network accoutns. If you come across a cool article on your industry or something that interests you that you want to share with others, post it. You are creating a voice for yourself on that topic and you are informing others with information they will find relevant. Because these social websites are “share” friendly websites, people may even share that information with their contacts which will link back to you and create a new follower of your information, maybe even a potential customer. You can use these sites to create conversation starters that often result in people contacting you directly for more information.
Even if you do not want to participate on these websites, simply set up an account. Protect your username, you never know when/if you will want to use it. If the website gets out of control popular, your name or business name may be taken by then. Saving your username is just as important as buying your domain name to protect your brand these days. Whether you use it or not, it is going to help your search engine placement because the search engines see the links and the words associated with that account.
As you can probably tell by now, sometimes I go off on tangents. What started as a article to help you get ranked higher in the search engines has also became an article on the importance of protecting your brand. I’m just trying to help.
What have you done using the social web to help your search engine ranking? Share your thoughts with us below.