Promote your Business with Google Places

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In April last year Google introduced Google Places. Its purpose was to allow business owners to verify and supplement their business information and generally manage their presence on Google, but there are many more advantages to Google Places.

Google Places 0.5

Google Places - Splash Page

You can add the following information on Google Places:

  • Essential Facts about the business
  • Hours of Business
  • Geographic areas the business serves
  • Photos
  • Videos
  • Product Offerings
  • Coupons / Vouchers
  • Real-Time updates to your Place page i.e. promote a sale, a special event
  • Customers can leave a review of your business.

To add your business to Google Places follow the steps below:

  1. Sign in to the Google Account you want to register your business under. Note: If you don’t have a google account, you can register for one here also.
  2. Browse to Google Places
    3. Google Places 0.5

    Google Places - Splash Page

  3. Click on “Add new business”
  4. Fill in your business details:
    5. Google Places - Step 4a

    Google Places - Step 4a

  5. After you submit your details, Google will send you out a confirmation letter with a PIN. You need to enter this PIN in order to verify your address details.
    6. Google Places - Step 5

    Google Places - Step 5

  6. After confirming, you can access your Google Places Dashboard and see how many times users saw and showed interest in your business listing as a local search result. From here you can also modify your business info and post to your place page.

    7. Google Places - Step 6

    Google Places - Step 6

After you have added your business, it can appear in local search results. For example, the following search for “restaurants northern ireland” reveals the following:

Google Places - Results

Google Places - Results

Note that each of the results (A-G) has a Place Page link that can be clicked that will take the user straight to your business Place Page.

Google offer a personalised dashboard within Google Places that includes they keywords that people have used to find your business, how many times people have found your business and from what areas people have travelled from to visit your business.

Use Google Webmaster Tools to Avoid Duplicate Content

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In the General Guidelines for Google Webmaster Tools, Google advises that there are steps you can take to proactively address duplicate content issues and avoid receiving a duplicate content penalty. One such step is:

  • Use Webmaster Tools to tell us how you prefer your site to be indexed: You can tell Google your preferred domain (for example, http://www.example.com or http://example.com).

I recently set this up for my Abipo domain name and I had the choice of either:

  • Display URLs as www.abipo.com
  • Display URLs as abipo.com
Northern-Ireland-Google-WebMaster-Tools

Google Webmaster Tools

As I have always preferred the www prefix,  I chose the former: “Display URLs as www.abipo.com” . However, upon choosing this option, I received an error:

Part of the process of setting a preferred domain is to verify that you own http://abipo.com.  Please verify http://abipo.com.

As I had already uploaded a Google generated HTML file to the root directory of my Abipo web server I was thinking my sites WERE verified. I wondered why Google was asking to verify when it has already been done. Did I need to reverify?

The answer was I needed to verify the http://abipo.com domain AS WELL as the http://www.abipo.com domain name. This was done by visiting the Home Page of Google Webmaster Tools and clicking on “Add a site….”. After I did that, I was able to go back and specify http://www.abipo.com as my preferred domain for indexing.

Add ‘MailChimp’ eMail Marketing to your WordPress Blog

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MailChimp

Have you ever wanted to allow people to sign up for newsletter and email updates on your WordPress blog? It can be done very quickly and easily by adding the MailChimp plugin to your WordPress blog. The MailChimp plugin adds an email list subscription form to your WordPress blog and after subscribers submit their name and email address they are added to your subscriber’s list. Best of all, a Free account allows you to have up to 1,000 subscribers at no cost. Here are the steps to follow to get MailChimp up and running on your WordPress blog:

1. Log in to your WordPress control panel.

2. Select ‘Plugins’.

3. Click on ‘Add New’ (beside ‘Plugin’s)

4. Type “MailChimp” into the search box and click on ‘Search Plugin’s’.

5. Install ‘MailChimp List Subscribe Form’ by clicking on ‘Install Now’.

6. In a new browser window, set up a MailChimp account at http://www.mailchimp.com. You will need to create a new ‘List’ that your subscribers will sign up to.

7. Ensure you are logged in to the newly created MailChimp account, and then select ‘API Keys and Info’ from the ‘Account’ dropdown at the top left of the screen.

8. Select and copy the API key.

9. On your WordPress control panel, click on ‘MailChimp Setup’ under ‘Settings’.

10. Paste the API key into the API textbox and click on ‘Save and Check’. You should get the following message returned: “Success! We were able to verify your API Key! Let’s continue, shall we?”

11. Ensure the list you created in step 6 is selected under ‘Your Lists’. If necessary, click on ‘Update List’.

12. Find the header content textbox. In here you will put the text that will be displayed beside the subscription form. You would generally put a call to action here. For example, I put “sign up to the Abipo community.”

13. If you don’t want a “powered by MailChimp” message to appear underneath your form, uncheck the ‘Monkey Rewards’ checkbox.

14. Click on Update Subscribe Form Settings.

15. On your WordPress control panel, click on ‘Widgets’ under ‘Appearance’.

16. Drag the ‘MailChimp’ widget from the ‘Available Widgets’ section to the location of your choice. For example, I put my MailChimp widget in the sidebar.

17. You should now have a fully working solution. Go to your blog home page and subscribe to your own list so that you can test everything out. You can see how the form should look at http://www.abipo.com/blog.