Welcome to this weeks SEO Video tutorial, over the past two weeks we have covered the initial setup of Google places and the optimisation of the listing to improve the impressions for your business.

This week we will explain the analysis of your Google Places listings and the information displayed, we will then show how you can adjust your business’ information to improve the relation of the queries that your business appears for.

To see the analytics, click your business’ name. You are then shown the ‘dashboard’.

The first piece of information shows the date range, you can adjust this accordingly. By default it is set to 30 days or a month.

Next you have the ‘Activity’. This separated into Impressions and actions.

Impressions denote the amount of times your listing has appeared from a user query.

Actions then illustrates the amount of clicks from a user, so you can easily work of the CTR (Click through rate) by dividing impressions / actions.

Actions is also broken down further into ‘clicks for more info’ and ‘clicks to your website’.

(Show image) You can see the two options on an impression. The company name clicks through to the ‘website’ or the ‘more’ button displays the business’ Google places profile page.

Lastly the ‘top search queries’ show what keyword queries your listing is appearing for.

Looking at the ‘top search queries’ will allow you to decide whether what your current listing appears for is related to your business and your main services.

If you want to alter the ‘top search queries’ that your listing appears for, you can edit your business information on the right hand side. You should look to change the description, categories or areas of businesses to suit your business’ main services.

Thanks for watching if you have any additional information that can help optimise Google Places, please leave a comment on the supporting blog post.

In this weeks SEO video tutorial, Nick from the Creare Group explains how to best optimise your Google Places listing to try and improve the rate of impressions.

Welcome to this weeks SEO video tutorial, we are going to produce a 3 part series on Google Places. This will include the setup, optimisation and analysis.

Google places as it’s now known has evolved over the years, previous being called local business center and Google maps.

The tutorial this week will show how to add your company to Google Places.

Go to Google.com/lbc

Add new business

Login with your Google account or register with a new account.

Fill in the information about your business and click next.

Select either claim listing or add new listing.

Add the service information about your company including videos, photos, area’s of business etc.

The last step is to verify your listing, You can do this a number of ways including, Phone, SMS and Postcard.

Once validated, you will see listing in the Google places dashboard

Thanks for watching, next week we will show you how to optimise your new Google places listing to improve the possibility of impressions.

Welcome to this weeks SEO video tutorial, Most webmaster are familiar with Google Analytics and the data that it provides can help towards your websites development with both organic SEO and internet marketing.

Filters can improve the flexibility of Google analytics, allowing you to modify and customize data to suit your business.

Some of the more popular filters include:

• Removing traffic from internal sources (Checking your own listing.)
• Restricting data for a particular profile
• Customizing reports

Filters can be great, but they are permanent to a particular profile and once Google has passed the data through a filter it cannot be re-processed, filters forever modify the data within a profile.

For this reason we recommend that you set up a raw data profile before implementing any filters, we found the best way to do this is to apply filter to a new profile and keep any existing profiles as the raw data one.

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To set up a new website profile, go to your analytic settings next to the domain name on the right hand side and click ‘add new website profile’.

Ensure that you ‘Add a Profile for an existing domain’

Give the profile a name and make sure the domain and time zone is correct and click ‘continue’.

You will then see the profile appear in the analytics settings.

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Now you have set up your profile, can start to use either default filter applications or create a custom filter.

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To create a filter click the ‘edit’ button next your new profile.

Click the ‘add filter’ button next to the ‘Filters Applied to Profile’ option.

Here you have 2 options ‘Add new filter’ or apply ‘existing filter’.

You can use the ‘Apply existing Filter to Profile’ if you want to apply the same filter to multiple profiles.

For new filters, give the filter a name.

Next select either, Predefined filter or Custom filter.

You now have to select a filter that suits your target, we will show a simple example of excluding our own IP. This is so that our own Google queries and clicks don’t influence the reports shown.

To do this select: exclude > traffic from the ip addresses > that are equal too > enter IP address.

And save changes.

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The example shown was a simple exclude filter, but the custom filters are composed of 3 main parts:

1. Filter types -
   Exclude, Include, Lowercase/Uppercase, Search and Replace, Advanced.
   
2. Filter fields -
   Filter fields represent a wide range of information, I have attached a list in the resources on the supporting blog post.
   
3. Filter pattern -
   This can be exact matches of data or use data as part of regular expressions.

We hope this helps customise your data from Google analytics, The Google conversion university has a video blog on filters and profiles, which we have also added to the supporting blog post, this expands on filter types.

Thanks for watching.

Resources

• http://services.google.com/analytics/breeze/en/filters/index.html
• http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?answer=55588

A now removed Tweet by Digg founder Kevin Rose suggested Google were developing a social network to rival Facebook.

I can’t imagine it being too much of surprise to most people seeing how popular Facebook is and how much data they have access to.

Pete Cashmore, CEO of Mashable and social networking blogger for CNN, brought up some interesting points regarding Google’s possible entry into the social networking game.

Cashmore believes Google is growing envious of Facebook’s treasure trove of data it has collected (and continues to collect) from its users, especially since the ‘Likes’ feature was implemented into more than 50,000 websites. Meaning many users preferences are recorded allowing targeted and specific advertising.

As well as being envious Google is probably worried that Facebook could pose a threat to their own dominance/profit-margin.

The ‘Likes’ feature could form the foundations of a search engine, with ranking determined by the amount of ‘Likes’. It would only take a subtle change for Facebook to allow its users to search the Internet for relevant content from their profile or news page, more or less meaning people would be using Facebook for everything except shopping (which is bound to come).

Is there a demand for a Facebook rival? A little. Consumers like competition, it breeds choice, better service and cheaper prices and at the moment there is no real alternative to Facebook.

Within the next couple of years we will probably see Google jump into social networking and Facebook step up its SEO relevance. With Bing powering Facebook’s search engine it’s taken a small step but if the ‘Likes’ feature continues and maintains its popularity then we could be implementing ‘Likes’ onto all web sites.

P.S. The Internet changes so fast there’ll probably be some new form of communication this time next year; psychic or the use of robot avatars.