Getting Into Google Places for Inclusion in Google Maps and Google Main for Local Search Results:

Much like their main search index, Google Local is the most popular local search engine out there with current estimates (at the time of this writing) providing Google between 65-70% of the search market share.

When we say local search engine, we mean submitting a search query using a search engine to find a product or service that is usually delivered locally. Searches results from searches performed on Google Maps or Google’s main or primary search engine are sourced from Google Places’ business listings. Google Places was originally called Google Local but was re branded Google Places in mid 2010.

Lets start out with two examples:

Example one, search for Lawyer, Albany, NY from Google.com, sometimes referred to as the Google "main"or "primary" search engine. The follow search results are returned:

You can see from the search results that Google understands the local intent of the search given the location information provided (in this example, Albany, NY) and the local search results are integrated into the Google Search results where A, B are locations that are in view of the screen shot and on the right side, we can see a map with a number of search results for local lawyers.

All of the local search results are sourced from Google Places business listings.

In the second example, we will begin the same search (Lawyer, Albany NY) but start our search from Google Maps.

The Google Maps Search Results are overlay ed on a local map and represented with letter push pins that correspond to listings in the left margin. Again, these business listings were sourced from Google Places. Hopefully you are begenning to see how important it is to have a business listing in Google Places to "put your business on the map."

Google Places Add Your Business Listing – Step by Step HowTo

 

1. Go to Google Places. Before creating your Google Places business listing, Google recommends reading their Google Places quality guidelines and Local listings content policy

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2. If you already have a Google Account, sign in with your email and password. If you have a gmail account, then you can use that login/password combination.
3. If you don’t have a Google Account, click sign-up page and create a Google account as this is required to create your Google Places business listing.

   

4. Note: Planning is important as Google Places accounts are not transferable. For shared accounts, consider creating a shared Google account that you would be comfortable providing others access.
5. Check for your business by searching on your business phone number. Phone number is the search key that Google Places uses to check its database to see if the business associated with that phone number is in the Google Places Database.

   

6. If your business is listed as one of the search results, click Edit. If you did not find your business listing in the search results, you will be presented the option to Add new business starting with adding Basic Information.

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7. Fill out the basic information about your business. This includes:
   • Company/Organization: This is the official/registered name of your business.
   • Address (required): The address should look exactly the way you’d write it on a standard mailing envelope. If you are a service-area business, you’ll be able to hide your address in a few steps.
   • Phone Number (required): Be sure to include the area code with your phone number.
   • Website: Your website URL can be a maximum of 255 characters.
   • Description
   • Categories: Enter several categories to describe your business, to make it easier for others to find when they search Google. Google will automatically suggest categories as you type. Make sure you choose one Google-suggested category before adding customizable categories. You can enter up to 5 categories for your business.
8. Enter additional business details, including:

   

   • Hours of operation: Select your hours of operation using the drop down menus. If would prefer not to specify your hours of operation, keep the radio button selected next to “I prefer not to specify operating hours.”
   • Payment options: Select the checkboxes next to the payment methods that your business accepts.
9. Add rich media such as business photos, videos and additional details to your business listing, then hit submit:

   

   • Photos: Use the photo up loader to add a photo from your computer, or specify a URL to add a photo from the web. You can add up to 10 photos to your listing. To learn more about adding photos, check out the User Guide.
   • Videos: To add a video, upload it to YouTube and copy and paste the URL to your Places listing. You can add up to 5 videos to your listing. For help with uploading your video to YouTube, read the article on how to upload a video in the YouTube Help Center.
   • Additional details: Use this section to add custom information fields to your listing. For example, parking availability, or whether your business allows pets. Learn more about useful custom attributes to add to your listing.

10. You can preview your listing as it will appear in Maps on the right side of your screen. New information will appear in the preview as you enter it. When you’re satisfied with your listing, click Submit at the bottom of the page.
11. Choose how you would like to verify your listing and click Finish.

    

    Note: Phone verification is real-time and verification by post card sent via the USPS can take anywhere from 2-3 weeks. This verification step is designed to protect business owners against a non-owner creating or manipulating a business owners listing without the owners consent.

Q&A with Arete’ Coaching and Consulting

Interview Video Transcript

Brian: So Rick, What is eBiz ROI?

Rick: eBiz ROI is an Internet Marketing Service Provider helping companies of all sizes leverage the power of the Internet to grow their sales profitably while increasing their marketing return on investment.

Brian: A lot of our viewers are small business owners. The internet is pretty intimidating. What advice would you give them to get the most value out of the Internet?

Rick: There are three things that I tell all entrepreneurs and clients looking to get the most value out of the Internet for t heir business.

1. And the first thing that we tell them is to get a website, some kind of web presence, even if that is a Facebook page or a Twitter Page, but ideally a website or a blog where they can manage their own content on.
2. The second thing that I tell entrepreneurs is that they need to drive traffic. They need to have a plan to drive targeted traffic to their websites.  `When I say targeted traffic, I am talking about visitors that are searching for the very products and services that that entrepreneur offers as part of their business.
3. The third thing is to be able to measure what is going on so they need to have an analytics package in place. The good news is there is a free one available that lots of businesses use. With the analytics package in place, they can know who is coming to their website at some level, where that traffic originated from, What search terms they used to find the site and all this information is useful information to visitors into customers and to maximize your return on investments for Internet marketing.

Brian: I think that we understand that everybody needs to have a web presence, but how do we get found on the Internet?

Rick: Getting noticed on the Internet really involves three aspects. The first aspect is traffic, the second aspect is the search engines and the third aspect is local search engines.  What I mean by traffic is getting noticed on the Internet is really about getting traffic to your website;  targeted traffic; people that are searching for the very products and services that your company offers.  Search engines are the mechanisms that people use to get to websites. If you think of your own personal search experience, perhaps maybe how you got to this content, through a search engine looking for a very specific piece of content. Google happens to be the biggest without 65% of the total searches.
For  Local Search, it’s a specialization within search with about one Billion searches per month in terms of US search volume. About 90% of people go to local search first for information about local products and services that of offered. Of those people, Of those 90%, 86% will result in either a phone call, an email or a visit to a physical brick and mortar store.
So you can understand that utilizing traffic, the search engines and local search in coincident is very important to local entrepreneurs.

Brian: So what does it take for a business to get on local search?

Rick: Local search and a business getting into the position to take advantage of local search involves building profiles on what I consider to be the top four local search sites.  So what you do is you register your username, build a profile, then you take information about your business such as the categories, the products and the services that you offer. You populate those profiles then you go through a validation step where you actually validate the profiles through different mechanisms.

Brian: Our clients are very busy and it is clear that this is really important, how long would this normally take to get done?

Rick: So the time that it can take to do this can very based on your technical aptitude, but what we have found is that on average, it takes people a day or more to create these profiles which are still well worth it.

Brian: Wow Rick, that sounds like a lot of time. What are my options?

Rick: Well there are two options. If you are inclined to be a do it yourself person, then you can have a Step by Step Local Search HowTo Guide that I will offer to viewers of this video free of charge. Also, for viewers of this video, I am offering an exclusive package where I will go an have eBiz ROI create those profiles on your behalf, and for the cost of less than a print advertisement in a local circular, you can perpetual ads in these local search engines and be in the places where your customers are looking for your products and services.

Brian: Rick, that sounds great, how do our viewers get in contact with you?  There are three ways to get in touch with eBiz ROI. The first way is through the phone at 518 557-3502. The second way to get in touch with eBiz ROI is via email at sales@ebizroi.com and the third way is through the website at www.ebizroi.com.

Online Commercial Intent is Critical to Keyword Research

 

OCI, OCI, come out, come out wherever you are? Does anyone know where the Microsoft Adlabs OCI data went? Somewhere along the line last week, while performing keyword research for a client, I noticed that the tool used, which I like precisely because it merges Microsoft OCI (Online Commercial Intent) information and marries it with Google Keyword Tool data, was unable to retrieve the OCI data.

click image for view of full resolution screen capture of keyword analysis sans Microsoft Adlabs OCI data

You will notice on this keyword research, the OCI column (one on the far right, column heading is covered up by tools definition of OCI) remained conspicuously blank. After several attempts to retrieve the OCI data within the tool, I decided to take matters into my own hands and go directly to the source, http://adlab.microsoft.com/ which the is the Microsoft Adlabs web page.

Much to my surprise, after several attempts, the following error message was the only feedback from Google Chrome: “This web page is not available.”

The web page at http://adlab.microsoft.com/ might be temporarily down or it may have moved permanently to a new web address.” Could this be a denial of service attack or a change in strategic direction by Microsoft Advertising Solutions.

Feeling confident that surely a search of Google News would turn up something, especially if I filtered the search results to be in the last 24 hours. But Alas. Nothing. Widen to the search to last week. Still nothing. OUCH!

OK. Time to get serious about researching where my source of OCI data went. Let’s twitter this dilemma and see what Microsoft Adlabs is saying or what at least what other Internet marketers hearing about OCI data availability. A search of Microsoft Adlabs returned minimal results. as seen by the image below.

Search term volume and competition data is necessary but not sufficient for complete keyword research

It seems like there are not too many other Internet marketers concerned about the loss of this unique perspective on keywords, namely, what is the commercial intent of a search. Is it informational like “how to open a PayPal account” or is it navigational like “official Nike website” or is it likely to be transactional like “find a fee-based advisor”? Maybe Coxymoney or jenovate can comment. Techies and marketers, where did our OCI friend go?

It seemed like Microsoft Adlabs OCI was the only source of data in the industry that was free, publically available and designed to measure the commercial intent of a keyword. Knowing the search volume and competition for certain keywords is necessary, but not sufficient. Having at least one trusted data source to determine the likelihood of a search term to convert was HUGE!

Mr. Microsoft Adlabs, can OCI come out an play? OCI, OCI, come out, come out, wherever you are! Those with info, do share!!

Internet privacy concerns affect businesses whether they are an e-commerce company leveraging Internet marketing services to increase sales and drive down marketing cost per sale, or a services business using the Internet to market to prospects and generate leads through different inbound marketing techniques.

A great technique used by most successful Internet marketers is to capture lead information through what is called an “opt-in” form on your website to capture visitor information. This is a tried and true Internet marketing technique used by service businesses to feed and grow their sales funnel. The barrier to success is often instilling sufficient confidence in your web site for a visitor to submit their name, email address and other personal information online.

Online Trust is Earned and Should Never be Assumed

Visitors are much more likely to provide personal information such as name and email on websites that have an obvious (translated to “easy to find”) privacy policy. A privacy policy should be accessible from any page of the web site and provide easy to understand information about what information is collected (personally-identifying versus non personally-identifying information), how it is collected, what it will be used for, who it will be shared with and under what conditions.

Some of the readers of this post will no doubt say hogwash, who reads those privacy policies anyway? While that is a semi valid point given that most people will not read too deep into a privacy policy, some not even looking at it at all. But, and there is always a but, not having a prominently accessible privacy policy is both noticeable to visitors, even the ones who won’t read it, and speaks volumes about how visitors personal information is likely to be handled (translated “mishandled”). Having a privacy policy on your web site is an important component of any Internet marketing strategy, especially for services businesses built on trust and focused on Internet marketing for lead generation including doctors, lawyers, accountants and financial advisers.

Internet Marketing Model – Give and You Shall Receive

In Internet marketing, the model is give first before receiving. Sort of like the old water pumps used in older water wells where you primed the pump with a little bit of water, using it to get more water than you needed. In other words, people need some kind of incentive to share their personal information with companies they come in contact with on the Internet. Typically the kinds of incentives that work well are providing easy and in some cases, exclusive access to high quality, specialty content delivered periodically via email. Many times, people will be reluctant to share their email address based on negative experiences they have had in the past where their email address and possibly other information was sold to third parties by unscrupulous Internet marketers collecting their private data.

The good news is that writing a privacy policy is not like a creative writing assignment from the six grade. In fact, not much creativity at all is required to write a simple and easy to understand privacy policy for a business website. A method commonly used is to review privacy policies of companies that are large well respected brands. If they are trusted brands, why not model a privacy policy after theirs? Also be sure to include an email address and/or physical mailing address where questions and concerns can be sent, then be sure to respond in a timely manner. These are a few Internet marketing best practices to ensure that privacy concerns don’t inhibit visitors from participating fully in your online initiatives.

Mid to large companies, at least well-run ones, data backup and recovery procedures are managed by a dedicated IT department. For small businesses, data backup for disaster recovery is often overlooked until disaster strikes and the lack of a recovery path becomes alarmingly apparent. The impact to the small business from an unrecoverable data loss can be huge.

Those that have had a hard drive crash before and lost valuable data are likely to have a data backup and plan for disaster recovery. For those lucky enough to have not experienced this kind of loss, the need and risk may be less evident. For those small businesses that only have one copy of business-critical data that is not backed up, that data is vulnerable and at risk, a risk that and and should be mitigated. Often times, a virus or hardware failure can result in severe data loss. More times than not, this lost data cannot be recovered or can only be recovered at a very high cost by experts specializing in data recovery.

Small businesses should back up customer data, accounting information, customer deliverables and important, business-related email messages. There are many other small business data areas that should be backed up, but the list provided is intended to provide the reader a starting point and food for thought, hopefully getting them to think, then act.

For instance, for a small business may publish a blog as part of its Internet marketing efforts. The effort for this kind of marketing activity is typically significant, even if only blogging once or twice a month. What is the impact to a small business suffering a data loss of 100 blog posts or a year’s worth of content from your Facebook page that was not backed up? This kind of data is often overlooked in a data backup and recovery plan, but is valuable to the small business nonetheless.

Small business must think of their data in terms of a key business asset and value that asset as by the commercial value of time spent creating that data as well as the effort to recreate the data if a data loss incident occurs. Small business data backup for disaster recovery must be viewed as critical investments required to protect valuable business data.

The good news is that there are now a number of affordable solutions for small business data backup for disaster recovery in the market that make backing up businesses critical data virtually effortless. Many of these small business data backup solutions for disaster recovery are configured on installation and then automatically back-up any data files that have changed since the previous data backup, backing up data online efficiently, using the least amount of bandwidth and computer processing power to protect value business data. Some software data backup solutions will initiate an online incremental backup automatically when the computer is idle for 30 minutes, making the backup process both automatic and nonintrusive.

The nice thing about the currently available small business data backup for disaster recovery services is that they are that “set it and forget it” without requiring IT knowledge or skills often required for proprietary data backup and recovery solutions. All online data backup services provide the added benefit offsite storage which is some industries, is a requirement. This protects small business from suffering a data loss from equipment theft, fire or other common data loss hazards. For small businesses that rely solely on external hard drives, the risk is that external hard drives are usually stored next to the computer whose data they are used to back up and unless your thief or fire is IT-sensitive with some conscious, there goes your back-up with your data!

With these small business data backup for disaster recovery services starting in the neighborhood of $60/yr/computer, there is no more need for old school, weekend, hard drive swap rally’s at the local safety deposit boxes just to achieve offsite backups and protect data critical to your small business.

Based on Unbiased Advice and Real World Experience

1.) Look for Unbiased Web host Reviews – This can be difficult in the world of Super Affiliates who build lucrative, legitimate businesses around ranking high for search terms live “webhosting reviews.” Since affiliate review sites generally only cover hosting companies with affiliate programs where they are members and can earn a commission when someone gets to a hosting providers web site through the affiliate site and then buys. Therefore, while this is a completely legitimate business model, the reviews from web hosting review sites run by affiliates are, by the very nature of their compensation models, not unbiased.

A great source for evaluating hosting companies from a business perspective is the better business bureau, an unbiased third party resource.  It is very easy and quick to check any web hosting company out on the BBB website at www.bbb.org. Rest assured, there are plenty of well-known, established hosting companies with BBB rating of A- or better, so there is absolutely no reason to select a web hosting company with a questionable BBB rating.

2.) Compare Web Host Uptime SLAs (Service Level Agreements) – i.e. What % of time do they guarantee that your web server will be available. 99.9% is pretty standard. This might sound like a high % of uptime, but .1% downtime translates into just over 8 hrs and 45 minutes a year which might not seem too bad unless it happens to be the time that an important customer or prospect or even you yourself are trying to access the website. Some hosts will provide rebates or discounts to offset hosting costs when an unschedule outage occurs for prolonged period, violating the uptime SLA.

It is not practical to expect 100% uptime and don’t believe web hosting providers that claim this. Some down time is required to perform routine maintenance to keep the web hosting environment secure by applying software bug fixes, maintenance and security patches. Most reputable companies will perform server maintenance during periods of historically lighter traffic.

3.) Compare Web Host Customer Service –  When comparing web hosting plans, it is good to see what kind of customer support they provide. There is no question that either you, someone in your company or maybe a consultant that handles your website and other Internet marketing initiatives, will need to rely on the web hosting customer service department to get an important task accomplished. It’s not a matter of if, but when. You will want to make sure that you hosting company has 24x7x365 phone support available, preferably staffed with consultants that have the same first language as you do which will faciliate communication.

Since customer service is one of the key distinguishers when evaluating web hosting companies, it is worth investing the time to call sales or support representative to ask a business or technical question and to evaluate the hold time experienced and the quality of support received. Remember, once you are a customer and you need support for an online business continuity issue, just think about the difference that good support will make in obtaining a timely solution.

4.) Read the Web Host Terms of Service, paying special attention to things like how they define “reasonable use” which are used to place limitations on the “unlimited storage”, “unlimited bandwidth”, “unlimited email accounts” and other items used in the sales collateral and advertisements of the web hosting companies that compete for your businesses. Other nice things to find in a web host terms of service include a money back guarantee with a prorated refund. There are reputable web hosts that provide 30 day money back guarantee and even one that at the time of this writing provides a money back guarantee for the life of the service term. 

The other thing to consider is that as the number of visitors to your website increase, you want to be sure that your web host can support a graceful scaling to account for increase bandwidth and serving requirements as your business and traffic grow. This is especially important when deploying your website on a shared virtual server hosting environment. In this kind of environment, the web server that is serving your web pages is running on a server that is running lots of other web servers shared across a number of websites, all running on the same physical computer. Experienced hosting companies understand how to load balance in a way to ensure that performance is maintained. The key metric to track is page load time as users have little patience to wait for slowing loading web pages. Search results also factor in page load time when determining a page’s position in the search results.

5.) Web Host Redundancy is key – Make certain that any web host that you are considering has multiple data centers so that an outage in one data center does not necessarily mean that your website will go offline. Most will have back-up power, including diesel generators and in one known case, wind power to keep the servers running in the event of an outage. They should also have redundant network connections so that if one network is down for some reason that the back-up network will keep your website, and therefore, your web server, connected to the Internet and accessible by customers.

Remember, finding a good web hosting company is important, especially if you have a web host that has caused you grief and lost business in the past and you are looking to switch to a new provider. If you have tips to add based on your own experience, please comment on this post to share your wisdom.

Online Article Marketing Defined

Online article marketing is the practice of writing articles to give your business, brand, product or service a visibility boost . In fact, Article Marketing is a key component of an overall public relations strategy and is a tried and true marketing practice that has been around for centuries.

Prior to the emergency of the commercial Internet in the early to mid 90s, Article Marketing relied on print publications for article distribution and to achieve broad reach. This included newspapers magazines, trade journals and other periodicals. Article inclusion in these print publications is at the discretion of the editorial staff and the fit of the article with the editors needs at the time of submission.

Today the Internet has given emergence to a new Article Marketing distribution channel provides the opportunity for worldwide reach. There are a number of reputable online article marketing sites online that have editors who actively manage quality.

Benefits of Online Article Marketing

• Increasing reach for existing content: These article marketing directories increase readership of content by making that content easy to find for their millions of users and getting that content indexed quickly by the major search engines making it easy for relevant Internet users not currently members of these sites to also find your content. Another way that online article marketing directories increase reach is through syndication where other members can republish your content while providing you attribution and if included in your article, links back to your website.
• More cost effective than other forms of advertising: Online article marketing costs only the time to write and submit articles. If time is your scarcest resource, then it is possible to hire resources to write and submit articles on your behalf. The real efficiency and returns are achieved when publishing existing content you own, where the cost limited time it takes to post content to the chosen online article marketing directories.
• Establish expertise to your target market: Publishing quality articles through a trusted online article marketing site boosts your credibility with readers. Quality articles that enable readers to solve problems based on sharing your relevant knowledge is an effective way to establish yourself as an expert in your field. Your author bio box is the tool to promote your own website and personal brand that can be used to drive targeted traffic to your website. Satisfied readers will want to read more about the same topic that you have written about and the resource box is the place for links back to your additional content.
• Create Website Traffic: Since the top online article marketing directories enable you to include links back to your site, readers of your articles can follow those links back to your website, blog or a social media page resulting in driving targeted traffic to your website.
• Improving SEO efforts: Links in your articles back to your website boost online visibility of your website to the search engines. Since the top online article marketing directories support content syndication enabling other members to republish other members content under specific rules, links generated from reposts of your articles online will not only drive additional traffic from readers on those sites following your links, but also provide links back to your website, further improving your ranking within search engines. The top online article marketing sites track readership statistics so that you can view how many times an article has been viewed and what search terms readers used to find your content, thus providing insights that can be used to help guide future publishing and SEO efforts based on demonstrated audience interest.
• Build brand image: Getting published on a quality online article marketing directory can do wonders for boosting your brand. Having your article get picked up by high quality publishers can boost your brand even further.

The Top 5 online article marketing sites ranked by traffic at the time of this writing are:

1. ezinearticles.com
2. suite101.com
3. buzzle.com
4. articlesbase.com
5. articlesnatch.com

Four of the top 5 online article marketing directories have in excess of 1M unique visitors each month with ezinearticles.com, the top online article marketing directlory at the time of this writing, with over 10 million unique visitors each month.

Traffic of Top 5 Online Article Marketing Directories

If you are looking for a great way enhance your public relations strategy today, then sign up for an account at one of the top 5 online article marketing directories and begin increasing the return on your content investment.

If you are spending resources to create and publish content there are simple steps you can take to use the viral nature of the Internet and social media in particular to increase distribution of your content with little or no incremental effort. Does this sound too good to be true? Well it’s not and here’s how.

There is a company called AddThis, LLC that specializes in enabling publishers to make it easy for their readers to share their content with their social networks, whichever ones they use, without placing a large support burden on the publisher. Other social networks? You mean there are other social networks beyond Facebook? Yes Virginia, there is life beyond Facebook. AddThis is the market leader for social bookmarking and sharing services and aside from being among the 1.2 million sites that share content with AddThis social bookmarking widgets, I have no affiliation with AddThis.

You can add an AddThis social bookmarking widget to your website, blog (both WordPress or Blogger currently supported) or a MySpace profile in three easy steps:

1. Select your Service. choices include website, WordPress, Blogger and MySpace
2. Select you Button Style
3. Click the Get Your Button button

Once you click the Get Your Button button, you will be brought to a page with customized instructions based on steps 1, 2 above. The customized instructions for installing your AddThis social bookmarking widget are simple and adequately detailed for anyone who manages or administers a website or blog to implement. For WordPress installations of AddThis, no html knowledge is required and the AddThis widget can be installed from the WordPress administration interface in literally under one minute. I reserve the right to update this post with a short 60 second video just to prove the point.

The same is true for installation of the AddThis social bookmarking widget on a Blogger blog, however, for the Blogger template, if you want to have the AddThis widget associated with each blog post so that social bookmarking widget will appear at the end of each post and be associated with the post and not only the blog level, you will have to edit the blog html template to insert the AddThis widget for blog posts. Nonetheless, the instructions are detailed and if you get lost, AddThis has a step-by-step tutorial for adding AddThis to Blogger posts to guide you through the installation.

Free Social Bookmarking Analytics for Those who Register

Though not required, to get the full benefit of the AddThis social bookmarking widget, eBiz ROI recommends to clients that they register for a Free AddThis account to obtain access to analytics for their sharing buttons, weekly analytics email reports, and other cool features.

So what are you waiting for? Why not start increasing your content reach virally today through the addition of an AddThis Social Bookmarking widget to your content, while giving content the added bonus of generating inbound links from popular social network sites, all with just a few clicks!

What is a WordPress Blog Ping List and what do I do with it? While reading a post about whether Google likes blogs better than websites, a comment was made that a blog provides mechanisms to let Google and other key directories and search engines know when a blog post is published. For instance, this Internet Marketing Blog is a WordPress blog and therefore has an update service.

What is a WordPress update service and what is it used for you ask. When a a new post is published on a WordPress blog, WordPress automatically notifies the list of sites in the update services configuration. This list of sites is what is referred to as the WordPress Blog Ping List.

The ones used to configure the eBiz ROI Internet Marketing Blog include:

1. http://rpc.pingomatic.com
2. http://api.feedster.com/ping
3. http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
4. http://api.moreover.com/ping
5. http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
6. http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
7. http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
8. http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php
9. http://www.blogsnow.com/ping
10. http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi
11. http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
12. http://www.newsisfree.com/xmlrpctest.php
13. http://ping.blo.gs/
14. http://ping.feedburner.com
15. http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
16. http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
17. http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
18. http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
19. http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
20. http://www.feedsubmitter.com
21. http://blo.gs/ping.php
22. http://www.pingerati.net
23. http://www.pingmyblog.com
24. http://geourl.org/ping
25. http://ipings.com
26. http://www.weblogalot.com/ping

The ping list was added to the WordPress Update Service, from the dashboard > setting >> writing.

There are longer lists out there, but the danger is that some of the services in these WordPress blog ping lists are intermediaries, forwarding update notices to multiple sites, often creating unintentional overlap which can result in 3 or more pings to the same service for every update. The impact could be that your blog gets labeled as Spam.

Why not update your WordPress Blog ping list today to get your content the visibility it deserves?

So now you have your business website. OK, that’s good. Now what? Wait for someone to fill in their contact info and then click submit on the contact us form? Wait until somebody calls the phone number listed on the website? Wait for someone to click the email link? Well, you could, but why not submit your website to Google to expedite the inclusion of your website in the great and mighty Google database, and by extension, in the Google search results.

The process of Submitting your website to Google is quite simple.

1. Navigate to the Add your URL to Google
2. Enter website address in the URL input field
3. Enter comments in the comments input field
4. Enter the optional characters in the image which is a mechanism used by Google to distinguish between sites submitted to Google and by individuals and those submitted to Google automatically through software. Note that this input field is optional
5. click the submit button

Only the top-level page of your website needs be submitted to Google and then the Google web crawler will discover linked pages that collectively comprise your website. According to Google, the comments entered in the add your URL to Google form do not affect how your page is indexed or used by Google once submitted.

If you are a procrastinator, fear not as new domains, once registered, generate what is called whois records that include the domain name and name servers which get communicated to Google who adds the new domain information to the queue of web address to crawl. That is not to say that submitting your URL won’t expedite the process getting your website listed on Google faster to bring more natural search traffic sooner.

Google does have the following disclaimer listed on the Add your URL to Google page: “We do not add all submitted URLs to our index, and we cannot make any predictions or guarantees about when or if they will appear.” In my experience, it is rare that Google will exclude any unique and useful content from its database but like most things in life beyond death and taxes, nothing is guaranteed.

As the next step in managing your website positioning within Google, navigate to the Google Webmaster Central and login to learn more about tools and techniques to enhance your search positioning and Google search referral traffic.