While currently only available to a limited number of people for trial purposes, the Google+ experience is showing a lot of potential to take on Facebook, with a lot of features that Facebook users have been asking for a long time.

A more modern approach to social media, such as real-time video hangouts, and a much simpler, easy to use and way less clunky design, Google Plus allows users to navigate around the new network much easier than Facebook.

But will it be enough to attract the followers that Facebook currently has?

Only time will tell.

The advantage for Google though is it integrates well with all the current Google Apps and keeps the same feel throughout all their applications, which overall means it has a lot more functionality than Facebook as an entire business and social tool, rather than just a social network.

Learn more about Google +
https://plus.google.com/

These days, if you’re not on the first couple of pages of Google your business is probably missing out on a lot of potential customers and new business.

If you’ve got great search engine optimisation you might be lucky enough to be on the first page of Google’s organic searches, otherwise you might be spending hundreds of dollars a week in pay-per-click to achieve good results.

But there is another option, which Google provide free of charge, called Google Places.

Google Places is the search results you often see at the top of the listings next to the Google Map, which provides a basic overview of the business listing and often a star review of the business.

There are limited spots available for Google Places listings, but there are a few simple tricks to getting your business into these top spots and generating a huge amount of free traffic to your website.

Here are out tips for creating a great listing on Google Places for Business:

The easiest way to get started is to type in ‘Google Places’ into Google or follow the link to the Google Local Business Center – http://www.google.com/local/add

You may need to create a Google account if you haven’t already.

Now you need to create your Google Business profile. Creating this correctly is the key to your success on Google..
Make sure you include a physical postal address and a real phone number as Google will verify you are a real business by either calling you or posting you a code to enter into your account.

Make sure your description contains [a good amount of keywords that reflect your business and that you want to be found under. For instance if you have a car parts business your description should be something like: ‘Todd’s Used Car Parts Calgary stocks genuine vehicle parts for all european makes and model cars.’

The description now includes a good variety of specific keywords including the location to help Google recognise exactly what the business does.

Makes rue the categories you choose reflect the business and your description.

You can also add your trading hours, payment types etc. The more you add the more Google loves you.

Now, you can also include photos and a logo. Preparing these correctly can help your listing.
Name each image with relevance to your business, for example: rather than an image name like ‘img123.jpg’ name it ‘calgary_car_parts.jpg’

This also goes for your logo as well.

for the images, don’t make them too large or they will load slow. A good size is about 600 x 450 pixels at 72dpi.

Google Place Reviews
Often you will see reviews on the Google Places listings. These reviews can also help drive the listing to the top spots.
If you run your website or blog on WordPress you can also get reviews directly from your website listed on Google Places by simple adding a Google Reviews plugin into your website. The plugin is free, and it places a Review button on each page of your website allowing people to comment, which you verify before it goes live. These reviews then show up on Google Places.
This is particularly helpful if you have an online shopping cart, real estate site or a business directory.

Author: Chris Bourke of WebSEOCoach.com and Devision Design Australia
Chris is a web developer and social media marketer from Australia who also specializes in getting business on Google

Google Adsense is a fast and easy way for website publishers to display relevant text and image based Google ads on their website’s content pages and earn money in the process. The ads displayed are related to what your users are looking for on your site. This is the main reason why you both can monetize and enhance your content pages easily using Adsense.

It doesn’t take a lot of work, takes just a few minutes to set up, and the money starts trickling in.

The problem is many people get frustrated that they can’t make enough money from Adsense, and this is because they miss a few critical steps, which I’ll share with you below…

How do you maximize your site?

How much you will be earning with Adsense will depend on how much the advertisers are willing to pay and it will depend also on the keywords.
If the keywords the advertiser have chosen are in high demand then you could receive more dollars per click. On the other hand, low demand keywords will earn you just a few cents per click.
So if you are setting up a new website try and create one that will attract a load of visitors. Go some keyword research first and see what people are really searching for on the internet. It might be travel tips, diet reviews, or even how to find the perfect date!. Whatever the topic you can work with and is popular will make you money.

How can you start making profits out of your website using Adsense?

1. Firstly go the Google and type in ‘Google Adsense’ and you will find the signup page. Sign up for a free Adsense account. It will only take a few minutes of your time.

2. When the site is accepted, you will be receiving your adsense affiliate code to include in your web pages. You can insert this code on as many pages or web sites that you want. The AdWords will start appearing immediately after.
Google has a very good system allowing you to generate ads that will suit the look of your own site or blog, such as changing the colours, and even selecting the target advertisers, ensuring the best possible results.

3. You will be earning a few cents or some dollars per click when someone starts clicking on the AdWords displayed on any of your web pages.
Never try and bump up your profit by clicking your own ads. Google is very clever, and this will only result in a penalty or the possibility of your site being eliminated. The money you have already earned may be lost because of this.

4. View your statistics regularly. Adsense earnings can be checked anytime by logging into your web site account. See which days and targets are working best for you.

Once you got your account working, you may still want to pattern them to the many sites that are earning more money than you are. It is important to note that there are factors affecting how your website will perform and the amount of money it will give you.

It is a common practice that when a site earning money, the tendency is for the owner to want to make more out of what they are getting already. It usually takes some time combined with trial and error to attain what you want for your Adsense contents.

Time and some important factors that you can practice and use.

How do you increase your Adsense earnings?

1. Choose one topic per page on your website or blog. It is best to write a content for your page with just a few targeted phrases. The search engine will then serve ads that are more relevant which will then result in higher click-thoughs.
for better targeted content results, make sure your header title of your page or article has the keyword you want the ads to relate to, and also add that same keyword in the first and last paragraph of your page.

2. Using white space around your ad. This can make your ad stand out from the rest of your page so visitors can spot them easily. There are also other choices of colors you can use, provided by search engines, which can harmonize the color of your ad with the web page color.

3. Test your ad placement. It is recommended to use the vertical format that runs down the side of the web page to get more positive results. You can also try both horizontal and vertical formats for a certain period of time to see which one will give you better results.
If you already run a WordPress blog, there are a number of great free plugins which you can add that make is as simple as clicking abutton as to where you want the ad placement, and a cut/paste of your adsense code, and the plugin does the rest.

4. More content-based pages. Widen the theme of your website by creating pages that focus more on your keyword phrases. This will optimize the pages for the search engines. It can not only attract traffic but also make them more relevant for the AdWords to be displayed.

5. Blogger and WordPress. This is the perfect way to create lots of Adsense revenues. Either set up a free WordPress or Blogger site, or for maximum results create your own blog under a good keyword-specific domain name. WordPress has all the tools necessary to quickly achieve a keyword-rich site that can rank high in the search engines. This will also produce a flow of traffic to your site of highly targeted visitors, and with the correct layout, you’ll have people clicking your Adsense campaigns like crazy. Then site back and watch the Adsense cash roll in!

Author: Chris Bourke is a web and seo coach from Web SEO Coach and Devision Design.

For more ways of making a load of money from blogging, we recommend Ultimate Cash Blog.
Find out more at http://www.ultimatecashblog.com

For the last couple of months, Google Adsense has dominated forums, discussions and newsletters all over the Internet. Already, there are tales of fabulous riches to be made and millions made by those who are just working from home. It seems that Google Adsense have already dominated the internet marketing business and is now considered the easiest way to making money online.

The key to success with Adsense is the placing of ads on pages that are receiving high traffic for high demand keywords. The higher the cost-per-click to the advertiser, the more you will receive per click from your site. Obviously, it does not pay to target low cost-per-click keywords and place them on pages that do not receive hits.

With all the people getting online and clicking away everyday, it is no wonder why Google Adsense has become an instant hit.

For some who are just new to this market, it would be a blow to their pride knowing that their homepage is buried somewhere in the little ads promoting other peopleís services. But then, when they get the idea that they are actually earning more money that way, all doubts and skepticism is laid to rest.

There are two major, and clever, factors that some successful webmaster and publishers are learning to blend together in order to make money easier using Adsense.

1. Targeting high traffic pages on your website. If you check on your logs, you will discover that many of your visitors are taking advantage of the free affiliate marketing resources and ebooks that you are offering on your site. In simple words, your ads are working effectively and are generating more clicks. It also means more money for you.

2. Placing Adsense links on pages that are producing little, or better yet, no profit. By placing Adsense on a free resources page, you will reduce the amount of potential customers being lost to other sites. Tricky, but effective nonetheless.

When learned to work effectively, these two factors are actually a good source of producing a minimal amount of revenue from a high traffic page. Many people are using this strategy to pick up some extra and cash with Adsense. This is also especially rewarding to informational sites that focus their efforts on delivering powerful affiliate link free content to their visitors. Now they can gain a monetary return on their services.

With the many techniques that people are now learning on how to make the easiest money by their Adsense, it is not surprising that Google is trying everything to update and polish their Adsense in order to maintain their good image.

The possibility of adding is 2nd tier in Adsense is not impossible. With all the people spending more time in their Adsense now and still more getting into this line of marketing, there is no doubt about the many new improvements yet to be made. Imagine the smiles on the faces of the webmasters and publishers all around the world if ever they sign up for sub-affiliates and double or even triple the amount that they are already earning.
The one particularly handy money-making feature that is available with Adsense now is the ability to filter out up to 200 urls. These gives webmasters the option to block out low value offers from their pages as well as competitors to their websites. Talk about taking only those that are advantageous and discarding the ones that seem ìuselessî.

With Google Adsense, the possibilities are limitless. Yet there is also the possibility of someone taking advantage of the easy money process that this internet marketing is doing. If you think more about it, these negative factors may force Google to break down and thrash Adsense in the process. If that happens, people would have to go back to the old ways of internet marketing that does not make money online as easy as Adsense.

For now, however, Google Adsense is here to stay. As long as there are people wanting to earn some easy cash online just using their talents, the future ahead is looking good. Besides with all the strict guidelines that Google is enforcing over Adsense, it will take awhile for the Adsense privileges to be spammed and even terminated.

Many web developers saw immediate changes in how their website’s presence on Google site, even though they may not have changed their own website for some time. Some listings climbed, many fell.

When Google launched Caffeine they wanted to help ‘clean up’ the web at the same time, and in the process rewarded websites that were built well, and penalized sites that weren’t so good though may have got away with it in the past.

So what are the major factors to ensure your website ranks well on Google Caffeine?

1. Website Loading Speed
If you have a fast loading website, Google will most likely reward you and give you prominence over the slower loading websites, even if those other websites may be keyworded better than yours.
Try and avoid elements of your website which may make your site ‘clunky’, such as slow loading Flash graphics or Flash Navigation, large video content on the initial pages of your website, optimize your images so they load fast, and overall keep a nice balance between text and image content so each page loads as fast as possible.

2. Overall quality of your website
Previous versions of Google, webmasters were often told to minimize keywords to just a handful of the most specific keywords. To achieve a broader search spectrum, add a few more keywords than you used to, but don’t go overboard.
Alt tag images with a few more keywords than you used to, and overall ensure the body content of your page has the correct text with the specific keywords you want to be found under.

3. Broken Links
It’s already a common element of a good search engine listing that broken links can affect your ranking, but even more so than ever with Google Caffeine. Check and recheck that your links are all working correctly, and include a 404 page which has a link to your sitemap, to avoid any dead-ends by the search engines.

4. Linking to bad neighborhoods
While it can work to your advantage to get backlinks from other websites, do your research on these sites first and make sure they are not linked to spammer sites, or your ranking will drop swiftly.
stay away from Link farms which have a bad reputation. If in doubt, check them out in Google by searching the website name and the words ‘spam review’ after it.

5. Get rid of any spam elements from your site
Google hates spam! remove anything that could be considered spam by Google, including over-use of keywords throughout a single page, hidden text, or even text that is a similar colour to the background. If you have more than one duplicate website, at least optimize it different from the original and move it to a different hosting provider so the IP address doesn’t match or Google will instantly recognize it’s the same site.

6. Review your website’s design and structure.
Make sure your website is user-friendly and easy to navigate. If it’s hard for site visitors it’s probably hard for the search engines too.
Each page title and description should be unique and relate to the content within that particular page.

7. Obtain links from social media websites and social bookmarks.
Links from social networking and bookmarking sites such as Delicious, Digg, Facebook and even Twitter give you huge brownie points with the search engines in regards to your placement.

Work on these features above and then resubmit your website to Google and you should see a change in your ranking in as little as a few weeks.
Don’t be surprised if you drop off the search engines totally for a couple of days.
Often when resubmitting a website with some major changes Google likes to start with a fresh listing to give you maximum results…if you deserve it!

Author: Chris Bourke – WebSEOCoach.com
Chris Bourke is a web designer and developer in Australia, who also specialises in SEO and affiliate marketing.
Follow Chris on Twitter: twitter.com/webseocoach

Firstly to get started I read everything I could on Adwords before diving in. After hearing all the horror stories of Adwords sucking people’s bank accounts dry I determined it was most likely their lack of Adwords knowledge that was allowing Google to take the money from their account, which in a majority of the cases was the truth.

Google Adwords is a great advertising system and works great, don’t get me wrong about that! I have often used it myself for many of my own sites after reading systems such as Google Shadow, with pretty good results.

But more recently I optimized my WordPress blog, linking it to Twitter, Facebook and Myspace, and then for a month compared the two results.

I monitored day to day results on both sites Adwords and WordPress results and without a doubt a single posting on WordPress every day provides me more sales than a $10 account on Adwords.

Both make sales, but Adwords costs me for advertising, which I don’t mind, except for the fact that my blog gets better proven results for better optimisation.

The beauty of WordPress is that if your article titles are good, you will always outrank Adwords. It’s a fact. Throw in a few free downloadable plug ins for wordpress to help with your SEO and you have top page listing son all the major search engines, for free.

Adwords is designed to make you spend money to get results, while WordPress is designed to get a good ranking. It’s simple.

So, if you are spending dollars on Adwords to promote your business and also own a blog, maybe take a good look at your blog search engine optimization and the keywords you are using and see if you can turn your free WordPress blog into a money making machine, and ditch Adwords. I know I am!

1. Provide useful content on your web pages. Search engines are constantly on the lookout for helpful content for their searchers. It will be more like likely to rank your pages higher if you’re constantly updating your site with new fresh content.

2. Put your emphasis on optimizing your pages for the search engine. There are easy SEO strategies you can implement on every web page you build.

These would include targeting a keyword phrase, putting those in your meta tags, including them in your headline tags, and adding them to the body of the web page.

Try and think like a search engine would. If you’ll just let them know what your page is about it will improve the ranking in the eyes of the search engines because you’re making their job easier.

3. Build a keyword relevancy to your web pages by getting back links for those phrases. Article marketing is an excellent way to do this.

You want a hyperlink to targeted keyword phrases in the resource box of every article. You should be linking back not only to your home page but also to your inner pages.

Deep linking through article marketing is a strategy many people don’t properly utilize. However this is a guaranteed way to improve the page rank of that specific page.

4. Start a blog and utilize the same strategies on it. Create your blog articles around targeted keyword phrases and include those in the title and in the body. Submit your blog articles to social directories which can serve as search engine bait and help improve all of your pages in the eyes of Google and other search engines.

5. Add videos to your pages. Google owns YouTube and they rank pages higher if videos are included in those. These are not hard to create today and the benefits of doing video marketing and promoting your web pages with videos is outstanding.

6. If you do any reciprocal linking be cautious of pages that you link to. Giving away page rank is a bad practice in something that can hurt your page rank rather than improve.

These are a few guaranteed ways to improve page ranking that are not hard to do. Any Internet marketer can quickly see the benefits from.

About The Author

Suzanne Morrison is the owner of the Higher Search Engine Rank website – a site that teaches you how to optimize your website content so that it ranks more highly. Sign up for her free seo course to learn more. http://www.3StepsToSearchEngineSuccess.com

How to Use Google is a fun and detailed manual about all the Google functionality you didn’t know existed!

How To Use Google includes:

• 60 Powerful Tips, Tricks and Shortcuts

• Active HTML links that take you directly to the web
• Magazine color format with high-quality screen shots.
• Over 70 pages of powerful information

• Traditional services like News, Images, Groups, Local, Mail & Directory

• New services such as Video, Music, Phonebook, Earth and Maps

• Plus, tips like Advanced Operators, Link Love, Q&A and Zeitgeist

Why is this Important?

• Many people use Google 5, 20 or even 100 times a day

• Most users are slow and inefficient in using Google

• Getting beyond basic Google keyword searches is essential to success

CLICK HERE FOR FULL DETAILS

Don’t panic since the field of affiliate marketing really requires you to do only 3 things to be successful.

Here’s a look at the 3 areas of preparation you’ll need to complete to start earning an income as an affiliate marketer.

Choose a Domain Name & Hosting

It is recommended although not necessary to have your own website or blog from which you can maintain an online presence. You will want to select a domain name that is relative to what it is you intend to market. This not only increases the professional image you want online for your business but it also prevent the visitor from being confused. If your domain name indicates something other than what it is you’re promoting you can easily lose visitors who may think it is not the site they’re looking for.

Make sure the hosting company you select is reputable and can easily be contacted 24/7. If your site goes down for whatever reason you are losing money the longer it remains offline so you want to be able to have the problem fixed quickly.

We recommend registering with either Webcrowd, Globat Web Hosting or Hostgator. All provide great value hosting.

Build Your Site

As an affiliate it is not required that your site is elaborate in fact it is recommended that you keep it simple. You don’t want so much ‘glitz and glitter’ that your intended message is lost.

Make it clear to the visitor what it is you’re promoting, maybe elaborate on a few benefits but for the most part leave the hard selling to the main affiliate site.

Generate Traffic

Here is where you need to focus most of your effort. Select 2 or 3 traffic generation techniques you’re comfortable with then push as many visitors to your site as possible.

This is the single biggest advantage of affiliate marketing. You don’t have to do much selling therefore you can concentrate on learning how to drive traffic to your site.

Launching your online affiliate marketing business really only requires that you simply first establish your online presence with a website. After that you are ready to begin marketing on the internet by driving traffic to your site. Many assume that starting an online business is more complicated then that but as you’ve seen it is really fairly simple. This is one of the biggest reasons the field of affiliate marketing is so popular.

By setting up a simple website you are in the position to start making money online from home provided you invest a little time generating traffic to your site. This entire process is extremely straight forward and actually requires nothing more other than a little effort from you.

By following the 3 steps we reviewed above you will be ready to start marketing as an affiliate in absolutely no time at all.

Author: TJ Philpott is an author and Internet entrepreneur based out of North Carolina.

Did you know that about 80 percent of all web site traffic originates from search engines? Yes, it is true! Listing near the top page of search engines and obtaining the attention of your target audience should be a main priority for any web site internet promotion.

And the good news about this is that improving a web site position in search engine pages may be done for free. How? Using search engine optimization (SEO) techniques.

There are many ways to promote a web site. Some promotions are paid and some are free. Among the free ones, the search engine optimization techniques enable web sites to become search engine friendly. In other words, it makes website pages to accept the search engine crawler in a friendly way. These techniques will be some of the steps one will have to use to obtain a better position in search engine’s pages, when searching for specific keywords, related to services or products offered by a web site.

Search engine optimization steps for a web page:

Title:

The html Title tag is a very important element and must include the most important keywords or phrases, which best represent the products or services offered by the web page. It should not contain more than 60 characters.

Keywords:

The html meta Keyword tag should have all the keyword phrases which best represents the products or services offered by the web page. Avoid repeating keywords and bad use of capital letters. It should not contain more than 250 characters.

Description:

The html meta Description tag is a description of the web page, which will be displayed by the search engine. Make sure it contains keywords phrases. Avoid repeating keywords and bad use of capital letters. It should not contain more than 200 characters.

Keywords in Headings:

Keywords in Headings tags (h1) will be interpreted by search engines as being an important keyword relevant to the web page, and it should be looked for and indexed by the search engines.

Web page text:

It is a good practice to include informative text one every page, using natural language and appropriate keywords. It should contain more than 200 words. Informative text should be placed in the html Body section of the web page.

Keywords in Alt Tags:

Every html picture ‘img’ tag should contain an ALT tag with an appropriate description. Keywords should always be used when appropriate.

Keywords in Anchor Tags:

Every html hypertext link ‘a href’ should contain a TITLE tag with an appropriate description. Keywords should always be used when appropriate.

Robots.txt file:

Make sure there is a robots.txt file in you web site directory. This is a text file created by the webmaster, which will guide the search engine’s crawler when indexing a web site.

There are some cases in which one might not want to have some web pages indexed. This way thru the use of robots.txt, one will have control over which pages will be indexed and made available to the search engines.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /tmp/
Disallow: /data/

HTML code validation:

Search engine’s crawlers become more efficient when indexing web pages with no html errors. Beware that some html errors can make search engine crawlers to give up indexing web pages. So it is recommended for those web pages to be indexed, there should be no html errors.

Links:

Links are very important to search engines. The quality of links and whether it is reciprocal or not, are important factors in evaluating the importance of a web page. Links from web sites with higher page ranks are a plus.

Registering with Directories and Search Engines:

It is very important the registration of a website with directories and search engine web sites. It is a way of telling the world that your web site exists. Avoid using automatic search engine/directory registration.

Search engine optimization has become a very important set of procedures which helps web sites to become more relevant to search engines. To obtain an increase in internet traffic will take some time. It probably will take some kind of additional promotion too. But anybody in need of higher internet traffic, free search engine optimization might be considered his first option.