Link your Website to your Google+ Page.

It's Google+ time again and SocialEyes has another important tip in furthering your successful internet marketing campaign.  

Today we are going to discuss linking your website to your Google+ Page! This is extremely important as this function will make your Google+ page eligible to show up on the right hand side of the Google search page for relevant search queries and make your Google+ page more discoverable.

By adding a short line of code to your website's html you can verify and link your website to your Google+ business page (This is not your personal profile but your page under your personal profile).

Do it yourself or ask your site's webmaster to add the line of code provided by Google to your website's homepage.

After you are finished it will take a few days to start showing up but once it does; BAM your page becomes much more visible!

Follow the simple below:

1. Go to your Google+ page, click on the about tab, scroll down and click the "link website" button. (Make sure your profile contains your website first. If not click edit profile and add your website.)

2. Copy the code provided in the box. 

3. Take the code and either add it yourself or ask your site's webmaster to add the line of code provided in the box to your website's homepage.

4. Once the code is added to your website click the "test website" button.

5. If done properly you should get the "Test Successful" message. Click done and hold on tight while your practice jumps to the top of the search results!

Thank you!

Steps to verify your Google+ Page.

Have you verified your Google+ Page yet? By verifying your Google+ Page it allows you to connect it to your Google+ Local Page. As you can see here http://bit.ly/VeoBh7 my Google+ Local listing (The one where people write reviews) is now connected to my Google+ Page (Think of it as Facebook for Google). You can see my posts and review me as well.

Go to your Google+ Page and follow the easy steps below!
 

1. Click "Verify".

2. Choose your Google+ Local listing and Click "Yes Let's Continue"

3. Click "Yes Let's Continue".

4. Click "OK" They will send a postcard with a Pin Number to your Office.

5. Once you receive the Pin Number go to your Google+ Page, click "Enter Pin" and Enter your Pin.

6. Voila! You are now Verified!

Google + and Google + Local for the Eye Care Professional?

Does an Optometrist, Ophthalmologist, Optician or Vision Therapist need to have a presence on Google + and Google + Local?

Absolutely, and here's why.

Roughly 60% of your patients use Google to find your practice when they are in  need of Eye Care. I am willing to bet that most Eye Care Professionals do not even know that Google has done away from the Google Places page? Are you even familiar with the new Google + Local for your business?

Google + and + Local are the biggest trending topics online these days. So, what is it and why should you care about it? Simple –  Google + is a new social media site that is directly tied into the most widely-used search engine on the planet, with looming search engine optimization (SEO) implications. If you care about your company’s online reputation – what consumers are saying and where they are saying it – you need to read this post.

If you used Google’s search engine in the last year, you may have noticed a strange development – a little “+1” button that would show up in search results. Clicking on it would indicate to Google that you have endorsed that result as a solid source of information for the search term you used. Naturally, everyone speculated that the more +1 clicks that a site received, the higher that Google would esteem it for that particular search term. Google denied this at +1’s implementation but did not dismiss the possibility of +1 affecting search rankings in the future – which means it will be a reality soon enough.

With G+ using the +1 button as a way to endorse a post by a contact, the overall vision for +1 is revealed to be a bit grander. Google envisions +1 as the tool that ties together all user-endorsed content across the web. Whether you +1 something in search results or a photo that your friend took of his dog and uploaded to Google+, you’re contributing to your personal version of Google’s search algorithm, meaning that content may eventually be served to you differently based on your +1 behaviors.

This concept is very bold and presents an interesting problem for SEO management, if it does indeed create a personalized set of results which varies wildly for every user. When the SEO community reaches some sort of consensus (or if Google releases more information) then I’ll do a follow-up to this post on how +1 affects Google+ SEO performance.

Here is how to get started:

Create your profile
To create a Google+ page, an Eye Care Professional first needs to have a personal profile on Google+. You can login using your Google account if you already have one. If you don’t have a Google account, it’s very quick and easy to join. Start now.

Create a page
Google+ can help people learn about what makes your business tick -- your products, promotions, hours and anything else an Eye Care Professional wants to share. If your location is important, for instance, add a map to your Google+ page that directs customers right to your doorstep. Keep that information up to date and make it easy to find through Google+ searches.

Grow your circles
Whenever people follow you, you can add them to your circles. They’ll also begin to see your posts in their stream. So spread the word and encourage people to add you. You can even get the Google+ badge to let people add you to a circle without leaving your site here.

Google+ Tips

Add your Google Plus  Profile ID to the following:

LinkedIn Profile (Hint: Use the Website Section in your Profile)
Twitter Profile (Hint: Create a short url link)
Personal Blog or Website (Hint: WordPress has Code- Widgetsplus)
Facebook Profile (Hint: Use the Website Category)

Google + Local 

Google Places have been swallowed up by Google+ Local Pages, merging all business listings into one to be used across search, Maps, mobile, and Google+.

Users can access enhanced local listings via a new Local tab in the left sidebar of Google+, by performing searches on the fly on their mobile (currently supporting Android, iOS coming soon), in Google searches, and through Maps.

One notable addition: Zagat’s reviews are incorporated, taking the place of Google’s five-star rating system. Google purchased Zagat’s last year and working the review system into Google+ Local has taken down the paywall, making the service free for all users.

Here’s how it works, demonstrated in a video released by Google.

The new format will be rolling out to all users “in the weeks and months ahead,” Google VP Engineering Jen Fitzpatrick wrote in the blog post announcing the change. Business owners are still able to manage their information through Google Places for Business, though now the listing will surface through a number of Google services.

Different people are interested in different parts of your business. Whether it's breaking news, updates, promotions, links, photos - even talking face-to-face with groups via easy-to-use video chat - Google+ lets you easily share the right things with the right customers.

Help word get around. Put the +1 button anywhere you'd like people to be able to recommend your business, products or services to friends and contacts all across the web.

Do you want to capture 50% to 60% of the people searching for eye care in your area?

Here is what to do:

1. Claim Your Listing.
2. Add Information About Your Business.
3. Upload Photos.
4. Add Videos.
5. Solicit Reviews.
6. Create an Offer.
7. Promote it on Your Website and Social Media sites.
8. Optimize the Keywords on Your Website.
9. Create Backlinks to Your Website.
10. Create Address and Phone Number Citations on the Web.

Happy Googling !

Social Media tips fo the Eye Care Professional, Internet Marketing for the Vision Care Community.

It’s a fair bet that your boss, dates and anyone you give your business card to will type your name into a search engine. If something negative appears in the results, your online reputation can quickly damage your offline reputation — and affect your life.

Of the almost 80% of U.S. hiring managers who had searched for candidates online, 70% of them said they had rejected a candidate based on what they found in his or her search results, according to a 2009 study commissioned by Microsoft.

While you might not be able to remove damaging content from the Internet, there’s a good chance that you can minimize its impact using simple SEO techniques. And even if your search results are squeaky clean, the same techniques can help you control how you’re perceived online.

Here’s how to get started.

Step 1: See Where You Stand

Before you can manage your online reputation, you have to assess it. Type your names in search engines. Set up search alerts for your name (Google recently made this easier to do from the Google dashboard through a new “Me on the Web” tool).

If you find something unflattering, ask yourself:

• Did I post it? If, for instance, photos from your Flickr account that you’d rather keep private are showing up in search results for your name, you can simply delete the photos or adjust your privacy settings.
  After you’ve removed the offensive content, you can use Google’s URL removal tool to stop it from appearing as a cached copy or snippet in search results. If you do nothing, the content will still eventually drop from Google’s index — it will just take a bit longer to disappear.
• Is it personal information that could be used in a crime? If someone posts your social security number, bank account number, credit card number or an image of your handwritten signature, Google will makeefforts to remove it from search results. It will also contact the site’s hosting company to request that the page be taken down.
• Is it posted on a high-traffic news site? Competing for search results with a popular news site is difficult. ButPatrick Ambron, the cofounder of a personal online reputation management service called Brand-Yourself, says that all hope is not lost. “Google usually only likes to rank one result per domain name per page,” he says. “So if you could get another result on the same domain name like Huffington Post that was better optimized for your name, you could theoretically knock the bad article off.” One way to do this is to create a profile on that news site using your full name. Use as many links as possible, and link to the profile from all of your other web properties.

If you can’t answer “yes” to either of these questions, your best bet for reducing the visibility of negative content is to compete for top search results using positive content.

If you can’t get the content removed from the original site, you probably won’t be able to completely remove it from Google’s search results, either,” reads Google’s guide to keeping personal information out of Google. “Instead, you can try to reduce its visibility in the search results by proactively publishing useful, positive information about yourself or your business.”

In other words, if you want to make negative webpages appear lower in search, you’ll need to create content of relevance to push the negative links down. Google suggests responding to negative reviews of your business, for instance.

Profiles on social networks are powerful tools for this purpose, as results from large sites like Facebook andTwitter often carry more SEO power than a single post on something like a personal blog.


Step 2: Post Positive Content

“If you can’t get the content removed from the original site, you probably won’t be able to completely remove it from Google’s search results, either,” reads Google’s guide to keeping personal information out of Google. “Instead, you can try to reduce its visibility in the search results by proactively publishing useful, positive information about yourself or your business.”

In other words, if you want to make negative webpages appear lower in search, you’ll need to create content of relevance to push the negative links down. Google suggests responding to negative reviews of your business, for instance.

Profiles on social networks are powerful tools for this purpose, as results from large sites like Facebook andTwitter often carry more SEO power than a single post on something like a personal blog.

Step 3. Create an Identity Hub

One secret to pushing your positive online presence further up in search results is to make a hub that links to all of your content. Ambron recommends these tips for pushing your hub to the top of search results for your name.

• Claim your domain name. Including the search term (in this case, your name) in the URL of your web page tells search engines what the page is about.
• Mention yourself. You’re trying to tell search spiders, “This page is about me!” A good way to do that is to use your name a lot. Use your name in tabs and headers.
• Link to your content. “[Google] considers each link to your site a vote for the site,” Ambron says. “Google has gotten pretty smart, so where those links come from is very important. The more reputable links are better votes. A vote from CNN is better than some site you made that you just linked to yourself.”
  Remember all of those social media profiles that you created in step two? They’re attached to reputable sources like Facebook and Twitter, which makes their “votes” count as much more reputable than a page you just created.
  Sign up for as many of them as possible (use one of these sites to see what is available), and then link them all to your hub.
• Post often. Search engines like fresh content. One easy way to create it is to post your social media feeds to your blog.

• Step 4. Consider Automating the Process

  
  
  There are several services that will help you with your quest for a pristine online reputation for a small fee.Brand-Yourself, for instance, keeps track of your reputation on a dashboard and helps you improve it by helping you raise existing positive content or helping you create new positive content. Vizibility allows users to pre-select the information they want displayed in “search results” from a special button or URL that can be added to online profiles, websites, resumes, email signatures and business cards.
  
  
  This article was reposted form Mashable. http://mashable.com/2011/06/27/manage-online-reputation-seo/
  
  
  
  

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Getting over the Facebook hump! - Social Media Marketing - Optomerty, Vision Care, Eye Care

It's a great feeling when that facebook page you have been working on so hard on suddenly takes on a life of it's own. You've worked so hard setting up the apps, uploading the perfect pics, recruiting fans and blasting out posts and now people are starting to interact. Interaction is the key to a successful facebook page. Without it no one else reads your perfectly worded posts, no one sees your pretty pictures and worst of all no one shares your page with anyone else.

So how does one create a page that encourages social interaction? You can do it yourself if you have the time or you could hire a professional like SocialEyes. SocialEyes has been working with Eye Care Professionals for over 20 years now and they know how to create Social Media Gold! The Eye Care industry is a tough place to market yourself in but SocialEyes invented Social Media Marketing for the Vision Care Community!

We create an environment for your patients to interact in. Our Doctors now have hundreds of fans asking to buy contacts, find them special eye glass frames, leave them excellent reviews and comment on our interesting posts. These interactions create fans and these fans translate into happy patients who generate revenue.

Please stay tuned for more on getting over the facebook hump. It is late and I need my beauty rest :)

What’s Next in Social Media Marketing? - It is time for Eye Care Professionals to ride the Bandwagon.

Here are the top 10 insights:

1) The physical and digital worlds will be more highly connected than ever before – already today we are able to run in the park and track our progress online while sharing it with our friends or track our weight loss, or even our ovulation (well, some of us, that is) with iPhone apps that connect to our Facebook and twitter profiles and enable us to keep track of our progress as well as share the data with our friends. Robert Scoble had a brilliant presentation on this topic at the last TNW Conference in Amsterdam. You can see it here.

2) Facebook, Twitter and other major social networks will become increasingly what Fred Wilson coins “Social Dashboards”. In essence, Facebook and Twitter are social channels on which other companies can grow and develop their own technologies and businesses. Both Facebook and Twitter have created economies far larger than many nations. Take for example, companies like Stocktwits, Tweetdeck and Zynga, (amongst others) that have gained huge profits “piggybacking” on these two platforms.

3) Until now, brands have been very concerned with bringing as many people as possible to their pages. Consumer brands can now finally reap the fruits and build social commerce stores where Facebook users (all 700 Million of them) can purchase products on their favorite social network without needing to go to any destination site. Facebook will become one of the major channels of future online shopping.

4) Companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon are currently collecting information about each any every one of us: Our likes and dislikes, our interests and disdains. Soon in an age of Web 3.0, an age of Semantic Web, we will no longer need to search for information on the Web as information will find us based on all this data which companies are collecting. The right information will be served to the right people at the right time, saving us all a lot of time, effort and energy.

5) Mobile technology will become more dominant and NFC technology will be developed further enabling it to offer us special promotions, coupons and tips based on our geographical location and the interest graph we discussed in insight #3.

6) Human Relationships will no longer be as physically dependent and we will befriend and hang out with people from all over the world and all walks of life, all ethnicities and all beliefs, creating a worldwide melting pot.

7) We will no longer be passive media consumers. Media will interact with us in dynamic ways on all platforms. Just like gamers playing WOW today, we will all become a part of a virtual world unknown to us yet where we will all be avatars in the game of life.

8 ) As the Web is overloaded with more information, the content that we are exposed to will become more and more customized to our needs as companies will large sums of money to companies like Facebook and Google, making sure that the information we are exposed to is highly targeted to our interests. Rather than experiencing information overload, we will actually experience the opposite effect.

9) Companies will understand better how to measure the ROI of social media and realize that social media is not about the number of people brands have in their communities but rather the amount of engagement that they see on their page and the overall online sentiment they faced this month as opposed to the last. See Gary Vaynerchuk’s response to how companies should measure the ROI of social media in the video link above.

10) Services will become increasingly crowdsourced. Whether it be the way that we get from point A to point B (Waze), the way that we find answers to our questions (Quora), the manner in which we test our Websites (uTest), the way that we get things done (Fiverr) or the way that we share information (Wikipedia).
All of these insights are of course complete speculations based on my years of experience in the world of social media and following of trends occurring all over the digital space. Do you agree with these speculations? Is anything missing? What do you think is coming up next in social media?

Ayelet Noff is the founder and CEO of Blonde 2.0 , a New Media PR agency helping brands create brand awareness and increase social engagement. Check out Ayelet's Blonde 2.0 blog and Twitter.

Social Media benefits for Eye Care professionals. Your patients vision.

Our communities have been redefined over the decades. Cavemen gathering around their first fire, Pilgrims settling the first colonies, 50's soda pop shops, 90's internet cafe's and now Social Media Communities. That's right we rarely even pick up the phone anymore. I was out today visiting a prospective client. I asked her are you on facebook. She replied. How do you think I stay in touch with my mother? 

The question you must ask yourself is are you socially connected and if not why aren't you? . For instance, Facebook estimates it has more than 500 million active users. Adults "friend" their kids, parents, coworkers, poker buddies and friends from high school, among others. They become "fans" of businesses, clubs and grassroots initiatives. No longer a mystery, social media sites are the places to be.

The average age of a social networker is 37 years old,  for a suburban family practice, this is your target patient age range.

Those optometrists who have begun to use social media sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, are finding that social media is not just a fun add-on to the marketing strategy. It really can produce results.

Social media is a new way of looking at marketing. It requires a kind of day-to-day authenticity that differs from more traditional forms of marketing, where customers do not post opinions of your business — both good and bad — in real time.

The one question I always hear is, well where and how do I start? Social Media Marketing can often seem overwhelming and it may be a good idea to let a professional help you. SocialEyes LLC is a great place to get started. They are professional, effective and affordable.

No matter what route you take to becoming socially connected just make sure you start the journey.


Thanks


Michael Muller
mike@eyesocialeyes.com