If you’ve seen the power of social media in entrepreneurship and small business, can you afford to ignore Google+? I think not. Plus already has more than 100 million users, and some business press is predicting more than 400 million by the end of this year. 

But even if you’re already working with social networking for your business, maybe especially if you are, you may be feeling like I did, initially, about another social network. I like Twitter a lot and I’m there a lot, and I’ve tried to keep up with Facebook and LinkedIn, so my reaction was a lot like what Guy Kawasaki says was his first reaction to Google+:

I need another social media service like I need more email or my dog to throw up on the carpet.

That quote is from the introduction to Guy’s latest new book What the Plus. Yes, I recognized the feeling. But What The Plus goes very quickly from that initial hesitance to why you want to deal with Google+ at all. Guy Kawasaki is known as the original and quintessential Apple Evangelist, which makes this quote particularly significant:

“From my perspective, Google + is to Facebook and Twitter what Macintosh is to Windows: Better, but fewer people use it, and the pundits prophesy that it will fail. As a lover of great products, this rankles my soul.”

I liked this comparison too, part of an opening chapter called Why I Love Google+: Twitter is about perspectives, FaceBook about people, and Google+ about passions:

“Ask yourself if you want to enhance and expand the number of people who share your passions. If the answer is no, stick with Twitter and Facebook until Google + reaches critical mass. Or, you may decide you need multiple services: Twitter for perspectives, Facebook for people, and Google + for passions. That’s OK too.

I ended up reading the book from cover to cover on one weekend morning, loving it, and reviewing it last weekend on Small Business Trends as A Quick Practical Guide to Google+. I said:

a short, practical to-the-point book on Google Plus by Guy Kawasaki. It’s all about tips, shortcuts, and step by step to taking more advantage of Plus, and doing it better. Don’t judge it by my presence on Plus, because I’m writing this fresh after reading the book, before implementing. I’m not going to take long, though, to implement this books suggestions for modifying my profile, my profile pictures, my posting strategy, and my approach to circles. 

Often the best spend in business, dollar for dollar, is a good business book. You can get this one on amazon.com as an ebook for only $2.99.

Conclusion: As I said in that review: “It’s a lot easier to learn from a well-written and practical book than my trial and error.”

You could spend the rest of your life reading detailed guides to SEO and meticulously cramming keywords into every possible tag on your website. You could also empty your bank account on marketing consultants or a crack marketing team that works day and night to raise your company’s search engine profile. For marketers and companies with limited time and resources, it’s critical to focus on the SEO strategies that bring in the best results.

Whether you’re designing your blog or hiring an expert to handle it for you, here are the key aspects of SEO that you need to focus on in order to get the most for your time and money.

Use the Google All in One SEO for WordPress
There aren’t any magic tricks you can do to make your site rise in the search rankings. Perhaps the closest you can come to magically raising your rankings is using WordPress and its plug ins. If you are using WordPress for your website or blog and you want a simple way to bump up the SEO of your website, a simple plug in is a great place to start. The Google All in One SEO plug in will make your site search-engine friendly and provide a simple interface for plugging in keywords and clear titles.

If you are a DIY marketer, this tool is a great place to start and a real time-saver. Some developers claim that Headspace2 has more features than the All in One plug in, and you can compare them in this chart.

Optimize Your Page Title’s SEO for Readers
Of course every guide to SEO is going to trumpet the importance of nailing the keywords for your page title and description, but there’s one critical angle that you don’t want to overlook. By using Google Instant’s auto fill for searches, you can learn what your potential readers are already searching for and which keywords go together in the most common searches.

In other words, you can use Google to tell you what people are already searching for and then refine your website’s title keywords accordingly. Learn more about how Google Instant works.

Use Long Tail Keywords for SEO on Your Web Page
While it’s critical to include the top keywords for your field, don’t overlook variations and less common keywords—the long tail of keyword traffic so to speak. By using a broader range of keywords you can improve your website’s copy for readers while ensuring that you fill up your h2 and h3 headings throughout your pages with a wide range of relevant terms that will reach the broadest segment of readers.

In fact, too much keyword repetition could hurt your page rankings as Google’s search capabilities have grown wise to keyword stuffing techniques. Don’t spend your time on the increasingly insignificant meta keyword tags for your site. Google and Bing don’t even bother with them. Even ‘alt tags’ for your images are believed to have a minor impact on your search rankings. Nail the title and subtitle keywords and write a diverse keyword article full of information that readers need. If you nail the content, you’ll get inbound links.

Focus on Generating Meaningful Inbound Links for SEO
Another key to the SEO game is making sure you have meaningful inbound links from sites with high authority. It’s far more important to have links from twenty experts and leading trade sites than to enter your information in a hundred no-name directories. The relationships you build with top notch bloggers and the articles shared on top websites will give your SEO a significant boost.

Take Stock of What You Can Do
If you can’t do everything the SEO experts suggest, review this list  that ranks the top SEO practices according to a grading system that indicates their importance. SEO is too important to ignore, but every business operating within the constraints of a budget and time and space—which hopefully includes all of us—will need to prioritize what will work and what produces the best results. In fact, if you aren’t already, make sure you track the effectiveness of your SEO regularly.

Optimizing your website for search engines takes time and planning, but by cultivating several practices you’ll get better at integrating keywords in the places where they matter and producing content that readers are looking for online.

This guest post is written by marketing enthusiast, Lior Levine, who works for a variety of MA In Israel programs, particularly the MA in political science  department at the Tel Aviv University.

Early adopters are showing enough cautious optimism that it’s time you become aware of what all the hype is about with Google+, that’s if you aren’t already “building circles” and “hanging out.”

If you think “Why? It’s less than a month old. How big can it be?”

You need to know that in its tiny life span it has already exceeded 20 million users (something that took both Facebook & Twitter 3 years to do). That means Google+ might be the newest entry in the social media ring, but it’s definitely in the “heavyweight” division. It has created a platform that quite frankly melds the worlds of Facebook, Twitter, and Skype.

So why would a business look to jump on the Google+ bandwagon?

Reason #1 – It’s another place to claim your online real estate. If you haven’t already, you should start by setting up a Gmail account and then your personal Google Profile and make it public. If you have one and it’s private, Google may have already deleted it. Not only does Google+ revolve around your Google profile, but once you set it up, it will probably rank at the top of the first page of Google with links to your site, blog, etc. How great is that!

Make sure to fill your profile out with a ton of valuable information about you and your company. By the way, at this point Google+ is set up to work with People profiles only…their business version of this tool is expected to hit later this year, so you need to start by creating a personal profile first.

Reason #2 – Getting in early makes it easy for people to find you. When you launch Google+ you will see that it immediately lists a ton of possible people you might know and within seconds you can drag and drop them into groups called “Circles.” These mean you can segregate and communicate with different sets of contacts from Family, Friends, Co-Workers, Acquaintances, etc. If you join late and people don’t see you or can’t find you, you’re going to be the one doing all the legwork to find them later on. Right now, Google+ has made connecting with contacts even easier in that you can upload contacts – up to a 100 at a time per day. 

Reason #3 – It’s a haven of business minded individuals. Google+ is attracting an incredibly high percentage of business people and entrepreneurs. This makes it a great arena for B2B companies and for online networking. I certainly don’t just mean small business owners either. I was immediately able to connect with the likes of Michael Dell and Mark Zuckerberg (Not surprisingly, he isn’t saying much, not to mention that Google+ hasn’t started to verify famous profiles so who knows if it’s really him). Unlike Facebook where you have to put out a friend request and then be accepted, Google+ works more like Twitter, where you can add anybody to your Circles. When that person provides updates, they can choose if they want the world to see it or only certain circles. So it’s a nicely structured online networking haven.

Reason #4 – Your Own FREE Virtual Soapbox and Meeting Space – Google+has a function called a Hangout. It’s got some glitches, so you will definitely want to have a test run before you get too carried away with this. But let’s say you want to share a concept about your business (think webinar) – you can start a hangout and either invite people in your circle or publicly. You can only have 10 people on a hangout at any time, but it’s free and it is video chat. Talk about an inexpensive conference call tool.

You can also use it for meetings with collaborators or to present to prospect. It’s not perfect yet, so be careful on the importance of the presentation, would hate to rely on it for a million dollar deal just yet!

Reason #5 – MOST IMPORTANTLY – It can drive a ton of traffic to your site – Since joining Google+, John was saying he’s astounded with the amount of traffic it’s bringing to the Duct Tape Marketing site. Ventureweb.com noted that 67 percent of its online referrals came via Google Plus in one day. The beautiful thing about this is it’s free! Of course it doesn’t just happen. You need to be active on Google+ in terms of posting, and following people and adding them in your circles to see the results.

So I hope if you are completely new to Google+, I have convinced you to a least take a look at it, and for those of you heavily entrenched, I look forward to connecting and hearing about your discoveries.

I picked this up from the Business Insider Chart of the Day email list from last week. I like the detail here. As Facebook grew, founder Mark Zuckerberg traded share of ownership for investment money.

You’ve probably seen a lot of discussion lately about Facebook’s $50 billion value. It’s not a theoretical value of an expert’s guess, it’s a simple math calculation from the last real transaction. Goldman Sachs paid $400 million for 8/10 of one percent (.008 of the company, also called 0.8%). You can do the math here: divide 400 million by .008 and you’ll get 50 billion. And that most recent transaction is what tax code sets as the value.

The debate about real value is all guesswork. Did Goldman Sachs pay too much? Is Facebook really worth $50 billion? Will the investors who bought in at the Goldman Sachs $50 billion price make money? Time will tell. And sometimes these valuations are a bit like musical chairs. Investors can make money if later investors pay a higher price, whether or not the company is really worth it. Worth, called valuation when we talk about startups, is what somebody will pay for something.

You’ve seen ups and downs in major stocks and house prices, and in those markets it’s obvious. Will Facebook’s value increase? Microsoft and Google are each valued at several hundred billion.

This chart shows how founders’ ownership gets diluted as a successful startup collects investment through various rounds. Mark Zuckerberg now owns 24 percent of Facebook. Another 30 percent is set aside for other employees. Similarly, Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page own between them about 20 percent of Google. Bill Gates owns about 40 percent of Microsoft. And these are enormously successful companies with brilliant founders. A lot of founders end up with single digit percent ownership, after all the investment dilution.

Another interesting note is that the owners shown here can’t trade that ownership for real money yet. That happens only after the stocks are registered and set to be traded on a public stock market. Until then, the holders live with a lot of legal restrictions. Option holders often sign agreements limiting their ability to trade stocks. And the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has some serious restrictions on selling this stock.

And my last thought on this subject: everybody involved in this has a big win right now. Mark Zuckerberg can’t just walk away with $12 billion dollars, but he’s already shown he can have his cake and eat it too, living very well without converting any more than tiny pieces of his ownership. If you followed the detail presented in the The Social Network movie, Eduardo Saverin has five percent ownership, so he’s okay. And those twins? They’re complaining about $60 million. It’s hard to feel sorry for any of them.

Today’s BIG Blog post is from Mark Macias, author of Beat the Press: Your Guide to Managing the Media.

Everyone likes to secretly Google himself, but what happens when Google turns up results you don’t like? How do you get your name removed from the search engines when the material is damaging?

An established New Jersey financial consultant, Alan Gottlob, woke up one morning to discover his reputable name was falsely accused of ethical violations. Making it worse, the writer never called Gottlob for a response. Gottlob first learned of the article three months after it was published when a client read it on the Internet and asked him about it.

These strong allegations can destroy nearly any person’s business but in an industry built on trust – like the financial industry – the article nearly destroyed Gottlob’s private practice.

Gottlob reached out to me to manage his crisis communications after he didn’t get anywhere with the web publisher, Investment News. We applied several new strategies and within weeks, Investment News and its parent company, Crain Communications Inc., were in discussions to correct the article.

If you find yourself in this situation, there are several steps you can take to get the material removed from the Internet. Contrary to the popular saying, “the Internet is written in ink,” it is possible to modify the record if you apply some proven crisis communications strategies.

Here are some of the strategies you can take if you find yourself in a similar crisis situation as Gottlob.

1) Go after the power brokers or the people who finance the publication, which includes the publisher, city editors, Executive Producers, and most important: the legal counsel for the publication. Do a quick Google to find out who owns the website or publication. Most people, like Gottlob, contact the writer when a negative article is published, but that’s like complaining to the sales clerk when the cashier gives you the wrong change. You need to complain to the people who control the money. Your letter to these power brokers needs to state why this article is inaccurate and most important, how the article has financially harmed your business. If you can’t show any financial duress from the article, you won’t succeed in the court of law or with the publisher.

2) Understand the difference between libelous, slander and opinion. If a blogger writes that you smell, you can’t take legal action to bring down the story. However, if the blogger writes a factually inaccurate article that accuses you of wrongdoing and harms your business, you do have legal recourse to get the web page pulled down. And you don’t always need an attorney for this. Sometimes a strongly worded letter that outlines the bullet points from above is enough to get the publisher’s attention.

3) Don’t wait. Go after the website’s owners immediately. The longer the website is up, the more time search engines have to index the web page. Unfortunately, it took Gottlob several weeks to get a hold of the reporter and her superiors. By the time he was able to speak to the reporter, the web page had already been indexed and was on the first page of Google.

4) Google will stop indexing the website if you can prove the website displays private personal information like social security numbers, however you need to make a case to them if it involves other matters. You can find this page on Google at https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/removals.

5) Push the article off the first Google page with new content. There is another strategy you can take to bury the article off of the first page from Google. You can accomplish this by writing your own blog or material and making sure it is indexed with the proper search engine optimization.

6) Once the page is removed, you need to write a letter to all the search engines to make sure the page is no longer indexed.

This form of crisis communications will only grow in the future as more bloggers and news organizations post articles on the Internet. If the article is false and inaccurate, don’t be afraid to fight back. Just make sure you’re not picking a fight over someone’s opinion because luckily the First Amendment still protects us from that.

Mark Macias is a crisis communications consultant. He runs a TV production (www.MaciasTV.com) and PR company (www.MaciasPR.com) that has consulted restaurants, retailers, lounges and Congressional candidates, including one challenger who beat an incumbent. Macias also wrote the communications book, Beat the Press: Your Guide to Managing the Media. You can read excerpts at: www.BeatthePressBook.com.

Did you miss the first internet boom, back in the 1990s, and fail to make your millions then? Did you not write the cute little iPhone app that made the teenager tons of money? Well, cheer up. There’s still hope.

Read Google App Inventor: Now Anyone Can Create an Android App on Mashable. That post says:

Google App Inventor claims to enable non-coders to develop complete, working Android apps by connecting a series of “blocks.” Google has been testing App Inventor in schools for a year, reports The New York Times. At the time of writing, App Inventor is only available to those who apply via a form

.

App Inventor is supposed to be launched Monday.

A lot went on this week at Google’s developer conference in San Francisco. Google TV, for example (video below). I’ve got Comcast DVR and Roku these days, plus an iPad, and I’ve gone through ReplayTV and Tivo. But I guess I can’t get enough of this stuff, because now I want Google TV. Consider the video here (and if it doesn’t show, click here for the original on YouTube):

That’s only part of it. The rest of the story, as ReadWriteWeb put it, is Whoa . . . Chrome Makes an App Store for the Web where we see something like the upscale phone app stores showing up soon for Google Chrome, the Google browser. The Read/Write post summarized:

Chrome, Google’s web browser, is now adding an application store to help with discovery and sales of web applications.

That’s amazing. Apple’s App Store, the seductive jungle of little bundles of functionality that changed the mobile market, has also changed the open web. As Google said at the event, it can be hard to find good web applications. Now the Chrome App Store will make that easier, including posting user reviews of apps. It will also allow developers to sell full-screen, browser-based web apps. It’s one thing to experiment with charging for web content like newspapers are–but charging for casual consumer-level tech functionality on the web? That’s crazy.

It’s so crazy that it just might work.

Crazy like a fox, maybe. It’s an exciting world for startups. Apple’s products created a booming new app market. Now we have Google’s power joining in. Summary: Whoa!

1. Not really exclusive. Legal isn’t the whole issue with names. Lots of legal names work fine until you grow and run into somebody else with the same name, in the same business area, who had it first. Check out this true-life story. You can easily have a name that’s legal but stunts your growth because even though you own it, somebody else owned it first, so you can’t really compete. It happens a lot. I saw a business plan for a high-end boutique for men’s underwear, catering mainly to the wives, partners and significant others of relatively well-to-do men. If they had called it Victor’s Secret, it would have been legal. But when they started to grow, Victoria’s Secret would have had the legal right to force them to come up with a new name.
2. Focusing too narrowly on the domain name. “Damn, we can’t be such-and-such, because such-and-such.com isn’t available.” Did Jeff Bezos need books.com? Did Flickr need photos.com? Did search.com beat Yahoo! or Google? Many companies run domain names different from the company name. Get something easy to remember and hard to misspell. It doesn’t necessarily have to match your company name. If you can’t get your favorite domain name, get a good name.
3. Confusing a name with marketing. I dealt with some young entrepreneurs who had a plan to acquire the domain name cameras.com to sell cameras. When asked their marketing strategy, they responded with blank looks. Wasn’t it obvious? They were going to own cameras.com. With that domain name, who needs marketing? No cigar, I’m afraid. The name itself doesn’t generate enough traffic for anything. If you don’t believe me, first search cameras for sale and then look at cameras.com (no offense intended to the current owners of cameras.com, who aren’t the same entrepreneurs I knew back then).
4. Gag-me cute, dumb, offensive names. With thanks to hubpages.com, names like Drain Surgeons, The Stalk Market and Get Plastered. Be careful with puns. I love puns, but they get old. When they work it’s great. I’ve always liked Noah’s Arf or Doggie Pause (real businesses) for dog day care. I think those two work.
5. Too trendy or too clueless. What if a fashion dies and your business is still around? Things named for bellbottom pants, fax machines or Y2K, for example. Did anybody else notice when Disney had to completely redo its future themes because the year 2000 came and went? And names that are plainly insensitive about ethnic identities, religions or sexual preferences; that gets old way too fast.
6. Misspellings. Arrgh. I hate that. My company is a client of NPD Intelect, the market research company; great company, but damn, “Intelect?” Misspelled. I suspect the problem is that they started in Germany, where that spelling is correct. Try this list of well-known businesses with misspelled names. I agree with the blogger; they’re annoying.
7. Your own name. I knew a guy named Bob who owned Wayne’s Garage. That was a constant small annoyance, about as trivial as a very small pebble in your shoe. On a long hike. Some day you might want to sell your company to somebody else. Maybe even somebody with a different name. And here’s an interesting piece of trivia: When Borland International got started, there was nobody named Borland involved. And have you met Peter Norton, founder of Norton Utilities? Sure, there are exceptions to every rule.
8. Acronyms. When I worked for Creative Strategies International, we called it CSI. But nobody else did. As I write this, “CSI” gets more than 32 million hits on Google. Not just the TV show, but Computer Security Institute, College of Staten Island, College of Southern Idaho, Construction Specifications Institute . . . on and on.
9. Too local. I’ve got a pots and kettles problem with this one, because my wife and I named our company Palo Alto Software while we were in Palo Alto, Calif. Then in 1992 we moved to Eugene, Ore. Whoops. Moving is easier than renaming. And ours, while a problem, could be a lot worse. At least Palo Alto sort of says Stanford and Silicon Valley. Thank heavens we weren’t living in Boring, Ore. Or Drain, Ore. Or Hell, Mich.
10. Too generic. Too vanilla. I learned this one the hard way, too. Palo Alto Software started out as Infoplan Inc. One day a consultant walked in and told me that there were more than 26,000 companies in the United States whose names started with “Info-” something or other. Oh dear. That’s why it became Palo Alto Software.

(Image: David Hilcher/Shutterstock)

Here’s an interesting new business that might be useful for Web app and related entrepreneurs. I found it on TechCrunch this morning: “WatchMouse Monitors 26 Popular APIs So You Don’t Have To.” If you don’t know what an API is, this probably doesn’t concern you, but it stands for Application Programming Interface. You’ll probably recognize some of these names (quoting the post):

The lists of monitored APIs consists of 26 of the most heavily trafficked Web services, including Google Search, Google Maps, Bing, Facebook, Twitter, SalesForce, YouTube, Amazon, eBay and others.

The company, WatchMouse, is launching a new service dubbed API-status.com today.

I have no personal experience with APIs, but my company links up with several, and I read a lot of business plans for business offerings that depend on them. There’s a lot of entrepreneurial interest out there, because there’s a lot of functionality. I use apps based on APIs frequently, and you do, too.

Here’s an interesting graphic (straight from the TechCrunch post, so you can click on it to get to the source):

(Source: this graphic is on the TechCrunch post. Click to get there.)

I’ve posted here recently–several times–on how important web search is for startups and growing businesses. Today I found one interesting new site and received a recommendation for another longstanding good site to follow in this area.

Thanks to Josh Cochrane of bplans.com for these tips:

The SEO consultants at SEOmoz have a couple of catchy recurring series of posts on their blogs. One is “Headsmacking Tips,” which covers basic techniques or easy wins that often get overlooked. Sort of a “back-to-fundamentals” message. Here’s an example: Vertical content can earn you links.

The other is “Whiteboard Fridays,” a weekly video post series (similar to your new Bplans.com content) where the company founder explains a topic on video using simple whiteboard. Again, I just like the catchy title. An example: How to get awesome links

Meanwhile, thanks to somebody recommending it on Twitter, I just discovered an almost brand-new blog called Rank and ROI Web Marketing. There are only a handful of posts, but the first two I saw were very good. That would be:

• Small business owner’s guide to Google backlinks and
• Online Local Business Listings for Small Business