This past week we had a MeetUp Group Meeting and I met with two website owners looking to improve their business:
First we spoke about the power of Gmail. Gmail is Google’s e-mail client, like Hotmail or AOL or earthlink. But Gmail offers a few things the others do not. I consider Gmail to be an e-mail manager. You can send and receive e-mail from all your accounts in Gmail.
So if you work at Autozone and your e-mail is JoeJoe@autozone.com, you can receive all that e-mail in your Gmail account and you can reply to it (Re: JoeJoe@autozone.com) without the person ever knowing you use Gmail to manage your e-mail. I recommend that for its sheer simplicity and efficiency.
Another great part of Gmail is the “labs”. In the upper right corner of the Gmail screen, you’ll see a little circle that looks like a gear. Click it and drop down to Settings. Inside the Settings is a tab called Labs.
Click that and it will take you to tons of Gmail options – like e-mail recall, categorizing, filters, auto-replies and much more.
We also spoke about anchor text links. See how this word is highlighted and you know it is a link:
That’s an anchor text link. I’ve got that linked to my marketing website. When Google sees anchor text links, it equates the word with the website. So if you want your site to come up as #1 for the term Los Angeles Gardening Supply Store, use that phrase in articles and throughout the web and have the words linked back to your site. Here’s the html code to do that:
<a href=”http://yoursite.com”>Los Angeles Gardening Supply Store</a>
We also spoke a bit about the three houses of Google. Google ranks sites heavily three different ways: Content (which means quality pages and well placed keywords), Social Relevance (which means links from 3rd party sites) and Social Interaction (which means blog comments, +1 hits and interaction on the site itself). Make sure you’re paying attention to all three.
I also promised my Meetup Group links to my favorite hosting company: hostgator (http://danmorrismarketing.com/hosting) and to the very cool Randy Pausch video that everyone should watch. Listen to what he says about roadblocks and speedbumps.That’s what you’re up against right now:
Seriously, listen to what Randy says about them. Remember, if it were easy – everyone would be doing it. Do what Randy says!
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