Here is an instructional Youtube video on how to create a Google Page for your business
Your customers and clients will often turn to their friends and family to help them make decisions and gather recommendations for using businesses. The +1 button combines the power of these types of recommendations on Google and it’s owned and operated properties. Google has social circles across the web and has integrated this into Google search and on many news sites to show these timely recommendations to help your site stand out in the crowd.
Google+ Pages help you build deeper relationships with customers by sharing your links, photos and videos as well as promotions. You can get reports on visitors and highlight special deals and offers as well as to chat live with international customers all over the world.
There is still an old school site submit that Google has but not the recommended way to establish a relationship with Google. If you want to drop your URL into a black hole then you can use the Google Addurl tool. I remember over 10+ years ago when this was the only way to talk to the engines and let them know you existed.
Google has one of the most advanced Webmaster tools that you can use to both submit your website to be crawled and also to add sitemaps, xml feeds or product feeds for them to crawl and index.
Google Webmaster Central also has great reporting tools and resources to show you any site errors or issues they have crawling your content. To sign-in to Webmaster tools you just need to have an active gmail account. I usually use the same one that is linked to my GA and Adwords accounts to keep everything streamlined.
Once you have logged into the site and are on the Tools homepage at: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/home, you will see a red “Add a Site” button and enter your sites URL. You will then need to authenticate ownership of the site and you can do this using Google Analytics if your GA tracking code that uses the asynchronous snippet. You can also click on the ‘alternative methods’ tab and add a meta tag to your sites homepage, add a DNS record to your domain’s configuration or upload an HTML file to your website. They will provide a link to download the HTML file and you will need to upload it directly to your root folder. Remember – you only need to do one of these methods to verify your tag.
Google Verify with HTML
Google Site Verification Tag
If you are using WordPress and want to verify your site using the meta tag snippet then you can usually go to the Appearance > Editor > and edit the header.php file and place the meta tag just before the tag in the file and then go back to the Google Webmaster Central page and click to verify the tag. Don’t forget this process as Google doesn’t do an auto-check until you tell them to.
Once you have verified your site then you will want to get your sitemap submitted to them. If you haven’t ever built an xml sitemap then there are a bunch of free xml sitemap tools or if you are using WordPress then you can download a sitemap plug-in which will automatically create and update your sitemap on the fly for you. I’ll do another post on best practices sitemap settings for the different fields like lastmod, changefreq and priority.
