Last week I had the opportunity to meet with a few groups of United Methodist Church leaders near Washington, DC to discuss how the church can best use their websites and social media tools to reach people more effectively.

My social media presentation was largely focused on the fact that Twitter and Facebook are no longer tools for churches to be “playing with”; they’ve become legitimate communication tools.  While most churches are doing fairly well with Facebook, Twitter remains a problem.  I’m hoping the tools I shared with them will help get things rolling.

Google+

Even though the sessions were only a week ago, my thoughts on Google+ have changed.  At the time, I said something like “You need to focus hard on Facebook and Twitter, and start playing with Google+ because you’ll need to be active there later this year“.  As it turns out, “later this year” is now.  The reason for the sudden shift is Google’s release of “Search, plus Your World”, which adds heavy Google+ integration into the search results.  Here’s a quick video showing how that works:

That alone should be enough to encourage you to get your organization on Google+.  But it goes further.  Try searching for “music” or “cars” and you’ll get a result similar to the shot below.  Notice the area that I outlined in red.

Notice that the red box is for Google+ profiles only; no Twitter or Facebook found there.  That is seen by some as anti-competitive, and perhaps it is, but that’s simply how it works right now.  Britney Spears trails a variety of artists on Twitter (Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber, Katy Perry, etc), but none of them are on Google+ yet.  As a result, she’s suddenly getting a lot more free promotion when someone performs a search.

For now, that area doesn’t matter much for your business, but it will soon.  For local searches, Google will almost certainly start showing businesses in your area instead of just generic industry-related results.  If you wait until that happens before you join Google+, you’ll be way behind.  Suppose Katy Perry sees those results and joins Google+ to get back in the game.  While she may catch up to Spears eventually, she’s already behind by 1.3 million followers.  How far ahead do you want your competition to get before you join the game?

Faces in the main results

Not only is that side bar relevant, but the main search results (in both personal and non-personal mode) are already full of results from Google+.  In many cases, those results show the face of the author of the post even if the post was made on their own blog.  For example, the below search for “google earth imagery january” shows my face next to the second result, because it knows that I wrote that article and it connects to my Google+ profile; and this is the non-personal results!

Don’t put all of your eggs in one basket

As much as I love Google+, I’m certainly not advising you to bail on Facebook or Twitter.  As I said at the beginning, those are legit communications platforms and your organization needs to be active on both of them.  For now, at least, all three are very important to your organization.

If you want to dabble in social media, there are places to do that.  Play with Pinterest (connect with me), play with Path, or play with any of the other new services popping up.  Pinterest may become more serious this year, but for now you can just poke the tires a bit.

I don’t have time

I hear it a lot — “not another service to keep up with!”, but it’s all about your mind set.  Instead of worrying about how you’ll have time for three separate services, just look at it from the positive side.  Now you have another way to connect with your customers, and this one will help you show up more frequently in the search results too.  It’s a win-win!

Once you get things set up, simply take 10-15 minutes/day to post your latest thoughts and respond to people that are talking to you.  It doesn’t have to be a huge deal.  If it takes longer than that to respond to everything coming your way, then your business is likely doing well and you can afford to spend more time working with those people (or hire someone to help you out).

Do you think any other services are worthy of the full attention of your business right now?  I can see LinkedIn being one for a few organizations, but that’s about it.  Agree?

It’s time to stop dabbling with social media is a post from: MickMel

Last week, I saw a speech that Gary Vaynerchuk gave to a bunch of RE/MAX realtors on the topic of social media engagement and it was quite awesome.  Here’s the video if you care to watch it:

Watching it inspired me to pick up Gary’s latest book, “The Thank You Economy“.  Awesome book, highly recommended. The folks at Marlow’s Tavern really need to read it.

As a general rule, we enjoy Marlow’s.  They have a few locations near us, good food, and solid service.  Tonight we took our babysitter out there for her birthday, but the evening had a few minor issues, and I think they could really benefit from having more of a “Thank You” approach to business.

No birthday desserts

We made sure to mention that today was our babysitter’s birthday, because we knew that Marlow’s did the little free cupcake dessert like most restaurants.  Nope, not anymore.  ”Some people lie about it being their birthday, so we can’t do that anymore.”  Uh-oh.  Really?  Did that surprise them?  Of course some people will lie about it — that’s why you give them a cheap cupcake and not a free steak. We had three adults and two kids, with a total bill of $78, and they’re concerned that they might give away a $3 dessert that isn’t legit?

While you certainly need to watch out for people taking advantage of you, this just seemed really shallow.  Companies that do customer service the right away (like Zappos) just focus on treating their customers like rock stars, and don’t worry so much about potentially giving up $3 every now and then.

My food was SLOW

It was remarkable.  The other four people in our party got their food fairly quickly, but I didn’t.  So I waited.  And waited.  And waited.  We’re guessing it was 10-12 minutes before my food arrived, which is crazy for a place like that, but things happen.  However, I still don’t know what happened.  I got a quick “sorry ’bout that” when they brought it, and that was it.  It was clear they didn’t care about the issue a single bit. A much better approach would have been like what Scott Stratten had happen at a hotel a few years ago; he had a very bad breakfast, but they apologized and explained the problem and he was much happier as a result.  Here’s his full write-up of that experience.

I decided not to press the the issue with them, just to see how they’d handle it.  Simply put, they didn’t.  No apology from anyone, no deduction on our bill.

(Speaking of the bill – $2.50 each for kid’s drinks?  Wow!)

Twitter

With those in mind, I did a little digging when I got home.  They’re pretty solid on Twitter (@MarlowsTavern), so I poked around for a while.  The content they push out is solid, but their conversation skills are weak.  They reply to some comments, but it appears to be at random.  Just in the past week:

• Jennifer asked whether a dish at Marlow’s was gluten free.  A few days later, she got a reply from them — yes!  Excellent.  So she replied back asking if they had a gluten free menu, or how they should request gluten free products.  Crickets…
• Robbie tweeted that he was taking his wife to Marlow’s for her birthday.  A quick “congrats” would have been nice, but they simply let it go without comment…
• Another user tweeted to rave about their Sunday buffet.  Again, no reply.

Seriously, businesses need to build true fans to be successful and here are people actively telling their world about your restaurant — and you ignore them?

Google Place Pages

How about their Google Place pages?  They have a handful of locations, so I just checked out a few of them.  I found these two gems rather quickly:

• “The salmon was tasty, but I won’t be returning“
• “Probably one of the worst meals I have ever had“

The response from Marlow’s, as expected, was silence.

Google+

Needless to say, they’re not on Google+ yet.  Not that I can really fault them for that (it’s new, smaller than Facebook/Twitter, etc), but people are already talking about them on there…

Website

Since they’ll probably be reading this, I’ll toss in a few suggested website tweaks as a bonus.  Their website is really pretty solid (many restaurants have dreadfully awful sites), but it could use some adjustments:

• On your front page, you have a link to your “to-go” menu.  Seems like people might often be in the car when they call for that.  And the menu is a PDF?
• In the footer, “copyright 2007″.
• Also in the footer is the “designed by” garbage.  Don’t leave that on there.
• Your canonicalization is a bit messed up.
• “Follow us on Facebook”.  Don’t you “follow” people on Twitter and “like” them on Facebook?  People get confused enough, so don’t switch them up for no good reason.  I’ve never liked the words “follow us” anyhow, because it implies that “you should follow us and we’ll send you a bunch of crap”.  I’m glad the Twitter widget (which you have on your site) says “Join the conversation” instead, as that sounds much better.
• Your Entertainment page encourages people to visit you on MySpace, which you haven’t updated in about two years.  Can’t blame you for the lack of updates, but you should probably remove that link.

It just takes time

Social media can be difficult for some businesses.  If you sell toilet plungers, it’ll take some work to come up with a creative campaign.  For restaurants, though, it’s dead simple.  Just put in the effort, connect with your patrons, and prove that you really care about them.  I should also mention that their Facebook pages (like this one) seem to be managed quite well, so they’re not totally ignoring everyone.

At the end of the day, these weren’t killer problems for Marlow’s.  We certainly think less of them, no doubt, but we’ll be back eventually — they’ll just be a little bit lower on the list.

Marlow’s Tavern, meet Gary Vaynerchuk is a post from: MickMel

Over the years, I’ve discussed a lot of ideas to help your business flourish online and today I’m going to show you what it looks like when it all comes together.

The East Cobber is a free local magazine in Marietta, GA that was created back in 1993, and they’ve had an online presence for nearly a decade.  However, with the ongoing shift from print to digital, they realized the the site could do so much more.  Last year they enlisted the help of Green Mellen Media, and the results have been amazing.  Here is a chart showing their growth since the new site launched last fall.

The beginning of that chart is October, 2010, when they had 1,509 visitors.  Last month they had a total of 16,498.  For a year over year comparison, they had 1,691 visitors in May 2010, and then the 16,498 in May 2011 — an increase of 875% in a single year!  Even better, this wasn’t from a brand new site; this was a very well-established site from a popular magazine.  So what made the difference?  There were quite a few things, but here are some of the big ones.

WordPress

We moved the entire site over to WordPress, which helped with quite a few things.  It not only made it easier for them to publish articles, but WordPress has excellent Search Engine Optimization by design.  Using a StudioPress-powered theme helped even more, as they add some additional SEO tweaks to the mix.  Here is their incoming traffic from search engines over the past eight months:

Content

This is the big key.  Rather than posting a few articles each month when the new issue came out, they’re posting multiple stories every day to keep the community informed of local news and events.  They’ve published over 2,900 entries since the new site went live, making them a true hub in the community.

Social

I recently pointed out how you can’t fake your way to social media success, and they’re an example of social media done right.  Their Facebook page auto-posts some new items from the site, but they’re quick to respond to comments and often run contents to give away prizes from area businesses.  They’ve gone from just a few hundred likes on the page to well over 1,000 and it continues to grow quickly.

The key here is that they work hard at it.  People are always looking for shortcuts, but the East Cobber folks simply got to work and are engaging with the community daily.  We’ve given them some tools to help make it easier, but there is no substitute for actually diving in and connecting with people.

The Little Things

Little things can add up too:

• We didn’t put our name in their footer in order to help them rank as well as possible in Google.  The results above speak for themselves.
• They post a new photo of the day on their home page every day to keep things fresh.
• They trusted us and we trusted them.  When we assured them that a feature or idea wouldn’t work, they believed us.  When they told us that their readers were interested in certain topics, we believed them.
• We used most of my favorite WordPress plug-ins, plus a few others to help add additional functionality to the site.
• We use Google Analytics (which generated the charts above) see what content people read the most, what needs to be improved, etc.

The magic solution

People are often looking for the magic solution to put their online business on autopilot, but things just don’t work that way.  A properly configured site, using a solid platform, with lots of hard work put into building content and the community, can lead to a very successful site.

Traffic is continuing to grow for them, and I expect it will for some time.  Congratulations to Cynthia and her team for such great success over the past year!

How to make it all come together is a post from: MickMel

A few months ago, Google introduced the +1 button to the world.  It’s essentially a simple way for you to approve of a page, and your friends will see that you “+1′d” it in the search results, meaning it’s likely a good site for them to visit as well.  Here’s Google’s official video explaining it:

Now Google has finally gone a step further and created a button that you can add to your own website.  If you’re reading this on my site (and not via Google Reader, etc), look at the bottom of the post and you’ll see the new button.  This is quite important, because Google has said that +1 can affect how well your site ranks in the search results, meaning it’s quite important for site owners to add this button to their sites!

Here’s the quick version; just add this code to your page and the button will appear:

<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js”></script><g:plusone></g:plusone>

However, it can be tweaked quite a bit by using this webmaster +1 page.  You can choose various sizes, make it vertical, and even give it a specific URL to +1 (by default, it uses the page you’re on).

Update: If you’re using WordPress, there are a lot of great plug-ins to choose from.  I’m currently using this one, which seems to work quite well.

URL to +1?

For example, look at the front page of Google Earth Blog.  Each post on the page has a +1 button at the bottom, but they’re each set to show +1′s from their respective posts; you wouldn’t want all of those buttons to simply add a +1 for “gearthblog.com” — you want them to +1 the post that they’re under.

In most cases, you don’t need to worry about that.  Just add the simple code snippet from above and you’re good to go!

Is it worth my time?

The big question is whether or not +1 will take off.  The fact that it will affect search results, even a little bit, means that most sites will be adding the button.  If most sites add the button, it’ll probably be seen as a successful move for Google.  Time will tell, but things seem to be in their favor.

How about you? Have you added it to your site yet?

How to add a Google +1 (Plus One) button to your site is a post from: MickMel

Three years ago I wrote up a list of my favorite plug-ins, and decided that it was well past time to give the list a fresh look.  While many of them have stayed the same, I’ve got a few additions and a few deletions.

The ones that stayed the same

These plug-ins have certainly been updated in the past few years, but remain part of every blog I manage:

Akismet – Amazingly awesome spam fighting plugin.

FeedBurner Feedsmith – I still run all of my blog RSS feeds through FeedBurner, and this is a great plug-in to quietly redirect visitors over there.

Google XML Sitemaps – A simple way to generate an XML sitemap and automatically notify search engines of your new posts.

Highlight Author Comments – Make your replies stand out when you reply to comments on a post of yours.

Subscribe to Comments – Allow users to get email notifications of new posts after they leave one.  I love when blogs have this, so I can be notified if someone replies to my comment and then we can continue the conversation.

The ones that I’ve moved away from

Here are the plug-ins that I no longer use regularly, for one reason or another:

All in One SEO Pack -Most of the themes that I use (typically from StudioPress) have great SEO baked right in and this is less important.

Enhanced WP Contact Form – I’ve switched to Wufoo for virtually all of my forms.

Fancy Zoom – I still use it from time to time, but most themes have better image management.

Top Commentators – This isn’t really a bad plug-in, I simply don’t use it any more.

Sociable – I’ve removed this in favor of Twitter and Facebook-specific plug-ins, shown below.

Twitter Tools – I now use dlvr.it to handle this instead, but I use it rather sparingly; be fresh on Twitter, not automated!

WordPress.com Stats – Still a great plugin, and I use it on a few blogs, but I primarily rely on Google Analytics.

The new additions!

I’ve dropped some plug-ins, but also added some new ones over the past few years such as:

Canonical URL’s – A very simple plug-in to add the canonical tag to your pages.  Not overly helpful in many cases, but can be excellent for your SEO sometimes.  (What is the canonical tag?)

PuSHPress – This enabled PuSubHubbub support for your blog. In short, it makes sure that RSS readers and others will get your posts instantly, rather than the next time they check in a few hours.  (more about the PuSHPress plugin)

RSS Footer – This adds a line of text (with a few links) the bottom of each post in your RSS feed.  The basic idea is that if someone is scraping your site and posting it as their own, you’ll at least still get some free links back to your site!

Twitter Button for WordPress – A simple way to add a “tweet” button to your posts.

WP FB Like Button – A simple way to add a Facebook “like” button to your posts.

WPtouch – A great plug-in that creates a mobile version of your site and automatically serves it to mobile phones when they connect.

You?

What about you?  Any other killer plugins that I’m missing from the list?

My favorite WordPress plug-ins is a post from: MickMel

Google just introduced a bold new feature today that could (maybe) become quite a huge thing: +1′s.

At first glance it doesn’t seem like much: when viewing search results (and related ads), you can click the “+1″ icon next to a result to show that you approve of it.  When your friends have those same sites come up in their search results, they’ll see that you approved of it.  Here’s a quick video showing how it works:

They’re slowly rolling it out on the main Google site, but you can activate it now by turning it on in the Google Experimental Labs page.

The tricky part is how Google will determine who your “friends” are.  On Facebook it’s quite clear; with Google, not so much.  For now they’ll be using your Google Contacts, Buzz followers, chat buddies and other Google tools, and may eventually tie into sources like Twitter to try to make the recommendations as solid as possible.

Sometime in the future, websites will have the ability to add “+1″ icons to their pages, similar to the Facebook “Like” buttons that are showing up everywhere.

The big criticism I’m hearing so far is that you won’t want to +1 a search result until you’ve actually visited the site, but by then you’re not likely to go back to the search results to do it.  Very true.  However, this is where Google could make this thing huge — if I were to add a +1 button on my site, and it’s tied to the +1 in the search results, I’ll have no choice but to add it to all of my sites or be left behind.  Google is by far the biggest search engine, and that’s not changing any time soon.  If all of my competition has +1′s by their search results and I don’t, I’m toast.  Expect to see a ton of websites add this feature as soon as it becomes available.

One last piece of this is that they show all of your +1′s on your Google Profile (if you enable that feature).  For example, here’s mine.  Not especially valuable, but an interesting addition.

So this thing could turn out to be pretty big, but in the meantime it’s kind of a cute toy.

Google introduces the “+1″ button is a post from: MickMel

Ever since Google took the throne of “world’s best search engine” a decade ago, people have worked hard to try to get their sites to rank well.  Unfortunately, many unscrupulous companies try to cheat their way to the top and Google is constantly tweaking their system in order to fight back.

The folks at SEO Book have created a very cool graphic illustrating how this battle has unfolded over the years.  If you ever wanted to know more about how Google works, this is a good place to start.

Infographic by SEO Book

A history of SEO with Google is a post from: MickMel

I was talking to @jasonbhuffman on Twitter about search engine optimization on his church site, and he told me this:

I was informed that on Google, more clicks on a particular site would cause it to be listed higher in certain searches.

Google won’t confirm or deny whether or not clicks can help, so know one knows for sure, but most experts agree with the following:

• Clicks from Google search result pages possibly help. If you come up fourth for a particular phrase, yet more people click your result than the third listing, it seems there’s a chance you could move up.
• Clicks from other pages (like Twitter) to your site are unlikely to help. While Google can often see clicks from other sites via the Google toolbar or Google Analytics installed on your site, it doesn’t appear to have an effect on your rankings at this point.

Of course, clicks from sites like Twitter are still certainly excellent, since they’re visitors!  Even if it doesn’t have a secondary benefit, you’re still getting someone on your site, which is the entire goal.

So what can be done?

Jason’s site is First UMC Palestine, so I thought I’d offer a few other on-site SEO tips that might help.  There are really two things that we need to focus on:

1. Make sure that Google is aware that the church is located in Palestine, TX, so they can rank well when people refine their search to that area (like “churches in palestine tx”).
2. Make sure pages focus on their primary content, so Google will know when to show those pages.  As a result, we want to rank well when people search for specific things in the area, like “palestine preschool” or “vbs in palestine”.

So, here’s a few things that should help:

• First, clean up the page titles.  The title on the home page is incredibly long, and titles on the internal pages are missing some nice keywords.
• Add more internal links. For example, the list of worship services on the left side of the home page should link to details about those searches.  Use the main text on each page to link to other relevant pages, but do it naturally.  If you mention the preschool, link to that page, but don’t try to force extra links in there.
• Build separate pages for each staff member, with the full list of them on the main “staff” page.
• Avoid saying “click here”, which I noticed in a few places.  Link the relevant text every time.
• Keep posting great blog entries.  Each of those have the potential to pull in some visitors from Google, especially if we can get the page titles cleaned up so that each one has more of a “palestine” pull to it.
• Remove the link to the “Arras Theme” in the footer.  They allow you to remove it, but I agree that you should give them a small donation in exchange for it ($10?). Here’s why that will help.
• Get more links pointed to your site.  Our link at the top of this article will help, but now you need a bunch more as well.  Get church members to add a link from their personal blogs, see if any Palestine-centric sites (Chamber of Commerce, etc) will link to you.  Any inbound link will help.

Over time, those should help you rank better.  You don’t appear to have Google Analytics installed, so I hope you have some way of accurately tracking your traffic to see how things change and improve.

More clicks = better rankings in Google? is a post from: MickMel

Here’s our next review: Mt. Zion UMC, Grandy – http://www.mtziongrandy.org/

I again referenced my “page titles” post, which you can find here. Now the review:

Any other ideas for them?  Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

Church Website Review: Mt. Zion UMC, Grandy is a post from: MickMel

I’ve decided to spend some time reviewing various church websites, upon request.  I look at things such as new visitor friendliness, overall usability, SEO, and anything else that catches my eye.  I’d be happy to take a look at your church website, too — just contact me with info and I’ll do a quick review of it.

On to our first one for now: Oak Haven UMC – http://www.oakhavenumc.org/

The review is contained the video below, but I reference a few items during the video.  They include:

• A way to post automatically from your blog to Facebook/Twitter: dlvr.it or twitterfeed.com
  • I certainly don’t recommend this as a long-term technique (you should try to be social on social networks), but it can be a good way for a church to get its feet wet.
• Why churches shouldn’t create Facebook Profiles — they should create Pages.
• Creating good page titles for your site.

On to the review!

Church Website Review: Oak Haven UMC is a post from: MickMel