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Archive for July, 2011
SchipulCon 2011: Coming Soon! Don’t Miss Out on the Early Bird Discount
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
SchipulCon 2011 is well on its way, taking place October 6th – 7th at the Norris Conference Centers at City Centre. This is one tech conference you do not want to miss. Grab your tickets by July 31st for a special $100 early bird discount. This year’s conference is centered around three main focus areas: create, profit, reach. Our list of presenters continues to grow with inspiring speakers and content. SchipulCon 2011 will also feature fascinating and helpful search engine marketing content from experts in the field. Stay tuned for specific details on SEO speakers and presenter content coming soon in a future blog post.
What can SchipulCon fill your brain with?
We’re very excited about the upcoming SchipulCon 2011 event on October 6th – 7th in Houston, TX. SchipulCon is a 2-day learning whirlwind for business owners, marketers, nonprofit professionals, Web geeks and all-around curious people. It’s still a few months away but registration is already open.
This year’s conference is dedicated to 3 very special areas of awesomeness (go in-depth on these topics on this blog post here):
- Create – design, develop, program, master, conquer
- Profit – grow, culture, sales, HR, employee relations
- Reach – market, optimize, fund raise, community build, generate buzz
Our speakers (new speakers being added all the time – check out the speakers page for detailed info) are a diverse, funny, brainy and successful bunch.
Early Bird tickets are going quickly – buy your SchipulCon tickets by 7/31!
Join us! Our July-only ticket special is quickly coming to a close, so buy your tickets by July 31st to take advantage of a $100 early bird discount.
We can’t wait to see you there!
Google Announces Places Changes
Monday, July 25, 2011
Google announced Thursday that Google Places pages have undergone a few very important changes. You’ll notice that third party reviews are now gone from Places pages. These changes come as a result of other consumer ratings websites like Yelp, Citysearch, and TripAdvisor claiming that Google was using their content without permission.
Places pages will still link to these third party sites for a more well rounded search experience but only after showing Google user reviews. Google will no longer integrate the actual reviews from any other consumer rating websites into the page or the Place rating system. Take a look at the photo below to see what this looks like.
Another important change to note is that Google is now emphasizing a call to action at the top of companies’ Places pages with two new buttons encouraging users to “Write a review” and more easily upload photos from places they’ve been.
Having stellar, yet genuine, user reviews are a great way to bring in business and encourage new customers to try your services and check out your business. Places photos also do a lot to help your search engine optimization efforts. Not only do they give your customers visual insight to your company, they also get indexed in Google images. In order to optimize your Places presence, encourage your happy customers to write reviews directly on your Google Places listing.
Expect more Places pages upgrades to roll out soon. Google also notes forthcoming advancements for increased user personalization of local searches, as well as platform and device flexibility.
For more information, view Google’s official statement on “The Ongoing Evolution of Place Pages.” For more do-it-yourself SEO tips from the Schipul SEM team, visit our DIY SEO page.
