Local search is a tricky beast to understand, let alone tame.  This is evidenced by the fact that it is possible to achieve a number one ranking for a local search term without even owning a domain name for your store or office.  While there are many ways to optimize your website that can help you improve your local search rankings, many of the factors that can help or hurt you lie in your local business listing.The local business listing, more often than not, is created by a representative of the company for whom the listing will appear.  Local business listings can be tailored to a variety of industries, offerings and specific details such as acceptable forms of payment, hours of operation, and much more.  The local business center can allow you to enter in your choice of phone number (local or toll free), coupon offerings, and website information (if applicable).Last month I talked about the emerging trend of using mobile technology to access local business results.  I also offered up a few easy ways to optimize your website or local business listing for the local search engines.  This time around, I will discuss a few things that your local business listing might be doing that could hinder your local search engine rankings.

1.       Inaccurate Information - In some cases, a company will have a local business listing that they did not create.  This occurs because different local search engines pull information from different sources.  If a company has created a local business account, this will be the primary source of information.  However, many local search engines pull information from review sites such as “Insider Pages” or “Yelp.”  If the data contained in these reviews is inaccurate, (i.e. wrong phone number, address, etc.) it can create a conflict within the local search engines.  If you see that your company has multiple business listings within a local search engine, there are options to verify your listing, if you hold a local business account.  Unfortunately, the search engines view multiple listings as spam, so great care should be taken to make sure that all mentions of your business refer back to the local business listing that was created by you.

2.       Lack of Reviews - The importance of reviews to your Local Search Rankings are very debatable.  If they factored too high into the algorithm, competitors would write bad reviews for your company and owners/operators would write millions of great reviews on their own business.  The review, in my opinion, exists to confirm the information about your business that has been submitted.  The Local Search Engines use the information contained in your review to verify factors such as service offerings and location.  The more reviews you have, the more refined your listing will become, making you more credible.  The Local Search Engines base their success on providing credible search results.

3.        Misleading Information - This can include a variety of different aspects such as having multiple businesses with the same phone number or multiple addresses for the same business.  Many times, even if this is legitimate, the search engines will view them as spam.  If you have multiple businesses across the city, they should each have a unique phone number, even if calls are all directed to the same location.  If you have multiple locations across the same city, great care should be taken to ensure that each listing remains unique or else the search engines will eventually merge the listings into one location.  This can be done by having unique reviews written about each location, and even opening up separate Local Business Accounts for each one, even if they are all managed by the same individual.

Often times, the optimization of a website or Local Business Listing can take a significant amount of tedious effort.  This is essential to seeing an increase in rankings.  If you are serious about optimizing your listing and ensuring that you are ranking as high as possible for your local services, you will take the time to ensure that your business listings are verified and that the reviews contain accurate information.  By paying close attention to what could be hindering your listing from achieving first page rankings, you can make careful steps to avoid these pitfalls and you should see your listings improve.

Aaron Garcia
SEO Analyst

Press Release History

For over 100 years, the common press release has been used by public relations companies and professionals to promote the companies they represent.  The typical press release can focus on a new product announcement, the hiring or promotion of an influential executive or can be used to act as a “tarp” to cover the fall-out from bad press.  Historically, the first press release ever, was submitted to help shield the Pennsylvania Railroad after a horrible accident.  The release was delivered before the news media could react and create their own versions of what might have happened. (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Press_release)
 
Using traditional methods of distribution, a press release’s target audience is the media itself - those influential writers and news media outlets that would be capable of turning a “nobody” into an overnight sensation.  By targeting national newspapers, magazines and media outlets, a company or individual would have a much better chance of getting the story distributed the way they wanted to (versus the media’s interpretation).
 
Press releases are typically written by the company which the release is promoting (or who the story is about).  A lot of critics have argued that this one-way point of view is misleading and contradictory to the types of honest stories that the media would report through research and interviews (Ya right, huh?).
 
Moving forward to the late 1990’s and early 2000’s, the Internet has played an ever increasing role in the purpose and method, with which press releases have been utilized.  A new generation of “optimized press releases” has emerged, much of it due to the high-demand of SEO companies and fledgling online businesses looking for an edge.

Sample Press Release Summaries

Optimized Press Releases

So what exactly does an optimized press release look like?   Before we jump to that, we must first define “optimization” for those not familiar with the art of SEO (Search Engine Optimization).  It’s basically building up a theme and authority for a given website, with the sole intention of improving that site’s search engine rankings (results from a search query).  This is done using a variety of methods, including using the keywords on the website, building incoming links to the website and others.

An optimized press release takes the idea of SEO to another level.  During a time when most webmasters focused on optimizing the content on their own site, the first originators of the optimized press release had one goal in mind - to increase the number of “one-way” links to the website of the release’s focus.
 
By optimizing a press release for the keywords and phrases that your website is targeting, and then submitting it for global online distribution, one can quickly build up the number of incoming links (backlinks) to their website.  Of course, the more backlinks you have, the better you should rank for the keywords that you’ve targeted.

Backlinks from Press Releases

A lot of companies that submit press releases for online distribution fail to take advantage of the optimization opportunities that are available.  I could show you hundreds of press releases that are submitted each day without any hint of optimization -How much money are they spending for virtually no benefits to their online business (& revenue)?
 
The key to optimizing press releases for distribution is the use of “anchor text links” within the body of the press release.  Anchor text is the keyword or phrase that is linked to another page or website; anchor text is typically identified by the blue font and underline.  It’s possible to submit press releases with your URL in them, but if you’re not using the anchor text, you’re wasting your money.  By implementing the anchor text links, you’ll get a free link from every site that picks up your release.

Sample Press Release Distribution Stats

That begs the question; how does a press release get picked up online?  The answer: RSS Feeds… These are the keys to distributing an optimized press release quickly and effectively online.  You choose the optimized RSS feed categories and topics that your release is about, and once approved, your release gets distributed via RSS/XML to hundreds, sometimes thousands of other relevant websites who’ve chosen to display those category news items.  Not only do you get the backlinks from the press release distributor, but you also get links from the sites that pick-up your release and distribute it on their website.  In some industries, this could be thousands of websites - and it all happens very, very quickly.

Summary

Submitting optimized press releases is good for your SEO campaign and general search engine marketing strategy.  Knowing what to submit, and how to submit it, is the key to your success. 

For more information on how MorePro can help you achieve higher search engine rankings through press release distribution, please click here or call (866) 249-2432.

Cory Howell
SEO Strategist
 

Content is King.

Web content.  What is this “king” that search engines, web-savvy intellects and other industry gurus refer to?  According to Lou Rosenfeld and Peter Morville in Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, content is broadly defined as the “stuff in your Web site” (second edition, page 219).  While this may be a loose definition, web content can be further defined as the text, data, applications, images, video files, and audio – among other things – that make up your site.  In other words, anything that is textual, visual or audible in nature can be deemed web content. While each of these should be focused on, as far as optimization goes, in order to improve a website’s results within the search engine rankings, textual content is the most viable for optimization – and a primary focus for most SEO departments in an online marketing company.

Yet, when referring to “Content is King”, “content” is implied as the written HTML text, or a derivative thereof, that is easily index-able by the search engines.  So…how is this relevant to SEO?  It’s relevant for a couple reasons.  One being, that if a search engine can index the text available on a site quite easily, the search engines can then determine which categories, keywords, etc. that each page of a site is about.

Now, you may still inquire as to the relevancy that the content plays in optimizing for organic results…to which I continue to my second point.  So, how is content useful in gaining rankings within the search engines?  Easy.  Since search engines use the information that they have indexed to “match up” with what a searcher seeks when querying for a certain phrase or topic, the pages of a website that have the most relevant content on that particular phrase or term (topic) will be those delivered to the searcher in the order of most related sites to least related.  Therefore, the more a certain phrase is used within a page – or multiple pages – of a website, the more likely that those pages will appear in better positions of the Search Engine Results Page or SERP.

For example, I have a website that sells designer handbags.  I carry some of the following designers: Prada, Louis Vuitton and Chanel.  If I want to show up in the top spots for terms such as “Prada handbags”, “designer purses”, “Chanel hand bags”, etc., I better make sure that the content I place on my site includes these phrases.  Keep in mind that I will also want the page of my site that features the latest Prada bags to include relevant and optimized Titles and Meta Tags featuring these keywords as well.  I would not include terms that are irrelevant to the products I offer.  Some examples of keywords that I would refrain from using include:  snowboard equipment, dog collars, picture frames.  Why?  Well…hopefully it’s obvious, but none of these terms have anything to do with my site or the products I offer because I only sell designer purses and handbags.

Once you understand the important role that content plays in the scheme of website optimization, you should better understand the need for your site to update its content or improve its relevancy.  As one of the most important elements in reaching desirable rankings within the search engines, it is no wonder that content is king!

For further information on the do’s and don’ts of content strategy…stay tuned.

Brittany Passante

A lot of emphasis in the SEO world is focused on improving external linking or backlinks. Of course, since this is one of the most effective ways of improving search engine rankings, it is definitely an important aspect of search engine optimization.

While external links are often the focus, internal or “on-site” linking can be nearly just as important. The way links are set up on your own website can have both positive and negative effects on your search engine rankings. If you link to the wrong websites, you may be flagged or penalized. If you don’t optimize the links on your website with your important keywords, you’re certainly not getting the maximum rankings possible for your website.

Here’s what you can do to make sure you’re getting the most out of your website (in no particular order):

1. Use important keywords in your navigation and menu options. Without going overboard, try to use keywords that are popular and relevant to the page the link will be pointing to.
2. For any links you add that point to external websites, be sure to use the “nofollow” tag to ensure you’re not showing a “vote” for that website. Of course, there will be instances where you may want to maintain that vote, so don’t use the nofollow tag on those links. Nofollow tags can also be used to block the search engines from following pages* on your own site that are of little SEO value.
3. Within the body of your content, there may be opportunities to link to other pages on your website using relevant keywords as “anchor text”. If you choose to create links within your body content, be sure that you’re taking the site’s visitors into consideration - you wouldn’t want to add a link in a spot that may distract them from completing a goal (e-commerce sale, generating a lead, etc.).
4. If your images contain links to other important pages, be sure to use descriptive ALT tags that include the relevant keywords for the destination page.

*This is an advanced SEO technique and we do not suggest that you utilize this procedure on your website without consulting an SEO professional first.

The most important thing you need to understand is that your website is valuable and directly influences your company’s ability to rank well in the search engines. While we’ve included some basic linking recommendations here, it’s important that you research each method and determine if it’s something that’s right for your website. We suggest that you consult with an SEO company or consultant to ensure that you’re implementing these tactics correctly.

Jennifer Kaufman
Linking Strategist