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.
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.
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 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.
While it might seem that the page Title Tags and Meta Tags aren’t very important, it’s quite the opposite. Most notably, the Title Tag is arguably the most influential on-site component of the search engine’s algorithms. If you want to rank for a keyword phrase, it should be in your Title Tag.
The Meta Tags are much less effective because of heavy spamming in the late 1990’s, but are still an important component that should not be overlooked.
Your rankings will not only be affected by doing your tags the right way, but doing them the wrong way could cause lead to problems that are easy to avoid.
So…what is a Title Tag?
A Title Tag is essentially one of the most important components to your site’s rankings other than the content itself (and of course the quality links that you’ve acquired as well).
If you want to achieve high search engine rankings, it is recommended that you fix your title tags to make them not only unique, but also to optimize them for the terms you wish to rank well for.
The Title Tag is what shows up at the top of a browser and what also appears within the results of the search engines - that notorious clickable link on the search engine results page - when listing the top ranked sites. With just the fix of your site’s Title Tags, you are sure to receive appreciable differences among your rankings.
Title Tags should contain keyword phrases that you wish to receive desirable rankings for. You can include, and it is recommended, that you include your company name within each Title Tag – preferably at the end of the Title Tag. You will receive better results if your targeted keyword phrase is placed toward the beginning of the Title Tag rather than leaving that open to insert your company name.
Most importantly, make sure that your Title Tags are relevant to the copy found on the page each Title Tag is intended for. You should not be writing a Title Tag about basketballs if the page you are writing it for only features baseball equipment. However, it is imperative that you refrain from copying a string of text found from the content of that page into the Title Tag. As mentioned above, each Title Tag should be of unique, well-optimized content.
In a recent survey of our own SEO clients, MorePro has discovered that many business owners and marketing directors are not paying full attention to the ROI of their online spending. While Search Engine Optimization is online component of a company’s online marketing program, it’s one of the most critical to the bottom-line. Natural, organic traffic gets cheaper each time a new visitor comes to your site - PPC continues to be costly throughout your campaign, unless you simply turn it off.
Here are some interesting results from our survey:
Approximately 36% of the individuals we surveyed, said they look at their SEO ranking reports “infrequently” (less than once a month).
Ok, so we’re sending the SEO results to our clients so they can keep tabs on the program’s success… that’s good right? But 36% aren’t even looking at them - ouch!
33% of respondents said they’re “Not sure” what affect incoming links have on their SEO campaign.
25% said they’re not sure what affect Social Media Marketing has on their SEO campaign.
Almost 49% of respondents said they did not implement the SEO recommendations provided, or only installed some of them.
The last bullet item has always been a difficulty…
How do you convey the importance and urgency of SEO recommendations to a client? Besides using common SEO best-practices and providing resources confirming the recommendations are in fact legitimate, how do you ensure that the changes get made?
Unfortunately, it’s not always possible to enforce the completion of SEO changes due to numerous circumstances, including: additional unforseen costs, amount of effort to complete, adequate staffing or time, failure to believe recommendations are valid, site limitations (coding, structure, etc.) and many other excuses. For sites that have implemented the recommendations, we see great improvements - so why can’t everyone do it?
What we take from the results of this survey, is that most businesses don’t fully understand the following:
What SEO actually is and involves.
Common terminology & methods of SEO.
How to evaluate the success of an SEO campaign.
By sharing this information, our intention is not to point fingers at these businesses or to say their aren’t smart; we’re simply showing how companies interact with SEO firms, including ours. I’m sure this applies to other SEO companies as well - it’s just as important to teach & inform your clients about our industry, as it is to do the work itself.
We need to do a better job of teaching our clients about SEO best-practices and keeping them updated on the strategies & techniques that are required to continue improving their SEO rankings and traffic. Afterall, if the client doesn’t know what’s going on with their SEO campaign - how are they going to see the “value” in it?
The folks over at Axandra.com have published a new article today about “Mosaic Cloaking” and how search engine optimizers are now using it to “game” the search engines.
Mosaic Cloaking (the basics)
It’s not much different from regular cloaking, except that instead of serving completely different pages to the search engines, clever marketers are now just serving different parts of their pages via cloaking.
For instance, you might have an E-Commerce site selling bikes. To the average visitor, you’re going to present them with a great photo, bullet list of the bikes features & an easy way for them to purchase. For the search engines, you might swap out that entire product section and fill it with an optimized article about that particular bike.
While this new Mosaic Cloaking is certainly a twist on the original, I would be willing to bet that those of us reading about it now are months (if not years) behind the game, in terms of keeping up with other SEO professionals.
This new method may work for some sites, for an undetermined amount of time, but with it now out in the light and more people talking about it, you can bet that Google and the other search engines will be creating a way to detect it and penalize those sites that are using it.
I’ve never used cloaking personally and our company, MorePro Marketing, has never employed that practice either - something I’m rather proud of. We’ve been able to acquire top search engine rankings for our clients without resorting to that level of “black hat” optimization.
I was reading an SEO newsletter this morning and they had mentioned a number of important SEO strategies to consider when undertaking the optimization of your website on your own.
A number of the SEO tips were quite common and should be practiced by all SEO strategists, not only those working on their own sites, but also those working for agencies and an actual SEO company. Some of those tips include:
Navigation and internal linking
Titles & Meta tags
Unique content
Relevant backlinks & continuous linking programs
There were two other SEO tips that I feel are generally disregarded or not implemented on a frequent basis:
The Value Proposition (VP) issue isn’t always that easy to resolve quickly, because it takes a lot of constructive thinking in order to determine what sets your business apart from your competitors - especially how to communicate that to your potential customers. A good VP can make a world of difference on how your website converts visitors to sales (or leads).
The other item was the “Code bloat / Site download time”, which I strongly feel is overlooked on a regular basis.
The concept is simple… reduce the size of your pages (code & images) and they’ll load faster, enabling better usability from your site visitors, as well as allowing the search engines to spider your pages more quickly. There are a number of rather easy ways to reduce your code bloat & increase your website’s download speed:
Convert all inline JavaScript to external files and call them as separate files
Convert embedded font styles & formatting to an external CSS file and reference it as a separate file
Optimize the size of the images on your pages - For some industries/markets, having crystal clear images is important and those visitors should be willing to wait a few more seconds. For most industries, however, they’re not going to wait, so your fancy, slow loading image is actual a friction point that will hurt your chances of converting that visitor.
There’s nothing that I’ve mentioned here that’s “new” - it’s common knowledge. Use these SEO tips on your website and you’ll see improved results.
It doesn’t matter if you sell widgets, get real estate leads or have a full-fledged store on your domain… if you’re thinking about redesigning your site or adding new features, be sure to do your homework first.
Big-time programming & service companies are missing the boat when it comes to preparing for the search engines, specifically the consequences of not being SEO friendly to an existing website.
Case in point…
SitStay.com, an online retailer of goods for dog owners, grew steadily since its began in 1996. It now operates from a 20,000-square-foot facility in Lincoln, Neb. The owners of the 13-employee company, Darcie and Kent Krueger, invested slightly less than $100,000 in new Web site technology from I.B.M. that, starting last month, allowed them to more quickly post sales and product recommendations, among other things.
But because the new technology required SitStay to replace all of its old Web pages with new ones, search engines no longer rank the site’s products near the top of the results. Because few consumers click to the second or third page of search results, the effect was significant. Bigger merchants like Petco and Petsmart, meanwhile, can easily outbid SitStay for prominent ads. Read the full story here
This is a great example of a big company, IBM, developing a great storefront interface for it’s customers. I seriously doubt SitStay.com would’ve invested such a great amount of money if the technology & features of the new site were not superb.
Unfortunately, IBM dropped the ball on the SEO side and SitStay.com is paying the price. When they switched to the new website, they forgot to map all of the old pages to the new pages (using 301 redirects). The result… Google and the other search engines lowered their rankings and their traffic died.
SitStay.com will slowly work their way back up the rankings if the new site contains as much quality content as the old one, but they could’ve transferred all the value from the old site to the new one much more quickly w/ the 301 redirects.
You could fault IBM for this one (alone), but at least half the blame for the oversight has to go to the web guys over at SitStay.com, who didn’t prepare fully for the site migration.
In an article published in the SEO-News newsletter this morning, Kanga Internet’s Chris Diprose details 10 of the most common SEO mistakes that you’re bound to make on your website. Whether or not the mistakes are done on purpose, are done because of a lack of SEO knowledge, or you had someone else build your site - these SEO mistakes should be avoided. Some of the mistakes that Chris mentions were covered back in January, when we published our “Common SEO Blunders… Must read for web designers” post.
If you find that you’re guilty of any of these mistakes, take the action now to correct them so you can start improving your search engine rankings.
Here are Chris’ Top 10 SEO Mistakes:
Bad Titles
Filename of the Page
Duplicate or Bad Content
No Links
Incoming Link Anchor Text
Bad Internal Page Links
Live Links
Impatience
Keyword Selection
Keyword Spamming and Stuffing
I certainly don’t have any objections to the list that Chris prepared. I might rank Impatience (#8) higher on the list, only because becoming impatient with your SEO can lead to more problems down the road. You’re more likely to try an SEO tactic that’s untested or engage in some type of questionable SEO practice if you don’t plan out your strategy properly and if you don’t give it time to work.
1. Bad Titles
A survey of top SEO professonals on SEOMoz.org a couple months ago ranked the Title tag as the most important aspect of SEO, so it only makes sense that bad titles are probably the worst mistake you can make when optimizing your website.
2. Filename of Pages
This one is a little off-base, at least in naming the mistake. This should be URL structure or “dynamic URLs vs. static URLs”. Certainly, having a site with long, dynamic URLs is a problem. Use Mod_rewrite or the Windows equivalent to rewrite your URLs to be more friendly. This is not a necessity unless your URLs have more than 2-3 variables on the query string in my opinion. We’ve had plenty of experience and success w/ single variable query string URLs.
3. Duplicate Content
We’ve covered this topic several times in the past and it’s probably one of the hardest mistakes to effectively communicate to site owners and content managers. They just don’t see the value of writing unique content for their products or their stores, when they can get a completed data feed from the manufacturer and plop it right into the site… unfortunately, that just won’t yield any long-term results.
4. No Links This is a no-brainer… a site cannot rank on content alone. Every website should have an ongoing backlink strategy.
5. Incoming Anchor Link Text
See previous mistake… Just make sure your backlinks use keywords. Many site owners and marketers will try to use the company’s name and/or just the domain name as the anchor text. This is much less effective than using keyword-rich anchor text on all backlinks. Be sure to vary the keywords also - your incoming links (backlinks) shouldn’t all be the same.
6. Bad Internal Page Links
A site w/ poor navigation or linking structure will struggle to compete with sites who have good navigation and structure. Be sure to categorize your pages properly and to use keywords in the anchor text. Another common problem w/ internal page links is the use of images for navigation instead of text - always go w/ text unless you already have a full text menu elsewhere on the page.
7. Live Links
Broken links hurt… check your site frequently to make sure you’re links aren’t broken. If you find broken links, fix them ASAP. Setup a custom 404 error page if you have pages that no longer exist and if you can’t get the links changed (from backlinks for example).
8. Impatience
This can kill an SEO campaign. Do the work and use the methods that have been proven to work over time. Allow sufficient time for all the work you’ve done to take affect (several months).
9. Keyword Selection
Selecting the wrong keywords is almost as bad as not selecting keywords at all. Be sure that you’re optimizing for the keywords your target audience is using, not the keywords you think they are (yes, there is usually a difference). Use keyword research tools like Keyword Discovery, Wordtracker or Google Trends to find out what your visitors are using, what’s most popular, and what keywords are slowly fading into oblivion.
10. Keyword Spamming and Stuffing This is just plain dumb… Your website shouldn’t be stuffed with keywords you are targeting, let alone keywords you’re not (that’s a whole other story). Common keyword stuffing takes place in site footers, comment tags, meta tags or other typically hidden areas of the site and/or the HTML coding itself.
I’ve tried to get the important points from the interview, so several of these items are very short and/or are specific statements made by Google’s Vanessa Fox.
Sitemaps.org initiatives
Sitemaps.org content to be included in 18 different languages.
New method of notification - specify in robots.txt file via:
sitemap:filepath
URL removal tool in Google (out fo 6 yrs now). Could make it’s way into Webmaster Tools.
Real-time Google PageRank coming soon? Doesn’t sound like it (too many privacy issues).
Google Supplemental Results - could start providing more information on why pages are in the Supplemental Index, but likely wouldn’t provide a full list of everything in the index. Not considered such a bad thing anymore - many supplemental results still rank well for specific phrases.
Considering offering data on who’s linking to your 404 error pages and/or where your broken links are being linked from. Always try to redirect to the most relevant page on the site vs. using a 404.
Could submitting an orphan page through Sitemaps get a page indexed?
Yes… (but) it probably wouldn’t rank well. That means that all of the pages on a site should be submitted through Sitemaps.
Google Link Reporting - Link sorting (currently alphabetized).
Could make other options available in the future.
Sounds like they could be adding features to allow you to verify more than one domain within your account (ie: multiple domains).
Moving your website to another domain - Take pages from old site, move to new site (as is). Don’t restructure or re-design the website until after you’re sure the engines see the new domain & pages well. “Do things in stages” or “one step at a time”.
Pre-Sell Pages (ie: .edu hosted content)
They’re aware of what’s going on and could devalue some of the trust that certain domains have (ie: .edu, .gov). “Always looking for ways to do things better.” Hoping to get some changes in the hopper and to see some changes soon.One example given was searching for “viagra” in Google - several of the Top 10 results are .edu sites that appear to have had content hosted on them. Several of the pages have custom 404 error pages coming up, so they must have figured out what was going on. Another appears to be forum/comment spam that’s somehow ranked well (???).
Buying Links (watch out!)
Might make webmasters aware of detection of paid links (ouch!!!). The more information the better, including problems regarding ranking issues. No definitive answer though….
She mentioned that the engines, in some cases, wouldn’t want visitors searching in Google to click a result, only to find another page of search results. I guess some filters could be expected.
Google Base
Submit structured data (ie: feeds).
Separate searching system from Google.com.
Good for experimenting - “get in early”.
Google News
Can submit News sitemap through Webmaster Tools.
Send email to get included (for review) - English only.
