optimizing communications» seo

Local SEO For Small Business

admin — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 19:32:51 +0000

You have heard it all before. If you want to be found online by prospects, you need to optimize your website with search terms related to your products and services AND your local target market. Maybe you have put off doing so because you weren’t sure how much you bought into the whole idea of search engine optimization (SEO). Or perhaps you thought it was too expensive or not worth the return on investment. Well, here is an interesting fact that just might change your mind!

According to a study by the Pew Research Center, Americans trust small business owners over 13 other institutions! A whopping 71% of those polled said they trusted small business. Only 25% trust large corporations. And only 25% trust the federal government.

In this tumultuous climate, people trust local small business for a reason. Why? Because you are not some large inaccessible corporation. You are their neighbor, their son’s little league coach, and a face. But you need to get that face seen if you want to be recognized. So join your local chamber of commerce, volunteer for local organizations, join local networking groups. AND make sure your business can be found online.

That’s Where Local SEO For Small Business Comes In

You don’t have to tell people to shop local, this study already shows that people WANT to shop local. So make sure they can easily find your website when they are searching for your products and services. Don’t just rely on what you think your ranking is – remember personalized search can inflate your search engine rankings. Get a website visibility analysis and see how you are fairing. Learn how you can improve your site’s Internet presence and then do it! Here are some tips:

1. Make sure you are targeting terms that people are actually searching for
2. Don’t forget to include your market, such as dry cleaners warwick ny
3. Then make sure those terms are placed in the website’s coding and on the page itself
4. Create local business listings on Google Places, Yahoo Local and Bing Local and optimize them with the appropriate search terms as well
5. Submit your website to the top directories – Yelp, SuperPages, InsiderPages, and more
6. Submit your website to any local directories
7. Submit your website to industry specific directories
8. Create a Facebook page, optimize it, and post often

Local SEO for small business is important and it doesn’t have to be break the bank expensive. The local business listings are free. The directory listings are free. Facebook is free. If you’re tech savvy, you can attempt creating your listings and optimizing your website yourself. If you’re not, you should find an SEO consultant who can help. Depending upon the size of your website, SEO services can be minimal with great ROI.

Local residents want to support your small business, so make sure they can find it.

Page Load Time and SEO? Yes, they are connected, so you better check your site speed.

admin — Fri, 13 May 2011 14:22:02 +0000

A slow page load time doesn’t just cause visitors to hit the back button, it can also affect your rankings.

Google announced it was including site speed in its ranking algorithms as far back as last year. At that time, Matt Cutts at Google clarified that it is only one of 200 factors that the search engine considers and that it doesn’t weigh as much as relevance, reputation, etc. But it still carries weight—and could possibly be a determining factor when sites are close in some of the more important factors.

One year later, some Google actions confirm the significance of page load time

A few weeks ago Google introduced Page Speed Online, a performance analysis tool, which gives developers suggestions on how to decrease load time. This week the search engine giant unveiled a new Page Speed Online API that allows developers to integrate this performance analysis into other tools and dashboards.

Page speed matters for conversions and web visibility. Is your site fast enough?

How to check your page load time

Google’s Webmaster Tools is one way to take a look at your load time—over time. Click on the Diagnostics tab, then Crawl Stats to view a chart that highlights your high, low and average load times over a few months time period. For real time load time, check out Web Page Test.

How to reduce your page load time

Page Speed Online and Web Page Test, which are both FREE, can provide some eye opening information in terms of time and how you can shave it off – but you will probably need your web developer to explain the recommendations and make the changes. Although, Web Page Test gives a grade, so even non-techies can see where the problems lie. So do the tests and talk to your web developer about what they reveal.

Here are some general things you can do to increase your page speed:

1. GZIP Compression. See if your site’s host uses this form of compression, which can really speed up your load time.
2. Reduce the size of your images. But make sure you use a graphics program such as Photoshop or Smush.it to do so.
3. Cache your pages. This avoids the need for the browser to dynamically generate your page every time. Some content management systems, such as Joomla and WordPress, allow you to do this.
4. Limit your use of 301 redirects. And don’t pile them.
5. Combining CSS / Java Scripts. Load them in external files rather than putting them on every page so that the browser only has to load them one time instead every time someone visits each page.
6. Try a Content Delivery Network.

Importance of XML Sitemap

admin — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 16:12:07 +0000

If you have a website, you should be using an XML Sitemap to help improve your Internet visibility. What is an XML Sitemap? It is a simple, effective way for you to give the search engines a list of all the URLs you want them to crawl and index. If the search engines don’t find your site or specific pages on it, your prospects won’t either!

Brief highlights of the importance of an XML Sitemap

1. Although adding a URL to the Sitemap file does not guarantee that a URL will be crawled or indexed, it can result in pages that the search engines had not yet discovered or indexed get crawled or indexed.
2. XML Sitemaps can help pages that are on the search engines’ supplemental index make it to the main index.
3. You can use these Sitemaps to let the search engines know how often a page is changed to improve crawl rate.
4. You can alert the search engines to any changes/additions to your site
5. The additional URLs you provide help increase crawl coverage and crawl speed.
6. The verification and registration of an XML Sitemap can give the search engines the credibility that they desire.
7. In all, XML Sitemaps can help improve visibility and rankings.
8. Best of all – they are FREE

There are a few things to keep in mind. It is important to use the correct canonical version of your URL (i.e. www vs. non-www.) and that you load the XML Sitemap in the highest-level directory you want the search engines to crawl. Don’t include multiple URLs that point to identical content, simply pagination pages and low value pages. And make sure that none of the URLs you include contain tracking parameters.

Start 2011 off right. Check with your web developer to see if they created an XML Sitemap for you. If not, ask them to do so right away!

What Is Blekko? The New, Different Search Engine

admin — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 15:15:52 +0000

First Bing threw its hat in the ring. Now Blekko is joining. Are these “B” players or can they really compete with Google? As we know, Bing – a direct competitor of Google – is gaining users since its initial launch, but is still quite far behind the search engine giant. Blekko, on the other hand is different. It is not trying to take over the number one search engine spot.

Then What is Blekko?

Blekko is a search engine that allows you to search for results based on a particular viewpoint or category. For example, if you were looking for information on the recent mid-term elections from a conservative viewpoint you can quickly narrow down your search. How? With “slashtags”. You would simply type in your search query like this:

2010 midterm election results /conservative

Want to know the latest buzz on a particular celebrity? Type in their name /gossip and hit enter.

Just put in your search terms followed by the slash and the viewpoint or category you want and Blekko narrows down the results for you. Blekko currently maintains over 250 slashtags, including blogs, news, gossip, green, even chocolate. These slashtags are really a collection of relevant topic websites. You can even create your own slashtag and make it public or private. Blekko’s goal is to identify the best 50 websites on the Internet for the top 100,000 search categories.

How Does Blekko determine what websites to show and in what order?
Unlike Google or Bing, Blekko is pretty transparent with how it determines its rankings. It tells you the final algorithm score for a website and why the site ranks as it does. You can really dig down deep into its decision process. This is such a comprehensive topic that it needs to be addressed it a separate post! Stay tuned.

Suffice it to say that for deep, driven or truly targeted research, Blekko really has something to offer.

Place Search On Google

admin — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 16:42:25 +0000

Will Place Search on Google Affect Your SEO Efforts?
Yesterday Google introduced a new type of local search result. Place Search organizes information around local places to help searchers more easily make comparisons. Previously when you did a local search, you would see the local results from Google Places at the top of the page next to a pushpin map. Now the map is in the right column above the AdWords ads and the results are included in or above the regular organic search results, marked with red pins – which helps your listing jump out from the rest.

Place Search results will appear automatically when Google predicts a searcher is looking for local information, i.e., “chinese restaurants new york city”. Google has also made it easy to start a local search – just click on the “Places” icon in the left panel of the search results page. If a local web search doesn’t yield you the results you want, click on places and you just might find what you were looking for.

One very important thing to note, Google does not seem to be consistent with how it is displaying these new results. We did our own test. Some searches yielded one “result” per business, which incorporated a regular result with a Google Places result with links to both the website and the Places listing. This combined result is included in the 10 results per page. The problem with this is you are not being displayed twice, as you may have been in the past. Other searches yielded the old format with a 1 or 2 or 7 pack listing separated from the regular results so that you could appear twice on a page. Not sure how Google is determining what to show and how.

In any event, if you haven’t created a Google Places listing you need to now more than ever! Write On Point is here to help if you need us.

Hyperlocal Marketing For Small Businesses

admin — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 13:15:55 +0000

Hyperlocal marketing is a fabulous way for small, local businesses to get the word out about their products and services – both online and off – to their communities. This post will focus on how to gain online visibility in your local community.

Hyperlocal marketing – or should we say hyperlocal search – for small businesses

Local search is really gaining traction. More and more people are moving away from browsing through the local phone book and turning toward searching for businesses, services and products online. When they do, can they find you? Here are some Hyperlocal Search tips:

1. Create a local business center listing on Google, Yahoo and Bing. Make it robust with specific information about your services and products, pictures, videos and discount offers – and make sure to use relevant keywords in the appropriate places.
2. Optimize your website with the names of your town and surrounding towns.
3. Incorporate Google Maps in your website – you can even customize Google Maps to show your service routes.
4. Get listed in online directories.
5. Incorporate local events on your site.

Hyperlocal marketing or in this case hyperlocal search is a truly effective way for small businesses to target customers where they live and shop. For those of you who don’t have the experience or know-how to implement these tips, you can always reach out to your SEO consultant for help.

SEO and Google TV

admin — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 16:15:14 +0000

Web. TV. Two HUGE marketing platforms that will soon be one thanks to Google.

Approximately 400 million web searches are performed everyday. The average American watches 5 hours of TV on a daily basis. While these two stats may appear unrelated, Google is changing that. Google TV, which seamlessly joins the web and television, will make its debut in the U.S. this fall and world-wide next year. So, if you have been putting off tuning up – or even starting – your search engine optimization and Internet marketing campaigns, you may want to start kicking them into high gear.

What is Google TV?

This brand new service from Google will change how and where people will surf the web. Google TV will project a search bar on top of the television screen allowing viewers to search the Internet in real time as well as live tv listings – all without leaving the couch or sitting up to type on your laptop. The tv serves as the monitor running on Google’s Android operating system. You will even be able to change the channel using Google speech recognition technology and access Google Apps!

Google TV and your SEO and Internet Marketing campaigns

There are over 4 billion tv viewers worldwide and, as we said, about 400 million web searches everyday. Who knows how many more searches will be performed with this new service or how many more opportunities for your site to be found by prospects. Now is the time to optimize your website and get a jump on the competition.

Twitter On Google Search Results Pages

admin — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 00:37:23 +0000

If you are not using Twitter for your business yet, here is another reason to start. Last week Google made web search results timelier by launching Google Realtime Search – www.Google.com/Realtime.

Google has created a one-stop shop for Twitter search results

Google Realtime Search, which is separate from Google’s main search engine, is a great place for people to look for current conversations and topics happening online across the globe. It displays messages from Twitter and Google’s own version of Twitter called Google Buzz in the form of a continuously updating news feed. Realtime also shows some results from Facebook and MySpace.

Google Realtime is similar to bing.com/social. Yahoo also offers something similar when users search news results for a specific topic.

With Google showing realtime Tweets, you now have one more way to be found online. Greater content equals greater visibility, which equals greater traffic. What are you waiting for? Just be sure, however, that your Twitter content is keyword rich. Not sure what keywords to use? Your SEO consultant can help.

Adding Keywords to iWeb

admin — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 11:42:43 +0000

While iWeb makes it easy to create a stunning website, it does not make it easy to add the necessary keywords so that searchers can actually find it. Unfortunately, iWeb itself lacks a user friendly way to add targeted, keyword rich title tags, meta tags, and alternate image text all of which are crucial to being found. In order to do so you need to alter the site’s HTML coding which requires true web development skills. But don’t be discouraged!

Now Adding Keywords to iWeb is easy

There is a program you can download that makes it easy for you to add those tags without touching the underlying HTML coding. And best of all . . . it is FREE.

You can quickly and easily optimize your iWeb site for the search engines with iWeb SEO Tool – 1.9. This free download from RAGE Software allows you to customize title tags, meta tags and alternative image text, as well as add the extremely informative – and free- Google Analytics – all without adding HTML snippets.

How to Add Keywords to your iWeb Site

Once you have downloaded iWeb SEO Tool, when you sign into your iWeb site, iWeb SEO askes where your iWeb pages are. It then opens a user friendly interface where you simply type in your title and description tags and alternate image text. That’s it. Save and upload your revised web pages and you are good to go. You can even create a meta tag directing how often the search engines should crawl your site for new content.

If you want to easily add keywords to your iWeb website, download the free iWeb SEO Tool. There is even a step-by-step video tutorial to help you.

While these tags are very important to your ability to be found online, there is much more that can be done to enhance your Internet visibility. You may want to rely on the expertise of an SEO company for keyword research and analysis as well as strategic placement of keywords in your page copy among other things.

What are Google Tags? How do Google Tags work?

admin — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 10:46:43 +0000

Google Tags are a new way to help you enhance your web visibility. This post will explain exactly what Google Tags are and how they work.

What are Google Tags?

Google Tags are a new paid advertising feature for Google Places accounts. They are a way to enhance your local business listing on Google.com and Google Maps. A Google Tag is literally a yellow tag that highlights specific information about your business, such as a video, a coupon, or a weekly special and most importantly makes your business stand out! An example of what a Google Tag looks like is below:

See How Google Tags Make a Business Stand Out

How do Google Tags work

For a flat monthly fee of $25 you can select a type of Google Tag you would like to use to highlight your business. You can choose from:

· Photos
· Videos
· Coupons
· Menus
· Website
· Reservations
· Custom Messages

The type of tag you can select depends upon the information you already have included in your business listing. For example, if you want to highlight a photo, then you need to have uploaded photos to your listing. You can only select one tag at a time. However, you can change or remove a tag whenever you like which is great if you want to announce special discounts or limited time offers. You can even keep track of how well your Google Tags are working in your Google Places dashboard.

As more and more people are searching on the go, you may be happy to know that Google Tags will appear on mobile web searches.

Since this is a NEW advertising medium, Google Tags are a great way to get a jump on the competition. Keep in mind though, that Google Tags will only enhance your visibility if your listing is actually visible. If your business listing is not showing for keyword phrases that relate to your products or services, you may want to consult with an SEO company that can make that happen.