Marketing SEO Local

There are some of the practical ways of learning SEO. I hope the tips  will help you in increasing site traffic. If you would like to get a more successful online marketing activity, you can also get advice from the SEO guru.

The majority of all local search engine optimization work needing to be done for your website can be complete in four to six months depending on the number of search phrases that need to be optimized.

Google Places Page

Claim a Google Places Business Listing

Essentially, with the expansion of local results in the SERPS as powered by Google Places, your company is  competing with your traditional rivals in SEO,

Local SEO differs significantly from conventional organic SEO. First of all you have to register with Google by adding a Google Places profile, and then you have to get reviews  from a set of trusted sites Google uses to rank local results. This is an almost completely new game and most people . Furthermore, Google currently struggles to provide relevant results due to local business owners not yet wholly grasping what’s going on.

Many local search results now include unclaimed Google Places pages. This was made possible in part by the mass clean sweep Google implemented in the last months of 2010.

You can claim your Google Places page by finding your business listing in a Google search. Inside of Google Places for your location, search for your business phone, business address or website. This search should provide you with the link to your Google Places page. On that page you can claim your listing by clicking on this link at the top right of the listing.

Duplicate Content

When you get new content, there is one important issue – is this content original? Because if it is not, i.e. it is stolen from another site, this will get you into trouble. But even if it is not illegal, i.e. you obtained it for free from an article feed, have in mind that you might not be only one on the Web, who has this particular stuff. If you have the rights to do it, you can change the text a little, so it is not an exact copy of another page and cannot be labeled “duplicate content” by search engines. If you don’t manage to escape the duplicate content filter that search engines have imposed recently in their attempts to filter stolen, scrapped, or simply copied contents, your pages could be removed from search results!

You see, duplicate content can be a serious problem. But it is not an obstacle that cannot be overcome. First, you need to periodically check the Web for pages that are similar to yours. You can use www.copyscape.com. If you identify pages that are similar to yours. Even with product descriptions, you can add commentary or opinion on the same page and this could be a way out.

Content

If you are new to SEO, it might be a surprise for you that text is one of the driving forces to higher rankings. But it is a fact. Search engines (and your readers) love fresh content and providing them with regularly updated, relevant content is a recipe for success. Generally, when a site is frequently updated, this increases the probability that the spider will revisit the site sooner. You can’t take for sure that if you update your site daily, the spider will visit it even once a week but if you do not update your contents regularly, this will certainly drop you to from the top of search results.

For company sites that are not focused on writing but on manufacturing constantly adding text can be a problem because generally company sites are not reading rooms or online magazines that update their content daily, weekly or monthly but even for company sites there are reasonable solutions. No matter what your business is, one is for sure – it is always relevant to include a news section on your site – it can be company news or RSS feeds but this will keep the ball rolling.

If you are doing the SEO for an online magazine, you can consider yourself lucky – fresh content is coming all the time and you just need to occasionally arrange a heading or two or a couple of paragraphs to make the site SEO-friendly. But even if you are doing a SEO for an ordinary company site, it is not all that bad – there are ways to constantly get fresh content that fits into the topic of the site.

One of the intricacies of optimizing a company site is that it has to be serious. Also, if your content smells like advertising and has no practical value for your visitors, this content is not that valuable. For instance, if you are a trade company, you can have promotional texts about your products. But have in mind that these texts must be informational, not just sales hype. And if you have a lot of products to sell, or frequently get new products, or make periodical promotions of particular products and product groups – you can post all this to your site and you will have fresh, topical content.

An alternative way to get fresh free content are RSS feeds. RSS feeds are gaining more and more popularity and with a little bit of searching, you can get free syndicated content for almost any topic you can think of.

“Metatags” Another Important SEO Item

The meta Description tag is are one more way for you to write a description of your site, thus pointing search engines to what themes and topics your Web site is relevant to. It does not hurt to include at least a brief description, so don’t skip it. For instance, for the dog adoption site, the meta Description tag could be something like this: <Meta Name=“Description” Content=“Adopting a dog saves a life and brings joy to your house. All you need to know when you consider adopting a dog.”>

A potential use of the meta Keywords tags is to include a list of keywords that you think are relevant to your pages. The major search engines will not take this into account but still it is a chance for you to emphasize your target keywords. You may consider including alternative spellings (or even common misspellings of your keywords) in the meta Keywords tag. For instance, if I were to write the meta keywords tag for the dog adoption site, I would do it like that: <Meta name=“Keywords” Content=“adopt, adoption, dog, dogs, puppy, canine, save a life, homeless animals”>. It is a small boost to search engine top ranking but why miss the chance?

The meta Robots tag deserves more attention. In this tag you specify the pages that you do NOT want crawled and indexed. It happens that on your site you have contents that you need to keep there but you don’t want it indexed. Listing this pages in the meta Robots tag is one way to exclude them (the other way is by using a robots.txt file and generally this is the better way to do it) from being indexed.

Link Practices That Are To Be Avoided

As mentioned, link exchange is not a clean deal. Even if it boosts your ranking, it can have many other negative aspects in the long run. First, you do not know if the other party will keep their promise – i.e. they might remove some of the links to you. Second, they might change the context the link appears into. Third, it is really suspicious if you seem to be “married” to another site and 50% or more of your inbound and outbound links are from/to this direction.

When links are concerned, one aspect to have in mind is the ratio between inbound and outbound links. Generally speaking, if your outbound links are ten times your inbound links, this is bad but it also varies on a case by case basis. If you have a site that links to news sources or has RSS feeds, then having many outbound links is the inevitable price of fresh content.

Anchor text

Anchor text is the most important item in a backlink. While it does matter where a link comes from (i.e. a reputable place), what matters more is the actual text the link starts from. Put simply, anchor text is the word(s) that you click on to open the hyperlink – e.g. if we have the best search engine, than “the best search engine” is the anchor text for the hyperlink to google.com. You see that you might have a backlink from a valuable site but if the anchor text is something like “an example of a complete failure”, you will hardly be happy with it.

When you check your backlinks, always check what their anchor text is and if there is a keyword in it. It is a great SEO boost to have a lot of backlinks from quality sites and the anchor text to include our keywords. Check the anchor text of inbound backlinks is with the Backlink Anchor Text Analyzer tool below. Besides the anchor text itself, the text around it is also important.

Links – Another Important SEO Item

Probably the word that associates best with Web is “links”.   You link to pages you like and get linked by pages that like your site.  Actually, the Web is woven out of interconnected pages and spiders follow the links, when indexing the Web.  If not many sites link to you, then it might take ages for search engines to find your site and even if they find you,  it is unlikely that you will have high rankings because the quality and quantity of links is part of the algorithms of search engines for calculating relevancy.

There are two types of links that are important for SEO – inbound and outbound links. Outbound links are links that start from your site and lead to another one, while inbound links, or backlinks, come from an external site to yours

Backlinks are very important because they are supposed to be a measure of the popularity of your site among the Web audience. It is necessary to say that not all backlinks are equal. There are good and bad backlinks. Good backlinks are from reputable places – preferably from sites with a similar theme. These links do boost search engine ranking. Bad backlinks come from suspicious places – like link farms – and are something to be avoided.

If you are not heavily backlinked, don’t worry – buying links is an established practice and if you are serious about getting to the top, you may need to consider it. But before doing this, you should consider some free alternatives. For instance, some of the good places where you can get quality backlinks are Web directories like http://dmoz.org or http://dir.yahoo.com.

Keywords in URLs and File Names

The domain name and the whole URL of a site tell a lot about it. The presumption is that if your site is about dogs, you will have “dog”, “dogs”, or “puppy” as part of your domain name. For instance, if your site is mainly about adopting dogs, it is much better to name your dog site “dog-adopt.com” than “animal-care.org”, for example, because in the first case you have two major keywords in the URL, while in the second one you have no more than one potential minor keyword.

When hunting for keyword rich domain names, don’t get greedy. While from a SEO point of view it is better to have 5 keywords in the URL, just imagine how long and difficult to memorize the URL will be. So you need to strike a balance between the keywords in the URL and site usability, which says that more than 3 words in the URL is a way too much.
Probably you will not be able to come on your own with tons of good suggestions. Additionally, even if you manage to think of a couple of good domain names, they might be already taken. In such cases tools like the Tool below can come very handy.

Keyword Density

After you have chosen the keywords that describe your site and are supposedly of interest to your users, the next step is to make your site keyword-rich and to have good keyword density for your target keywords. Keyword density although no longer a very important factor in SEO is a common measure of how relevant a page is. Generally, the idea is that the higher the keyword density, the more relevant to the search string a page is. The recommended density is 3-7% for the major 2 or 3 keywords and 1-2% for minor keywords. Try the Keyword Density Checker below to determine the keyword density of your website.

Enter the FREE Google Keyword Tool!

==> http://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Although there are no strict rules, try optimizing for a reasonable number of keywords – 5 or 10 is OK. If you attempt to optimize for a list of 300, you will soon see that it is just not possible to have a good keyword density for more than a few keywords, without making the text sound artificial and stuffed with keywords. And what is worse, there are severe penalties (including ban from the search engine) for keyword stuffing because this is considered an unethical practice that tries to manipulate search results.

Keywords

The Most Important Item in SEO

“How do  I know what people are actually searching for?”… This is a very common question

Choosing the Right Keywords to Optimize

• Broad match is the default setting for all keywords. All searches made using your keyword (in any order or combination) might display your search.
• Phrase match narrows your reach by requiring the words to appear in that exact order.
• Exact match further narrows your reach by showing when the exact phrase is used in the search — without any other words before, between, or after.
• Negative match eliminates searched phrases you don’t want your site to appear for, such as cheap or free.
• Embedded match allows you to prevent your site from appearing in relation to certain phrase or exact matches.