SEO

A quick post tonight for the small business out there interested in how they can rank well for local searches…

There has been alot of data out lately (and I have confirmed this in my personal tests) that seems to show a huge shift in ranking factors for local search queries.  My personal opinion is that this has been a gradual change over the last year.

What is the primary shift???  Citations

What is a citation in the context of Local SEO?  A citation is an occurrence of a business address on a website… typically an IYP site (Internet Yellow Page websites).  There is alot of evidence to show that these occurrences can improve ranking significantly in the local search results area on search engines like Google.  Here is some more evidence…

Here are a few places where you can submit your business address to help improve your local search engine ranking:

• InfoUSA (feeds multiple sources)
• Yelp.com
• Localeze.com
• UniversalBusinessListing.org (this service will submit to all of them for $30)
• If you find any local directories that list addresses of businesses, get on it!

Hope this helps.  Local SEO is really hot right now, and it’s never been easier to get really good ranking in local search.

There are alot of these types of tips online, but I’ve found that many of them are outdated or just plain don’t work.  These 3 steps are proven tactics that I’ve used to help small businesses rank better for local search terms.

Before you dive in, remember that a site that targets local customers can be a huge advantage.  When you use your physical address freely on your website, it allows the search engines to help you place more emphasis on the searchers in your local area.

If you have multiple addresses, I highly recommend that you create a unique page for each of those addresses, and make it a quality landing page for customers coming directly to that page.  You also want to make sure you reference these specific pages when submitting a local business listing to search engines.

As always, let me know if you have any questions, and feel free to share and link to this post! 

1. Put Your Address in HCard Format (micro formats)

If you aren’t familiar with this, click here first.  It does require a bit of mucking around in the html, but you can simply use the code below as a guideline.  Just copy and paste it into your site and replace the location details.  This will basically allow the search engines to parse your address when they crawl the page you place it on and correspond it with your local listing (assuming you have one).  If you don’t, hang your head in shame, and then follow this link to get added.

<div class="vcard">
  <a class="fn org url" href="http://www.commerce.net/">CommerceNet</a>
  <div class="adr">
    <span class="type">Work</span>:
    <div class="street-address">169 University Avenue</div>
    <span class="locality">Palo Alto</span>,
    <abbr class="region" title="California">CA</abbr>  
    <span class="postal-code">94301</span>
    <div class="country-name">USA</div>
  </div>
  <div class="tel">
   <span class="type">Work</span> +1-650-289-4040
  </div>
  <div class="tel">
    <span class="type">Fax</span> +1-650-289-4041
  </div>
  <div>Email:
   <span class="email">info@commerce.net</span>
  </div>
</div>

2.  Put Your Address Info in the Meta Section

This is another piece of code that you can simply copy and paste and fill in the proper information.  It needs to be placed in the head section of the code for the page you want it on (normally the home page if your business only has one address).  I usually place my right below the title tag.  If you need help knowing what to place in the ICBM section, try this link.

    <meta name=“country” content=“USA, United States, United States Of America, America”>
    <meta name=“ICBM” content=“39.7114, -104.8192″>
    <meta name=“geography” content=“14501 E Alameda Ave Ste 1, Aurora, CO, 80012″>
    <meta name=“DC.title” content=“Aurora Counseling Center”>
    <meta name=“zipcode” content=“80012″>
    <meta name=“description” content=“Aurora Counseling Center at 14501 E Alameda Ave Ste 1, Aurora, CO  80012″>
    <meta name=“state” content=“CO”>
    <meta name=“keywords” content=“Aurora Counseling Center, reviews, ratings, recommendations, best, worst, map, directions, hours, Community &amp; Social Services, Counseling, denver, Directory &amp; Services, social services”>
    <meta name=“city” content=“Aurora”>

    <meta name=“postalcode” content=“80012″>
    <meta name=“address” content=“14501 E Alameda Ave Ste 1, Aurora, CO, 80012″>

3.  Submit Your Address & Business Listing To IYP’s

IYP stands for Internet Yellow Pages.  These sites are great to submit to when you want to build up some basic links, but more importantly, they will help solidify a strong listing on the sites that really matter like Google and Yahoo Local.  When Google Bot sees a large recurrence of the same address and lots of references to the web page associated with that physical address, it can really help to boost local rankings.  If you’ve never submitted your business listing to an IYP before, start with Google & Yahoo, then move on to InfoUSA (they help populate over 25 websites).  TIP: keep all of your listings very consistent, and if you have more than one address, make sure to link to the specific page on your website that references that address.

In this video, I talk about a couple of simple ways you can find out how popular a keyword phrase is, and the general level of competition.  This is done through Google’s keyword research tool, and a simple check of the titles in the Google results for that query.  By the way, here are a couple of sample search queries that may help you along the way:

1. “my keyword phrase”  (your phrase placed in quotes)
2. intitle:”your keyword phrase”
3. inurl:”your keyword phrase”

Hope you enjoy the video!

Practical SEO Competitive Research from Justin Smith on Vimeo.

Hot off the press… Hitwise just published updated statistics on long tail queries and search engine market share. Have a look!

*** Based on the percentage changes above, we can see that long tail searches are dominating on the search engines.  People are starting to realize that they can get better results on more descriptive phrases.  If there was ever a case to create more descriptive content, this is it!!!

*** This table shows Google’s continuing dominance.  The most surprising stat here is the 15% decline in Yahoo’s market share!  That is a huge drop in just a year.  The search engine wars are officially over and a clear winner has emerged.

What does this mean for you and your business??  Well if you read this blog regularly, it doesn’t mean much.  You are prepared, because I’ve always been a major proponent of quality conent and lots of it.  Keep writing those descriptive articles, keep creating valuable content, and pay close attention to this blog…  there are some changes afoot with the Google algorithm, and you’ll want to be paying close attention…  STAY TUNED!!

Click Here to Listen to this Podcast:

 

 Podcast Interview: Lorelle VanFossen: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

I had the great pleasure of being able to interview Lorelle VanFossen yesterday afternoon.  For those of you that are not aware of her work, you can head on over to Lorelle on WordPress.  She is considered to be one of the top blogging and WordPress experts in the world and can be regularly seen keynoting at large blogger conferences such as WordCamp, and SOBcon.

The podcast is quite long for an interview, so I won’t be able to transcribe the entire thing, but I will hit a few of the key points here.

• 0:58 - Lorelle launched one of the first websites in ‘94 - Taking Your Camera On The Road
  
• 2:10 - Lorelle as one of the early adopters of WordPress just after the 1.2 release.
• 4:45 - Development of early coding, plugins, and early testing.
• 5:10 - WordPress 1.5 and the launch of modular themes making design incredibly easy.
• 5:50 - Alpha testing WordPress.com based on the WordPress MU.
• 6:31 - Creating a blog network using the MU (New York Times, REI, and many other companies currently using WordPress MU)
• 7:52 - “blogs are not to be replaced by Facebook or Myspace, they are your online business card and resume.  They speak very loudly for who you are, what  you do, and what you’re offering to the world whether it’s your opinion, your product, or your service.”
• 8:40 - Discussing the number of websites that run WordPress, and the difficulty measuring downloads versus installations.
• 12:50 - Plug for the WordPress Sandbox Theme as a structurally sound theme that acts as a blank canvas.
• 13:35 - “micro-formats are very critical to the future of the semantic web”
• 15:43 - Lorelle’s prediction for 2009: “Alot of development in comment WordPress plugins”
• 16:25 - “The Captcha is dead - if you have a captcha comment system on your site, kill it.  People are seeing it, and not commenting”.
• 17:25 - Video commenting, image uploads, more integration with microblogging; Twitter, etc.
• 18:05 - Biggest prediction for 2009: consolidate online administration, monitoring, and management of online tools.  Better monitoring, and tracking.
• 19:02 - New social networking platform theme: BuddyPress
• 20:38 - Tips for new bloggers:

“You can’t get anywhere without a plan; my tip is multi-fold…”

1. Write down all the words that describe what you want to write about (what you want to write about, what you want people to search for, etc.)  25-50 words
2. Narrow the list down to 5-10 words.  These should ultimately describe what you are going to write about, and will become your categories
3. Write a minimum of 5 blog post titles for each of the 5-10 categories (these are poswts that you could write immediately.  You have the concept, the material, the ideas, in your head already)
4. “As you’re working through your list, you will naturally gravitate towards the things that are inherently important to you, and not just the things ‘I think I should be doing’.  If you find yourself struggling to find just 5 articles per category, then don’t blog about it.”

This is just a sample of some of the great tips Lorelle has to offer from her book: Blogging Tips - What bloggers won’t tel you about blogging.  Make sure to check it out!

Thank you again Lorelle for your time.  I am genuinely thankful for the time you gave for the interview.

Make sure to check out Lorelle on these sites as well:

** Lorelle On WordPress

** Camera On The Road

** Woopra

** Blog Herald

More reasons to rely on organic SEO…

• When Internet users look for information, services or products to buy, more than 8 out of 10 rely on search engines, not simple surfing.
• 85% of these searchers don’t click on paid links.
• 63% of links that are naturally displayed at the top of search engines get clicks.
• Over the last year, Pay-per-click (PPC) costs have grown 37%, and they go on rising.

Probably the most common request I get in the SEO field is: “Can you check my website for errors and problems?”.  People often seem to be paranoid that there may be some feature of their websites causing the ranking to suffer, or that some secret piece of code is hurting their ranking ability.  Usually this paranoia is unfounded, and they simply need better content, more links, etc.

But in some cases, I’ve found that there can be problems with sites that hurt the ranking.  Usually these have to do with the ability of a search spider to crawl a site.  I call this “Search Engine Friendliness”.

The Most Common Website Errors

The most common errors that lead to search engine ranking problems are:

• Use of flash and java - the search engines can’t read text that appears in these website features.
• Error in robots.txt - some site developers try to get fancy with this to allow or disallow certain search engine spiders but often make mistakes causing the site to turn away the search engines.
• Use of noindex in the meta tag section is meant to tell search robots not to index the page.  This is usually not intentional unless there is a developer that doesn’t know any better.  I’ve seen cases where plugins in wordpress accidentally turn this on.
• Spam links can often times draw a penalty from the search engines.  This is another one that isn’t always intentional.  Sometimes a site can get secretly hacked and spam links placed in secret hard to find places without the owner knowing.  This can often times cause a search engine penalty as sites you link to can be viewed as an association or endorsementthr from you.
• Large database driven sites with poorly written URL structures can sometimes run into ranking and indexing problems because the search engines can’t navigate dynamic pages and URL’s very well.

The 5 Step Website Error Checkup

So how do you know if you have any of the above problems, and how do you check for common errors?  Try these 5 steps:

• Step 1 - Do You Have a Penalty? Has your search engine ranking suddenly dropped in a drastic way?  The best sign of this is a drop in search traffic.  Did you go from 2,000 search engine visitors per month to 0?  There is most likely a search engine penalty in place that dropped you from the rankings.  Proceed to step 2…
• Step 2 - Do you link to any spammy websites? This coule be intentional or unintentional.  Either way, it could bring a penalty… and if you are seeing problems like in step 1, you may want to consider checking your outbound links.  I use 2 tools for this that both work very well, the Link Validation Spider, and Link Slueth (more advanced).  Both are mainly for checking for broken links on your site, but can be used to find hidden links and spam links.  You might also try a simple query on MSN.  Visit MSN.com and type this in the search box:  “linkfromdomain:www.yourdomain.com”.  It will search for all outbound links from a domain.
• Step 3 - Don’t Drive Away the Search Spiders.  More times than not, if someone is having serious ranking problems it can be due to a robots.txt or a meta data problem like the use of noindex.  Try this tool from Submit Express to test for meta tag issues.  To check for robots.txt issues, try this robots.txt checker.  Make sure to use the address for your robots.txt file  (Example:  www.searchingsolutions.com/robots.txt)
• Step 4 - Indexing Problems? Do you have hundreds of pages on your website but find that the search engines only record a handful of these pages?  The easiest way to check how many pages you have indexed with the search engines is through the site command.  Example:  In Google, type: “site:www.searchingsolutions.com”.  If for some reason only a very small percentage of your pages show up, you may have an indexing problem.  This means that the search engine is having a hard time reaching all the pages of your website.  Make sure to set up an xml or html site map that has a hyperlink list of all your pages.  For smaller sites, you can put all your links on one page, and for larger sites, you can use multiple sitemaps or multiple categories.  Make sure the search engine spiders can reach every page of your website within 3 clicks of the home page.  Also, remove any javascript links, links that require form submission, frames, flash links, or anything other than a simple html based link.
• Step 5 - Check For Meta Tag Duplication.  This isn’t a problem that can lead to penalties or problems with indexing, but can seriously hurt your ranking.  Page titles should always be unique as to avoid keyword and page cannibalization.  Seomoz has a great Crawl Test tool that can help in this area.

I hope these 5 steps are useful.  You may not need them very often, but when you do you’ll wish you would have bookmarked this post…