Custom Genius.com

As the fastest growing vertical in search, many people are now starting to recognize the value of local search engine optimization can have on their site traffic. Also known as regional search, it’s basically geo-targeting your audience when they search. Local search works best for the service provider, or a retailer that has numerous locations. While the search volume won’t be as great as a non-regional phrase, the person who reaches your site will be a more targeted visit and most likely ready to convert. Another happy accident in local search is that for sites that are well optimized may also pick up rankings in mobile search.   So, here’s what you need to do in order to rank for local seo:

• Be sure to have your location(s) full address
• If you have a regional number, list that as well since some people start with an area code
• Be sure to include driving directions to your location
• Use a mapping service to display your location
• Have pictures of your locations and name them with your street address
• Make sure your site appears in any regional directory that might be online
• If you can afford it, get listed in your local yellow pages
• Place the regions you want to rank for in your page titles
• Get text links that contain the regional phrase

Most of these techniques are are not only common sense, but also good web design. If you’re in business, you want people to be able to find you, right? -To your online success! Paul Bliss www.SEOforGoogle.com

I’m sure by now you’ve heard about how Press Releases can help your marketing campaigns on the Internet. But besides from people telling you, do you have any quantitative evidence that it’s worth the time to craft a newsworthy release? From a search marketing perspective, this is one of the best ways of killing two birds with one stone. Besides getting exposure for your site, you are also creating web saturation. By having the possibility of your release getting picked up by multiple media outlets, you quickly and cheaply get eyeballs looking at your product or service, and ultimately, traffic to your site.

Being that the Internet has grown to being a social environment with the ultimate goal of personalization for each user, how can anyone get their message out? With blogs, RSS readers and news aggregators becoming more popular, the user is becoming more selective to what they want to see. This is something every marketer should embrace. Now, instead of spending thousands to blast an add that may only be relevant to 10 percent of your audience, you can now selectively target your audience and deliver your message.

Since the majority of us do not have Google’s bankroll, we are left to find less expensive ways to drive visitors to your site. This is where one can get onto a level playing field with the big spenders. To demonstrate the power of the press release, take a moment to review some stats on a campaign that was conducted in early December.

PR Service: PRWeb.com Price: $80.00 USD (Note: – you can submit free press releases, but you won’t have access to any tracking stats, and you lose some services.) For the above mentioned fee, the $80.00 includes: Properly Optimized, RSS/XML Feed, Next Day Distribution, ability to attach files, featured, listing appears on: Google News, Overture, eMediaWire, Yahoo News, Excite News, DogPile, MetaCrawler, Inktomi, MSN News, Lycos News, AskJeeves News, Feedster and Topix News Quite the bang for your buck, eh?

The Press Release in question was for a free service, and it was geared for Christmas use, so keep that in mind as you review the information. Reads: 88,380 (This number indicates how many times the press release was accessed from the PRWeb site and other distribution points where they have the ability to measure a click through. This number does not include the number of journalists that have received the release through email.) Estimated Pickup: 3,908 (This number estimates the number of times the press release was picked up by a media outlet. This does not indicate how many times the story appeared in the media. It simply attempts to estimate media interest in the release.) Now how many places on the Internet can give you those type of numbers for getting traffic to your site? To try and get an accurate number for a "typical" Press Release, another release was submitted in March of 2005, for a new paid-for service. Reads: 80,375 Estimated Pickup: 1,362 Still pretty impressive, even if it’s just to get some traffic, or brand name exposure. If you’re serious about your business, $80.00 is easily worth the investment for this type of return. -To your online success! Paul Bliss www.SEOforGoogle.com

Written by: Lee Odden

Helping companies with very, very large web sites increase sales through improved search engine performance takes a unique type of person. Think equally strong left and right brain lateral thinking.  Heavy doeses of technical savvy plus creative problem solving are essential.

Shopzilla and Bizrate market millions of products and Michael Nguyen’s SEO responsibilities for those sites are substantial. In this interview Michael talks about Google’s recent MayDay update, a SEO checklist, his top resources for staying current in the field and the unique challenges (including duplicate content) that come with optimizing huge web sites.

There’s a bit of a trend as we’ve interviewed lead SEO practitioners for well known brands. They seem to have the combined experience of independent consultant, agency and having worked in-house. Please tell us about how you got into search marketing and how your past experience in these roles has contributed to your current position. Also, what’s the most interesting thing about working with Shopzilla?

Sounds like I’ve had a very similar path as your other interviewees. I started my career as a web developer for Aerospace Corporation, mainly building dynamic web sites and internal search engines. I spent a good amount of time testing and understanding search engine optimization on my own during that time – partly out of interest and applicability to my work. From there I did some independent consulting for a couple years and eventually joined an agency (SEO Inc). Spent a few years there working for a variety of clients, small and large. I had a chance to move in-house with Shopzilla about 4 years back and I took it. Been with Shopzilla ever since.

I do a lot of technical SEO on our large and complex sites, so it’s required that I understand the technical detail behind the scenes. It’s much easier to communicate with the development team if you understand what’s going on in the backend.

The greatest thing about working in the comparison shopping / product reviews space is the challenge. Our market is extremely competitive and there are many large players. You really don’t have time to rest, but it keeps me interested. With Shopzilla specifically, I’m given all the tools I need to do my job – it’s a simple concept, but in reality not many SEOs can say the same. I have access to large amounts of data, analytical resources, development teams, specialized tools, etc all tailored towards SEO. At the highest level, Shopzilla is a company that really understands search and user behavior. It’s the perfect environment for an SEO because we work at the intersection of search and users.

Working with large organizations and also companies with large web sites is unique for a variety of reasons. What have you found to be the best advice for getting quality SEO recommendations implemented with large web sites (or companies)?

I’m sure you’ve heard this before, but the best way to get things implemented within a large company is through education. Things get done faster when everyone is on board. So that requires constant educating and training. The more people that understand SEO the better. You want advocates for SEO in every area of the business – from engineering to upper management.

What are some of the unique SEO challenges that you encounter with a business like Shopzilla with its own network of sites and so much data being published?

With a business like Shopzilla, I’m always challenged with the sheer size of our sites. We have millions of products and various different business lines. So keeping everything indexed and ranking is a constant battle. I spend a lot of time thinking about optimal site architecture and site performance. For large sites, even small changes in indexing can equate to significant revenue shifts.

The comparison shopping and consumer review market is pretty interesting. Shopzilla not only competes with other shopping engines, but we also compete for organic traffic against informational portals, niche review sites, review aggregators, and blogs. We’re both a head and long tail business. All of us (Shopzilla, Shopping.com, Nextag, etc) start off with the same basic data from merchants. We all aggregate products and provide comparison shopping features on our sites.

So in order to drive traffic to our sites, we need to improve our product and provide value on top of that data. In the end it comes back to the user – what does the user find valuable and what is the user searching for?

Users want to easily compare a variety of products and make a confident buying decision. So at Shopzilla, we devote a lot of resources to ensure those two things happen on our site. We take millions of products and organize them around what users tell us is the most usable categorization. We allow users to refine by a variety of useful attributes. We help them understand the products they are interested in with user reviews, buying guides, and comments from the point of sale. We assist with merchant selection through our merchant reviews. So while we start with essentially commoditized data, we add a ton of content and value on top of that starting data. Increasing product value results in increased organic traffic.

In a sense, SEO is the product and the product is SEO.

What advice can you offer about dealing with content syndication and duplication? What are some common situations you’ve encountered and their solution?

301 Redirects and rel canonical are your friends when dealing with any sort of duplication/content syndication issue. It’s pretty common for sorting features (for example a “sort by price” feature) to create duplicate content. Rel canonical is perfect for getting rid of that type of duplication.

For content syndication, I recommend placing a variety of signals within the content that helps Google understand the true source of the content. Depending on the type of content this could be: links within the content pointing back to your page, a rel canonical, a URL, or your domain.

Can you offer some of your experience and insight regarding Google’s recent Mayday update? What can companies with large sites that rely on long tail traffic do about Mayday?

It’s even more important now with Mayday that large sites reconsider the signals they are sending to Google regarding their deeper pages (long tail). Obviously not every single page on a large site deserves to be equally promoted, so craft your navigation around the fact that different pages have varying value. Spend some time building links to deeper pages to support sections with weak indexing.

While it’s a little overdramatic, imagine how your site would perform if domain authority did not exist. Start tailoring your SEO strategy with that in mind.

If you were to provide a friend a checklist for marketing their new B2C website online, what would you be sure to include”

Guess my checklist would be pretty simple:

1. Build something people want
2. Make it extremely easy for search engines to crawl/index your site
3. Get people talking about your site online
4. Keep improving the site

Google’s guidelines are really helpful for a new site.

What web based SEO or social media marketing tools would you recommend for that new web site? Any tools we’ve probably never heard of?

These tools are more tech heavy than your typical SEO tools, but I figured some of these might be new to your readers:

1. 80legs – Crawl your own site (or a competitors) and extract whatever data you want
2. SEOmoz API – Mashup all that juicy SEOmoz data
3. Solr – Great for understanding the basics behind a search engine
4. nutch – Similar to SOLR, this one is great for understanding crawling/indexing

Monitoring tools are useful too, setting up a Google Alerts and Twitter RSS feed is helpful for keeping up with what others are saying about your brand online. Once you know what your users are talking about, you can join in on the conversation.

You’ve received kudos from people like the GM of your current company for “staying on top of what’s going on in the search marketplace”. How do you stay current? What are your favorite information sources? (Conferences, Blogs, Newsletters, Books, Forums)

I used to monitor a ton of different blogs/sites/sources, but I’ve paired it down to handful of sources recently. Here’s what I check regularly:

1. Hacker News
2. SEO Book
3. SMX/Search Engine Land
4. SEOmoz
5. SEO by the Sea

If it’s important, it will eventually make it to one of those sites. I’d also love to attend a WWW Conference someday.

Thank you Michael!

Written by: Thomas McMahon

There are currently 29.6 million small businesses in the U.S. (SCORE). 63% of consumers and small business owners use the Iinternet to find information about local companies and 82% use search engines (Webvisible & Nielsen).  That means there’s a lot of opportunity for local SEO.

Recently I attended GetListed.org‘s Local University in Minneapolis which focused on how to optimize web sites for local search.  Out of all the good information that came out of the event, here are 10 easy things you can do today to optimize sites and content to attract local customers.

1. Claim your profile. It’s as simple as logging into Google Places, Bing Local and Yahoo Local and walking through the verification steps which include a phone call or post card to verify your address.

2. Upload Pictures. The local sites listing services like to provide their users with pictures of your business. To help ensure that they see some good pictures, upload your own. They don’t have to be professional photos, but they will represent your business so make sure they are decent.

3. Control information across the internet. A big part of local search optimization and marketing involves obtaining information from other sites. Local listing aggregation services search the internet far and wide to find pictures, reviews and any information they can on your company. Submit your info to services like Localeze & infoUSA.

The downside here is that if something is incorrect on another site, it could find its way back into your local listing. If that happens, you have to go back to the source and ask them to fix the issue and then wait while the fix makes its way into local sites.

4. Ask for reviews. Most local sites, except for Yelp, are fine with you telling your customers to review you. So do it. On your contact form thank you page, on invoices, on email communications, make a point to say “Hey we’d love it if you gave our business a review on Google/Bing/Yahoo Local.” These reviews, good or bad, make your business more creditable to future customers.

5. Bad reviews are good. No company is perfect, so when users see all positive reviews, something looks wrong and they may actually choose a different company. Bad reviews are a part of any business and a few bad reviews can make the good reviews that much better. Obviously, you don’t want to encourage bad reviews.

6. Add local phone number. On your website, be sure to publish your local phone number in text vs within an image or not at all. 800 numbers may be nice, but on their own they don’t give any kind of location indication.

7. Have a full physical mailing address on all pages of your website. Your address is important and it should be on all pages of your website to re-enforce your geographic location.

8. Think like the searcher/customer. What would your customers put in a search box to find you and buy your products?

Lets say you own an outdoor sporting good store; like hunting, camping, hiking and fishing. If a searcher puts put ‘shoes’ into a search box, they probably aren’t a good match as it’s such a generic term. If they put ‘running shoes’ you’re still not a match as your sporting goods store doesn’t focuses on running. If they put in ‘hiking shoes’ then you want to target them.

Business owners often get caught up in popular keywords or keywords that will drive a lot of traffic and forget to focus on less popular keywords that have a higher probability of making sales.

Remember to think like the customer.

9. Multiple locations need multiple landing pages. Local sites don’t like a business having more than one local listing, but if the business has two locations, than that’s OK. However, you should ensure that each location links back to a page on your website that is all about that location and what it has to offer. Sending both local listings back to the same page, or homepage, isn’t ideal.

10. Treat Customers ‘Righter’ Everyone knows that they need to treat the customer right, but with social media, review sites and the ability for good, or bad, news to spread like wildfire, you need to treat your customers really good or “righter”. This includes online and offline customer service.

Local search takes into account information business owners put in their local profile, information it finds on other sites and information on the business’ website. Even what happens offline can be taken into consideration as customers may bring back those experiences in the form of online reviews.

Local search is it’s own unique entity as no one can control everything that appears on their local listing, but business owners can take steps to ensure that what gets listed is a good representation of the company. For more information, here is a list of local SEO blogs that we’ve reviewed in the past for TopRank’s BIGLIST with many, many more tips.

Written by: Joe Griffin

Google has one of the most extensive web site indexes in the World Wide Web. Being the most popular search engine

there is today, Google has established itself and set standards for other search engines to try and follow. The company has done this by using one of the most advanced indexing tools in its arsenal, the GoogleBot.

The GoogleBot is the company’s web crawler that scours the Internet and inspects the web sites in order to have them ranked according to Google’s standards.

Earlier versions of the GoogleBot had limited functions. It did nothing more than to search and read links and analyze codes in the Web. Google though revealed that the GoogleBot has been upgraded and can now interact with JavaScript. It went so far to declare that the Bot can understand some Java. If what they said was true, indexing and differentiating web sites with rich and quality content would be a whole lot easier.

JavaScript is not a relatively easy thing to understand. And for a bot to be able to do this is very impressive. According to Forbes, it is very hard to apply algorithms to a program and ensure that the program will continue to work ad infinitum. These difficult issues though can be eased if GoogleBot can execute JavaScript by itself.

Many analysts credit the Google Caffeine, the newest version of the company’s search index, for this vast improvement on the GoogleBot. With Google Caffeine, searching the Internet is now faster and more comprehensive. In order to do these, upgraded web crawlers would definitely be needed.

The world is now feeling the results that this new and improved GoogleBot provide. Now, many are looking forward at what the world’s largest search engine company will be doing next.

Apparently the answer is yes, they now do have a patent for the technology that would allow them to track your curser on the screen and add juice to certain items based on if, how often or for how long you hover over certain links, keywords, images, etc.

Below is an interesting related article about Google’s mouse tracking ability.

Written by: Matthew Elshaw We all know that Google’s ranking algorithm uses hundreds of different factors to determine the position of search results – but is your mouse pointer one of them?

According to a recent post on Seo By The Sea, the answer is Yes, after Google was recently granted a patent for determining search relevancy using pointer activity monitoring.

The patent discusses how Google may use information about where searchers hover their mouse pointer as a ranking signal for how relevant those results may be to a search query. This type of monitoring may be used across organic results, sponsored links and Google onebox results.

Below is a snippet from the Google patent,

A typical user’s behavior is to move the mouse pointer (or any other pointing indicator) over or near a target informational item, keep the mouse pointer there for a period of time while the user reads the item’s information (e.g., title and snippet), and then click through the underlying link or move to another item.

Sometimes, a user may review multiple informational items responsive to a search query, moving a pointer over or near each of the informational items that the user reviews. These various pointer activities can provide another way to evaluate the user’s feedback with respect to a particular informational item.

While the patent was only recently approved, it has been 5 years in the making so there’s no guarantee on the extent that Google are currently using this technology.

Heatmap and eye tracking providers have used similar systems for many years to monitor users, so I do believe it would provide search engines some useful data.

What do you think about the patent, do you use the mouse pointer as a tracker as you read over a page? Let us know in the comments below.

the humor came from lapsura.com

Check out more humor about search engines, jokes about google and other funny stuff from webconfs. be there or be square!

YouTube is one of the most popular sites and in addition to all the fun there, YouTube offers many opportunities for promotion and getting traffic to your site. Similarly to Facebook and Twitter, in order to use YouTube successfully for promotion and getting traffic, you need to know the rules for this. Here are some tips how to promote yourself, your site, and your products and how to get free traffic from YouTube:

1 Post viral videos

There are millions of videos on YouTube. If you post a video nobody is interested in, this video will go unnoticed, as millions of other videos. The clue to getting traffic from YouTube is to post useful videos, or even better – viral videos. Viral videos are not only useful videos, but they also tend to appeal to large groups of people. If your video manages to get viral, people will promote it for you and the only thing left for you is to reap the benefits.

2 Create an interesting profile

Similarly to Facebook, Twitter, or any other social networking site, an interesting profile is a must. If people like your videos, they will check your profile to learn more about you. When they see that your profile is boring, they won’t bother more with you. You can make your profile a bit informal but don’t make it as if it were the profile of a crazy teenager – you are using YouTube for business, right?

3 Include your logo and website in the video

Your logo and your website URL are your major branding weapons. This is why you must include them in the video. You can include them in the beginning of the video or at the end. It is best to have your logo and URL throughout the whole video because this way you will be gaining lots of exposure but if you can’t do it (for instance because of artistic considerations), the beginning and the end of the video will suffice.

4 Post quality videos

As already mentioned, there is no shortage of videos on YouTube. Unfortunately, this also means there is no shortage of videos with poor quality. These videos are not favored by viewers, so if you want viewers to watch your videos, make sure that your videos don’t have crappy sound and/or blurred pictures. YouTube is not a board for professional videographers, so you can post amateur videos, but make sure their quality is decent.

5 Promote your videos

If your videos get viral, you are lucky but you can’t count on this. In order to get YouTube traffic, your videos need viewers. You can’t rely solely on the fact that viewers will find your videos – you need to promote them. Even viral videos will benefit from a promotion by you.

6 Make your videos search-friendly

One of the ways viewers find your videos is through search – both locally on YouTube and on search engines. This is why you need to make your videos search-friendly. To do this, include your major keywords in the title and in the descriptions. Also, pay special attention to the tags. List as many keywords as relevant in the tags, but beware that you don’t get spammy.

7 Post in series

Standalone videos can become a hit but it is best if you create series of videos and post them once a day/week. This way viewers will know that there will be more and they will be coming to check. Even if you don’t create series, at least try to post videos regularly – this builds audience loyalty.

8 Post video responses

Video responses are one of the unique things about YouTube and you should take full advantage of it. Search your niche, choose the most popular videos in your niche and post video responses to them. Just be careful that the response you post is related to the video you are responding to and don’t make your video response a blatant self-promotion.

9 Choose the right time to post your videos

On YouTube, timing is very important because there are peaks in traffic and times when there are not so many viewers. Weekdays (especially Wednesdays and above all – Thursdays) morning or early afternoon US time is the best time to post a general interest video. In order to have your video uploaded in the prime time, you need to plan a bit. Have in mind that for large videos and/or slow Internet connections the upload could take you an hour, so start early.

10 Keep your videos short

YouTube doesn’t impose limits on the length of videos it publishes but generally long videos are boring. 3 to 5 minutes is the best duration for a video but if required you could go from 1 to 6 minutes. When a video is longer than 6 or 7 minutes, this gets boring and not many people will watch it to the end (where your logo and URL are to be found). 3 to 5 minutes is enough to lay your idea, give some details AND tell viewers to visit your site for more.

11 Comment on other people’s videos and include a link to your site in your comment

In addition to video responses, you can also use plain good comments. Again, search for popular videos in your niche and comment on them. If your comments are liked by viewers, they will check your profile and probably watch your videos.

YouTube is a valuable resource to drive traffic to your site and to promote it. The competition there might be fierce, but there is always room for a couple of good videos. Fill this room before your competitors do!

from www.webconfs.com

Well now, it’s been quite some time since an article was posted on here so I feel like I owe everyone something really good.

It’s common in seo to make suggestions to potential clients to not go after that elusive one word phrase. But by doing so, and with seemingly all seo professionals on board, has it gotten easier to get ranked for one-word phrases?

I’ve personally have been able to get some top rankings for clients of mine within the past year – I’m not saying this to brag, but if everyone’s drinking that kool-aid, how will anyone know how hard it is to go after one word?

Now, there are those that will tell you that a one-word phrase doesn’t convert. In my experience, these phrase drive a ton of traffic to the site (as much as up to 10k unique visitors a day) – of course not all of them convert.

But about 20% do.

Yes, 20% of all people coming in on a one-word phrase converts at that rate for something on the site. Maybe not for the phrase that brought them in, but that person converts on something.

Now, using WebTrends or Google Analytics will tell you the phrase on which the person came in from, but to get the granular level detail, the only system I’ve been able to come up with and rely on is a site database capturing system. It’s been custom created, but it can track all the pages visited and will tell you that if someone originally came to the site for the term "KVM" but ended up buying USB Cables, that data is retained.

Now, all of a sudden, those one-word phrases are looking pretty good. And, with soo many seo’s purposely not going after them, I think it presents an opportunity to grab those top rankings for those magical traffic drivers.

So, go get those words!

-To your online success! Paul Bliss www.SEOforGoogle.com

If you’re not thinking about this, you need to get started, and if you have started, how is it working out? Google seems to be at a defining moment in time with it’s penalizing sites with paid links, and almost constant shifts to the algorithm that make the SERPs a guessing game just about everyday.

So what are you doing now to make sure your site survives should it be hit by a Google penalty? You might be ranked very well today and making great money from the traffic that Google sends to your site naturally – so what if they flag your site for some deserved or un-merited form of spam?

With soo many people gaming the system, no wonder Google lashes out at the SEO community on occasion. We’re the ones pushing them to provide more relevant results while at the same time doing things that some would question on a moral level. Point is, Google delivers a ton of traffic. But the web is VERY big, and Google is not the be all and end all. You should be constantly looking for other ways to deliver traffic to your site such as: Be active in forums – answer questions without trying to sell our product or service – instead, demonstrate your expertise in your answers and people will realize that what you say is worthy, and in turn will use your product or service when they are ready. Write articles! I know it’s old and tiresome and boring – but like the first point, it’s a great way to not only show off what you know, but in inject your writing style. Some people will read you not for your content, but because they like the way you put things into perspective. Don’t underestimate that.

Ask for help – I know a lot of people have trouble with this, but when my car breaks down, I have no trouble calling a mechanic. Use this same approach on the web. If you need help with a problem seek out the people who can help you. Many times in that process there is an exchange of information that leads to a deeper and "real" relationship – leverage that for links!

Tell ‘em what you think – this applies to blogs, forums, articles and email responses. Why pretend to be something you’re not? Like is too short to pussyfoot around and to be taken advantage of by other people. Use your clients! I know I just said don’t let others abuse you, and now I am saying to use your clients? What I mean is, your clients have other relationships as well, and if you perform well for them, they will refer you to their other business relationships.

See a pattern here? While Google is great for delivering text-based computer crunched results, at the end of the day, human relations (social engineering) is what makes you money. Treat people with respect, end any relationship with grace, and you’ll see that over time, that crazy thing called karma makes it way back to you. Enjoy the ride!

-To your online success! Paul Bliss www.SEOforGoogle.com