How To Leverage Local Search To Get Traffic
The number of local searches keeps growing with the internet. You are about to learn some SEO techniques that will be helpful for achieving success.
The key to local SEO is to put yourself in the place of your prospective customers when they do searches. A crucial part of search engine optimization is thinking like the customer. You have to picture yourself as a prospect using a search engine to locate the kind of item you sell, and try to figure out exactly what they would type into the search field. Imagine that you are the owner of a store that sells only one kind of item, golf accessories. Search engine users who type in “golf” are doing an extremely broad search and are mostly not going to be looking for what you have. If someone does a search for “golf courses,” they are not looking for what you are selling either. Someone who enters “golf accessories,” though, is a likely customer for your store, so this is the kind of keyword to be focusing on. It’s common for website owners in search of local traffic to ignore potentially profitable keywords that don’t get tens of thousands of searches. And instead aim at highly popular keywords that have lots of traffic. The more you can think like a prospect, the better you can plan your SEO campaigns. Your ability to find targeted keywords will improve with practice, and you’ll find more customers and you will eventually be able to rank for a variety of relevant keywords. Anik Singal has what it takes you make money online. He will show you exactly how to do it at this Empire Formula site.
Don’t forget to target the local site listing services run by the search engines, such as Google Places, Yahoo! Local and Bing Local, and these sites all allow you to “claim your profile,” which is something worth doing. If you want to claim your profile on any of these sites, there are a few steps you have to complete to verify various facts about yourself, and this includes verifying your phone number and address. This is a relatively fast and easy process that gives you an advantage over the many other businesses who neglected to do it. People who search are impressed with pictures, and it makes them assume someone is more authentic, so it’s a good idea to upload pictures to your profile on these local site listings. It really helps if you post a few good pictures from your site so your prospects get a look at your business. These pictures don’t have to be taken professionally, but since they’ll be representing your business, you have to see to it that they’re decent.
Another way to get ranked well locally is to get backlinks from well established local websites, which the search engines consider important. The most beneficial sites to get links from are those that are popular and well respected, such as the local BBB (Better Business Bureau) or Chamber of Commerce in your area. You can find such sites by Googling your city name along with the keyword “business directory.” Contact these groups and find out what it takes to get a listing with them. You can easily locate these sites, so don’t neglect to take this step. Anik Singal wants to teach you the right method of online marketing and provide you with the skill set to finally make it online. Look at this Empire Formula blog. In conclusion: local search engine optimization requires more work from you but it pays off later on when you are better able to reach your target market.
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Recent Changes at Google, Yahoo, and MSN
Video tutorial on how to avoid getting Google slapped.
There are many changes taking place in the top search engines. Google, Yahoo, and MSN are all adapting to the many transformations occurring within the search industry. Because of these changes, I thought I would take the time to give you an overview of what’s taking place within the market and how it affects you as a webmaster. To begin, let’s start with Google.
Back in 2003, Google would index and crawl the web about once a month and everything would change all in one shot. WebMasterWorld would actually name these updates with names like Brandy, Florida, and Bourbon.
Google has moved away from these monthly updates to an ever-changing process. You can now see daily changes within the SERPS with the biggest changes occurring during algorithm updates.
Late June and July of this year saw some major changes within the Google algorithm. If your site was hurt from this algorithm change, you should re-examine your site and be sure to follow the guidelines below:
1. Pursue a continuous linking campaign with other quality sites. This can be achieved through article syndication, exchanging RSS feeds, submitting to directories or syndicating a press release.
2. Create a Google sitemap to increase the coverage of your webpages.
3. Make sure your site has a clear navigation system. Every page should be reachable from at least one static link.
4. Avoid all deceptive or manipulative behavior. Don’t get involved in linking schemes. Avoid all forms of cloaking and avoid hidden text or hidden links.
Besides the changes taking place within organic search results, there have also been recent changes within Google Adwords. In July of 2006, Google updated their landing page algorithm. These changes have harmed a number of online marketers. Many advertisers who had been paying five or ten cents a clíck are now required to bid at least 50 cents to a dolloar or more. There are also other advertisers who kept their bid prices, but those bids are now buying only 3rd or 4th page positions when they used to buy first page positions.
Some advertisers have even been effectively shutdown.
However, keep in mind that not all advertisers have been affected. There are four main types of sites that have been hit the hardest. These include:
* one page sales letter websites
* squeeze pages
* adsense sites (particularly those involved in Adsense arbitrage)
* affíliate sites
The new landing page algorithm gives a quality score to every landing page. Fortunately for us, Google has left some clues as to how they are ranking these pages.
Below are 3 general guidelines that will help those who have been hurt by the recent updates.
1. Provide relevant and substantial content.
2. Link to the page on your site that provides the most useful and accurate information related to the product or service in your ad.
3. Distinguish sponsored links from the rest of your site’s content.
To stay in accordance with the new quality score guidelines, you may want to remove all Adsense ads from your landing pages, create or find more original content for your sites, ensure that your landing page has at least 500 words, and check to make sure that your ad relates perfectly with the content of your landing page.
Google is getting smarter everyday. Our job is not to trick the search engines but to deliver truly valuable information to our visitors. By doing this along with some basic on-page and off-page optimization techniques, you should perform very well in the search engines over the long-haul.
There have also been some recent changes at MSN.
They have changed the name of their search engine spiders. Before the changes, they were all called “msnbot,”. Fortunately, they are now starting to group their spiders into separate categories.
The MSN Shopping bot is msnbot-products.
The MSN News bot is msnbot-news.
The MSN Image Search bot is msnbot-media.
The MSN search bot is still called msnbot.
It should now be much easier for webmasters to decipher what’s really going on in their web logs. In addition, webmasters can also block specific bots if they need to, without blocking MSN Search.
Last, but not least, there is Yahoo. This company has experienced some very exciting changes within the past few months.
One of these is the launch of a new Yahoo Search Crawler. The new crawler is faster and more efficient at visiting websites. As a result, website owners should notice as much as a 25% reduction in the number of requests and bandwidth consumed by the Yahoo crawler.
Yahoo also released an index update in mid-July. You can read all about it at http://www.ysearchblog.com.
In addition, there are a number of other, smaller-based search engines who are leading the way in the future of search engine technology. One of the best examples I have seen is Eurekster.com. They have developed a social search engine powered by the wisdom of crowds.
Eurekster makes use of its own SearchMemory technology, which remembers the sites a user finds useful and presents them higher in the results the next time they search. Then, Eurekster lets a user share their searches and sites with friends. For example, if you do a search on “internet marketing”, you’ll see sites related to “internet marketing” that your friends also found useful. These results are marked with an icon.
This personalization helps to increase relevancy in a way that no algorithm can match.
I expect to see many changes within Google, Yahoo, and MSN in upcoming years as they merge search engine technology with social search in order to make search results more relevant as well as personalized. One thing is clear, the future evolution of search is sure to be exciting to watch.
About The Author
Kim Roach is a staff writer and editor for the SiteProNews and SEO-News newsletters. You can contact Kim at: kim @ seo-news.com .
This article may be freely distributed without modification and provided that the copyright notice and author information remain intact.
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