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In SEO, local search should never be overlooked. It can provide a boost in traffic has a higher tendency to convert more visitors to customers since most people prefer working with local companies, even SEO companies.
Here are some factors that Big Oak SEO feels are important and should be considered when trying to get higher rankings for your site, whether or not you are marketing to a national or local market. I have tried to list them in order of importance but it really depends how important local traffic is to your site.
Location in the Title of your Pages Including your city and state, especially if you are counting on local customers is imperative. Don’t overdue it, but be sure to include it. I talk about this in detail on my SEO Titles: Using the Title Tag post.
Tell the Search Engines Where You Work
The physical location of your site should be on the footer of every page. If you work from home, get a P.O. box and list that address. It is important for the city, state and zip code be on every page.
Submit Your Site to Google’s Local Business Center You can’t get found in a search unless Google knows where you are. Submit your business to Google’s Local Business Center even if you don’t have a website…yet.
Keep Your Contact Page Connected Your physical address should be at the top of the contact page, above your contact form. At the very least it should be easy to find and accurate.
Link to your address on the Google Maps and Yahoo Maps. For example, go to Google Maps and then do a search for you physical address. After finding your location you will see a “Link to this page” link. Click that and then copy and paste that link on your contact page.
Adding written driving directions will allow for many local keywords to be included so having this in addition to a link to maps.google.com is a good idea.
List Coverage Area Big Oak SEO is located in Glen Allen, Virginia, but very few people have heard of or search for Glen Allen. We are in the Richmond, Virginia area so we use Richmond in our footer and mention it on our company page as well as other local locations. Try to include the metropolitan areas on your site if that is what people will be searching for.
Add Listings in Yellow Pages, Superpages & Similar Sites While I don’t often feel the cost is warranted for phone book sites, if you can get a free listing or a discount because you are already paying for a printed listing it can help to have a link pointing to your site from the online listing.
Provide a Local Phone number on Every Page It is a no-brainer to have your 800 present at the top of every page, but be sure to list your local number in the footer as well. Don’t forget to include the area code.
List your Site in Directories for Local businesses Sites like Yelp.com and Citysearch.com are good places for local businesses. They can also provide real traffic and not just higher rankings. I’m looking more into Yelp and hope to write a post about them soon.
Get your site or business reviewed I think this is undervalued in importance, but getting a few reviews from a site like CitySearch and Yelp is a good thing for search engine rankings. Submit your site and ask friends to review for you. Of course this isn’t applicable to all businesses, but it should be part of the marketing plan if you count on local consumers.
Google Coupons This isn’t new but not many people are using it. Google coupons was announced in August 2006. It may help your ranking, but it can’t hurt, especially if you have actual cost savings to offer over your competition.
Do you have any ideas or have any advice that has worked for you concerning local search. If so, send us an email or submit a comment to this post. We are always looking for new ideas to share.
SEO companies have two major functions when working with their clients: optimize the site content and finding quality, relevant links. So please forgive me if you already know this simple yet effective SEO tip, I’m sure those new to the SEO game will find it helpful. This tip on link building will help you find link opportunities but it will be up to you to acquire link placement.
I am posting this tip in response to a question I receive on a continuing basis from perspective clients.
How do you find links?
We have many methods but the simplest way to find links, that aren’t paid links, is to search for them. Searching with the right terms will increase your efficiency and success in securing the maximum number of links in the shortest time. What are these terms? I’ve listed some of the search terms we use to find good linking sources. Of course there are many others to try but this list should get you started.
Search Terms to be used with your keyword or phrase:
Add URL
Links
Resources
Related sites
Related urls
Submit a link
Submit a site
Submit URL
Suggest a link
Suggest a site
Suggest URL
Suggest an URL
Directory
Recommended Sites
Add Profile
Add Site
Article
For example, if you are trying to find quality links to help market your website which is selling pet turtles (We bought two, Bear and Grylls, while on vacation last week.) you would type into the Google search box something like this: “add url” + pet turtles. It would give you these results Links for Pet Turtles. The page shows five promising link opportunities that are already in the Google index. From here you can try more of the search phrases and then try different keywords and phrases to match with them.
There are also free tools that will help in finding backlinks. Some that I like are:
Google is indexing more pages now then ever before, but that’s not always a good thing. Sometimes these pages get sent to the supplemental index instead of the main index. It’s perfectly normal for most sites to have some pages in the supplemental index, but if your main pages (and especially your home page) get sent to the supplemental index you’ll likely not see much traffic from Google any more.
My site’s listed in the supplemental results, what does that mean?
As Google states, “Supplemental sites are part of Google’s auxiliary index.” Google will always show results from their main index before showing results from the supplemental index. This means that supplemental pages will almost never show up for searches, and will only show up for super specialized searches if few or no results come from the main index. With so many blogs and tag pages out there, even crazy many-word searches will bring back at least a few non-supplemental results.
How did my site get in the supplemental index?
One way pages end up in the supplemental index instead of the main index is a lack of PageRank (PR). This could be because you orphaned the page (no links pointing to it), the page lies too many clicks away from your home page, or your home page itself has a very low PR. If this is the case, you should work on your link building to those important pages of your site and build up their PageRank.
The other way your pages end up in the supplemental index is by having duplicate content on your page. This could be because you used the same manufacturer written product description that dozens of other sites use, you copied content from another website, or your pages have very little content and too much template which is duplicated on all pages. If this is the case, try writing unique content or changing your template so it doesn’t have the same elements on every page.
I changed my pages, what’s next?
Now that you’ve fixed your pages, it can be a long and hard process for getting them out of the supplemental index because the supplemental spider doesn’t come along very often. You should create or edit your Google sitemap XML file and hope that will be enough. If that doesn’t work, try changing the name (URL) of those pages and delete the old file.
Feel free to add your own observations about supplemental results here, we’d love to hear your stories.
I’ve got a simple SEO tip today. As an SEO Company we are always doing competitive research. Many of our clients are astounded at the wealth of information that can be discovered using Yahoo’s Site Explorer especially for competitive link research. Site Explorer can help you track down the links pointing to your competition and allow you to contact those same sites and request or pay for a link to your site.
Yahoo’s search engine also provides information about competitor backlinks. You can find tools to do this for you but going to Yahoo! Search and typing in the following commands will work just as well.
If you are looking for web pages that link to multiple competitor, usually you will find good backlink pages like this, you would type in:
linkdomain:competitor1.com, linkdomain:competitor2.com
We also should all know how important .edu and .gov links can be to our site. So why not look for competitors who have these links. I’ll give an example as if I was looking. I would type in a keyword such as “seo” and then do a search for only .edu domains. I would type in: seo site:.edu Replace the .edu with .gov for government backlinks.
Of course there are many other things you can do for research and seeing what advanced options are available can be a great catalyst so be sure to view the advance search options in Yahoo! for more ideas.
Google also has advanced search but I think Yahoo! does a better job with options and functionality, especially when it comes to researching backlinks.
Please send any suggestions or add them to the comments on this SEO tip. We are always looking for new ways to improve our SEO research methods.
Why you should use a flat site architecture rather than a deep, or nested, site architecture if SEO is important to your site?
In my previous life as a website designer and HTML developer I loved to have a folder/directory for everything. While I’m not a organized person (ask my wife) I did like keeping my files structured in clearly labeled directories. So nesting directories 4 or 5 levels deep was common practice. When I transitioned to an SEO specialist my ideas on structuring files and site architecture began to change and here is why.
A flat site offers quick access to all the pages within the site. A minimal number of clicks are needed to find all the pages within your site, usually no more than three clicks is ideal. According to the views of the search engines (SEs), less clicks mean higher importance. The view of the SEs are that more important information will be easier to reach. Home page information is the most important, one click from the home page is secondary information and two clicks is tertiary information and so forth.
Think of it like bodies of water. Your home page is the ocean and off of the home page are large rivers and then smaller rivers, then streams, then creeks and brooks and finally the smallest trickle of water is all that is left. Don’t let you products, services or information be at the end of the trickle, drying up eventually. Closer to the ocean is always better and that is how the search engines will rank your pages too.
I’ve seen some site place everything in the root folder and this isn’t good practice either. Structure your sites as to what makes sense, but be aware that more clicks can mean less viewers, both for search engine traffic and visitors on your site.
If you have been following this blog or looking into SEO you know how very important building links can be to your site’s success in the search engine rankings. Link building involves two types of links: Links pointing to your site (external linking), and links on your site pointing to other pages of your site (internal linking). While we don’t always have the ability to control external linking, a poorly worded internal link is inexcusable. The single, easiest and least low effort thing to remember is to make your links descriptive. If that is too much to remember, then just remember this, no links should be labeled “click here,” “more information,” “read more” or any other variation of these words.
I realize this might bring disagreement from the user experience community but I think we can all agree that your average user doesn’t need to be told to click a link and if it isn’t obviously a link (underlined) you have bigger problems on your site with usability.
Every time I see a “click here” link I shake my head at the wasted link opportunity that is being lost. You probably know how powerful link text can be in helping your rankings so it shouldn’t be a surprise to find that the site that ranks for the term “click here” doesn’t even have those words within the text of the page that is ranking for “click here”. Care to guess what company’s site is ranking for it?
I’ll give you a hint; you’ve most likely downloaded the application and probably more than once. The site, or page actually, ranked number one for the term “click here”is the Acrobat Reader download page. Make sense? This clue might help: Click here to download Acrobat Reader. This proves the power of the text in your link, so why waste it with a non-descriptive textual link?
I can provide thousands of examples, but let’s look at a few examples where a descriptive text link would be much better.
Prevent Blindness Home Page
I found six instances of the phrase “Find out more here”. I’ll use one example from the home page:
Early Detection Key to Preventing Vision Loss from Glaucoma More than 2 million Americans over the age of 40 have glaucoma, but many of those living with the disease don’t even know it. – Find out more HERE
Instead, remove the “Find out more HERE” and place the link on the headline text and best of all it doesn’t require any rewriting:
Apple’s iPhone Page
Being the huge Apple fan that I am it pains me to point to them as a bad example, but the new iPhone page is just that, a bad example. On this page I count five “read more” links and one “learn more”. It can be argued that Apple doesn’t need SEO help for the iPhone, but the principal and lost opportunity still applies.
Joint Commission Home Page
I count five “read more” links, incredibly listed below descriptive titles without a link. What better way to get listing for their top stories than linking to them with keywords in the story? Placing the link on the headline would solve this, much like we suggested for the Prevent Blindness site.
Making simple changes would have helped all of these sites make better use of their internal linking as well as helped with their site’s ranking for the words in the link.
Of course, going beyond the decision to not use useless text links and thinking about the best keywords and phrases to use will help even more. A few seconds, or better yet, a few minutes applied to thinking about your internal, contextual linking can bring in great rewards. Take the time and…Think before you Link!
Page titles are one of the most important parts of any web page, especially when performing search engine optimization. A page title is located at the very top of your browser’s window. It can bring traffic in abundance or completely isolate your site. Knowing how to properly word a page title is critical to your site’s SEO success. Let’s look at how page titles can be used to increase your site’s traffic.
Snowflakes and Titles
It is said no two snowflakes look exactly the same. Well, the same should be said for page titles on your site.
Every page on your site should have a different focus from the other pages on your site, or you are repeating yourself and duplicating content. So if all your pages are telling a different story, shouldn’t they all have a different title? And that title should effectively reflect the content of the page.
Missing an Opportunity
In my daily web searches, I see many missed opportunities with poorly titled web pages. Pages simply named “Untitled” or “Untitled Document” can be found in the millions (79 million were found in a Google search). Search engines depend on titles to gather information about your web pages. And a page title without a unique description does not help the search engines – in fact, a generic page title makes the page nearly impossible to find…
Putting Your Company Name in the Title Tag
I’m not against putting your company name in your page title – after all, it will help build brand awareness. But, I am against putting only your company name in the title and until you become a household name, I would suggest putting your company name at the end of your title. The focus of your web pages should be on what people would search for to find your company. In other words you want targeted keyword phrases in the title. Let me give an example:
If your company name is “Miller & Sons” and you sell fishing equipment near Whitefish, Montana you should not limit your title to “Miller & Sons”. Instead try “Fishing Rods & Reels in Whitefish, Montana – Miller & Sons“. With this you are netting traffic searching for your product, your location and your company name. Keeping the location in the name is very important if you are serving only a regional or local market.
Let Your Copy Be Your Guide
When deciding on your page titles, read the page first and let that guide your decision. If you can’t confine the theme of your page copy into a concise page title, you may need to break the copy into more than one page.
If you sell toys on your site, your page copy should have the keyword “toys” and so should your page title. Even better it should include what type of toys. Do you sell dog toys? Cat toys? Children’s toys? Your title should convey this. Adding in other possible search terms is also a good idea. An example of a toy site home page title could be “Children’s toys and games – toys for boys and girls of all ages” You have your most important keyword, “toys,” listed twice and have added some other important keywords such as “games,” “boy” and “girl.”
Suppose one of the sub pages of your toy site showcases Leap Frog’s Discovery Ball. What type of toy is this? It’s an educational toy and you should use that in your title along with the actual toy name. This gives you an opportunity to be found in the search results for the toy name, the popular toy company and the heavily searched key phrase “educational toy.” A title catering towards SEO for this example would be: “Leap Frog Discovery Ball – Educational Toys“. Since the more targeted term is the name of the toy you put that first. Educational Toys would be shown first on a category page.
Now that you have integrated your keyword phrases from your page copy into your title, you’ll find that getting found in the search engines is a much easier task.
Update 6/10/09 – Video from Matt Cutts about the underscore vs. Dashes issue.
Spaces should never be used in a URL or file names because the space character gets translated to “%20″ by the browser, and this can wreak havoc with both readability and statistics or analytics programs. The question then remains, which is better to use instead of spaces, underscores “_” or dashes “-”.
As far as Google is concerned Big_Oak consists of one word, “Big_Oak”, and Big-Oak consists of two words, “Big” and “Oak”.
The reason Google does not treat the underscore as a word separator is because Google was created by programmers who knew that programmers often wanted to search about programming. Many computer programming languages use the underscore character in such ways that CLASS is different from _CLASS.
Because of this, I always recommend using dashes instead of underscores in your filenames and URLs. Be careful not to use too many dashes in your domain name, as that could get your site flagged for other reasons. I prefer to have a domain name with no dashes, and to use dashes where appropriate in the directory and file structure.
Other things about Google to keep in mind when choosing filenames and URL structure.
There is no difference between lower-case and upper-case: big oak, Big Oak, BIG OAK, and biG Oak are all the same.
The ampersand “&” is a word seperator: Big&Oak is treated as two words.
Singular words are not the same as plural words: oak and oaks are treated as different words.
Google cannot read words that are within other words: bubble will not be seen inside of bubblegum.
As with any tip, keep in mind that it’s a combination of many factors which will ultimately decide your placement in the search engine rankings and quite often every little bit counts.
Update: A Test
I created a test page to illustrate how Google reads words.
A search for Flibstopper Test shows the sample page. The two words are even highlighted in the URL. The word “test” appears in the page title.
A search for travveran shows no results in Google. Google did not read my made-up word from the URL or content because it only appeared in phrases with underscores.
A site search for choosing colors shows all the pages in our Out on a Limb section because those two words appear in the navigation on all pages.
A site search for “choosing colors” (in quotes) shows no pages because those two words do not appear together in our site, choosing_colors on the test page is treated as a single word.
A site search for “the blue pill” (in quotes) shows our test page since dashes are treated as word separators.
A site search for “bush seo” (in quotes) shows our test page since the ampersand “&” also acts as a word separator.
Obviously one of the most important parts of an SEO Company’s success is keeping up with the new trends, latest techniques and search engine news. The best way to do that is to read the best SEO blogs out there. I have listed some in my blogroll to the right. I hold them all in high esteem, and of course, I would recommend reading my own SEO blog.
SEO Forums
Keeping up to date with SEO forum browsing is also a good idea. Here are some of my favorites:
http://www.webworkshop.net/seoforum/
http://forums.seochat.com/
http://www.highrankings.com/forum/
http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/
http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/
http://www.seo-guy.com/forum/
Search Marketing Standard Magazine
I have recently discovered something almost unheard of in the Internet world, a printed magazine that still has relevance. It is Search Marketing Standard. I read my first issue this month and was impressed with the wealth of information and the breadth of subjects covered.
As an avid researcher and online reader it is refreshing to sit away from my desk, or outside, or at my home, or anyplace other than my office, and read a printed document. There is something comforting even in the this digital age about holding a glossy magazine and flipping casually through the pages. I even looked at the advertisements, something we have trained our eyes to avoid online.
Looking at a colorful magazine is one thing, finding it useful and informative is quite another. Search Marketing Standard did a nice job in both areas.
Search Marketing Standard (SMS)
The issue of Search Engine Marketing Standard that I read (picture to the right) covered many topics in the search engine marketing arena. Of course they had articles about search engine optimization and search engine marketing, but they also gave commentary about social media marketing, SEO certification and a few other gems, including blogging and linkbaiting.
One of the most useful items in this issue was a very informative listing of SEM training courses and certification. I would have like to have seen a review of each course, but that could be very subjective, time-consuming and costly so I can understand the omission.
I also felt a nice job was done bridging the sometimes enormous gap between beginners and professionals in the SEO industry. It is something I try to do on this blog so I was pleased seeing SMS attempt this as well.
SMS also realizes a magazine without a website is a missed opportunity, so they have built a companion site. While you can’t read the published articles (why would you subscribe if you could?) they certainly don’t withhold information about the SEO tips and advice. The site is a useful tool for research with helpful blog posts.
Yearly subscription to the magazine starts at just $15 for 1 year/4 issues for US-based readers and $20 for international subscribers (shipping included). Click Here to subscribe today, I recommend it.
Adding fresh content to your site and your homepage is an often heard bit of advice from SEO consultants and advice columns. Yes, It is a good idea to keep your content up-to-date and fresh, but using information that isn’t pertinent to your site such as a weather feed or generalized information you can find on a host of other sites, it isn’t likely to draw much attention from the search engines. You need something more substantial and more on topic with your site.
Look for content that speaks to your audience. For example, maybe you own an SEO company and adding new content to your home page looks like a good idea. Well, if you write a blog on a consistent basis then your own blog posts can become homepage content through an RSS feed. As a matter of fact we have implemented this very tactic today on our own home page. If you look at the Big Oak homepage you will see an area that is displaying an RSS feed of this blog (SEO Blog) with a snippet from the two most recent blog posts. Now we have content that will change whenever this SEO blog is updated and most of the time the posts will be on topic. The search engines will notice my home page changes frequently and visit more often and give our site a higher value because of this.
If you aren’t an avid blogger, you can add content from other blogs or from search result and news feeds, but this can draw traffic from your site if your visitors follow links included in the third-party feeds.
Problems can occur as fresh content can cause your rankings to change based on the content displayed, but these fluctuations are usually minor and the benefits outweigh the negatives. Keeping a watch on your fresh content should be part of your strategy.
Be creative and think about what content would be of use to your visitors. Think about adding new products to the homepage or specials that change frequently. The key is to stay vigilant and automation is good answer. RSS feeds are a great way to do this and many shopping carts have the option to provide an RSS feed. Other ideas are writing tips, maybe 52 Industry tips in advance, that change out weekly. They don’t have to link anywhere and can simply be placed on the home page every Monday and so on. It is important to make it fun and easy, otherwise it will become a struggle especially if you are trying to provide the content yourself rather than displaying content from other sites or feeds. Be sure to get permission if you aren’t sure about copyright issues when using the content from other sites.
Please pass along any ideas you have for keep your homepage fresh with relative content.
This week’s SEO tip gets to the heart of the linking question. We know we need links, but what kind of links? Well, what if we could choose a link to have all the qualities that would benefit our site? This “perfect link” would benefit our SEO efforts, and it would be useful at driving traffic through clicks as well as inflating our link popularity and increasing our search engine rankings. Of course, this is can be subjective and I always welcome differing opinions, so if you feel I’ve missed something, please add your comments to this post.
The anatomy of a perfect link:
It would be a simple HTML link as follows: <a href=”http://www.yourdomain.com/page.html”>keyword phrase</a>.
The anchor text would would include keywords that are important to your site.
It would be part of a sentence, which would be part of a paragraph.
The content surrounding the link, and the entire page, would be on topic with your site.
It would reside on a site with a similar theme as your site.
The page would have links to other sites similar to your site.
It would be on a trusted site, with the site itself having backlinks from many sites including .edu and .gov sites.
The link would drive direct traffic to your site…targeted, highly converting traffic.
The site the link resides on should be popular and well-read.
I think you can also see why the perfect link is only slightly easier to find than Bigfoot or Nessie – much of the link’s perfection is derived from the site and page where the link resides. The old adage in real estate applies to link building too, it all about location, location, location!
This SEO blog is provided by Big Oak SEO, a SEO Company. Most blog posts are related to search engine optimization, short reviews, SEO tips and increasing site conversions. Email us at contact@bigoakinc.com or give us a call 804-741-6776 to see how we can help your company. More
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In SEO, local search should never be overlooked. It can provide a boost in traffic has a higher tendency to convert more visitors to customers since most people prefer working with local companies, even SEO companies.
Want to know what Shell is doing?