Getting Your Local Business Found in Search Engines

Many local businesses around the world are looking to the search engines to help find customers.

The following steps will help these businesses increase the number of visitors to their website and therefore find new customers:

1) Get listed in the Google Local Directory

Google is the biggest player in the search world. When you use Google to search something like "eye doctor New York" or "dentist Fargo" there is typically a top 10 listing of results for local businesses at the top of the page.

Having your local business listed here is the cheapest and easiest way to attract new customers. You can sign up for the Google Local Directory here: www.google.com/local/add. It only takes a few minutes and it’s quite a simple process.

If you’re a bit more web savvy, David Mihm has a very thorough post on increasing your ranking for local listings.

2) Build a great website

What is the purpose of your website?

My guess is that you want more customers to contact you – therefore you should make sure that your contact information is very prominent throughout your website.

Use Pillar Content to Generate Loads of Link Love

That title might not make sense to a lot of you reading this post.  You’re likely asking yourself, "What in the world in Pillar Content?"  I define Pillar Content as some piece of content, not on a website’s homepage, that generates tons of links and influence. 

Many sites completely rely on a few pieces of Pillar Content to rank well and position themselves as an authority.  It’s a really simple concept but maybe something you have not taken much time to think about.

Improve on Someone Else’s Idea

The great thing about Pillar Content is you don’t have to be a genius to come up with lots of great ideas on what you should produce.  My first project in a new niche is always to read through as many of my competitor’s sites as possible.  As I go, I jot down what content they are promoting most heavily and also what pages seem to pick up the most links (whether they are gained actively or passively).

Creating Landing Pages With WordPress

Most people think of WordPress as a blogging software. However, you will notice that some people are using it as a website building tool.

This gave me the idea to use it for landing pages. It will work for you if you are an affiliate or if you sell your own products and services.

On-Page SEO

The link structure of Wordpress makes it easy for your site to be indexed by the search engines. I have zero programming background background, yet I can rank well on search engines when I use WordPress because it is SEO-friendly by nature. With a few simple tweaks in my settings, my on-page SEO is done.

This is great for quality score when you are doing Google AdWords. Of course, quality score is not 100% about on-page SEO, however it does help you to get a much better quality score than if you skip your on-page SEO. Remember, higher quality score translates to cheaper clicks.

Dual Function

Getting to Grips with Google Part IV – Link Building & Promotion

If OnPage SEO is all about getting Google to understand the contents of your web pages, then OffPage SEO, link building, is all about giving Google a good reason to put your website high up in the search results.

The success of Google in the Search Engine arena is down to its highly accurate search results.

These are due to its primary ranking system – PageRank. Now, while there is much debate as to how important PageRank actually is these days, there’s no escaping that it’s still one of the major factors in generating Google’s SERPs.

The idea of PageRank is a simple and thoroughly democratic one. The theory goes that in a network of interlinked documents, such as the World Wide Web, the pages with the most inbound links to them are going to be the most important, and most authoritative pages.

In simple terms a link from another web page to yours is considered a vote, a vote approving your content and recommending it to others. It is this “voting” system that is the key to Google’s results generation.

Getting to Grips with Google Part III continued – OnPage SEO

Previously we looked at the basics of keyword positioning as a means of helping Google understand the content of your webpage. Continuing on from that let’s look at applying these techniques to our entire website.

Going back to our Rattan Furniture shop example, we’ve already optimised our home page, so what can we do to optimize our inner pages? The OnPage SEO techniques we covered last time still apply and should be used on every page on the website. But, do we want our inner pages to be targeting the same keywords in the same manner?

In a word, the answer is no. There’s no point for us to target the same keywords. Each page of our site is going to have specific and hopefully unique content which we will be optimizing in exactly the same manner as we did last time.

This time, however, there is a little more that we can do. We can build more SEO factors into our sub pages through navigation, file structure and file naming.

Getting to Grips with Google Part III – OnPage SEO

In the previous installment we looked at finding the best keywords for us to target with our website. Now that we have our list compiled we need to start working on our page, with the goal of helping Google really understand the contents of the page.

Once Google understands completely what your pages are about, it can then start coupling this with your backlinks to decide where to put you in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).

So how do we do this? When search engines were in their infancy, SE’s tried to understand the contents of pages by calculating things such as keyword density.

Techniques such as keyword stuffing could then be used to fill the page with the desired keywords and thereby raising the density for that term, and in turn ranking better for it.

Nowadays SEs, and in particular Google, are a lot smarter. They no longer look at your keyword density, and instead use other markers to understand a page.

These markers are semantic markers already built into HTML. HTML was originally conceived with the idea that the way a page was constructed would format the information, tag it, in a way that made it understandable.