SEO on Local Search

Many Small businesses, most of the time, their business transaction doesn’t take place over the Web. Anything you traditionally search for in the print Yellow Pages become a local search on the internet. In this case, the small business owners would prefer their clients to call them or visit their stores.

So, what is the methodology to influence the SEO ranking on Local Search?
1. SEO efforts to enhance local business listings
The local SEO search algorithm is based on relevance, so to make sure your business listings are complete, accurate and up to date. Use good product, or service, or brand terms keywords with geographical extension (e.g. Bangkok Business Hotel.) in your description or title and fit your business in the most relevant categories.
2. SEO efforts to optimize your Site for local terms
Place your city and state in the title tags of your Web site and put your street address and local phone number with area code in text format on your pages. The number and Quality of links pointing to your Web site by a reputation local links are also another important factor.
3. SEO – standardize information.
Local Search engines such as internet yellow pages, eguide – these sites offer free listings, the green book etc contribute “trusted” data to the Search Engines, and you do not want to confuse the Engines with different data or information, so always standardize your information, so be assure to use the same information for all websites
4. Get good reviews
Reviews are always important in your SEO rankings, so if you have successful campaigns execution for your clients, always encourage your clients to put some good reviews about your services to help in the SEO local search ranking.

If Content is Still King, Who is Prince Charming?

Today it’s all about titles. Others have talked about “the title” recently and its importance and even provided ideas for “can’t lose” titles, so I’ll attempt not to be repetitive. For an extensive bunch of articles and tips on headlines – what where when who and how -
Content is vital - in your blog posts, your articles, your seminar presentations, your emails to colleagues, your emails to your clients, your website, your phone conversations with the plumber, your excuses to the wife, your sucking up to the boss, your calming of hurt feelings … the list is truly endless.

But even more important than the content itself is the way you begin that content. I’m not talking about the first line of your blog post, although that is incredibly important also for bringing a reader in. The most important part of your content is the title, the headline, the category, the very first words out of your mouth – in short, the frame around your content.

Consider this. How often have you decided to go ahead and purchase something just because of its name? Look at the genius behind the name “iPod”? I mean you’re buying MP3 player, but you don’t say “I bought an MP3 player today” … you say, “I bought an iPod” and people think you’re cool. Or at least they used to think you’re cool. Just like content, titles can become dated, whether they are the name of a product or the title of a book.

If you pay close attention to the title of your content, you will draw in readers who otherwise might quickly decide that it’s “just another blog entry about linking”

That’s what you’ll get with a title like “Linking and SEO.” Sure, your blog entry may be about the basics of linking in SEO. But if you have a title such as “O-SEM-a Bin Linkin Online,” you will (hopefully) not just get a laugh or two, but also have potential readers asking themselves questions. They may wonder: “is this just a funny title?” or “is this going to be about terrorism online?” or “is Osama bin Laden turning to learning SEM as a way of dealing with his loneliness?” or “OK, I get it … the blog will be about linking and SEM.” Even if the reader says, with disgust, “what a stupid title; it must have been written by a Democrat,” you have their attention a lot longer than the “Linking and SEM” title has.

Be a good Search Engine Marketing advertiser

Having said enough about Search Engine Marketing & SEO, the benefits, features, methodology, etc; I would also like to share some experience in terms of what makes a good Search Engine Marketing advertiser.
Search Engine Marketing is a new media, many times, we encounter different kind of clients, and I will narrow it to only 2 types for now, the understanding Search Engine Marketing clients, and the non understanding Search Engine Marketing clients.

Understanding Search Engine Marketing is pretty straight forward, they trust what their Search Engine Marketing consultants have to offer or propose, and most of the time, they don’t even know what they are advertising, as long as they have substantial visibility in their advertising campaigns; their campaign may work or may not. Even if it’s working, they may not know which parts are working, I shall stop here and do not wish to elaborate further in this case.

What I really want to share here is what makes a good Search Engine Marketing advertiser. (through my experience, these group of clients can be experienced marketing personnel, they have a lot of experience in multiple marketing platforms, but not Search Engine Marketing, the worst thing here is that they always leverage their past or traditional experience to Search Engine Marketing, and they like to interfere with what Search Engine Marketing has to offer, especially during Search Engine Marketing execution.)

So, what makes them good Search Engine Marketing clients?
1. Know how to listen
2. Maintain the right tools and technology to track campaign performance
3. Have realistic expectations
a. Question: How much do you think you can get from me?
Answer: I can bring you value, improve your marketing
b. Question: But how much can I expect my marketing be improved?
Answer:That depends on your site, your product, the market, seasonality and other variables such as competitions.
4. Allow enough time for success
5. Do not meddle.

SEM vs SEO

SEM vs SEO
We put these two terms together because they are similar but they are different, they have a very tight relationship but they have some feature that have to be distinguished from each other. We can't tell you how many times our clients confused about the two. Simply speaking, SEO services is the optimization work done to your site in order to acquire traffic from search engines, and SEM is the marketing actions to increase the exposure of websites through various channels. Sometimes we can include SEO as part of SEM.

• Search Engine Marketing (SEM services) involves a combination of free website submissions and paid search engine listings, to ensure your website reaches customers using search engines to research purchase decisions. Search Engine Marketing is a broad term that encompasses various tactics for exploring online brand communications and initiating customer contact. The tactics includes website optimization (or organic search engine optimization) and sponsored listings (or ppc listing) which offers distinct benefits that can work together to serve the online marketing customers.
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the integrated art and science of increasing your website’s visibility to search engines for those important keywords and phrases that are relevant to your business. Search Engine Optimization typically includes keyword research and development, competitive analysis and industry benchmarking, backend coding optimization, website submissions and results reporting.

WebNatics lives in this industry as a Professional Search Engine Optimization (SEO) group and Search engine Marketing (SEM) Agency Company with considerable hands-on implementation experience. WebNatics has been providing SEO and SEM services to private and public sector organizations, as well as marketing and advertising agencies. It is a web marketing firm specializing in search marketing (SEM), search engine optimization (SEO), keyword market research, web analytics and web marketing strategies.

As an SEM services provider, we understand the most important points that search spiders and algorithms put weight on. We’ve found that all web marketers need to strike a balance between these seemingly disparate elements of paid and organic search, recognizing the unique benefits and deficiencies of each route.

WebNatics Marketing’s SEM and SEO services include:
• Web analytics
• Search Engine Registration
• Search Engine Optimization
• Link Building
• Pay per click Management
• Writing for the Web
• Keyword Market Research
• Market Research and Market Segmentation
• Search Engine Market Demand Analysis
• Search Engine Market Trending and Reporting
• Competitive Search Engine Research and Strategy
• Internal Search Consulting
• Search Engine Positioning

Flash site - Search Engine Friendly

Flash itself is not bad and for some target markets it can be a great feature to have as part of your site. Unfortunately, flash isn't the best format for doing SEO. It also seems that a lot of designers do not know how to make the best use of flash.

Up until recently the most common use of flash seems to have been the flash movie on a splash page. Besides the fact that studies have shown that almost everyone presses the "skip intro" button meaning the flash intro is not an attention grabber or means of enhancing brand awareness, the flash splash page will kill your site's search engine listings - or ensure you never get any if it's a new site.

Flash MX is supposed to move flash design away from "useless" and "fancy" and into "content" and "usability". It is meant to go some way towards making flash more accessible to disabled users and possibly search engines, but the designer needs to know how to use it correctly in order for it to be effective in this way. It will be some time before flash can be considered either truely accessible or indexable.

So if flash itself horrid? No. The judicial and purposeful use of flash on websites whose target audience will appreciate it is a good thing and can help to increase the site's "stickiness". Games, quiz, surveys, online forms, multi media streaming, and other interactive features are all good uses for flash. And since the rest of the site does not need to be designed in flash, using flash technology in these ways will enhance your web presence without taking anything away from the engines or disabled users who will still able to read and navigate the rest of your html site.

But it goes without saying that sites composed entirely in flash are not going to achieve SEO, even on FAST Alltheweb.com. The SEO problem with flash and is primarily with:

Flash Based Sites: If the site is composed entirely in flash you will ideally design an accessible html site as well. If you do this, provide a link to the other option on each site rather than a splash page giving the options.
Flash Navigation Systems: Flash navigation systems should be complemented by text links either throughout the body copy or as an alternative set of links at the bottom, top or left hand side of the pages.
Flash Splash Pages Flash based splash pages are covered in the splash pages section.

Measuring SEO successfully

Everybody want to know how successful they are if they are doing something. The success of a SEO project should be measured based on the lift of traffic from organic search traffic other than the ranking result. The image below shows an example of a successful SEO project. Sometimes a little action can make your web traffic on fire.

Ranking can also be very important because if only the pages sit on higher positions the website is possible to acquire traffic. But if you think that the ranking positions are the only measurement of SEO success, you are totally wrong. SEO success should be measured by both the growing up of organic traffic and the ranking position of some most important keywords. For the businesses like airlines, hotels, etc which has seasonality effects, the measurement data should be compared year over year.
So you can understand how important it is to choose the right keywords in the very beginning. If a wrong keyword was selected, even if one of your pages ranked No.1 in every search engine, you still can’t benefit from it simply because few people search that keyword.
Now, you may wonder how to measure the organic traffic. The very first thing is to make sure your web analytics is set up correctly. And, if you're trying to compare history traffic data, month over month or year over year, the data need to be accumulated within your analytics console. There’re two different types of web analytics. One is browser side web analytics, another one is server side analytics. Both of them have their own advantages and disadvantages. No matter which way you choose to use, implement it correctly has no doubt to be most important step.
Is your analytics set up correctly?
One tool that we recommend is Google Analytics (GA). Many of our clients are using this tool on their site. It is free, easy to install, monitor. For some clients who used it before our consultation, I've noticed that only a few of them implement it perfectly.
1. One big error is that not having the tracking code on every page of website. The easiest way to ensure this file is on every page is to create a server side include file that is universal across all of your pages, and place your analytics code in that file. If you don't have an include file, make sure to check the source of every page to ensure all pages have the code. Again, make sure this is done before you create the baseline for your SEO efforts.
2. Another error is CPC data can’t be separated from organic search traffic. Sometimes the CPC data is being reported as organic traffic. To fix this, enable auto tagging in your Google AdWords account. A gclid code will be added at the end of all landing page URLs and the data in this code tells your GA information about which campaign, ad group, keyword, ad position, and other data about the CPC clicks. But sometimes, this gclid code might make your landing page trigger a 404 error which means you pay for the visitors come to your website, but they can’t see the content you want to show to them. Please take note that Google will not be responsible for this. Make sure that Google AdWords and Google Analytics accounts are properly linked.
3. One more error need to be mentioned is that sometimes a redirect within the website anywhere can cause error reporting in the console.

SEM and business

There is an enormous difference between improving a SEO campaign for a company that opened its online doors in the 1990’s than one that only recently decided to start an online business. The majority of the time an established company can achieve top search engine results in a relatively short period of time; whereas a brand new one might have to wait many months before their site will even appear in the search engines.

While there are many reasons why this is the case, I wanted to provide a little insight into a few factors a smart SEO company will look at before doing business with an established organization. The Google Sandbox, the number and type of inbound links, and the size of the website are a few of the considerations to factor.

Luckily, few established companies have much to worry about when it comes to the Google Sandbox. This term is used to describe a penalty placed on a brand new website that prevents it from appearing in the search results until at least a few months after a link first points to the domain. The rationale is that there are thousands of domains that are purchased each year and only a fraction of them are still around the following one. Therefore until a site can establish that it is a meaningful resource, which is also likely to stay around in the future, Google, Yahoo, and a few of the other major search engines will not even list it in their search results. The reason is quite simple. Why list information from a site that is not yet established when similar information from a business that has already existed is readily available?

Inbound links from external sites pointing to a domain is another factor in an SEM campaign. Google uses links as a form of voting and typically the larger number of relevant links a website has pointing to it then the higher it will appear in the search results. An established company tends to have a larger quantity of inbound links simply because the business started awhile ago. However, oftentimes the links are not ones that are going to help the website appear at the top of the search results. For instance, a link that contains only a company’s name is unlikely to help it appear at the top of the search results for a keyword phrase that relates to the products or services it sells. When starting a search engine optimization campaign with an established business a key component is acquiring relevant links that point to a company’s website.

The size of a website is also a key consideration. Picture a website as a large building. If it has an excellent foundation then it will typically stand for many years to come. Unfortunately, websites built a decade ago, usually have an outdated foundation than those built yesterday and this is one area that puts an established business at a disadvantage to a brand new website. It is much easier to build a foundation from scratch than to rebuild one after there are thousands of web pages built on a site from that uses technology from a decade ago. Therefore one of the most time consuming and difficult components with an existing website is rebuilding a foundation that takes into account the changes in the search landscape that took place over the past decade. This is especially true of websites that have thousands of products or pages.

SEO or SEM is never an easy process and there are different issues to address with each website. One such issue is the length of time the company first went online. Depending upon the website, this can make starting or properly continuing an internet marketing effort much easier or exponentially more difficult.

SEO consulting service

Before you hire a SEO professional, there are several things to be considered.
First, ask yourself, what quality of service that you would like to get.
Secondly, set your budget bearing in mind the strategic importance of web promotion for your business.
Sad but true, sometimes finding the quality/price balance appears a real challenge.
Setting aside all the false modesty, we are one of the best choices you could possibly find. Years of experience in SEO promotion have taught us a few lessons, and one thing that we know for sure is that internet technologies are not standing still, so a flexible approach, quick reaction to the new trends and continuous learning are absolutely necessary.
When you entrust your SEO campaign to us, we will start with a careful analysis of your niche, study the competition and only then propose a step-by-step unique development plan for your website, whether it already exists or not. These first steps are crucially important for the company branding, so it start makes half the deal.
Basing on your niche choice, we will research the marketplace of the major search engines and define the optimal keywords to compete for, or revise the keywords you are already using and improve this list if necessary.
Regarding the on-page optimization, while we’ve already chosen the keywords, and thus, set the objectives, it’s time to squeeze all you can from your landing pages. This includes refreshing the page titles, meta-tags, alt text of your images as well as creating or editing the content (which still relates to the royal family, if not being King itself. A team of professional copywriters in our staff will make sure the words on your site will interest both people and search robots.
The SEO report you get will include tips on how to make these factors work for you, so then you might easily handle on-page SEO yourself.
Finally, it’s time to build authority for your site, and it’s where our link building solutions will take their turn. Your neighborhood tells much about yourself not only in real life, but on the web also, so quality relevant links from a variety of trusted resources will show the topical communities you are worth while their attention. Fortunately, the SERP position you strive for often depends directly on the funds invested.
So, when compiling a consultation report our experts will estimate the time and money you need to reach your goals, and advise you on how exactly to do that. The scope and character of links, the schedule of their appearance, the anchor text, as well as internal cross-linking of your pages are all the tiny bricks which help build a solid business construction.
But even then, it’s not all. Retaining the leading positions is sometimes as difficult as getting to the top. When you seem to be done with the optimization of your website, we can consult you on how to keep the good work up.

Integrating SEM with offline channels

Search marketing is slowly getting its share of marketing budgets. More and more marketers, over half , are integrating SEM with offline channels. According to the research, intentionally integrate SEM with at least one offline marketing channel such as direct mail , magazine/newspaper ads , TV and radio.

The study attributes lack of budget and lack of staff as the main reasons the remaining 45% did not integrate offline channels with SEM, although 1/4 of respondents claimed not to do any form of offline marketing.

While many reports suggest that the findings of the study are disappointing, I tend to agree with the saying :
“Search marketing is only just finding a dedicated place in the marketing budgets of companies, so it’s still early days, when it comes to blending SEM with other channels.”