Archive for October, 2009

October 30th, 2009

Local Business Website Marketing

Google Local Searches – Website Marketing

New ways of advertising have changed. If you would like to reach people on the internet that may want to frequent your establishment in a specific neighborhood (your city or region), you can now pay for geo-targeted online advertisements.

Local business websites must know local search engine optimization that generally consists of two parts: on-site and off-site.

On-site means what you do on your site and off-site means what you do on other’s sites, in a way. On-site SEO generally calls for intensive keyword research, smart navigational designing of the website and a few other technicalities here and there. Just for the information, a keyword is a term typed in the search engine for a query. It can also be a combination of words and thus, be called a keyphrase. You want to rank high for this keyword, by making your site relevant, and the aim of the local business SEO is to make it possible.

The off-site SEO basically is concerned with backlinks. A backlink is when another site links back to your site. Backlinks are important because a backlink means a vote from the other site. It passes off page rank to your site and makes it important’ in the eyes of the search engine robots. And the text used for the backlink provides a tag for your local business website. That might also make you rank high for some term. Moreover, regular updates and activity in the website, plenty of content and many other such factors make a difference.

Many small businesses do not have the experience they need to make their business a success. Just because you set up a store does not mean people will come and buy. Just because you give great service does not mean that the tittle-tattle advertising will bring you to your projected return of investment, no matter how realistic your business plan is.

October 28th, 2009

Search Engine Marketing Your Business

Google Local Searches – Promote Your Business

Search engine marketing is a simple process which you can use in promoting your business.

Search engine marketing and search engine optimization are designed to optimize for all users of the internet, including users from all over the world. By focusing on an internet marketing endeavor that is localized, you can make sure that you are attracting attention from the right web traffic. They are these people in your local area that can patronize your business not only online, but in person as well.

One simple way to get a high ranking in Google local search is to optimize your meta tags. These tags are located on the head section of your website. This is where search robots visit each time they are crawling web pages for indexing. If your website is poorly optimized, search engine robots will not pick your website as a good option. While designing your pages, if you’re the webmaster, do research on what users search for everyday on search engine. Visit google.com/trend/hottrends and see what people have been searching for. Use those keywords on your meta keyword area. Also, check the websites that appear on the top on your result, view the source, copy the description and use it on your website.

Overall, the strategy is simple. You create your website, you use search marketing methods to get your website listed on search engines results. When someone searches for you, chances are your website will come up in the popular web searches. Because when you have a local presence for your company or business online, you are creating a completely new and unique presence for yourself online that will go further than your traditional web presence, allowing you to reach out to new audiences that normally would not find you online. This way, when people start looking for local help in their vicinity, and they make a search in Google local, your business will come up for them.

October 26th, 2009

Easy Steps to Get Listed on Google Local Business

Google Local Searches – Get Listed

Google Local Search allows small and local businesses who are trying to compete online in the search engine pages to have a fair shot at getting traffic-based results on their location without having to have high ranking sites. Getting listed in Google local search is easy. Just create an account in Google Local Business Listing and provide all your business information. Then they will send you a postcard with your PIN code, and you will need your confirmation that your business is actually located at the address you listed. You will enter your PIN in the URL given in the postcard and you will be in the local search results.

By doing a trend research about your market can also be helpful. Find both high profile and some long tail keywords. It’s important to understand that SEO is not an overnight success. It’s a marketing strategy that might require you to be aggressive. And as more people use the Web to find local services, SEO could become one of the more important components of your marketing plan. Additionally, using SEO-friendly URLs, appropriate Title and Meta Tags, optimizing your internal linking structure, etc., could require more work, such as the off-page SEO factor link building.

Providing a physical address with complete contact information and putting the city/state names in the content and tags certainly will help users to find you. It will also be helpful for the searchers if you provide your operation hours and business phone number. If you have multiple locations, you can send Google business listing feed. Google local crawls your site and picks up the address. Hence it is very vital that you make your address clear on every page. It is even better if you can include your address in the title of a page. Not necessarily the front page, but the about/locations/contact pages as well.

Google Local Business Searches can still mean competition for the business. Even if no other competitive business has listed themselves with Google Local Searches they may at any time do so.