WSI Solutions

Finding the right words to attract your local market is critical, and today I want to share new research from interactive media marketing firm, Trusted!, which shows how using the wrong keywords or key phrases can hurt your local business.

A recent article, titled, “Where Is the Best Place to Put Your Keywords to Get Traffic,” was provided by Trusted!. The report shows that among the most important factors “Where is the Best Local Market?” is now being considered by search engines and strategists to help determine what ads to show when local searches are done online.

Now, I don’t disagree that organic search engine traffic is the best way to bring visitors to your site, but if you’re new to the game, your competitors may be putting your information online and you may not realize that your online competitors are possibly being generated from the very places you want to attract local visitors.

A perfect example is found in the hotel business. If you are all about giving the people a hotel night, you will be doing a great deal of marketing in social networks, maybe even making videos to give yourself an advantage. Consider for a moment that when someone finds your hotel info online, they are using a keyword phrase to find the hotel.

That keyword phrase could be something like “cheap hotel night in the city”. If you have a hotel in a city, you want that business to find your hotel when they are using that keyword phrase to find the city.

So again, if your business has a website, your top priority is online visibility. You must use the right online strategies to be found by your top competitors, and an important step of the process is to satisfy the needs of your local market.

This approach is nothing new. Local businesses have been marketing online for decades, and as any offline business owner will tell you, marketing is one of the most overlooked marketing goals.

We are seeing online marketing take-off faster than ever before, and we expect this trend to continue for years to come. Of course, as a local business, your online marketing plan should address local market concerns, such as getting ranked on Google by local people.

But as we also know, Google’s been updating their algorithms for local marketing rankings, such as Google Places and Google Local, so staying on top of your local SEO can be easier than you once thought.

Google Places

In case you haven’t noticed, if you search for something on Google, you will now see local search results pop up. Many local businesses have told us that they get many more visitors from Google Places in comparison to Google Organic search. In fact, getting on the first page of Google Places is becoming quite the challenge – and local businesses are falling down on the face of this competition.

There are many possible reasons why local business websites can be underperforming in the race to get to the top of Google’s local search results. I could go through them here, but it’s far better to address these issues than go through all seven of them.

1. Demographics.

Both Google and local visitors to your website must be looking for a localist. In the animal kingdom, looking for a vet is not the same as looking for a chiropractor. Being able to speak a language that includes not only common phrases, but unique terminology is essential in attracting visitors from the internet.

Local people are using the internet to find a business that serves their neighborhoods. They are not looking for a large national company with thousands of nationwide employees. They want a small company with actual people that are physically there to assist them.

2. Local content sites must be at least subdomain or sub-domain of your main website.

If your main website is “business.com”, and a local site is ” beauties.com”, you’ve got to make sure that either you host the website yourself, or you link to it from your main domain.

If you’ve got a century-old website, you’ve got to make sure that it’s not pointed to a country other than yours. If you’ve got a forward-facing database system, like an HTML editor, you’ve got to ensure that it’s identified locally.

3. Build a list of local directories and other local search engines.

Google apps, Yellowpages.com, Ezinearticles.com; other local search engines are virtually useless for local businesses unless you are also on the first two pages of the search engine results for your area.

You can go to each of them and manually upload your website, as well as fill out a keyword form. That said, some of them are free, and some of them you have to pay to list your business.

4. Use your main keywords in your meta tags.

We all want our pages listed in the top 10 in the Search Engines especially in Google until lately, I have been reading a blog post by Jason Jellerson, a Google search engineer. Although he talks about Matters that are beyond our control, like weather effects in the US this is a worthy subject.

Question 1 In light of Google’s recent flood of users Bing has opted for more human intervention to shake up the search engine playing field. Jell essentially is wondering why Google did this and thinks you may have even flouted their guidelines without even knowing.

Google’s recent filing in appeal denied all appeals related to their handling of Exact Match Domains, stating “the record, in this case, reveals no evidence that Exact Match Domains have presented a present risk of abuse…We, therefore, deny the appeals in their entirety.” Brief Opinion Regarding Domains

But Google is still investigating links to the domain names in question. So it could be that where you rank because of links back to your site that could make a difference in your Google rankings. “Upon further review, we have determined that the appeals, in this case, were filed by individuals attempting to artificially impact our algorithm.” saidURL Specialist Matt Cutts.

On the opposite side of the spectrum tricks to raise a site’s ranking were popular, often named “black hat SEO” or “black hat wonders.” These methods are used to create traffic to a site by using certain means to tie the search engine’s results to the content of the site. Today, the search engines look at a number of different factors when ranking a page including the frequency of visitors the site receives, the importance of other sites linking to the submitting site, and the overall quality of the content on the page. So effectively it is not so much about links back to your site, but the quality and relevance of the pages that are linking to your site.

So how do you create legitimate links? The best way is to provide a unique experience for visitors to your site, make sure the text and graphics on your site are accurate and interesting, and let your customers post comments.

Start getting links back to your site from:

– Other sites with relevant content;- Comments on blogs that have posted relevant stories;- Guest posts on similar sites;- Article submissions to directories;- Social bookmarking;- Forum participation;- Use of RSS feed; there is no need to trick the search engines, just provide a friendly environment.

It is important to understand that many of the tactics used to artificially inflate the rankings will be frowned upon by the search engines. This also means that websites will stop getting traffic. That’s because they will no longer be listed in the search results. You may even experience a significant drop in your search rankings.

If you plan to operate a web portal and quite a few of the older sites remain, you may still manage to compete with the search engines in the future, provided that you serve quality and unique content. However, in today’s online world, if you want to succeed, you need to now more than ever before. You need to embrace the fact that a vast majority of the traffic you will receive from the search engines will be from the freshest search results. You cannot afford to be satisfied with a fraction of that traffic.

As you may have already guessed, search engine optimization is not a quick and easy matter of quote. However, if you implement the necessary practices it can be easily achieved. practitioners should make sure that they do not resort to unethical techniques that violate search engine policies. These practices include keyword stuffing, page swapping, using hidden text and links, and doorway pages. These methods can get your site banned by the search engines, turn off potential customers, and give the appearance of search engine spam. Because search engine rankings are achievable, you have to keep in mind that there is a not-so-secret formula for the success of your portal.

Keyword Inclusion

The first step in search engine optimization is to include the words that your potential customers are using in the title and Meta tags of your home page. This is the page title and description that you can see in the search engine results. By using the words that your potential customers are using, you have a better opportunity of ranking high in search results. The trick is to use them as well at the appropriate locations in your page content.

Linking

One of the factors that search engines look for in ranking sites is the number of quality links that point to your site from other sites.