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It is easy as a small business owner or entrepreneur to start a website and then forget about it for a long period of time. It is also just as easy for someone to put a lot of work into their businesses’ website in the first month and then forget about it. After sitting for a while there is a lot of momentum lost, and it can be very difficult to get back. There are millions of websites on the web (maybe billions) with hundreds of thousands going up daily, if you let your site slip into hibernation it is easy for Google – and, more importantly, your potential clients – to forget about it. Here are some items below that should help get things headed in the right direction again. (This is typically what I do in the first week of SEO services).

* Optimization of Title Tags - The title tags are the titles of each page that show up on the top of the internet browser and as the title of the site page in search engine results. I will go through all the pages on the site and rewrite the title tags to include accurate, descriptive titles of the page content as well as important keywords relevant to the webpage. This makes visitors more likely to click on the site in search engine results. It also makes the search engines rank the site higher for keyword search terms.

* Optimization of Meta Descriptions – The Meta descriptions are the descriptions of webpages that show up under the title in the search engine result pages. Similar to the title tags, I rewrite the Metadescriptions of every page to include more detailed descriptions of what the page is about and make the site more attractive to visitors.

* Optimization of Existing Site Content –I also go through all of the site’s pages to optimize content with strong keywords, anchor text (internal links), html heading tags and more. I review the content and check for grammar and vocabulary errors. I don’t change the actual information of the text content unless it’s necessary to fix grammatical errors.

* Repairing All Broken Links on the Site – I will go through the site and repair all the broken links so that the entire site displays efficiently.

* Setting Up a 301 Redirect – A 301 redirect will automatically direct visitors who land on http://yoursite.com to the “www.” version of the URL, http://www.yoursite.com

* Correcting URL structure issues – If possible, I will rename page files to shorten URL addresses of pages and include descriptive keyword in the file names. At the beginning there may be many different folders to navigate through to get to pages, so I try to shorten URLs without interfering with site functionality. This makes the site easy for search engines and visitors to navigate.

Adding 10-15 new pages of quality content also helps, and the practice of continually adding said content will “trains” Google and other search engines to see that your site is not neglected and is a source of great, authoritative content that is updated consistently.

It also makes sense to sumit your site to high quality, authoritative directories. The best ones to list your site in are:

* Yahoo! Directory
* DMOZ
* Business.com
* WhatUSeek
* Best of the Web
* JoeAnt

Make a commitment to adding new, fresh content to your site at least twice a week. Finding topics to write about can be difficult. One method I suggest is using the Google Keyword Tool to generate some ideas. If you type in a word related to your business, look for related words that make a good article, for example:

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Using the keyword: “central vac systems” as an example we see several interesting article options.

Keywords:

central vacuum systems

central vac systems

central vacuums systems

central vac system

beam central vac systems

central vac systems in

for central vac systems

air vac central vacuum systems

vac central vacuum systems

There won’t always be article ideas that jump out, but you could write a few articles about “beam central vac systems” or “air vac.” The keyword tool will automatically sort the words that get the most traffic, so you should work your way down that list. If you are a local business working on your own internet marketing, make sure if you search for keywords revolving around your city. For example, you could research “Central Vac Systems Chicago” to get a good list of local keywords to write about. Make sure to incorporate keyword phrases that include your city’s name in your new content.

If you let your website sit stagnant for too long, it can be difficult to get the ball rolling again. It will take a recommitment to your site, spending at least a few days a week on it. Once you get into the habit of things, the work isn’t really difficult. If you are a small business doing your own internet marketing, it is important to make this a part of your weekly schedule or hire someone to do so. Allowing a site to gather dust can be an expensive and time consuming mistake to reverse.

There are a lot of reasons small businesses stay offline, some think they cannot afford it, some think they don’t need it, and others have tried and failed.  Even though there seems to be no limit to the reasons our local baker doesn’t have a website what it really comes down to in our experience is bad information.  Whether it is fellow business owners, self serving trade magazines, or in the worst case and often the most common case—poor advice from vendors in the industry small businesses don’t have many resources for quality advice on Internet Marketing.

Obviously, we do Internet Marketing for a living so there is a little worry that this post won’t be taken seriously, but there is a reason nearly every new client we take on has a horror story about getting some bad information or getting ripped of by some snake oil salesperson—and it is true.  Below are some things you will want to look out for when choosing a company to help you market online:

Is it too good to be true?

Things like promising a “Tsunami of Traffic in Just 30 Days!” just is not going to happen.  Ask yourself this simple question, if it were that easy why isn’t everyone else doing it?  If someone claims to have “cracked the Google code” steer clear, even when issues are exploited on Google changes are made very quickly to not only fix the glitch but often times punish sites that were trying to take advantage of it.  Any good online marketing company should understand that your business is your life, and it is not to be messed with.

Do They Have Real References…People You Can Talk To?

We are not really sure why people seem to always skip this step.  Many online companies will have a list a mile long of testimonials and “case studies” but at the end of the day you trust someone with your potential livelihood and that should not be taken lightly.  Often time’s references are not checked, and then someone gets ripped off or feels like they were lied to when a simple reference check might have avoided it.  It is important to ask for multiple contacts as to avoid talking to an employee at their company or a friend of the owner.  This task seems like a paid at times but most reputable Internet Marketing companies should have no problem presenting several very happy clients.

Do They Have A Realistic Approach Do They Use Jargon?

The other really important thing is do they care if you understand what they are doing?  In reality you have to have at least a general knowledge of what services they are going to provide, and what general results you should expect, at least what the expected results should be.  What we do can seem like a mystery to most and it is really important that the Internet Marketing firm’s success that you understand what they are doing for it to be a successful long term relationship.  Internet Marketing is not a one off solution, it is about building a long term relationship and if the company doesn’t seem to care about that stay away.

These are just a few of the things small business owners can do to make sure the relationship they form with an Internet Marketing company is mutually successful.  There are a lot of shady people out there, but don’t let that discourage you, the good ones are out there too you just have to look for them.

There is something that needs to be addressed, in most cases you will find posts on this blog of the educational type, and at its heart this topic is also meant to teach. This post deals with the very real obstacle people who sell search engine optimization must deal with, and as potential customers what you will need to understand as well.

To guarantee or not to guarantee results?

The reality is many search engine optimization companies are faced with the decision of whether or not to provide a guarantee on their services. Innately, clients feel more comfortable when they are offered a guarantee and you’ll close more business that way; however, the reality is—you can’t really guarantee anything and here’s why:

1.    We cannot know what your competition is doing
2.    We cannot know what search engines will do
3.    We cannot predict search volume accurately (long term)
4.    We cannot predict market demand (long term)
5.    We cannot  know exactly what timeline your site will be on

Expanding On These 5 Points

At the end of the day, it’s just too difficult to know exactly what is going to happen. We can make our best guess, but that’s all it really is—money back guarantee is just a calculated risk based on several assumptions.

When we say you cannot know what your competition is doing, that is true for the most part. You can look at certain aspects, monitor their site, and get a pretty good idea what their overall strategy is. The safest decision we usually make from looking at competition is simply whether or not it looks like they’re doing anything online at all.  Usually it’s pretty clear who is and who isn’t.  Though most businesses at least have a website—often times that’s about it.

The second, and most obvious, point is that we can’t know what the search engines will do. As internet marketers we are charged with the task of understanding as much as we can about certain search engines—and what they like and dislike. That said, we do not control the search algorithm and it’s impossible to predict. The best we can do is follow best practices and react when things change.

The last three points are all more about our inability to definitively see what the future will hold. We can use previous numbers, industry traffic trends, and make professional assumptions. To get a better idea, here’s an example: Let’s say you had a website about Swine flu. You’ve hypothetically owned it since 2001, had lots of information on it, had a great url, and some decent links. Now fast forward to spring of 2009, swine flu hysteria strikes and your website is getting a million hits a week. The influx of traffic wasn’t dictated by SEO; it wasn’t about anything other than being in the right place at the right time. While this is an extreme example, it still illustrates that we truly cannot know. We can only make our best estimate. An extreme case will always be pretty accurate, but we find that managing our client’s expectations is much easier than making bold predictions and hoping we are right.

Bottom Line

There are simply too many variables when it comes to predicating a sites traffic increase, and in reality, it’s not about increasing traffic in most cases—it’s about increasing the actions you want. If you were trying to generate leads, what good would 10X the traffic be if it didn’t get you 10X the leads or sales?  It is very easy to get caught up in terms like page rank, overall visitors, and time on site—when the real number you want to look at is ROI.  That’s what we focus on!

Anyone who works in Search Engine Optimization will tell you that anchor text from inbound links is one of the most important factors in boosting a site’s search engine rankings. Anchor text is the text you click on to follow a link to another webpage. Why is this important in SEO? In short, anchor text tells search engines what the linked webpage is about. If 100 links point to a page with the anchor text “Discount Italian shoes,” Google, Yahoo and the other major engines will say, “Hey, this site is a good place to find information about discount Italian shoes! Let’s place them higher in the search results for that term.”

The importance of inbound anchor text is SEO 101, but what many people want to know is how internal anchor text (links on a website that point to its own pages) will affect page traffic. The response to this topic is not as clear-cut as it is with inbound links; however, some of the world’s top SEOs have done extensive testing with internal links and come to some interesting conclusions.

SEOmoz co-founder and CEO Rand Fishkin acknowledges that using internal links to point to less visited pages on your site can give them a “positive nudge” in the search engines. For example, if your homepage is a PageRank (PR) of 8, while an inner page is a meager PR1, it is possible to pass some of the stronger page’s “link juice” along.

To keep a consistent, hypothetical example, let’s say the inner page is an article about buying Italian shoes. You want the page to rank well for keywords related to this topic, so rather than placing a link to the article on the main page that reads “click here,” the anchor text should say “Discount Italian shoes buyer’s guide.” Note that the most important keywords are at the beginning of the text to grab people’s attention and because search engines weigh the beginning words of anchor text more heavily than those at the end.

Fishkin continues to say that this strategy doesn’t seem to work when the anchor text points towards the index page. You can spend a lot of time and effort crafting links to the index that incorporate great keywords, but results seem to show that the anchor text “Home” is just as effective.

How to Craft Effective Internal Anchor Text

So how do you go about writing the best internal anchor text for your inner pages? There are a few strategies that SEO experts strongly recommend:

• Tailor internal anchor text to suit your strongest keywords – “Click here” or “Find out more” won’t cut it when it comes to writing anchor text. Use a keyword tool like the Google AdWords Keyword Tool, the SEO Book Keyword Tool or SEOmoz’s Term Extractor to find out what search terms to target. Internal anchor text is great for targeting “long tail” keywords (3 words or more) so use this to your advantage!
• Keep internal links at a productive level – You may get the urge to link to every page on your site from your PR9 index; however, this usually sacrifices any hope the site has of being considered “user-friendly” and makes it look just plain ugly. What’s more, stuffing keyword-rich anchor text on any page puts you at risk for a dreaded Google penalty.
• Keep older content in mind as you build out your site – Let’s say you’ve just written an article about upscale fashion for business men and women. Within the article you mention several styles of Italian shoes. Keep the link juice flowing to your discount Italian shoes buyer’s guide by pointing appropriate anchor text towards this previous post.

There’s little that can help your website’s search engine rankings more than links from a well-established domain. But if you really want to go the extra mile you must optimize your internal link anchor text. Use your most important pages with strong visitor activity to funnel traffic to articles, blog posts and content pages that are newer or have been forgotten by time.

The recent economic recession hitting the automotive industry has taken serious tolls on the auto dealership industry, which is why it is more critical than ever to optimize your dealership website for maximum e-commerce potential. No matter what auto manufacturers your dealership deals—know that any dealership can take simple steps to start ranking higher in the search engines. In this guide we’re going to give you the lowdown of 5 easy-to-do steps that’ll ensure your dealership website will rocket its way up the search engine results.

1. Establish A Strong Relationship With Your Website Vendors
If you’re currently working with a website vendor, know that it’s critical that you make the most out of your relationship and try to build a working relationship that’ll be conducive to more efficient workflow. Though many website vendors have a notorious reputation for atrocious customer service, you’ll have to be patient and work through the hurdles to ensure you’re getting the service you want and need.

2. Find a way to get search-engine friendly content on your website
Whether you’re using an in-house staff writer or you’re outsourcing your content to a third party—it’s critical that you find a way to get quality content regularly posted on your website.
•  Many auto dealership websites lack severely when it comes to search-engine friendly content. In addition, most auto dealership websites are ubiquitous with flash media, which the search engines can’t spider; therefore, most have difficulty ranking in the search engines. If this is currently the case with your website, try talking to your website vendor or third-party web master to fix some of the inherent web design problems preventing the search engines from spidering your site.

• To combat the non-spiderable components installed on your website, and to make sure you’re getting adequate content refreshed on your site—create a workaround system that’ll allow you to post new content on a daily-to-weekly basis. One of the best (and cheapest) ways to achieve this is with a blog.

• Where there sometimes seems to be a negative reaction to the word “blog,” know that a blog is simply a systemized way to easily post new content. Whether you  choose to write about newly arrived vehicle models, promotions or service deals—a blog is an excellent way to nail a handful of birds with one stone. A well-crafted blog will help you generate:

• Spiderable content that’s search-engine friendly
• Link Juice
• Potential customers
• Excellent promotional possibilities
• A chance to showcase other areas of your dealership, like your service department, to boost revenue

3. Systematizing a weekly schedule to post new content
Whether you choose to generate your content in-house or you choose to outsource to a third party—make sure your copywriters or third party knows what you’re aiming for short and long-term.

•  Whether it’s a blog post or an article, you’ll want to make sure the information is informative and not too promotional.

• You’ll also want to make sure to post one to two articles or post per week at the  minimum.

•  Whether you choose to shoot for 2 articles per week or 5 articles per week, commit    to a long-term schedule and continue to meet or exceed your weekly goal.
•    Again, make sure your content is authoritative, informational and top-notch. Make sure to have a proofreader proof all your content before posting live.

4. Website Health Check
Aside from content, you’ll also want to make sure and do a routine health check examination of your website. Whether you, your web developer, or your web vendor controls your website—make sure you check the following on a regular basis:
•    Check your website for broken links
•    Depending on your link report, you’ll need to fix any broken links you might have
•    Update your sitemap
•    Optimize your Meta descriptions, title tags, and Alt tags
•    Keep track of your analytics data and optimize, adjust and week according to what   you’re doing right and what you’re doing wrong
•    If you’re working with a website vendor, remain persistent with your needs and be patient when dealing with customer service despite how challenging that might be.

5.    Actively pursue high-quality/authoritative links
Another key component to help your website gain authoritativeness, search-engine friendliness, and ultimately rocket your way up the organic listings is high quality, highly authoritative links. In order to achieve this, you’ll want to:

• Include your URL on all promotional materials

•  If you belong to auto associations, the chamber of commerce, or any other community, statewide, or nationwide organizations or institutions—make sure to use those links as well as generate back linking.

• Make sure to list your website in the top directories. Use Strongest Links to find the top-rated directories on the web as well as detailed information on each of the directories. Aim to list in the top 20 directories.

Bottom Line

Whether your dealership’s website is operating in the black or operating in the red, use these 5 surefire steps to outrank your competition and dramatically increase your web traffic and subsequently your showroom traffic.

Whether you’re new to search engine optimization or you’re currently using a marketing company or website vendor service for your dental practice’s e-commerce needs—you’ll want to make sure your website is getting the traffic you need to bring in the business you need. Extensive research indicates that many dental practices are significantly behind the times when it comes to web design, search engine optimization and e-commerce.

Does Your Website Compare to The Competition?

As you may already know—Yellow Page’s ads can run up to more than $50,000 per year to advertise in; however, the paper advertising industry (like yellow pages) is being phased out by the overwhelming number of internet users that (in today’s interactive market) rely almost entirely on the web to make their decisions. If your practice doesn’t have a website, you’ll unequivocally be passed up by the fierce competition of dental practices that have gone interactive. If your dental practice does have a website, you’ll want to make sure you’re getting the most out of it. Generally, most dental practices don’t even have a website, and the ones that do are lacking in the fundamental marketing and SEO concepts that comprise a fully-optimized website that will drive the business and referrals needed for your business growth.

5 Ways To Improve Your Website For Optimal Traffic

With a vast array of specialties in the dental profession and oral surgery, it’s necessary to advertise and market your niche to drive business.

• Web Design: A major problem ubiquitous with websites in the dental profession is the overabundance of indistinguishable websites. By that, many dental practices opt to go with website vendors or niche dental/medical website management companies that service web development and optimization. The problem is, however, these types of vendors also service a multitude of other dentists in the local area. This poses a number of inherent problems because your website’s design appears identical to your local competitions’. In addition, many of these vendors comparatively charge exorbitant sums in monthly fees and deliver additional sub par services that make your website anything but friendly to the search engines. The cause can be related to a serious lack of quality content, web design, navigation, keywords analysis and SEO. To get the optimal results your practice needs, look for a company and web designer that’ll take the time to research your individual market niche and deliver the hand-tailored quality your website needs to stand out in the search engines.

• Opt Ins: If your dental practice puts out a newsletter or sends out mailers, an excellent way to boost business, referrals and clientele base is to take advantage of opt-in email blasts.

• Video: Whether you specialize in oral surgery, prosthodontics, pediatric dentistry or cosmetics—video and other multimedia tools used with appropriate alt tags can help boost your website’s authoritativeness and serve as a lucrative advertising vehicle for your practice.

•  Content: From general dentistry, cosmetic dentistry, patient education, dental tips, to FAQs—regularly updating quality content is key to ranking in the search engines. Fresh authoritative content serves as informative information for potential clients as well as the search engine spiders that crawl your website. The more authoritative content you have, the more authoritative Google and other search engines will deem your site, thus ranking you higher in the search engine results and ultimately bringing more traffic to your site.

• SEO and PPC Focused: If you’re practice specializes in a specific specialty, target keyword in both your PPC and SEO efforts to maximize your marketing potential.

Bottom Line

In a profession that’s significantly behind the times with interactive marketing and e-commerce, having a search engine optimized website is vital to your dental practice’s success. Today, just having a website isn’t enough. By optimizing your website’s design, updating content, and marketing your specific dental niche with an SEO and PPC focus—you’ll be outranking the majority of local competition in a matter of months.

If you’ve ever wondered how to get your website from the D-list to the A-list, listing in the directories can play an instrumental role in boosting your website’s potential in a number of ways including: Passes on page rank/ link juice, amplified website authoritativeness, and boosted traffic to name a few. The trick is, not all directories are equal, which is why the goal is to get the most out of the web directories.

Why Directories Are Important
Not all web directories are created equally, which means they don’t all provide the same results. Strongest Links offers info on over 200 directories on the web and gives you all the info on price, subscriptions, submission requirements, the directories page rank, and so on. The mechanics of listing in the directories as well as the bottom line benefits are as follows:

• The most authoritative directories help search engines understand what your site is about and help improve your relevancy and position.

• Having links to authoritative directories intrinsically helps improve your website’s authoritativeness and promotes link juice.

• Many search engines like Google make it extremely rewarding for a webmaster to  list their site in many different directories. In that, the more directories you’re listed in—the more Google and other search engines will view your site as authoritative and subsequently reward you with higher page rank.

• By listing in the top directories you’ll also inherently boost traffic from web surfers looking through the directories. In addition, you’ll also get the front-end traffic from the search-engine results as Google and other search engines continue to boost your authoritative web pages up the listings.

Nuts and Bolts of Listing In The Directories
Generally, to list in the directories your website has to be on point. Though many directories differ in their submission requirements, the general guidelines to be considered are:

• No broken links
• Must have highly authoritative content
• No pages can be under construction
• Every aspect of the website has to be fully functional
• Website content has to fall within acceptable directory criteria
• *In most cases, directories will not refund your money if they should decide that your website isn’t worthy of being listed, so you’ll want to get it right the first time.

Types Of Directories

As a general rule of thumb, it’s best to target the top 20 directories listed on Strongest Links. An example of some of these directories are as follows: Yahoo Directory, Business.com, and Best Of The Web to name a few off the top-5 list. A couple of other important directories and web guides are: About, the GoGuides, JoeAnt and Gimpsy. Know too, if you’re on a limited budget, there are several free directories that are excellent to list in like: DMOZ, Joeant, and Gimpsy.

Topical or Niche-Specific Directories

Many niche specific directories are focused on quality and provide static text links to your site. These directories not only improve your site’s relevancy in search results but also drive a significant amount of prequalified traffic to your site. Many niche specific directories are works of love and provide free listings.

Be Aware Of Bogus Directories

Some unscrupulous money hungry parties have established web directories that accept any site that pays them; the catch is that the directories are bunk and usually don’t last long before Google blacklists them. Most of these directories, which are created to Sell AdSense and cheap link rentals, have increasingly made it easy for other bunk directory providers to create garbage directories to collect your money. In addition, you’ll also want to be aware of duplicate directories, which are sites such as emfind.com, pearlfind.com, moonfind.com, findeyes.com, beyondfind.com, and findww.com. Generally these sites are easy to spot because they all look exactly the same. If you’re unsure about the directory you’re considering listing in,  just remember–the top 20 on Strongest Links is always  a safe bet. If, however, you’re going to venture elsewhere, know that well referenced directories with lots of high quality links from editorially robust sources are likely to carry far more value than those whose links stem from directory lists, SEO-centric communities or paid/affiliate links.

Bottom Line
For all intensive purposes, listing in the directories can dramatically influence your search engine rankings, organic traffic, authoritativeness, and overall link juice. If you plan on listing in the directories, make sure your website is completely functional and know that selective is good. If you’re site has all the right refinements, it’s worth paying the extra cash to list in the authoritative directories as it will pay higher dividends in the long run.

TITLE TAG

A title tag is the keyword that appears at the top of your browser and in search engine results like: “Discount shoes – Shoebuy.com – Free Shipping & Return Shipping.”

The title tag is a fundamental component of a webpage.Not only is it the first thing people see as the page loads, but it also helps breed continuity and increase click-through rates in the search engine results.  Some general tips are:

• Put your keywords in front

• Keep title tags below 65 characters to make sure the entire message displays in all search engines. This is one of the most influential aspects to generating website clicks in search engines.
• Use synonym-rich terms to reinforce the overall continuity of on-page content

META DESCRIPTION
A Meta description is the keyword-rich description that appears under the title tag in search results such as: “Discount shoes – on Sale! Here you’ll find a wide variety of discount shoes, all marked down at exceptional values and include free shipping and return shipping…” Notice how the keywords are positioned in front where they belong.

Meta descriptions are also a fundamental aspect of SEO success. Here’s what you need to know about Meta Descriptions:

• Use your keyword research to help determine what words to include.
• You’ll want to work in a variety of keywords and rich synonyms into your Meta description; however, you’ll want to put your keywords right in the front.
• The general rule of thumb is that your Meta Description should be the maximum amount of characters (160) with the important keywords listed in the front. Make your Meta description reinforce your title tag and embody the continuity of your website. Many websites overlook title tags and Meta descriptions; consequently, there’s huge opportunity to attack your market niche.
• Use SEO tools for your keyword research to optimize title tags/Meta descriptions.

OVERALL CONTINUITY
Whether you’re writing title tags or Meta descriptions, continuity is critical. In both your title tags and Meta descriptions, you’ll want to use relevant key words to reinforce your on-page content. If your webpage’s title tags and Meta descriptions repeat the same thing over and over—you’re going to lose a great deal of traffic. Google and the “humans” considering your site aren’t going to be enticed by a repetition of the same key words over and over. If you want your website to be search-engine friendly and hook readers’ attention, then spend the time optimizing your title tags and Meta description. The key thing to remember is that optimizing your title tags and Meta descriptions is one of the quickest ways to increase your website’s traffic without search-engine positioning.

Whether you’re selling personal investment strategies, fitness coaching, or jewelry-making accessories—if you’re selling locally—then aim your SEO tactics locally!

Local SEO is a highly effective way to boost your business to the top of the local results. Here’s The 10 Irrefutable Laws of Local SEO:

1. Have a local address: If you want to list in the local directories, you’ll have to have a local business address. Even if the bulk of your business is done outside your city location, use your business’ physical address to list locally anyways. The stimulated local traffic will only increase your chances of ranking higher in the search results.

 

2. URL Address: If your biz is local, then, make sure to get the city name in the URL address. This, along with quality local content, and locally descriptive title tags and Meta descriptions will help your website become more search-engine friendly.

 

3. List in the local directories: If your business or website is locally listed, Google local, Google Maps, and Yahoo local are, in a nutshell—one of the best ways to generate search referrals quickly. The more local information that you give the directories about your business, the more the directories will reward you!

 

4. Local keywords: Whether it’s your website’s content, title tags or Meta descriptions, make sure to add locality keywords like your city and state.

 

5. Localized content: When your writing copy for your website, make sure it’s properly geo-targeted. The more continuity your website has with localized keywords, the more search engine friendly it becomes and subsequently it’ll be easier to rank in higher local search result positions.

 

6. Localized title tags and Meta descriptions: Making your title tags and Meta descriptions localized with local keywords will help add to your website’s continuity as well as help generate more local traffic.

 

7. Investigate your competition: One of the best ways to better position yourself in your local market is to spend time examining competitor analysis. Use tools like compete.com to get detailed data on your local market competitors to find out what you’re doing right, what you’re doing wrong, and what you should be doing differently.

 

8. Localized Press Releases: To boost your website’s local authority and subsequently climb up the search engine results, start generating press releases to local media. If you want to avoid using PR firms you can either run your own in-house PR or you can use sites like prweb.com

 

9. Blogs: To add even more authority to your local business website, start a local business blog write for it on a weekly routine. The more blogs per week, the more fresh local content the search engines see—making your site stand out in the local search results. Not to mention, you can also start linking out to other blogs, as well as potentially having other blogs link back to you.

 

10. Video Marketing: Another method you can use to try boosting your business’ local web authority is to post videos about your business that include your company name, local city names, local keywords and links back to your site.

No matter what types of products you’re selling in your city, these 10 local SEO tips will help you boost your web traffic and your business.

Let’s face it, there are plenty of websites out there that aren’t getting nearly as much traffic as they deserve. You can offer a top-notch product or service, but without taking the right startup steps your site may not get a single visitor. Your best chance to gain online popularity is to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) practices to get your site up to speed.

In the simplest of terms, SEO aims to increase a website’s organic traffic by helping it place better in search engine results. Here is a list of basic steps to consider when you begin the SEO process:

• Redesign your website. It can be difficult to keep up with the latest trends in web-design, but it is crucial that you have an interesting and professional looking site. Many web surfers will immediately navigate away from a webpage that looks amateurish or too confusing to navigate.

• Research the popular keywords in your niche. Find those that are used frequently, yet are possible to dominate. For example, the keyword “Shoes” would be incredibly difficult to place for, but “Italian shoes” could be narrow enough for your cause. Google Adwords and SEO Book offer great tools that can help you find popular web searches related to your topic.

• Improve your site’s architecture. An easy-to-navigate website offers many SEO advantages. If your important pages are deep within the site, it can be hard for search engines to index all of your content. A good rule of thumb is to ensure that your most important pages are no more than one or two clicks off of the home page.

• Optimize your title tags and Meta descriptions using your niche’s relevant keywords. Title tags help search engines understand that your site is relevant to a specific topic, while meta descriptions convince potential visitors to click through. Title tags should be no longer than 65 characters and meta descriptions no longer than 160.

• Correct any and all broken links. Broken links make it difficult for search engines to index your pages and can prevent you from getting listed in major, online directories. Xenu’s Link Sleuth is a great, free tool that allows you to easily identify any broken links on your site.

• Setup necessary 301 redirects. Did you know that yourdomain.com and www.yourdomain.com are recognized as two different domains (even though they point to the same site)? When others link to your site, they could use either of these addresses and split your traffic. You can automatically direct all visitors to the www. version of your domain by using a 301 redirect.

• Correct URL structure issues. Keep your URLs short and sweet. If, for example, you have a page located at www.yourdomain.com/info/brochures/57/faq.php, try to shorten the address. www.yourdomain.com/info/faq.php is much easier for search engines to locate and index. It is also helpful to use keywords in your URLs. If you have a page that is about discount Italian shoes, call it yourdomain.com/discount-italian-shoes.php.

• Install Google Analytics to monitor site traffic. This is a free service offered by Google that allows you to monitor the number of visitors to your site, the keywords they use to find you, where they are from and much more.

• Produce 5 to 10 new, original articles based on keyword research each month. Fresh content ensures that your site will be frequently indexed by search engines. Never post text that you find on other websites, as duplicate content will result in search engine penalties.

These steps should be employed on all websites, no matter the age or existing traffic volume. It’s risky to say that any tactic is guaranteed to boost a site’s visitor count; however, the methods listed above tend to have very positive results whenever they are used.