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“Pay per click marketers tend to “settle in” to a pure PPC marketing effort. This is a serious mistake, not only because they’re neglecting the opportunity for a LOT of extra volume (65% of searchers never click the PPC ads) and dollar cost averaging … but because PPC and SEO are slowly but surely merging as the Adwords Quality Score spider becomes more and more sophisticated.

In this powerful mp3 interview Jeremy and I review Rocket Clicks best practices for a new search engine optimization campaign. Listen carefully and you can implement them yourself, or have Jeremy’s team prepare a SEO Blueprint for you to use on your own”
-Glenn Livingston
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Learn how to list your local business on Google local business center. Listing in Local Business Center will help give your business instant visibility online whether you have a physical address or not. There are a lot of things you can do once you have submitted your business to make sure it ranks well within the Google Local results. Whenever people search for a business in your area they are likely to be served Google Local results and having your business there is huge. Here is how.

This is a little more advanced than our typical blog posts but it a concept anyone running a website should always keep in mind as they design their overall site structure or add additional pages to their current structure. To get the maximum about of bang for your buck so to speak when you create web pages there is a very specific formula you need to follow. We will use our orange website for an example and also remind you before taking on any web project it is a really a good idea to chart out your pages, keywords, and title tags before hand. We will include a nice little excel spreadsheet you can use to help stay organized.

We will use a little more complicated example other than a home page, let’s say this is an inner page selling t-shirts made from oranges. (Yes I know that’s crazy)

Best Example:

Title Tag:
T-Shirts Made From 100% Oranges Best Selection Online | Site Name

URL:
www.sitename.com/t-shirts-made-from-oranges.html

On Page Content:
Lots of great content about orange made t-shirts, and important keywords relating to searches on that topic

Meta Description:
Come See The Nations Best Selection Of Orange Made T-Shirts. 100% shirts made from oranges. Special Internet

Use this format whenever you create web pages on your website and you will tend to rank much better than those who choose to not be so diligent. Google really appreciates a nice quality flow of information from beginning to end, and really so do the web surfers. If they see a listing in the search engine results that makes sense, has a great message, and communicates well is always far more likely to get the click over one that doesn’t.

Making your message clear and easy to follow is a good practice for your potential clients as well as any search engine spiders. We as people like everything to be neat and clean.

While everyone knows search engine optimization is no easy task regardless of what niche or vertical you are in, there is something important to note about businesses with a physical location. On Most SEO jobs we take projects for businesses that have a physical location, and also target the area around that location have achieve a very dominating position online with a few simple tasks. While we understand sharing these with our blog readers might cost us a little work that’s fine by us. Other than servicing our clients accounts we also like to keep everyone informed on some of the little things they can do on their own to help their business grow online. The point of this post is simply to bring light to an untapped resource many of the sites we audit have.

Local Identifiers Multiply the Effect of Your Efforts

You may be first wondering what a local identifier is. Basically someone looking for a shoe store may type into Google or another search engine “shoe store” but what is far more likely is they would type in “shoe store city”. For example, if they lived in Dallas Texas, they might type something like “shoe store Dallas” or “shoe store Dallas TX”. When they type is local information this is when Google and other search engines tune into their local maps, and local links, content, and listings for the results they serve the person searching. The point is, if your business serves a particular area, and you are located in that area, scream it from the rooftops!

How to Scream It from The Rooftops (and search engines)!

There are a few easy steps most businesses can do to can a competitive advantage over their local competitors.

*Have a Nice 5-10 Page Website (more content is better)
*List the Physical Address of Your Company on Every Page (Use The Footer)
*List Your Business on Google Yahoo and MSN Local (this is free)
*Write On Page Content to Include Local City Name & Surrounding Ones
*Find Local Business Directories to List Your Site & Physical Address
*List Your City Area in Title Tags & Meta Descriptions

Obviously this is just a short list but it is unlikely many of your competitors are doing even the simple entry level things like this. These steps are some of the first things we do with any account local or otherwise and they show some of the quickest and deadliest results. If you run a local business regardless of size local SEO should be part of your marketing plan no matter what and many of our clients fit right into this mold and find themselves at the top of the search engines within a few months of focusing on local search engine optimization. If you have any questions please comment below or email us at support@indieresults.com

Everyone in the SEO community understands page rank can be greatly over rated. While there are many different opinions of page ranks value the fact remains arbitrary or not it is a measuring stick used by Google to rate the quality of your website. Essentially PageRank is a measure of connectivity. It is a rough approximation of the odds that a random web surfer will cross your page. PageRank is calculated by following links throughout the web, and placing more weight on links from pages and sites that many quality pages link at.

The Google Toolbar provides a 0-10 logarithmic scale to mimic the link popularity of pages. PageRank provides a quick glance how important Google thinks a page is. Google would like you to believe that their PageRank algorithm is the core of their search technology, but they also use many other technologies to improve their search relevancy.

This all said many website lack even the smallest amount of page rank, and it should be used to gauge your online efforts at least as a guide but perhaps not the be all end all of a sites quality. There are many other things that are calculated by Google when deciding how to rank certain websites, but you would be hard pressed to find someone to say having a good page rank is bad.

So here is my little experiment I took a clients website which was about a year old had 0 back links, and very little content to a page rank 3 website and more than tripled his organic traffic by doing 3 little easy things.

• Spent $600.00 on high quality high relevancy links from directories
• Added roughly 20 pages of useful content
• Optimized All Title Tags
• Optimized All Meta Descriptions

That is it! In September the site received just 50 organic referrals, and in October it rocketed up to 150, and last month (December) was well over 250 and had achieved a page rank of 3. SEO has a snowball effect, it takes time to build some momentum but once you have it growth can be astounding. If you make a commitment to quality and content the rest falls into place, which is what we do here at Indie Results. If you would like us to take a look at your meta descriptions and title tags we would love to just email us at support@indieresults.com

This Saturday we take a look at what exactly are title tags and meta descriptions. We also talk a little about how your business can leverage high quality title tags and meta descriptions so that when your webpage shows up in the search engine results it attracts the most amount of clicks.

The Effects Of Good Meta Tags & Title Tags from Indie Results on Vimeo.

There is a a great way to get your local business to the top of the search engine results pages. It will take you about 15 minutes of your time, and at most 10 minutes of planning, but the amazing amount of instant value it provides makes it one thing every single business owner should do regardless of their size. If you have a physical address, adding your business to Google, Yahoo, & MSN local will help your current and potential customers easily find your companies information regardless of if you even have a website.

How To List Your Business On Local Business Centers

Google Local Business:
Start by setting up your Google account
here. Then make sure to be as descriptive as possible about your business can be. This will help increase the odds of your local business ad showing up when people are searching. Make sure and include all hours and payment information. Google local business ad’s will have the most power of the three and can really generate a lot of results within Google. Many times it will simple be people searching for your specific business but there is a lot to be said for making things easy on them. The easier you are to find the better.

MSN Local Business:
To add your local business to the MSN local business center you will follow a similar procedure except it’s a little quicker. Start by heading over to this link and start signing up. As with Google local business you will want to be as detailed as possible and take the time to list everything right. Going back to make changes later can be very difficult especially on the MSN Local Business Center.

Yahoo Local Business:
Yahoo Local Business can also send your company lot’s of great traffic. The first step to doing that is heading over to this link. Like the other 2 take enough time to be very specific in your business listing. Going back to edit these listings later can be a total pain. That said, once you have completed the yahoo local business center ad you will be complete. The entire process will take you less than one hour and drive tons of phone calls and website traffic.

We realize that this method of online advertising certainly isn’t groundbreaking. That said, it is free and pretty much the most effective free advertising you could possibly do online. Before listing your website on any of these sites make sure to place your companies address clearly on your website, usually in the footer. This will also help your website get more local traffic.