The Click Depot Blog

Archive for September, 2008

Whether or not you have a brick and mortar store, it is vital to ensure your web site is ranked well in searches for your local area. What does this mean? What matters is that your website has organic visibility across multiple search engines when searches are conducted for your most prized keywords and key phrases. We wrote a post about this recently - raleigh internet marketing

With millions of companies competing for top 10 placements for their products and services, local search engine optimization provides a competitive advantage as well as allows consumers to conveniently shop locally as a result of using the web to locate the best deals.

In addition, local internet consumers are prone to shopping locally and prefer working with local businesses. The advantages are options like (a) checking their references (b) performing due diligence (c) establishing trust or (d) meeting in person to finalize deals are easier compared to a national organization.

For example, if you own a dry cleaning business, potential customers want to not only see your prices; they want directions and a map to get to your store. Even in the face of a global economy more and more people are realizing the importance of community and want to give their business to local merchants.

Here are some ideas to improve Organic Ranking of your site on web.

5. Link to Local City Searches

List your company with CitySearch. CitySearch is a major provider of local information for sites including MSN.com, Ask.com, Expedia.com, Ticketmaster.com, and many others. Also consider listing on http://www.superpages.com, http://www.infousa.com, http://www.yellowpages.com, http://www.magicyellow.com and http://www.directorym.com

4. Add Contact information on your site

Have a physical address and phone number within an address tag at least on your contact page and one other page; the best option would be the homepage. By far the best option is to have your address on all pages of your site. Such information builds trust rank value for your web site too.

Search engines pay particular attention to proximity as well as keyword density (the number of times the keyword appears) as well as proximity to other keywords or qualifiers. A qualifier is a term like services, company, professional, expert, affordable, specialist, etc. and are used specifically to (a) add relevance to your keywords or (b) assist your positioning when people use them in search queries.

3. Use the city name and abbreviation of the state in the title or description tag

Pages are interpreted and indexed with the in title, in anchor and in text so understanding this provides one more unique opportunity to construct your pages in accordance to standards which are known to affect how search engines rank and respond to your content.

2. Submit your company’s listing

Submit listing to some top directories like Yelp, Insider Pages, City Squares.com, and MojoPages.com. Submit to Internet Yellow Pages like SuperPages.com, Yellow Pages, Info Space, and Switchboard.com. Submit to Local Search Engines like Google local Business Centre, Yahoo! Local Merchant, and Ask Business Search. Submit your company to Data Providers like Geosign Corporation, Info USA Sales Solution.

1. Add the qualifiers or specific geographic terms

This rule applies if you have qualifiers in the title, description and page, then solidifying the affect of the collective goal of the page for the sake of word density can be accomplished. For an added kick, hyperlink the main terms in the footer on every other page and point them to your about us page, which usually has the highest concentration of local and geographic information.

Bonus Tip: Hyper link the city and function of your web page

When employing links, the less the better for the strength of the link, also the higher up on the page a link is placed, the higher relevance it garners.

Ever wondered how to attain higher local search engine rankings? Here are a few SEO tips to strengthen organic search engine placement. Although the competition can be fierce from local businesses, local search engine optimization is far less convoluted by comparison to national search engine placement.

Creating a truly effective marketing campaign online takes a lot of work that consumes a great deal of time for small business owner. Simply having a website will be suitable to many, but this is hardly relevant if it is poorly designed, hard to use, or bland. The process starts with having a website but never truly ends. Maintaining the site, targeting an audience, tracking statistics of visitors and other factors has to be employed to grow your business in the information age.

What matters is that your website has organic visibility across multiple search engines when searches are conducted for your most prized keywords and key phrases. Ranking above the fold, the top 10 positions for your most relevant keywords is important, particularly locally which can facilitate calls or walk in traffic. Local optimization services should be tailored to meet the requirements of all major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN to achieve search engine visibility.

Local Internet marketing is a cost-effective advertising method for your online business. Local search results through local marketing campaigns can yield qualified loyal repeat local business for a fraction of the cost of television, print or radio advertising. If you haven’t considered local search engine optimization as a viable alternative, your business could be missing dozens of calls, emails or leads every day. Local search marketing can secure organic rankings top 10 for your website for keywords related to your city or state.

Local SEO is one of the most effective forms of internet marketing and online advertising. Optimizing your site for local terms such as your city, state, surrounding county or suburbs not only produces a steady flow of regional business for your company, but brings more revenue into your community.

The more qualified visitors that frequent your site, the more likely you are to sell your product or services. However, all traffic is not created equal. Although a number of regional websites are available for local marketing such as craigslist.org, Topix, the Yellow Pages, Google, Yahoo just to name a few, unless there is a common thread that unifies your marketing message, the optimal keywords used for positioning and offer you are promoting, you may as well be shouting your offer from rooftops to random passerby’s.

The long-term effectiveness of online advertising is more complex and requires a bigger time investment than most choose to accept. Setting up a campaign is the easiest part, but because it’s so easy, everyone does it. Reviewing, tracking, testing and changing require not only proper setup and analysis, but also regular follow-up modifications. All of this becomes a fairly technical undertaking, but because it is hard, not many are willing to dedicate the extra effort even if it means sacrificing income and future clients.

To be honest, if you value your time and money, you probably want to find an expert to help you with all the fine-tuning and analysis. By working with an expert, you’ll virtually guarantee that your resources will be used with high-efficiency and will attain results that you could do on your own after a great deal of frustration and many hours later. Once you have an effective website and strong online marketing campaign, you won’t have to chase customers; the customers will come to you.

Obama has charisma. Does that rhyme?:). But he’s got more than that - he’s got the country’s liberal youth on his side now. He’s got the 20-somethings that traditionally rarely appear at voting booths talking to each other about him now. And how did he do it? Did he use a million dollar defense-developed system for magically infesting youth minds or nobel-prize winning economic theories? Not really. All he did was use the power of Internet and Mobile marketing to his advantage. He used the same tools and techniques that a Plumber, a Carpenter, a Doctor, a Restaurant or any other business can use. In fact, we even know what tools he used and they cost hardly anything.

He contracted with local and national Search marketing and Internet Marketing firms. He built an Email list. He used mobile marketing. He used www.icontact.com, a tool to build email lists, something that we’ve used for a long time.

Read this detailed report about the use of SMS in the US, and how Obama’s clever use of SMS in the presidential race has made it a huge success with businesses around the country.

All this should either confirm your approach and belief in the Internet as an ever-growing marketing tool. If it’s sounding like something you haven’t invested in yet, take our advice, do it now! Trust me, you don’t even need a website to do that. We do it all the time and help small companies realize their dreams.