Localized search engine optimization is often overlooked as an excellent tool to bring in local traffic to your website. By including local information in your tags and web pages, you help prospective customers find specific information on the area and business they are searching for.
What Is Localized Search Engine Optimization?
Localized search engine optimization is the addition of local search terms to your tags and web pages. For example, if you work in Sonoma County, California and are targeting local or state visitors, be sure to include “Sonoma County” and “California” in your tags and in the text on your page. This way when searchers look for services in Sonoma County, California in the search engines, your website will have a better chance of showing up in the search engine results.
How Do I Include Local Search Terms?
There are many way to include local optimization terms. Oftentimes we as web page creator do not think like the user: we are too close to the subject matter we display on our websites. Sometimes when you know a subject very well you speak in shorthand when talking about it. Take a step back and read your web pages again. Spell it out for your visitor, using easy to understand, clear information. Realize that your visitors may not be as familiar with your message or product as you are. Get specific. If you sell blue widgets, say so in your text. If you sell primarily to a Sonoma County audience, include Sonoma County in your tags and text.
Include your local search terms, just like your typical keyword phrase terms, in your title and meta tags, headings, link text, and web page text as reasonable. Most importantly, include local information on your contact page, where your city and state location information is typically listed.
The simplest way:
* Title tag
Blue Widgets Sonoma County California
What if you want to get even more specific? Try including:
* Title tag
Blue Widgets Santa Rosa Sonoma County California
* Heading tag
Blue Widgets For Sale - Sonoma County, California
* Page text:
Looking for blue widgets? We have the most affordable prices on blue widgets in the Sonoma County area. We deliver throughout Sonoma County and all of California.
In this way, users searching for “blue widgets sonoma county” will more likely pull up your web page of blue widgets for sale.
What About Sales From Other Places?
Don’t worry, localized search engine optimization works much the same as regular optimization. With local search terms, you are simply providing additional information for your local customers, much like you might in the yellow pages. Your other search terms work the same way as always. This will not change your opportunities to pull in traffic from across the country if you have your regular optimization in place. What you may want to do is specify a few pages on your website for local search terms, instead of the entire website if you are reaching for both a local and country-wide audience. This gives you the opportunity to drive local traffic to specific sections of your website with regional information. Some users feel better about supporting their local economy when buying from local vendors. You can even dedicate specific content pages to your local search visitors, including advantages to buying your product locally. In this way, you get the best of both worlds, your local audience as well as visitors from across the country.
Use Localized Optimization
Be sure to use localized optimization to bring in your local visitors, providing them with a personalized touch and regional information. Widening your scope of traffic builds the number of your visitors, both near and far. Get specific for optimum local website traffic.
Daria Goetsch is the founder and Search Engine Marketing Consultant for Search Innovation Marketing, a Search Engine Marketing company serving small businesses. She has specialized in Search Engine Optimization since 1998, including three years as the Search Engine Specialist for O’Reilly Media, Inc., a technical book publishing company.
Copyright ?2002-2005 Search Innovation Marketing. http://www.searchinnovation.com All Rights Reserved.
Permission to reprint this article is granted if the article is reproduced in its entirety, without editing, including the bio information. Please include a hyperlink to http://www.searchinnovation.com when using this article in newsletters or online.
Written by SEO Tipster on March 27th, 2006 with no comments.
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One of the important factors in ranking high in search engine results is link popularity. It is not enough to just have the best website in the world–other sites have to point back to you. The thought is that if your site is good enough for others to link to you, then you must have a great site.
How do I increase link popularity?
Building link popularity is hard work. You’ve searched endlessly. You’ve sent every reciprocal link email you can think of. What else can you do? Surprisingly, writing articles on your topic can lead you to a wealth of link popularity.
What are the benefits of writing articles?
Think about it. If you write articles, you get to use them on your website and you build your website content. You can also submit your articles to other sites. With both methods you get a lot in return:
*You build your content. More is better when it comes to site content.
*You promote your website. With more keyword-rich text on more pages, you will increase the number of pages indexed by the search engines.
*Other websites link back to your website content. Sites focused on related topics link back to you.
*You receive a link back to your website from the site you submitted the article to. Remember to include a link in all guest articles you submit.
*You become an authority on your topic. Search engines reward sites with a larger number of inbound links from sites dealing with similar topics.
What do I write articles about?
The saying goes “write about what you know.” Sometimes it takes thinking in a creative way to open the door to a new route for link popularity success. Think of what your visitors might be looking for. Why do they come to your site? What can you help them with when they arrive on your website? Answer their questions about your topic. We all search to find information, so give them what they are looking for.
So what are they looking for? That is easy enough to find out. Review your web server logs to see what keywords and phrases your visitors are using when they find your site through the search engines. Run your own searches using those keywords. What kinds of sites are returned in the search engine listings? Pay attention to visitor feedback. Know your visitors. Answer the questions they are asking, or even those questions they do not know yet to ask
Most importantly, write because you have something to say. If in the process of building your content and inbound links, you benefit your readers with your content, all the better in terms of providing visitor satisfaction. This is the best reason to write, which is the way of the web, to seek out and share information.
Where do you put articles?
On your site. The first and obvious answer is to put them on your site. After all, you have all this knowledge; why not share it with your visitors? You may want to create an Articles page on your site. This will give you a place to put your articles, and any new ones that you write. Make sure to add this new page into your site navigation, and especially to add it to your sitemap page. Add a link to your main articles page on your sitemap, and a link to each new article on your articles page, and you are on your way to having your good content indexed. Make sure your visitors and the search engine robots can find your new pages.
Adding article content not only answers your visitors’ questions, it adds to your website. Your visitors will have a richer experience with your site when there is more content. Not only can they buy the widgets you are selling, but they can also learn more about how to select widgets, exciting news from the world of widgets, and so on.
The more pages you add to your website, the better chance the already visiting search engine robots will also pick up your new pages to be indexed. More pages mean more links. Be sure to make an archive of your articles on your website. Always keep your pages in directories close to the root of your site for optimum indexing by the search engine robots.
Submit to the search engines. As always you will want to submit your new pages to the mainstream search engines and directories. In addition, look for specialized, topical directories that deal with your particular subject. There are also many general business directories available.
Submit guest articles. In addition to submitting your articles to the various search engines and directories, think about submitting the articles themselves. Submit your articles to sites that accept guest articles. It may take a little detective work to find some of these locations. You can start small, submitting to lesser-known portals seeking information on your topic. Some sites are focused on one topic; others need articles about all sorts of topics. Get searching and you should be able to come up with a healthy list of sites to submit to. Searching in Google and in categories in Yahoo! and ODP (Open Directory Project/Dmoz) would be helpful.
Once you are featured as a guest writer on a website, you will notice that most sites archive these articles. How many articles can you write? How many articles are archived and linked? How many different search engines indexed those pages? You get the idea.
Always include a bio of the author, article re-print instructions, copyright information and a link back to your website. Add an active link in your link text in your submission or request one for your listing. Be aware of dynamically generated pages–a static URL also increases the chance that the article you have submitted has the optimum chance of indexing by the search engine robots.
What if I don’t write?
What if writing is just not your thing? You are in luck, because there are sites out there that have free content and articles available to you. When you add them to your site, you still build the content on your website.
Legitimate links, no spam
The best part is that your new links are all legitimate and not just junk links. You add important information to your site, and that is good for your visitors and good for your image. Naturally, using your keyword phrases in your Title/META tags and the text of your articles as you would in your regularly optimized pages makes sense for good search engine ranking.
It will pay off
Be creative when writing articles and submitting your content for linking, it takes hard work but will be worth it in the long run.
Resources
*General Content
EZinearticles.com (free content/submit articles)
http://www.ezinearticles.com/
GoArticles (free content/submit articles)
http://www.goarticles.com
ArticleCity (free content/submit articles)
http://www.articlecity.com/
World Wide Information Outlet (free content/submit articles)
http://www.certificate.net/wwio/
*Marketing Articles
IdeaMarketers.com (free content/submit articles)
http://www.ideamarketers.com/
Marketing Seek (submit articles)
http://www.marketing-seek.com/articles/index.shtml
*Business Articles
BPubs (submit articles)
http://www.bpubs.com/
*Internet and Web
Web Source (free articles)
http://www.web-source.net/free_articles.htm
*Site Carrying Links To Free Content Sites
Freesticky (free content)
http://www.freesticky.com/
Daria Goetsch is the founder and Search Engine Marketing Consultant for Search Innovation Marketing, a Search Engine Marketing company serving small businesses. She has specialized in Search Engine Optimization since 1998, including three years as the Search Engine Specialist for O’Reilly Media, Inc., a technical book publishing company.
Copyright ?2002-2005 Search Innovation Marketing. http://www.searchinnovation.com All Rights Reserved.
Permission to reprint this article is granted if the article is reproduced in its entirety, without editing, including the bio information. Please include a hyperlink to http://www.searchinnovation.com when using this article in newsletters or online.
Written by SEO Tipster on March 27th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on SEO Articles.
Looking for a way to advertise your web site, product or service? Blogs and forums are a great way to get the word out and usually cost nothing. If you would like to advertise on blogs and forums, here are some tips.
Blogs and forums are great places for people with the same interests to congregate to, no matter what your product, service or web site, you can easily find a few blogs and forums that cater to the topic. Blogs and forums are usually great places to advertise, because most blogs and forums allow you to either leave a sig or link when you post info or an opinion. Some forums even have threads devoted to advertising products, services and web sites.
Thousands of people visit the most popular blogs and forums and you can easily spread the word on your site or offerings. Many people love blogs and forums, because it also gives them an opportunity to network and see the competition.
There are also a few forums that cost admission, but are super specialized. While most paid membership forums are usually affordable, they can be a great investment to network and spread the word on your products. So if you are looking for ways to advertise, check out blogs like problogger.net and forums like sitepoint.
Written by SEO Tipster on March 27th, 2006 with no comments.
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Good overall optimization, the right keyword phrases and quality content play the key roles in the success of any web design project. Link Popularity and Google PageRank are almost secondary for the overall success of a website.
Here is an example. I recently took advantage of a free service offered by a competing SEO firm. It was for a Free Keyword Analysis. Sounds like a great deal, we charge $129 for the service and it’s almost a give-away. I wanted to see what they were offering for free so I inserted the URL of one of our clients, fkpfishing.net in the form, added my personal e-mail address and hit enter.
When I received the e-mail results a couple days later (quick by any standard) I was told that the site’s link popularity is very low and that it is not optimized for the keyword “float tube” as well as it should be. They also informed me that the site’s Google PageRank is only 4/10.
Link popularity of course refers to the amount of links that are around the web that point back to your site. I was told “there are only 192 sites that link to yours, according to Google’s database” and they searched for “float tube” and it did not bring any top 10 results on Google search or Yahoo Search. Actually it is #16 on Google for that keyword.
First off I know a top 10 listing is every ones goal The major search engines drive over 85% of traffic to web sites, and only 7% of search engine users go past the first page of results, so properly optimizing a site for a top ten ranking on the search engines for your keyword phrase is essential to a business’ online success.
Now the reason I bring this up first is to point out how easy it is to make a mistake. While I appreciate the effort put in by this firm, wasted as it was, they didn’t do there job, free or otherwise. When you offer “keyword analysis” The first thing you should do is check the “keywords” meta tag on the assigned site to see what the site owner perceives to be important. You should also take at least a few minutes to look over the site and see what it offers the viewers and who the target audience is.
Had they done so it would have been obvious that the keyword phrase “float tube fishing” was the optimum target and they would have found top 10 ratings on both search sites. (#6 and #2 respectively) In fact the second key word phrase in the meta tags “floattube fishing” (one of the most common misspelled fishing term on the internet) also comes in as #2 on Google and #1 on Yahoo. This misspelling was a mistake made by a typo a few years ago but fortunately it is a spelling error made by 1000’s of fishermen on a regular basis and our client has been able to capitalize on it.
The overall optimization of the entire FKP Fishing website for those two keyword phrases was the #1 goal of the project.
Secondly, while we try very hard to get a high PageRank by Google for our clients it is only part of the Net Performance Group “Equation of Success.” Remember, Google is the only search engine that puts so high a value on page rank. Yahoo & MSN use page content. That is why we believe Content is King! Google may someday change its algorithms and drop page rank all together or lessen its impact on the equation but content will always be included in the formula.
Quality content can do more for a sites success than 10,000 Mickey Mouse links and a PageRank of 7/10. If a viewer does not stay on your site long enough to look at more than 2 or 3 pages either your navigation is bad or your content is not what it should be and your site is in trouble. Search engines may direct them to your site but your page layout and content will keep them there longer and bring them back!
Overall website optimization is what we call the Net Performance “Equation of Success”. The four part equation is simple. Good website design + good title, discription and keyword meta tags + quality content + “old Fashion” hand search engine submission = more repeat visitors. Which in turn will bring the good link partners looking for you and ultimately result in a successful overall search engine ranking and your success.
In conclusion, while luck may have played a small part in the keyword placement for FKP Fishing.net search rankings, good overall optimization and quality content played the key roles in the success of the project.
Note: A year ago I corrected what I perceived as a mistake in FKP’s keywords and got back on track with the correct spelling and have achieved good results. FKPFishing now has a Google PageRank of 6/10 and is in the top 5 of all major search engines results for its targeted keywords. Ironically the misspelled “word phrase” continues to bring a good 25% of that sites search traffic. To this day we continue to include the misspelling scattered in articles and always include it in the meta tags.
Michael Klasno is an Assisted SEO Marketing Specialist and CEO of Net Performance Group Inc. Net Performance specializes in fishing and outdoor website design and marketing. For more internet marketing articles by this author please visit: http://www.netperformancegroup.com/Articles/articles.htm
Written by SEO Tipster on March 27th, 2006 with no comments.
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