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Localized SEO:

How to Contact Your Neighbors

Sure it makes sense for worldwide conglomerates to establish and grow a presence on the world wide web. Their clients are global so of course they want to be seen globally. But what about the small business owner? Does the world wide web make sense for Dick’s Hardware on Main Street? Especially since Dick isn’t set up to handle mail orders on a worldwide scale?

It is. SEO localization is happening. More and more small business owners are signing up with web hosts and creating small sites to provide information for local buyers. These business owners aren’t interested in making a sale in Mozambique but they are interested in creating and expanding their businesses to the people in the community. Here’s how to do it effectively.

You Can’t Control a Search Engine (Very Much)

Let’s stick with Dick’s Hardware for a moment. Dick may sell electric generators in his small town hardware store but he doesn’t want to sell them to people living in time zones where it’s tomorrow today. He wants to reach the people in his home town. Dick wants to reach the local market and tell that market segment about what’s on sale that week.

However, if a search engine user in Mozambique types in “electrical generators,” Dick’s Hardware in Anytown, USA may well show up on page 106 of the SERPs. There’s not much Dick (or the guy in Mozambique) can do about it. Search engines aren’t intuitive. Search engines don’t know that shipping a generator to Africa would cost more than the generator itself. Think of search engines as “savants” – extremely intelligent in one area (locating letter strings), not so bright in all other areas (making good decisions based on those letter strings).

Localizing Your Site

Localization is the practice of narrowing a market demographic to a specific geographic area. That area could be a small town, a metropolis, a state, country or region of the world.

So how do you reach the residents of your community without pulling in traffic from another hemisphere? Well, localization takes several forms, none of which is difficult even for the start-up web site owner.

Localization techniques include:

• online marketing protocols
• geo-centric SEO
• directory submissions
• PPC advertisements
• web-based ‘telephone’ books
• language and dialects
• images
• mapping

Online Marketing Protocols

Search engines don’t just spider your selected keywords. These crawlers examine everything – site text, HTML description and title tags, in- and out-bound links, embedded text links, site maps – your whole site.

So, it’s not enough to simply add your local zip code to your HTML keyword tag. It should be added to all meta data to ensure that spiders ‘know’ you’re local not global. This meta data is part of your HTML code – the underlying support for your site and it provides a great deal of useful information to spiders – including your location.

Your location should also appear throughout the text of your site – as part of the home page header, and in bodies of text on different site pages.

Geo-Centric SEO

Of course, this doesn’t mean you should exclude your location from your keyword set. In fact, it should be at the top of the list and should include the name of your community and your state (or province or region). Why? Because search engines will give greater weight to those first few keywords, and if one of them is the name of your community, your site will pop up at the top of the SERPs of any search engine user looking for local outlets and using ‘local’ keywords.

Directory Submissions

Sites like craigslist.com and angieslist.com are ideal outlets for local businesses seeking to establish a web presence. These directories, along with larger directories like the Open Directory Project, will better clarify where you’re located and what you do. What’s even better about these directories is that your customers can add their opinions of your goods or services. So, if you’re good at what you do you’ll pick up extra testimonials from happy customers.

On the other hand, if you’re terrible at what you do you’ll get slammed in these directories, and should probably consider a different line of work. No amount of online exposure is going to help if you’re really bad at what you do.

Pay-Per-Click

Using PPC programs, like Google AdWords, enables you to cherry pick where you want your AdWords to appear. You can limit their appearance to those search engine users who actually enter the name of your community as part of their search so you aren’t wasting money with useless click-throughs from someone half a world away.

Another advantage? AdWords employs a bidding system with more frequently used keywords going for a higher PPC than lesser used keywords. So, by bidding on keywords that include the name of your community – hardware stores anytown usa – you’ll get those critical keywords for less than if you were trying to reach a global market with your online advertising campaign.

Web-Based Telephone Books

Type in ‘telephone books’ into Google’s search box and you’ll see just how many of these resources are available to the local merchant. Some of the most popular of these guides include: yellowpages.com, yellowbook.com, whitepages.com, superpages.com and, on this day, approximately 64,700,000 more online phonebooks categorized by location, activity or products.

It will cost money to take a listing in some of these telephone directories. You can add images and business information, just like the yellow pages in your regular telephone book if you have the cash, but it’s not essential. However, it is essential for the local business to get listed in the local, online telephone directory. More and more people are turning to the web to access local businesses and you want your business to be accessed – a lot.

Where You Want to be Listed

We mentioned a few on-line telephone books previously. In addition to those mentioned above, make sure your business and address are listed in all of the following: MSN Yellow Pages, Switchboard, Yahoo! Get Local, AOL Yellow Pages, Insider Pages, Yelp.com, CitySearch, DogPile, Windows Live, MetaCrawler, AltaVista and Google Local.

Language and Regionalisms

If your business is located in the U.S., obviously you want your site text to be in English – American English. UK English employs different spellings (humour vs. humor, e.g.) and uses different words to describe different things (gasoline versus petrol), and if you don’t know what ‘bubble ‘n’ squeak’ is, you don’t know UK-ese.

The same rules apply within different regions of the U.S. In some places, those large sandwiches are called subs, submarine sandwiches, torpedoes, hoagies, po' boys, grinders and other dialectic variations.

If you order a milk shake in Virginia you get milk, ice cream and flavoring all mixed together. If you order a milk shake in Maine, you just get the milk and the flavoring. If you want the ice cream, you’d better order a frappe in Bangor.

As a small business owner, you know the local dialect. Use it on your site, within your meta data, PPC ads and other advertising outlets.

Images

A picture is worth a thousand words. Include pictures of your store’s or business’ exterior. Many people will recognize it because they drive by it everyday. That’s a good endorsement right there.

But also include images of local landmarks – the statue on the town green, the local swimming hole or a long shot of Main Street. These pictures tell people your local and that you know the area – a big plus.

Mapping

With global positioning systems (GPS) becoming more and more popular, whether the GPS is in an Audi or on a computer screen, a map showing how to get to your business is always helpful – especially for buyers from a few towns away.

Google Earth, the world view provided by satellites, lists street locations, telephone numbers and even a push pin icon to identify the location of your business. The easier it is to find you, the more sales you’ll make.

Submit your business information to Google – including street address – and have a push pin added to show where your shop is.

Think It’s Too Much Trouble?

Your local competition doesn’t and you don’t want to be the last one listed. Yes, it takes some time to hook up with all of these directories and PPC programs but your competitors have already taken the plunge (check it and see) and, the fact is, you’re missing out on one of the best marketing opportunities available to the small business person operating at the local level.

Find a reliable, low-cost web host (less than $100 a year), design your site yourself (it’s really easy), launch your site and start getting hooked into to the local online grid. And keep at it. There are more and more local directories coming on line all of the time so list and list often.

You’ll be amazed at what the W3 can do for your small business in your small community.

And you’re going to love that growing bottom line.

Need some tips on going local. NP. Call me. We'll talk.

Webwordslinger.com

5 Quirky SEO Tips

5 Quirky Tips for Web Site Optimization:

Little Things Mean A Lot

Okay, you’ve just gone live with your retail site, selling services or products over the web. You’ve joined an “elite” community of one billion other web sites and you’re trying to figure out how to make a little noise in the loudest, most omni-present marketplace ever there was. The world wide web. The W3. The big game. The show.

Hate to burst your bubble but you’ve got a lot of work ahead of you to build your unknown site to profitability. Here’s a sobering fact: 94% of all web ventures implode within 12 months of launch. Most of these, of course, are undercapitalized from Day One, lack any sort of business plan and lack management that knows how the digital marketplace functions. It’s nothing like the 3-D world in which a local store drops a weekly quarter-page advert in the local Picayune. So, even if you’ve been marketing since mirror balls were all the rage, you’re in a new ball park now.

And every little bit of your web site and everything you do to market and monetize your site will be tracked, scrutinized, policed, monitored, recorded and stored by mindless bots that crawl the web. Your new venture has to be bot friendly and human eyeball friendly. Tip the scales too far in one direction or the other and your site isn’t optimized – optimized for search engine indexing or optimized for improved conversion ratios. In other words, you could be doing better.

Little Things Mean a Lot

No “so-called” SEO expert has a clue how search engines assess the quality and topicality of a site. Lots of theories but, in a recent study of Google ranking factors, 31 SEO pros were asked to rank various factors such as site accessibility and quality of inbound site links.

Of the two dozen or so ranking factors assessed by the panel of experts, not one single ranking factor received 100% consensus as a critical factor in how and why a site is spidered, assessed and, finally, cataloged in the SE index.

Tons of theories, lots of debates (some quite heated on SEO blog sites) and plenty of “sure-fire” strategies to “Get you on page 1 of Google.” Big whoop. Want to see your site on page one of Google? Use your URL as your search words.

Okay, enough ranting. There are some strategies that, under testing using Google’s own diagnostics and metrics, seem to have a positive effect on site performance. Small sites improve in reach (number of visitors factored with number of page views) in a matter of weeks and large sites see PR improvement and some of that link love all site owners are after.

It’s not the big things that separate you from web-based profits. On the W3, often it’s the little things, the quirky tactics, that make the difference between a site that looks good to spiders and humans. In other words, a successful site.

Five Quirky Tips for Improving Site Performance – All FREE

Of course, you have to do the big stuff. Create the site’s content architecture, choose the site’s look, create user-friendly navigation and all of the other macro-design elements that define a quality site, regardless of the product or service.

And, if you have deep pockets or an extensive knowledge of Flash animation and design or CSS technology, you can create a site that has visual impact – zip, zing, kaboom – even if you’re site sells rat traps in bulk. This is all pretty much the standard in the Era of Web 2.0.

But once the big stuff is taken care of and you’ve priced the creation of a Flash-based site (if you have to ask you can’t afford it), there are some small, quirky kinds of things that seem to have an impact, at least on traffic and reach rankings.

So, before you take that second mortgage on the farm to pay a hotshot site designer, try these steps. They don’t cost anything and there’s at least a consensus among SEO pros that these strategies help, or at least, they can’t hurt site performance. You decide.

1. Embed an ultra-optimized page deep in your site. This page will be indexed by search engine bots and, because it’s optimized for bots and not people, it’ll simply be a page of HTML code optimized for bot consumption only.

To a human, this page is meaningless code with tags and HTML conventions designed as bot bait to rank highly with search engines. This is the page that will appear on the first or second SERP – the link on which visitors will click. But wait, visitors don’t want to look at code. They want pizzazz or understated elegance or shock value.

So, when a visitor clicks on the deeply-embedded, ultimately-optimized site page, s/he is immediately redirected to pages designed for human consumption. This way, you can focus on perfectly optimizing one page for SERPs while developing other pages for human views.

Ahh, but bots don’t like redirects, right? They indicate something suspicious. Wrong. Redirects are used all of the time. When you post to a blog thread, you’re often redirected to a “thank you for you submission” page before returning to the blog itself. Bots encounter redirects all the time. Just make sure your super-optimized bot bait agrees with the rest of the site’s content.

You will get slammed if the redirect takes a professional CPA from a link promising the latest in CPA news (whatever that may be) to your faux flower on-line boutique. That’s a bad idea. However, if the redirect stays true to the site text, it’s an acceptable practice by consensus of SEO professionals.

2. Embed text links. One of the most difficult things for a new site owner to do is to get all site pages indexed. You may have 200 pages on your site, but if only five of them have actually made it into the search engine index, you aren’t getting your due.

Easy to fix if you don’t abuse the practice. Bots follow links. Keeps ‘em moving forward instead of spidering the same page in perpetuity. You don’t think bots are smart do you? They follow links.

Create an intra-site link structure that will lead the spider deeper and deeper into your site, but be careful. An overabundance of these embedded text links is confusing to humans.

Try at your own risk: If you believe in tempting fate, you can create links that don’t appear to humans but do appear to bots. Simply create the link then change the color of the type to the color of the text that surrounds it. Humans don’t know there’s a link there unless they accidentally mouse over it. But bots will find those links. Of course, you may also get slammed for trying to deceive visitors, but some SEOs do employ this quirky tactic with success. Toss of the coin, here. Your call.

3. Use your prime keywords in headers. HTML code offers a range of type sizes from

to

which is like 20-point type in the real world. Any way, sprinkle your top five keywords in headers. This gives more weight to the keyword and makes it easier for bots to decide what your site is all about.

Word of caution: Everything in moderation. There’s a debate raging (okay, it’s not raging) among SEOs about the use of this tactic. If overused, it’s called header stuffing and it’s as bad as body text with a 10% keyword density.

4. Italicize, underline and bold keywords. Yep, it’s a little thing but spiders do give more weight to these indications of content value or differentiation. Quirky, incremental and free. And while a step like this won’t set your site on a jet-fuelled rocket ride to page 1 of search engine SERPs, it’s the compilation of these little things that do have an impact on site performance with both SE spiders and site visitors.

5. Do NOT use the same keywords as the stiffer competition. Yes, this runs counter to every SEO download e-book you read. All the SEO pros tell you to go with the keywords that work for successful sites. But consider the logic behind that strategy.

Let’s say you’re a car dealer – a regional business trying to reach a geo-specific demographic. If you use the same keywords as CarMax and all of the other leaders in this market segment, your site will be buried under dozens of links to bigger and better known competitors.

Instead, employ “second tier” keywords – lesser used keywords. They won’t be used as often by search engine users but when they are, your site, optimized for these second tier keywords, show up on page 1 of Google’s SERPs. You can even use Google’s Keyword Generator to develop a list of lesser-used keywords. You eliminate the bigger competition. The trade-off is fewer search engine users entering the magical combination of keywords to bring your site to the top.

Another tactic is to employ “long-tail” keywords – keyword phrases. In the case of our car dealer above, a keyword phrase like “quality used cars Portland Oregon” will deliver local traffic to both the dealer’s site and to the dealership.

Conclusion? Don’t follow the conventional wisdom. It’s so…so conventional. Be creative. Don’t think outside the box – eliminate the box completely.