Blind Ape Seo

How to optimize your business’ web sites for local search

According to SCORE, the are 29.6 million small businesses in the United States alone.  Nielsen researchers state that over 80% of customers and small business owners use the Internet to find information about local businesses.

Easy to see why a SEO effort for local search pays off, but how to do it?

Lucky for you, young grasshopper that the old sensei knows some easy ways to optimize sites and content to attract local customers.

1. When seeing a professional, contact a local SEO agency

Remember that local SEO is part of a bigger, sitewide strategy of search engine optimization, so if you are overwhelmed by all this, see if there is someone in your area to help you.

In local SEO, it is better to go with a local provider, as he will know the local culture and interests of the internet users in the area and can help you target the local crowd more efficiently.

There are many SEO specialists offering help for businesses in their vicinity, such as San Diego SEO, and others, depending on your location.

Knowing your keywords is half the battle, also in local SEO.

2. Claim your business on local search
It’s as simple as logging into Google Places, Bing Local and Yahoo Local and walking through the verification steps which include a phone call or post card to verify your address.

3. Google+ pages

As the researchers at BrightEdge and others have pointed out, Google has started to integrate Google+ pages into the search results. So go and claim your account at Google+, then fill in all the information about your business.

4. Upload Pictures of your business

On the local listings, users are also provided with pictures of your business. To make sure that they see some good pictures, upload your own. These will represent your business so make sure they are at least decent. Think about contacting a professional photographer to make pictures, if necessary.

5. Control information on other sites
Aggregators for local listings search the internet to find pictures, reviews and any information they can on your company. Submit your info to services like Localeze & infoUSA yourself to make sure it is correct.

6. Ask for reviews

On your contact form thank you page, on invoices, on email communications, make a point to say “Hey we’d love it if you gave our business a review on Google/Bing/Yahoo” . Authentic user reviews serve to make your business more creditable and also add to your business’ internet profile.

7. Add your local phone number

On your website, be sure to publish your local phone number, not 800, in plain text (not in an image).

8. Have a full mailing address on all pages of your website.
Your address should be on all pages of your website, to make this information visible to the search engines and add more weight to your geographic location.

9. Give each location its own landing page

Local search is all about that - location, location, location. If you have more than one location, re-enforce this point to the search engines by giving each its own page.

» Guest post by Rankmywebsite.net, a trusted authority on Local SEO

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The old ape thought this was interesting as hell:

Wired Magazine article on Demand Media

enjoy,

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After reading the latest article on domaining strategies, the simian sensei took one of his drafts and turned it into a case study on how to develop and sell a domain.

Go and read this perfectly noob-friendly domaining case study.

In this case study I walk you through every step of the domain selling process. From registering the domain to actually selling it. Costs and revenues are shown as well as things that went well and those that could have gone better.

A while ago, the old simian read Rob’s description of his website galaxy concept over at his blog Eurekadiary.

Sadly, his graphics skills are lacking, so here is a new diagram for you to enjoy:

The concept was nice and interest was piqued again when Rob announced that he was selling off one of his galaxies because he had lost interest. Having talked to Rob before, the blind ape started bugging him about a possible e-mail interview. Read more

Today I want to write about my observations concerning the recent GOOGLE algo update.

The Google ranking algorithm seems to put more weight onto the age of a domain than before.

How do I arrive at that conclusion?

Wonderfully coincident, I have just started a fun blog in English a few months ago.
The wonderful coincidence being that it is basically a copy of my German blog.

The German equivalent has been up for a few years, but the last months on the blogs are almost identical

• Same domain name .de and com
• Same WP setup
• Same posts
• …

Here now is the Google analytics from the month to date.

As we can see, the American blog just took a nice nosedive from one day to the other, while the German blog just continues in the same pace.

I checked the ranking for some keywords which drive people to both sites (even those lign up).

Almost needless to say, the English blog is found somewhere on site 3.
The German blog has risen to rank 2 or even 1 for some keywords even though it dropped one level in PR.

Witholding the conclusion that PR is utter bull, I guess I will hold on to some old domains I thought of chugging and think of something to do with them instead.

Cheers,
::emp::

Google news is a nice way to get some content into your niche autoblog, but you will have some preparing to do.

(For starters, get and install WP-o-Matic)

- Point your browser to news.google.com
- Enter your search phrase, for this example we will be using “chimpanzee birth” (Always good to keep up with the family)
- Now look on the lower left navigation and press the link for “RSS”
- You are taken to the page of the RSS feed, go and grab that URL. It should look like this: http://news.google.ch/news?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&
rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&client=firefox-a&um=1&
tab=wn&q=chimpanzee+birth&output=rss&ned=:ePkh8BM9EwLbwQq0w4AFqy1A
qVyIFNweIwH_SKsbIrNcC6-xa3UWy88sBgBW2w2e
Unbelievably long Google link here
- Enter that as feed address into a new WP-o-Matic campaign

Now we have to get rid of the nastiness that is the Google news link. Basically, Google does not give you the direct links in the feed , but redirects them via their servers. Luckily, we can get rid of them by way of the rewrite ability of WP-o-Matic.

- Go to the “Rewrite” tab
- Enter this for origin:
/http...news.*amp;url=(.*)&cid.*"{1}/
- Check “Regex”
- Under “Rewrite to” enter
$1
- check “rewrite”
-Submit

Done.

For some reason, I have always been doing well with Amazon offers.

Their good name and huge selection helps, of course, as well as the fact that almost everyone on the net has an account with them.

Now we see the release of amazon widgets, which are well worth checking out. They offer a good range of nice tools for webmasters from a handy quicklinker for bloggers to slideshows and movie previews.

As an example, here are some programming books for you:

(REMOVED, since they broke the blog design AFTER working OK for a while - what gives, amazon?)

However, there are still some rough edges to this service.1. I am not too happy with the sizes offered. Take the above example and you can see why one might want smaller cover images.
2. The GUI is still lacking in parts. So you can save your widgets, but you won’t be able to retrieve the HTML code unless you go through the editing process.
3. Saved widgets can only be edited in parts. Although this might make sense for some things, not being able to change orientation or width does not seem justified.

Anyhow, I will use some of those and can see how they can add functionality, attractiveness and (last but not least) some earning possibilities to a site.

::emp::

Some clever interpretation of AdSense TOS involved, so use with caution.

Another reason to try auctionads.

::emp::

You can do far worse than this SEO checklist provided by the US military government.

Check it out

“This is my riffle this is my gun, this is for fighting and this is for fun”

I just stumbled across SeoMike’s take on Google’s CSEs.

While the article I wrote about using Google’s Custom Search Engines is still valid, here are some more points to ponder.

Pattern limits and the way around them

A normal CSE has a 500 entry limit for every contributor. That means you can add 500 URL patterns. Those patterns might be one page, a site or the subtraction of a site. (Yes, subtractions count against the limit)

Needless to say, you might run into this limit easily, especially with the CSE directory I have outlined in my earlier post.

Possible Solutions

• Add more contibutors to your CSEs, thus lifting the limit.
• Use a hosted CSE.

The CSE creation process is tedious

Well, yes. Lots of clicking and copy and paste does not make this a nice experience

Possible Solutions

• Use the XML specification to create your CSE.

…..

How can I react to a user coming from a Search Engine?

There is no “normal” way to do this with a CSE.

Possible solution

• Using the Hosted CSE approach, you can use dynamic variables to cater to your visitors. This is outlined in the Custom Search documentation provided by google.

To make this short(er):

Host the CSE and use the Google CSE XML to create your search engine.

::emp::