LOC@L SEO GUIDE

It has been widely reported that Google is now able to crawl through HTML forms like drop down menus.
See Matt Cutts post and the Official Google Webmaster blog post for more excruciating detail.
While this development is classified as an “experiment” by Google and “Only a small number of particularly useful sites receive this treatment“, over […]

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I am thinking Google must be pretty sensitive to people spamming Google Maps.
Earlier this week I posted about how SEO Champion had created fake addresses to show up for local searches for SEO in Pleasanton, CA and the surrounding areas. Mike Blumenthal followed up with his own mapspam investigation and found these guys […]

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A reader recently asked me how to generate buzz locally online. If you are going to promote yourself locally one of the first things you need to know is how to find a local audience. So I thought it might be helpful to put together this list of local online media:

General Web Search […]

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Last week my post How to Find Vicki Iseman’s Bio - The SEO Way got a lot of traffic not only from Google blogsearch but also from Mahalo.com. I had submitted a link to the post on Mahalo’s Vicki Iseman page in the user-submitted links section. Mahalo is a SEO machine and its […]

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If you are thinking about generating a lot of reviews for your business on Google Maps’ write a review feature, I recommend you read this post about a business who lost all of their reviews on Google Maps.  As Miriam Ellis of SolasWebDesign tells it, Canoe Sport in Houston, TX asked their customers to review […]

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I run a pretty white hat local search engine optimization operation here but I often am tempted by the so-called dark side. If you talk to some black-hatters out there it just seems way too easy to game search engines for short term gains. So once in a while I get the urge […]

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With SEO sometimes the simplest tactics can have the biggest effect. Here’s some inexpensive SEO you can do today no matter how big or small your site is and probably get some quick results. I call it the “Page 2 Bump”.
1. Look at the keywords that are sending you good to ok traffic.
2. […]

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With Google’s recent introduction of 10 yellow pages-like listings in Web search results for local queries, it is going to be harder for local search sites which depend on “category in city” search queries (e.g. “Plumbing Supplies in Pleasanton, CA”) for a lot of referral traffic from Google to get that traffic. If I […]

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Might as well pile on the Microsoft/Yahoo bandwagon and add my $0.02.
In a previous post on the new & improved Google local search results I implied that certain Yellow Pages companies might be getting a little agida at the prospect of Google pushing their sites farther down in the organic search results listings. Now with […]

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As you may know there have been numerous sightings this week of expanded Google Local results in Google’s Web Search. Previously when Google detected a local search they were displaying 3 Google Local business listings before the organic results, but now they are starting to show ten. So that’s why all those yellow […]

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