LOC@L SEO GUIDE

After three years of hard work I am now #1 on the planet for “andrew”!

Feel free to throw a few more links this way with “andrew” in the anchor text to reinforce my position of global andrew domination. :)  That dude at #2 has owned the #1 spot for years.
I love the smell of #1 [...]

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With all of the brouhaha going on about Google’s test of a new local SERP for category searches that will make it much harder for local directories to get traffic, I became almost willfully blind to the more subtle change that had occurred to the SERP for business name queries.  Thanks to Patrick Altoft for [...]

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Chris Silver Smith brings up a great point in today’s Local’s Only column about Google’s new local SERP design they are testing:
…you might think that the newer, larger listing treatment might be beneficial for the visibility of these businesses. But, think again—for any of them which have been doing significant search marketing activities, this sea [...]

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In case you were in doubt about this spammy technique for getting rankings check out the “News” results in this Google SERP for this highly competitive query:

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To: Local Directory Sites
From: Google
Subject: A Little Head’s Up
As you may have heard, we’ve been testing a new design for the SERPs we display when we detect a query with local intent.  In the past these results have typically been a mix of local businesses, local directories and other random sites that figured [...]

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I am in the initial roll-out group for being able to upload a background image to Google’s home page. I love it. I love Bing’s amazing photos on its homepage, but I love seeing my daughter cruising down a slide even more:

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In general you should know who your competition is in the SERPs, but Google just made it easier (unless I have totally missed this feature for months which is possible). I just noticed a “Pages similar to ” widget at the bottom of the results. Here’s what I got when I queried “localseoguide”

It [...]

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image liberally appropriated from Roger Hollander
Thanks to Vanessa Fox as always for eliciting grains of truth from Google.  At last week’s Google I/O conference Matt Cutts confirmed that there was an algo change at the beginning of May that will likely be affecting sites that generate a lot of long-tail traffic: 
”this is an algorithmic change [...]

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Mike Blumenthal has a great recap of a recent webinar held by the Google Places team where they answered a lot of frequently asked questions.  Here are a couple of my faves:
Q: Can we use call tracking phone numbers in our listings? if not, why?
A: No, please use the most local phone number available. [...]

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Sometimes I am embarrassed to be in the local search biz…

via BIrthday Ideas

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Since Google launched the ability to add a user to Google Webmaster Tools just by adding an email address to the account, I have spent a fair amount of time explaining how to do this simple process to clients. I am writing this so I can just send them this URL, as well as [...]

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Google has been playing some crazy games over the past couple of weeks and this morning Webmaster Tools delivered another surprise. Crawl rates have gone through the roof. Here are some sample screenshots:

So far I haven’t seen a commensurate change in traffic and this is definitely not happening to some link-poor sites that [...]

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Google Webmaster Tools recently released a very cool feature in the Top Search Queries report: Clickthrough Rate
Now you can see not only which keywords generate the most impressions on Google for your domain, but also what the CTR of each keyword is.  Even cooler is you can get a sense of what your overall domain’s [...]

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The most interesting info in the Real Time Search panel at SMX is how each of the engines looks at RTS data algorithmically and how it contributes to ranking in Web search results.  Some real-time blogging:
From BING:
Sean Suchter
The major types of data they look at in the real time search stream:
Meta Data:

URL referrals
Retweet counts

Primary [...]

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Google recommends that If you no longer sell a product, serve a 404.
Imagine my surprise when I checked out the Google Profiles home page and clicked on the “Matt Cutts” link only to get:

Is Google trying to tell us something?
Ignore this test: Angieslist San Francisco Roofing

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