LOC@L SEO GUIDE

So Google Webmaster Tools is telling me that my site has an average rank of 230 for “local seo” in Google Image Search and generated 70 impressions over the past month: So who are these people doing image searches for “local SEO”? And why is it that I rank only 230?! Let’s change that shall [...]

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In January, I posted about the power of Startup SEO. What I neglected to follow-up on was the fact that after fixing this particular start-up’s optimization issues and seeing huge organic traffic growth, two weeks later Google decided to take their traffic down to almost zero. I came up with a number of potential fixes [...]

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Google’s Penguin Update was supposed to help get rid of SPAM from the search results.  I think it may have had the opposite effect. This morning I posted Think a Bunch of SEO Spammers Just Got Destroyed but when I search for that phrase in Google check out the results on page one from a few [...]

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Danny Sullivan just announced that Google has officially named its recent webspam update “The Penguin Update”.  Danny provides some background on how Google names updates like “Panda” and some of the commenters speculate on how Google came up with “Penguin”. My $0.02:  Googlers are geeks.  Geeks like comic books. From the Wikipedia entry for Penguin [...]

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Google’s recent “over optimization” update aka The Penguin Update combined with Panda 3.5 has been interesting to watch unfold. My site’s organic traffic grew 20% over the past few days and while I’d like to think it’s because I am doing SEO right, the data suggests it’s more likely that other sites were doing it, if [...]

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Gee thanks Overture Google. That Comparison Ad is very helpful and I didn’t need for my organic results to show up above the fold anyhow.

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As noted yesterday, Google Webmaster Tools has started reporting on URLs that get large changes in search engine traffic with the following item in the Messages section: I dubbed it the GWT Cheerleader because it seemed so darn peppy. The message tells you that the traffic to the URL has either increased or decreased significantly [...]

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First time I have ever seen this message in Google Webmaster Tools. It reads: “Search results clicks for [URL] have increased significantly. Yay!” #yay

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And while I’m on the subject, Stever has a great post up on some tips for Encouraging Google +1 Votes for Local Business Websites. Key point for unsuspecting SMBs to take note of: “Forget the new schemes popping up to buy hundreds of plus 1 votes. Those will be meaningless to a local business as [...]

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SearchEngineLand just published Google Plus Connections Are The New Link, some thoughts of mine on how local search co’s and SMBs may try to leverage Google Search Plus Your World to improve local SEO. After rereading it, it seems clear that as more and more organic results are deemed to have “local intent”, the only [...]

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