LOC@L SEO GUIDE

Part 4 in the SEO Death series.
If you look at your robots.txt file, you usually don’t want to see this:
User agent: *
Disallow: /
Because if you see this, then you usually see this:

Here endeth the lesson.
or perhaps here

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David Mihm’s 2nd annual survey of my esteemed colleagues in the local seo world is now up. It’s a fantastic report and probably will do as much for the economy as the Stimulus and perhaps even more than TARP.  For those of you with ADD, here’s a summary of the top 20 factors on a [...]

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I just saw a press release that said something like “There’s more to life than Google - Try Zuula Search”.  So I had to check it out because the good lord knows that we need another search engine.  And while I can’t say that I’ll be using Zuula for everyday searching I do think it [...]

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This one probably doesn’t apply to your standard SMB website, but if you run a big local search site, this one’s for you.
“Faceted search” is the rubrick for a site that allows users to refine search results by categories (aka “facets”).  This kind of interface appears on a lot of sites (Kayak and Kudzu are [...]

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is now live on Mike’s site.  He presented this at SMX Local last month and I am bummed I missed it.  In my opinion there are few people who understand Google Maps outside of Google as well as Mike.  Here are a couple of my favorite slides from the presentation.

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Use your keywords in your business name

Create a separate page on your website for your video and use a description with your keywords
If you have a video and listing on a search results page you get 3.3 times the attention that you get from an ad or a single organic search result.
The more Web citations [...]

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Michael Gray: Use it to block the passing of PageRank to pages you don’t want indexed
Adam Audette: Don’t use it because who knows how the engines treat them now and how they will treat them in the future?  Here are his thoughts in more detail.

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That was the subtext of the email a client sent me last Wednesday.
He had just launched his beautiful new site and had received a boatload of press attention. Yet the home page of the site was not appearing in Google’s index even though every other page was.
We submitted a sitemap to Google and filed for [...]

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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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Many SEO practitioners bolt on extra navigation links to improve internal linking to important pages but I just noticed something on this blog that suggests that links inside of content (i.e. in the center part of the page) probably have more power, something which has been noted on other popular SEO blogs. For those of [...]

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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 to try [...]

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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. Check your [...]

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Check it out.

G’day!
Update:
Local SEO New Zealand

Local SEO Mexico

Local SEO Japan

And let’s not forget: Local SEO Luxembourg

And my personal triumph: Soup Nazi!

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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 pages CMO’s [...]

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Like all other years AG (After Google) in 2008 the incoming link to your site will be king, perhaps for the last time if the Google algorithm changes. From my experience optimizing your site’s “onpage” factors and then getting targeted links is still the best way to boost your performance in the search engines.
The Google [...]

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