LOC@L SEO GUIDE

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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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