When was the last time you reached for phone book when you needed a hotel, a florist, or indeed…. a solicitor? We’re much more likely to reach for Google rather than the good old Yellow Pages, and “Local Search” is way the Internet presents geo-targeted information about your business, including location maps, customer reviews, and detailed information about your services.

Google reports that one in every thirteen searches includes a map in the search results. That means a lot of people searching for local businesses, and one of those people might be your prospective new client.

Local searching isn’t limited just Google web search. Yahoo! has a local business listing service (http://uk.local.yahoo.com) and Microsoft’s Bing search engine shows local listings and a map for most local searches (http://www.bing.com/maps).

Nevertheless, the major player in Local Search is, of course, Google. Run a search for a local business type, say “Solicitor Newcastle”, and you will trigger search results from the Google Maps service that includes a list of 7 local business listings, including mapping information. This display is known as the Local Onebox and the 7 business listing is the Local 7-pack.

.

If there aren’t enough suitable businesses to generate a 7-pack, then Google might display the local 3-pack, and indeed sometimes just a single company listing is displayed, for instance for a search for your company name.

You can submit your business to the free Google Maps service at the Google Local Business Centre. You will require a Google account to list your business, and it is likely that your company will already have an account if it is using Google services like AdWords advertising, Google Analytics, or Gmail.

There is a very good chance that Google will have your company listed already even if you haven’t provided the information yourself. Google gathers information from a number of Internet Directory sources, and it may have created a generic listing for you. If that is the case, it is essential for you to claim the listing as your own. If you do not claim your listing yourself, you may find yourself victim of the scam known as “hijacking.” At its simplest, that means another organisation claims your listing, but changes the phone number to be their phone number, thus siphoning off your phone calls. Reclaiming a hijacked listing is tedious, so prevention is much better than the cure.

As you enter your company information into the Google Local Business Centre, keep in mind that how you enter the information will have a significant influence in whether your firm appears in the all important Google 7-pack.

Google publishes Google Local Business Listing Quality Guidelines and in particular these rules stipulate

you can only list

Tips for creating the perfect Google Local listing:

Name of your firm: it is important to use your official company name in the Title of your listing, but also making it clear what you do. So, if your firm is called Smith & Jones and you are solicitors, then make your entry Smith & Jones Solicitors. It is against Google guidelines to cram in keywords, phone numbers, or other SEO trickery in your company name.

Business address: ensure your business address matches exactly the address you are listing on your website, and the address that is listed on other Internet directory sites. The more identical addresses Google discovers for your website, the better.  You can only have one Google listing for each physical address of your business.

Phone number: 0800 numbers do not indicate any geographic area, so be sure to include your local dialling code phone number. You can add your 0800 number, but make your local number the first number.

Business description: You have up to 200 characters to describe your business, and you will want to include keywords in here. Keep in mind, however, that this content is intended for humans, so it will need to read well, and cramming too many keywords in here may get you banned.

Business categories: The categories you choose to classify you firm are exceptionally important, so choose them carefully. You should choose some categories from the suggestions provided by Google, as well as creating your own categories.

For Internet searchers using their mobile phones, Google Mobile Search uses the My Location feature to pinpoint your precise location and provides you with search results targeted to your physical location. Put in the word “curry” into your Google Mobile search, and you’ll find every curry house in the vicinity. (http://www.google.com/mobile.)

In addition to the search engines’ own local business directories, firms should be creating listings in the major Internet Yellow Pages (IYP) websites. Many of these listings are free, and offer you a way to provide consistent contact information for your company. These directories can be generic business listings like Yell (www.yell.com), City Visitor (www.city-visitor.com/), FreeIndex (www.freeindex.co.uk ) or Touch Local (www.touchlocal.com).

Review websites play an important role in local search, so make sure your firm is being reviewed in services like Qype (www.qype.co.uk) and Yelp (www.yelp.co.uk)

And finally, in addition to your listings on other websites, you need to ensure your own website is giving off clear local signals. Make sure you are including your physical address, including postcode and local phone number on every page of your website; typically this will be included in a footer on the page.

There are many more factors that influence local search rankings, but if you address these as your top priority you should start to see good results. The importance of Local Search for law firms in the UK cannot be underestimated, and the process of providing complete, accurate and consistent location information is what you need to do in order to take advantage of this relatively new and low cost marketing tool.

Recently we did a web review for a company and noticed something strange about their site.  Their old web pages could be found in Google, but none of their most recent new web pages were visible. The company in question holds regular public events and their website is one of their main channels for promoting them.  Google (and other search engines) simply were not see any of their new events information and so couldn’t include it in their search engines results pages.

It’s easy to check what content from your site is in the search engine database or cache. Just type in the command Cache:TheWebAddressYouWantToCheck

And Google will display the date that the spider last crawled that page, in this example on 4 March 2010 at 18:17:

What our client was seeing was an error message saying the page was not in the Google index:

Clearly there is a problem, and so the next place to check is your Google’s Webmaster Tools. This will show you when the Googlebot is visiting your site – and how many pages it indexes each time.

Login to your account in you’ll be able to see the spider indexing your site. It is typically to have a “deep crawl” periodically, with regular “small crawls” on a daily basis.

Our client didn’t have Webmaster Tools, or they probably would have seen a flat line with no indexing taking place.

A little bit of investigating soon worked out why the Googlebot wasn’t crawling our client’s site – an incorrectly configured Robots.txt file.
Robots.txt is a file on your server designed for guiding the search engines spiders as  they crawl your site.  But get it wrong and you could be doing your rankings some serious damage.   A basic example looks like this:

User-agent: *
Disallow:

In the first line, User-agent refers to the web robot you are addressing your instructions to , and the * means all robots.

In the second, line, Disallow tells the robots which areas of your website they can’t visit.  In our example no areas of the website are off-limits.

But our client’s robots.txt file looked like this:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

That second line is the source of all of their problems – their robots.txt file is telling all web robots not to crawl their website.  They are disallowing access to everything on their site, effectively putting up a big sign saying “no robots allowed”.

Their old content had previously been crawled and hence was in the Google index.

But none of their new content was being discovered.

Why had the web designer done this? Because they had moved their website to a new server, and  somehow this error crept in.

Of course this also had a knock-on effect on the ranking of their website.  Within weeks of correcting their robots.txt file the site has shot up to the first page of the rankings for many of their main keyword searches. That’s without any extra Search Engine Optimisation work being done.

This company was still getting traffic from Google, to pages that were indexed before the robots.txt was accidentally changed, and so it took a web review for them to notice the mistake.  But if they had used Webmaster Tools they would have spotted the problem immediately.  They are free and available to all site owners, so if you are serious about SEO it’s worth getting an account.

Robots.txt can be really useful, but an incorrect file could have a major impact on the success of your site.  Do yourself a favour and use the free tools out there to ensure that your website is in peak condition.

Good luck!

+++

Katie Saxon

Join me and my handpicked selection of Internet marketing experts for a full day of discussing the latest tools and techniques for promoting your business on the Internet. Book now for your early bird registration discount.

Date: 14 May 2010
Location: East Midlands Conference Centre
Cost: Early Bird Registration only £195 +VAT, rising to £245
Full Details: www.theInternetConference.co.uk

Universal Search is the “other” content that Google displays in the search results: Images, Video, Shopping results, News, Maps, and more. The prominence of universal search results means less space on the first page of Google results for your own website to appear. Your search engine optimisation strategy isn’t just about your optimising your website, you now need  tactics for getting your other content ranking well.

How do you optimise your own content for Universal Search?  I’ve produced some quick checklists for the main results types that I presented at the eChampions event about Universal Search.  I’ve summarised them here, and provided access to my slides:

Optimising Video for Search

• Use Original Text when describing your video – make it unique, and keyword rich
• Video Title (120 characters)
• Description (start with your URL) (1000 characters)
• Tags (120 characterse)
• Nothing new under the sun: Incoming links
• Community interaction: Views, Ratings, Comments
• Your own interaction on YouTube: contributions
• Views: embed on other keyword rich relevant pages
• Going viral: Name your channel something good (“How to..”

Optimising Your Products for Google Shopping

• Requires online sales
• Create a high quality data feed with complete set of item attributes
• Category
• Mandatory, Recommended & Optional attributes
• Tax and shipping
• Specific Image
• Manufacturers Part Number (MPN) or Universal Product Code (UPC) or equivalent
• Custom attributes (what people search for)

Optimising Your Google Local Listing:

• Verify listed in Google Local Business Centre
• Have a local address
• Choose appropriate categories for listing
• Include product/service in Company Name
• Get listed in the major local directories
• Create a complete listing
• Have a locally-optimised website
• Get customer reviews

Optimising your News

See my article on successful Online PR (PDF)

• Press release newswire services
• Keyword rich
• Headline
• Summary
• Headings
• Bold, italic
• Focus on keywords at the top of the release
• Keyword density
• Keyword rich links back to your site

Universal Search Optimisation
– Slideshare Slides

Choosing the right keywords is an essential part of your SEO strategy.  Once you know the killer keywords that your customers are using to search for your products you can build your search engine optimisation plan accordingly.

So, how do you go about finding those killer keywords?  Here are my tips:

Brainstorm keywords you think you should use

It’s an obvious, but important step.  What does your company do?  What do you sell?  Starting with a basic list of your products or services is an easy way to get some initial keyword ideas.  But once you’ve got the obvious keywords on paper dig deeper and add subcategories.

For example, you own a beauty salon and all you have on your keyword list is waxing, facials and massages.  That’s a great start but you can do better.  Don’t you actually offer eyebrow waxing , leg waxing and bikini line waxing (ouch!)?

With a little bit of thought you can probably come up with some two word keyphrases and you’re on your way to developing a good SEO strategy.

Keyword Research: The Secret Weapon of SEO

There’s a secret weapon used by Search Engine Optimisation experts the world over – Google Adwords Keyword Tool.  This will show you if your customers are using synonyms, misspellings, singular or plural versions of your keyword and more.  Let’s look at our beauty salon, who came up with the keywords “leg waxing”:

All basic variations to do with leg waxing that they might expect.  But further down you’ll see gems like:

and

…these could be smartly optimised articles “Does leg waxing hurt?  Not with Our Beauty Salon’s patented anti-ouch leg waxing formula…”  Or they might suggest new markets to target.  Who knew men long for silky smooth legs too?

Now this example may seem silly but it’s unexpected keyword results like this that might suggest new directions for your SEO campaign.

Long-tail keyphrases

Here’s another top tip for successful search engine optimisation.  Searchers who are looking to buy or book something will often use 3 or 4 keywords in their search engine query.    These are known as long-tail keyphrases and you want to find the ones that your customers are using.

If a potential customer for our beauty salon searches for leg waxing here’s what they’ll see:

Not very useful.  They are far more likely to get what they want if they search for “professional leg waxing Nottingham” or “mens leg waxing Nottingham”.  It is these keyword phrases that you need to identify and start using.

You’ll generally find that less people are searching for your long-tail keyphrases.  But the ones that do are more likely to become customers.  Especially if your website is well-optimised and full of useful content to help them buy your product or service.

So, to identify the killer keywords that will make your SEO strategy a runaway success, remember to:

• Brainstorm your keywords
• Research your keywords
• Think outside the box – never miss an SEO opportunity suggested by keyword research
• Start thinking like a customer and develop long-tail keyphrases.

Good luck!

+ + +

Katie Saxon

You may be fantastic at putting pen to paper, but when you’re writing for the web things are a little bit different.  There are some basic guidelines you should keep in mind when writing web (and search engine) friendly copy.

1. Remember to Use Headings

There are two reasons for doing this.  Headings break your text up so that it’s easy to read on screen.  And they’re great for search engines – which use headings to work out what your page is about.

2. Keep it Short

I don’t mean that you can’t write a long page for your website, Google actually tends to prefer longer pages.  But you need to think about keeping your sentences and paragraphs short.

Most people won’t read a paragraph that’s longer than 3 lines.  And using one sentence (or even one word) paragraphs can be a great way to hook your customers.

Go on…

3. Ask Questions

Another good way of engaging with your readers and holding their attention is to address your text directly at them.  And an easy way to do this is to ask your customers questions – don’t you agree?

4. You Don’t Have to be Grammatically Correct

I dnt fink u shud rite lik this, but the web is a more informal medium, so strict grammar rules don’t always apply.  Indeed, sometimes more grammatically correct content can sound forced, because online copy tends to be more conversational.

You wouldn’t normally write a sentence starting with the words “but” or “and”.  But sometimes this is appropriate to keeping your copy flowing naturally.  As a rule of thumb, if it sounds ok when you say it out loud then it will work on your website.

5. Emphasise the Right Words

Using bold text and italics is a really good way to add emphasis to certain words or phrases.  But you have to do this right.  Consider the difference between these two sentences:

“Please get the emphasis right when you are writing for the web”

And…

“Please get the emphasis right when you are writing for the web”

The first sentence probably sounds more natural to you – you can imagine me sitting here, exasperated, begging you to get your emphasis right.  But stop right there.

Search engines think that you will emphasise the most important words in your copy.  And so, they will use text in bold or italics to decide what your page is about.  The second version shows that this page is about writing for the web and that’s why I should use it.

Remember that humans as well as search engine spiders have to read your website.  If you emphasise too many words you’ll make your text hard to read – and you’ll probably confuse the search engines too.

6. Make a List

Lists and bullet points aren’t just a good way to make reading your website a nicer experience for your customer.  They can be a tool in your SEO arsenal.

People love numbered lists (6 Tips for Writing Well for the Web, The 5 Best Tricks for Keeping Fit, How to Write a CV in 3 Easy Steps).  So if you want to write articles that your customers will shout about – and link to – a numbered list might do the trick.

For more advice on optimising your website try our SEO training, which will cover copywriting perfect webpages.

I’ve had the pleasure of speaking at the SMX conference in the past, and am currently deciding whether to pitch a session again this year…

The SMX Advanced Conference takes place on 17 & 18 May in London, and it is designed exclusively for experienced Internet marketers.  No beginners stuff here, it’s all power SEO and search marketing content.

The speakers are world class, and  is always a worthwhile event.

And I’m very pleased to be able to offer you a 15% discount on the registration fee if you quote the code HALLAM010

http://searchmarketingexpo.com/london

Google has announced its search results will display a dynamic stream of real-time content from across the web, pulling updates from Twitter and Facebook, or postings from blogs and news sites.

Latest Results is yet another addition to Google’s already cluttered search page.

Many apologies in advance, but if you haven’t seen it in action, I thought I would demonstrate by doing a search the  key phrase X Factor.

Taking a look at this snip of the Google results, you will find my Twitter post mentioning X Factor in the new Latest Results section:

I’m preparing my new Social Media Marketing Training course, and  I think the big question for small businesses for Latest Search are:

What phrases are going to trigger Latest Results? At the moment it appears to be predominantly entertainment and news stories. As an example, the BA Strike is triggering Latest Results. On the other hand, Swine flu triggers News results, and Blog posts, but no Latest News.

What kind of content could your business generate to take advantage of this ephemeral content in the search results? Search engine optimisation doesn’t just mean web pages, but also means blog postings, and YouTube content, and Images, and now more than ever participating in the social media sphere.

What UK Centric phrases will trigger Latest News? It’s early days, and we will need to wait to see just how Google integrates this live stream into the search results.  Google provides a service called Google Trends that shows hot topics,  but I just don’t believe today’s UK data.  Are so many British searchers really looking for this kind of data:

Learn more by taking a look  at Google’s video introduction to Google Latest Results:

If you search for the phrase “childrens physio” on Google UK, you will notice the web site in the second position has a blue link that says “Welcome” and the fourth website has a link called “Untitled Document”:

“Why is that important?”, you may ask. Well, that blue text is the Title Tag of the page that Google is linking to in the search results.

Most search engine optimisation experts agree that the Title Tag is the single most important element of on-page search engine optimisation,that is to say it is the most important indexing signal on your web pages.  Well optimised pages will have appropriate keywords in their Title Tags.   I’ve written a set of tips to help you understand Title Tags, how important they are, and how to write good Title Tags.

However, if that is true, how come two of the top four results for [childrens physio] don’t have the keywords in their Title Tags?

The answer comes down to my emphasis on the phrase “on-page factors” – as you might expect, there are “off-page factors” too, which essentially come down to your domain name and the links you have pointing to your website. This is the explanation for the [childrens physio] search results – Google uses the links to a website as the primary ranking factor, so the Title Tag comes a distant second in terms of importance.

Google is using the links to these websites as “votes” to understand whether other people think they are a useful resource and what the resource is about. Incoming links are a sign of usefulness, and the words people use in the link (called “anchor text”) helps Google to understand that the site is about.

So the sites with “Welcome” and “Untitled Document” as their Title Tags, despite breaking one of the fundamental rules of search engine optimisation, are still ranking well because of the links they have pointing to their sites.

Except, in this particular example, links are not what are causing the high rankings, either. One of the sites has a single, solitary link, whilst the other has none at all and indeed the site itself is a “coming soon” page. So what does that tell us? Links don’t matter either!?

Well, the reality of the situation is that [childrens physio] isn’t a very competitive search term. None of the sites in the top 5 results have many links at all and most of the pages in the top 10 aren’t particularly well-optimised for that phrase. So what’s happening?

The answer must be the domain names of these websites: childrensphysio.com and childrensphysio.net. They both match our search term exactly. In the absence of any particularly well-optimised (i.e. “relevant”) pages for this phrase, Google has decided that sites called “childrens physio” are some of the best matches for what we’re looking for.

Does that change my opinion on the importance of Title Tags and links to your website? Frankly, no. They are both extremely important factors in search engine optimisation and assuming that your market is a little more competitive than [childrens physio], you won’t get very far without them.

Contact me to find out about our search engine optimisation packages, which include on-page optimisation and link building.

I was planning to write a post about using Region Tags on your web pages to help Google recognise your UK location.

Why are region tags important?  They help to geo-target content, and they will present additional information in the search page to help users to select the most suitable result.

The problem is I’m just not sure Google understands the UK.  Not really.

I live in Nottingham in the UK, but there is also a Nottingham in both Pennsylvania and Maryland in the United States.

A search in Google UK for “Nottingham potato” from a computer with a UK based IP address brings results in 5 of the top 10 positions being filled with American results for Potato Chip Factory tours in Nottingham’s in Maryland and Pennsylvania.

And worst of all, Google local brings up Derby as the top result on the Google map. Heaven forbid!

By the way, if you’re not impressed by my Nottingham Potato example, then scroll to the bottom of this post for some more serious examples.

Who ever thought watching potatoes get peeled and deep fried could be so much fun….

What did I expect to find when I searched for Nottingham Potato?

I would have expected to find lists of organic potato farming tips and ideas for people in Nottingham, or food wholesalers selling potatoes, or take away restaurant menus from Nottingham serving jacket potatoes, or catering suppliers.

Actually, what I would have liked to have seen is Bing’s results…

I know Nottingham Potato is silly example, but there is a more serious underlying issue:

it’s not so silly is when you search for Birmingham Airport, and as a UK user I’m served the Alabama results:

How about a pharmacy in Boston, searched on Google.co.uk: