SEO: What Is Local SEO & the Major Facts We Should Know

Google Local Listings can be defined as the business listings in the map that you usually see at the top or at the middle of Google’s first page results. These listings tend to show up when you search for a keyword accompanied by a specific city, e.g. “Shopping Stores California” or “used cars for sale UK”. As a result, these local search results are different from the organic results and sponsored pay per click listings. So if your business has a physical location, you’ve undoubtedly been told that you need local SEO. But for many business owners, local SEO remains covered in mystery, they don’t even know what is meant by “Local SEO”.

So here we will get a detailed idea on Local SEO, for whom it is most necessary and how we should implement that in order to get best result. Let’s have look over that.

#1.What Kind of Business Need Local SEO:

Any Business owners who get some or all of its customers or clients locally should go for local SEO. That could be a local restaurant, retail outlet, doctor, dentist or lawyer, but it could just as easily be a local ad agency. If you have a physical address in a city and expect people to go there, you should be doing local Search Engine Optimization for that location.

#2. How Local SEO is Different from Normal SEO:

Though all of the elements that apply to Normal SEO also impact Local SEO (i.e. on-page factors, links, social, indexing, etc.), local comes with a few unique elements.

The first and probably most important is that for local SEO you need to create and claim a local profile on major Search Engines like Google Places, Bing Local and Yahoo Local especially where major peoples go for search in order to fulfil their needs.

Second most important thing is called a citation. A citation is any place online that uses your company NAP (name, address, phone number) all on the same page, in the same format as your local listing. 

Third one is reviews, Lots and lots of reviews (preferably really good ones. Quantity and quality of reviews left for your business on your Google Places page is one of the most important local ranking factors.

#3. Most Important Facts That Boost Local SEO Ranking:

The three most considerable factors in local listings that influence your Local Listing are the number of citations, the number of reviews (primarily on your Google Places listing, though other places do count), and how positive the reviews are overall. From what I’ve seen, positive reviews will trump citations, so persuading your customers and clients to leave great reviews on your Google local page is the single most important thing you can do.

#4. How Onsite Optimization is Different for Local SEO vs. Nation SEO:

All of the same elements apply, but there are four things you should strongly consider mixing in. One, make sure your name, address and phone number are used on every page of your site, in the same format as your Google local listing (in the footer is an ideal location). Two, use your City and State names in your Title tags, Meta descriptions, and the content on your site (as it fits, don’t just force it in there). Three, include a KML file on your site. Four, make use of Schema local markup to better help search engines identify and show your location.

#5. How to make Local Listing Better:

Here let’s know how to do Local listing.

Ø  Claim Your Profile: Follow as mentioned in #2.

Ø  Upload Pictures: The local sites listing services like to provide their users with pictures of your business. To help ensure that they see some good pictures, upload your own. They don’t have to be professional photos, but they will represent your business so make sure they are decent.

Ø  Control Information across the Internet: A big part of local search optimization and marketing involves obtaining information from other sites. Local listing aggregation services search the internet far and wide to find pictures, reviews and any information they can on your company.

Ø  Ask For Reviews: Let your customers or clients know that they can rate their experience with you on your Google Places profile. Have logos up in your windows or in your office showing the places where people can leave reviews. Include your profile links in your email communications (particularly in follow-up emails after a purchase or visit), direct mail, and anywhere else you can think of to get it in front of customers. Of course, if you want positive reviews, you need to provide a product and/or service that warrant them.

Ø  Multiple Locations Need Multiple Landing Pages: Local sites don’t like a business having more than one local listing, but if the business has two locations, than that’s OK. However, you should ensure that each location links back to a page on your website that is all about that location and what it has to offer. Sending both local listings back to the same page, or homepage, isn’t ideal.

8 Effective Tips for Twitter Hashtag Marketing

Tip#1: Choose Hashtag Which Defines Your Brand:

Your brand is what people say about you when you aren’t around (i.e. your brand is not your marketing messages or how you present yourself, but rather how people perceive you).
Before implementing your own branded hashtag, you’ll want to think about being transparent without necessarily including your brand name, as this can discourage people from participating, as well as give brand haters more motivation to upend the Hashtags meaning.

Tip#2: First Write then Tag:

First write your Tweets, and then add your Hashtags. What you say and how you say will eclipse the importance of your chosen hashtag.

Tip#3: Don’t Fill up Your Tweets with Hashtag:

Tweets with more than three Hashtags have much lower engagement and click through rates than those with fewer than three. While it’s smart to use relevant Hashtags to participate and leverage existing conversations happening online, make sure you don’t overdo it. It just looks spammy and you’ll likely get ignored.

Tip#4: Keep Your Hashtags Short:

Shorter Hashtags gain more audience than longer Hashtags. In Tweet we get 140 characters to use and many social experts suggest keeping content fewer than 120 characters. Keep your Hashtag   under 20 characters so that people will not face difficulty to use it.

Tip#5: Use Hashtag as a Conversation not as a Place:

If you don’t have your own Hashtag for a campaign, then you can get a lot of relevant topic based Hashtags to promote your content reaching people. You can use Twubs, Hashtags.org or What the Trend to find most appropriate and relevant Hashtags for your post.

Tip#6: Monitor Your Hashtags:

It’s wise to monitor Hashtags to see what your industry, competition and key influencers are saying surrounding a topic. You can monitor your Hashtags by using TweetDeck . By setting up a stream of tagged Tweets, you can conveniently respond to prospect queries, connect with digital influencers, and discover new trending content.

Tip#7: Join & Organise Tweetchat:

Join Tweet Chat and use it as a tool for professional development and Social Media Optimization. Use TweetChat to identify or initiate real-time hashtag chats.

Tip#8: Avoid Hashtag from Highjack:

Spammers also love Hashtags. Virtually every stream of trending tag is hijacked by some fishy-looking Twitter user promoting their product or service. If you don’t have anything valuable or relevant to add to a conversation, don’t jump in with self-promotion. Aside from ensuring that your hashtag can’t be explicate as something negative or obscene, some Twitter experts recommend you avoid using any personal or company names, or referencing products specifically. It can draw less negative attention to your brand if your hashtag is more general.

Google Replaced "Not Selected" with "Removed" in Webmaster tool

If you login to your Google Webmaster Tools and go to the Index status report, then click on advanced, you will see Google removed the "not selected" option and replaced it with "removed."

Not selected was a very intriguing option within the report. We've talked about how you can use not selected in the past, in fact, Google's John Mueller said it is useful in that:

The number of "not selected" URLs is based on URLs that are either substantially similar or redirecting -- if you have changed your site's URL structure and have redirected those URLs, then that would be a good explanation for that. That curve would also be fine and not a signal of a problem.

But now it is gone, replaced by a more basic function named "removed." Yea, that now shows just the number of URLs removed. Maybe it is the same thing just a change in terminology? Here is a before and after shot of the advanced features:

Why did Google replace it? Google has not said why yet. There are threads inWebmasterWorld and Google Webmaster Help but no response from an official Googler yet.

Most webmasters probably have never used the feature but many did find it useful.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and Google Webmaster Help.

Google joins Yahoo for Ads; What's about Microsoft?

Despite Yahoo having a deep search & ad alliance with Microsoft, it seems like Yahoo wants to add more ad providers to monetize their own properties at least. I am guessing, their partner, Microsoft, just isn't doing it for them.

Yahoo announced Google is now an "non-exclusive" display ad provider on "various Yahoo properties and certain co-branded sites" specifically using Google's AdSense for Content and Google's AdMob services.

Soon, you will see Google Ads on Yahoo properties. Is this Marissa Mayer's doing? Being a long time Googler, now CEO of Yahoo...

Anyway, expect to see Google ads on Yahoo soon.

We Color Your World With Our Colorful Art

SOCIAL 2013:Now Its Time to Live Socially

If you’ve been reluctant to – or if you’ve just been putting it off – this is the year you need to get your business on the social scene. Quite simply, if you have a business but no social media presence, you’re losing money.

Why should your company be involved socially? Because it’s somewhere for customers to contact you and find out more about your products and services, and it’s also somewhere you can notify potential customers and clients of deals, special events and goings on within your company.

Sign up to as many as you can – YouTube, Google+,Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr. Even if you’re not technologically savvy enough to set up a page for your own business, you can easily get a friend or staff member to build one for you – if for no other reason than to secure your business’s name on various social media platforms.

It may not be this week, but there may soon come a day when it becomes imperative that your business has an active social media presence, and you’ll be disappointed when your company’s name is already taken. Your potential clients and customers will come looking for you on the social arenas and, if you’re not there, they’ll find someone else – most likely a competitor or someone pretending to be you.

You don’t have to be active on every social site, but as long as you sign up and claim handles and addresses, no one else can pretend to be your company, giving bad advice and posting negative comments that can be harmful to you and your company’s reputation.

So for now, the bare minimum of social activity that your business should have is a Facebook page and Twitter account. Sign your business up and enter your contact details: address, phone number, website and a brief blurb about who and what you are as a business.

Now that you’ve done the boring stuff, have a play around with the countless features available and maybe even upload some photos of your shopfront or a group photo of your staff. You never know – you just might enjoy it and make some brand new customers in the process!

Todd Pendergast- Social Media Community Manager

Google AdWords Policies Allow SSL Frames

A Google AdWords Help thread has an advertiser who implemented a landing page that asks for credit card information in not a standard manner.
The URL itself, when a user lands on the page, is not HTTPS or SSL enabled. But there is an embedded frame within that page that is HTTPS/SSL enabled. That frame has for the credit card and other sensitive information.
Is that okay with Google's AdWords landing page policies. There is a specific SSL requirement for landing pages that capture sensitive information.
An Google AdWords technical specialist responded to the thread in this case saying this is fine. It is fine to use SSL frames if the data you are collecting goes through the HTTPS component.

Basic Facts New Webmasters should understand about SEO

There are lot of things to tell about SEO, it’s not a single class study where I will tell do these things and you can drive huge traffic to your site immediately. A lot of new webmasters are there who are asking immediate actionable SEO where they will get huge traffic in a very short span of time. In SEO there are lot of information to process, but mostly four basic facts are there which I would like to share. These four things aren't technically action items but more of a mentality a new site owner needs to have when they are ready to start their own SEO campaign.

Fact #1: SEO Is Long Term Process:

If you need to drive thousands of visitors to your site right now, then you are going to be extremely disappointed in SEO. SEO is a long term process that builds on itself and gains momentum with time—and time isn't something you can force along, no matter how much on or offsite SEO work you do.

What you do today might not have a real tangible impact on your website for a few months, but chances are if you did it right you’ll be benefiting from that SEO action item for years down the road.

I know that most new site owners don’t want to wait six months or a year to see the value of their SEO campaign, but if you want to do SEO right, it’s going to take time. Because good SEO requires patience, dedication, consistency and definitely you will get best result as time goes on.

Fact #2: Always put your visitors before the search engines:

I feel like a lot fewer sites would get in trouble with search engine algorithm updates if they stopped worrying so much about the search engine algorithm. I realize that sounds kind of backwards, but in my experience, as long as you put your human visitors first in everything that you do for SEO, chances are it’s the kind of things the search engines are looking for.

Is that piece of content designed to actually inform and educate your readers or are you just looking to rank? Will this link send a few targeted visitors your way or just add one more link to your back-link portfolio? Stop chasing the algorithm and focuses on doing things that will help you connect with your target audience!

Fact #3: There is no Secret to SEO Success:

You want to know what the secret to SEO success is. Just doing it and making sure you does it right? There is no “trick” to catapult your website to the top (and actually stay there long term), and any SEO firm or consultant that tries to sell you otherwise is not the kind of SEO firm you want to trust your website to.

You may get a lot of messages like “your website is not ranked for any of your keywords? And you only have (x) back-links? Work with me I can place you in Google 1^st Page in two months time!! I Know Secrets of SEO!!??” Bluff Bluff......

Clearly saying no outsider can get idea how many back-links one site having because these data are in Google Webmaster tool and the only webmaster has access to it, but many new site owners that doesn't understand or don’t know this information about their own site might fall for such a line simply because they don’t know.

Fact #4: Link Building Is For Ever:

New site owners often ask me question like “Well, how long should I do link building?” or “How many links will I take to get where I want my SEO to be?” There is no definite answer to either of those questions. Link building is forever. You might hit a certain benchmark that you set to measure your own SEO success but that doesn't mean you get to ride off into the sunset on the back of your previous activities.

Every day you don’t bother with link building is another day your competition does and they get one step closer to unseating you. There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of websites competing for the top spot in the SERPs—just because you reach it that doesn't mean it’s yours forever. I've seen too many sites pull way back on their link building when they thought they had a ranking on lock down and their site just dropped through the SERPs over time.

Like I mentioned before, these aren't really action items that you can take and implement today—but they are four critical ways of looking at and thinking about SEO that I feel more new site owners need to understand. 

First Page-rank Update of Google In 2013

Google has begun pushing out new PageRank values to the Google Toolbar on 4th Feb 2013. This would make the first Toolbar PageRank update of 2013.

Normally Google updates PageRank values in the Google Toolbar every 3 months or so. The previous update was in November 2012 and before that in August 2012.

Despite PageRank still being part of the algorithm, SEOs know that toolbar PageRank is often outdated and not that useful. In addition, there are many other factors part of the algorithm that may or may not be as important as PageRank.

Even though, I hope your PageRank values increased and did not decline.