Thursday, May 28, 2015

Improving Your Local SEO


Whether you have a single store front or a nationally based chain, a local SEO strategy is key to driving more prospects through your doors. By optimizing specific parts of your site, you increase your prospects' chances of finding you in local search results.


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You've got to make it easy for people and search engines to find you. To do this, set up your NAP, which stands for name, address, and phone number (with area code). This should be included as crawlable HTML text on your site. Avoid the common mistake of only including the NAP within an image -- images can’t be crawled from search engines like HTML text. The most common location for the NAP is in the footer or header of the site. 

Create location pages if you have more than one brick and mortar location. Location pages provide readers with your NAP, store hours, unique store descriptions, parking/transit information, promotions, testimonials from happy customers, and more. It's also important you avoid duplicating content across multiple location pages

Be the local authority for your industry -- I'd recommend going about it through regularly publishing blog content. (And setting up a business blog if you don't already have one.) Promote local industry gatherings, news, employees, and other educational content on your blog. Think of top-of-the-funnel content that goes beyond what your business sells.

Local Profile Pages
  • Google+ Local

  • Remove duplicate listings using Google Mapmaker.
  • Develop a system for building customer reviews.

  • Optimize your business categories.

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Build these directory citations.
  • Express Update
  • Neustar Localeze
  • My Business Listing Manager
  • Factual
Verify that your citations are consistent and complete across these four data aggregators. Remove any duplicate listings you find. 

This  is intended to be alocal SEO jumpstart for your business. Some of the tips are one-off activities where you can set it and forget it (i.e. making sure your NAP is clearly written on your site). On the other hand, building reviews and publishing locally relevant content is an activity your organization needs to do on an ongoing basis for long term local SEO success

If you are struggling to get noticed online contact Results Business Marketing Get Results Today!

Results Business Marketing
Saint Paul, Mn
612-327-5756

Minneapolis SEO, Mpls SEO, SEO Services, Direct Mail Marketing

Tuesday, May 12, 2015

SEO: Getting Basic With The Basics

What's the point of writing good content if no one can ever find it?   


What matters more in SEO than content? Nothing.
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Content is King Once Again
And, while ranking high in serp's is a high priority for most businesses, when it comes to having a well-optimized Web presence content is the A++ and A+ of those efforts — more specifically, written content. Search engines can only crawl, index and understand text — not images, videos, podcasts, photos or any other type of graphic or multimedia content.
That’s not to say you can’t optimize non-text content marketing elements, but that is for another story.

What is the Key to Content Writing? Keywords

Strong, optimized and well written content is the most critical part of any SEO initiative.
However before any sentences, taglines or headlines are written, you must venture into the land of search optimization by researching keywords and key phrases your target audience is likely to use when searching for your website, articles, blog entries or other content initiatives, as well as for individual pages or specific pieces of content within a website or blog.

The first step in the keyword research process is simply to brainstorm a list of the words and phrases a searcher might use to find your site or business.

The task here is to be specific. Forget broad terms like “pants.” Focus instead on “dress pants” or “casual dress pants” or “bets prices on dress pants” or “Calvin Kline dress pants.” It can be helpful to ask  friends, family, clients or colleagues what terms come to mind.

Don’t completely eliminate very broad terms such as “pants” — this helps searchers get a general feel for the content. But it’s the very specific, targeted terms (“dark blue business casual dress pants”) that attract the targeted traffic at the bottom of the purchase or conversion funnel.

Once you’ve determined which keywords to target, both for an overall content marketing initiative as well as for specific, smaller campaigns, it’s time to build content around those terms.

 
Using those keyword terms in well structured sentences is important. In the past may a page full of keywords worked to get search engine attention but not any more.

Optimize Images And Multimedia Content

As stated above, search engines can not “read” anything other than plain old text.

What all these file types have in common is a need for clear, descriptive names or titles. These are not by all means the default name churned out by audio, video or image software. File names should be very descriptive and match what that file represents.


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Optimized keywords get results
If you’ve got an image of a ball, for example, call it a “World Series Baseball” or “replica baseball from 1938,” not just plain old “ball.” Be descriptive and give the search engines a chance to rank your content.

These descriptive terms are not only found by search engine spiders, but often have the added advantage of appearing above, below or by the image itself, enhancing the user experience as well. Beyond any other optimization tactics, file names are accorded the most weight by search engines when it comes to ranking.

It should therefore come as no surprise that websites that regularly use multiple media files require a naming strategy or protocol to ensure consistency in the names used for graphics, audio or video.
After giving media files clear, descriptive names, don’t forget to add more descriptive text (or meta data) to the “alt” attribute in the file’s tag. Make it short and to the point, like the file name.
This is an opportunity to go a little bit broader.


Quality Matters. So Does Specificity

It’s not just content that reigns supreme in SEO — it’s quality content. Google’s own published guidelines on the topic say in essence that anyone hoping to rank well in search should write for their own visitors and users, not for the search engines themselves. The company is putting its algorithms solidly behind this recommendation.

There are plenty of good reasons to keep content interesting, informative, entertaining, engaging, witty, useful, well-written and well-presented. There are dozens of reasons to have a strong taxonomy, descriptive and compelling headlines, tags and other organizational attributes. Now you can add search engine optimization to that list, too.

If you are seeking out a professional and respected SEO, (content marketing company) contact Results Business Marketing, Our Business Marketing Strategies get Results

RBM
Results Business Marketing
Saint Paul Mn.
Serving Businesses Nationwide
612-327-5756

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