Searcher Behavior – How Users Search For Local Businesses

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Searcher Behavior - How Users Search For Local Businesses

A very important question concerning SEO strategy is how much should we focus on search key-phrases and terms that include a local term (e.g. town name, ZIP code) vs. more generic keywords without the local term? From the point of view of local search optimization, it’s absolutely essential for businesses to include local terms or “Geo-modifiers” in their website content and link building activities. Google and other search engines needs to know where you’re located and which areas you want to serve in order to return your business as a search result for a relevant, local search.

More Specifically, The question we want the address about searcher behavior is: Do searchers or local consumers look for local businesses and use local modifiers such as town name and zip code?

Definitely! Searchers do expect Google to return local results based on their location, and to a large extent they do search using city names and zip codes. Therefor a well-rounded local SEO campaign should utilize both city name and ZIP code, but prioritize your SEO strategy for town names and city names first and then for ZIP codes.

People expect “localization” in “search engine behavior” to increase. So the optimal optimization strategy should ensure that they reach both town-name searchers and ZIP-code searchers. And for those with the budget and time, even go down to neighborhood and street level.

Tip! Enhance your Google Places listing and put your best photo front and center. To stand out in local listings, choose an eye-catching photo as your main profile image.

Webmaster Galactica

Apply these tips and techniques to boost your company’s SEO results

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Smart entrepreneurs know that search engine optimization is a necessary part of the marketing toolkit in this digital age. Instead of letting your Google rank get you down, apply these tips and techniques to boost your company’s SEO results.

  • Create Content That is Useful Forever

If you want your content to make it to the top slots for various keywords and phrases, you’ll want to have top-quality content. The best way to make sure your content is seen this way is to create content that is forever useful and authoritative, content that is not disposable. Create content that people will be reading 30 years from now, and you’ll be getting back-links for years to came.

  • Optimize Your Online Profiles

Log-in to your company’s online profiles. Make sure the biography is descriptive and up to date. More importantly, is your website’s URL listed on your profile’s pages? If not, find where you can add the URL, add it and then click it to make sure the link if working well. You’ll be surprised what it can do if you have more than a handful of accounts online with good and interesting content in terms of Google ranking.

  • Think Like Your Customer

What your ideal clients be typing into Google? Than look keywords up in Google’s free Keyword Tool to see if you are right. Chose the popular keywords with low competition if you can. Then write content around these keywords and learn to optimize.

  • Guest Post

Blogs love unique and fresh content. Start guest posting on relevant blogs. It’s a great way to build links, which will boost your rankings on Google.

  • The King and Queen Of SEO

Good content is very important to make your business rank higher in Google, and links are even more important. Google loves links and uses links like a road map to find its way on the web. Submit your site to any relevant directories and join websites and blogs where you can have a link back to your website. This will grow your back-links repertoire.

  • Video SEO

Video is a huge marketing tool for business owners. It give your company personality and can be spread across networks while linking back to your site. Create videos rich with information people can share and then repeat.

  • Backlinks From Colleges and Universities

A big SEO secret is that when .edu sites link to your website it gives you a higher Google ranking. Try to contact universities and have them link to your site.

  • Add New Info To Your Site Frequently

The rule is that the more often you update your site, the more important search engines thinks it is. Publish content to your site every day and Google will start to recognize you as a great source of information for whatever your keywords and key phrases are.

  • Take Advantage of Local Search

For a local business its great to claim your listing on Google, Yahoo, Bing and many other listing sites. You will see a huge jump in traffic for your businesses by simply claiming and filling out all the fields on these local profiles.

By WebMaster Galactica

 

SEO in a Nutshell

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SEO, SEM, Web optimization, Internet marketing, web development, search engine optimization Search Engine Optimization is a very complex area of web development. After working with SEO for a few of years I can tell you that it’s not Abracadabra to rank high as many think it to be.

When optimizing your site you most consider 8 important factors, and remember – SEO is not a quick fix but rather a long term strategy. Implement these methods and you will see increased search engine traffic to your site.

1. As emphasized numerous times – The TITLE tag is very important!

Take time writing the TITLE tags – Google takes most notice of this tag so make sure to include your main keywords in the title tag. The Title tag is what shows up in the search engines page results as clickable headlines for your page.

2. Get lots of Back links

Try to get inbound links from relevant sites – Such links to your pages are very important. And the best way of getting inbound links is to create content that the readers want to share with others. Use social networks like Digg, StumbleUpon, blogs and other services to spread word of your pages. If the content is good, bloggers and other site owners will link to it.

3. Its not necessary to stuff your pages with too many keywords.

Webmasters know that you need to include the important keywords – one or two – Per page a few times if you want to compete for good position. Yet, it should not be over done. The text must be fluent for the reader, not stuffed with keywords and phrases to manipulate the search engines. This strategy annoys your readers and can backfire by excluding you from the search engines.

 4. Internal linking

Both internal and external links are important. If you have a page with content relevant to what you’re writing about at the moment, Link to it internally – it improves your rankings.

5. Anchor texts

To get the most from a link, consider the text you are linking from (the anchor text). The word or phrase you link from will be the one Google will improve the ranking for. So, the page you link to will get a boost for that key phrase when you create a link on the word.

Bay the way – For links on images, the alt tag will be considered as the anchor text for the link.

6. XML Sitemap

An XML sitemap is a file showing all pages in the site for easy indexing by a search engine.

7. Use Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools

A. Google Webmaster Tools gives you tools to analyze and improve your site. With these tools, it’s easy to spot any place in your site where you might have missed the title or description. You can also submit your sitemap XML and test your robots.txt file, to mention some of the functions of it. (Read more about Google Webmaster Tools).

B. Track and analyze your site with Google Analytics – you need to track the traffic and analyze it regularly.

Consider things like: Traffic sources (referring sites, search engines, direct)

Bounce rate (the number of visitors seeing only one page)

What keywords are generating traffic (this way you get ideas for content to get additional traffic on these words)

The most popular pages (what do they have in common?)

8.  Keyword research

You can use the Google Adwords keyword tool, or other software to know what words and phrases to optimize for, you need to know what people are searching for.

And last but not least – learn From Rene Descartes never to give up - “You just keep pushing. You just keep pushing. I made every mistake that could be made. But I just kept pushing.”

Good Luck Web MasterGalactica