You know it’s really funny that as a webmaster you spend alot of your time (maybe?) optimizing your pages to rank well in the search engines to bring in good targeted traffic. Your goal, for the most part, is to be paid in full by a nice position on the first page of most search engines.

You know there are more search engines out there besides Google, but let’s face it – it’s the biggest, so you hope to catch it’s attention in any way you can as a webmaster.  All other search engines are just cherries on top of the Ice Cream Sunday (or cake if you prefer). Plenty of us think in this manner.

Well… while I was working hard on a backlink campaign for one of my clients tonight it hit me.  This Google Local Business Listing  thing is really going to have to be included as a marketing strategy for my clients. I mean to say that as of right now there are businesses out there that know absolutely nothing about Search Engine Optimization, and yet they are given a top “A through E” rank on Google maps for local search terms.  Of course we all know that the top 3 listings tend to get most of the clickthroughs. Most of these listings aren’t even put together very well, but they rank incredibly high nonetheless.

Since I tend to deal with more local business websites anyway this has now become a major goal of mine.  I want my clients to be FIRST in that directory for the given local search term that we deem profitable.  Think about it. When is the last time you asked yourself…. “Now where did I put that Yellow Pages Phone Book?”.

Bottom line… Google Local Business Listings IS the new “phone book directory”. What is more powerful is the fact that if one were to optimize their business listing correctly they would have the opportunity to dominate any major city without even needing as much effort as you would need if you were going for say a #1 Position building thousands of backlinks (in some cases – not all).

Not saying we should ditch our SEO efforts to only focus on local search terms, but we should certainly not overlook its potential for highly targeted visitors either.

The “Rank A Listing” is our new “#1 Position” to shoot for if you are a website that offers local services.

Just my thoughts.

=D

Evan Obijiofor is the webmaster of www.helpmysmallbusinesswebsite.com which offers small business website help.  Atlanta Website Design solutions don’t have to cost an arm and a leg. Contact him and get the help you need today.

Atlanta Website Design Advice, google, google local business results, link strategies

In case you hadn’t noticed every now and again you will see ten businesses in your area convenintly placed at the top of your search results by Google. Sometimes they are helpful, and other times not so much. Like seraching for “carribean beaches”, and getting businesses located on “Carrabean St.” as your top results.

But this brings me to my point. Everyone is so crazy about the right keywords for ones website that if  they maybe took a step back there can be a killing made by going after local search terms. For example, if you are a painting company why not invest the time to see which cities in your area have the highest search activity, and the create pages that focus on those areas – fully optimized of course.

It could be a lot smarter than going after broader search terms where you’ll find the bigger fish swimming.

Here is an interesting case study that can break this down for you even better.

http://www.seobook.com/local-seo-case-study

Until then give local SEO some thought it just could pay off for you.

Atlanta Website Design Advice, google, page optimization

Every webmaster always has getting faster page loads in the back of their minds when they are tending to their websites right? Most say that the average web surfer has the attention span of a fruit fly. In some cases surfers are so used to fast surfing that if they get to a page that is slower than the average it actually pains them to be patient enough to wait for the page to load. I guess we have been fully conditioned to expect speed when it comes to the internet.

The worst thing that can happen to you as a webmaster is to have a website where your visitors are leaving due to the page loading to slow. So our friends at Google have yet again come to the rescue. In case you haven’t noticed there is a new tool called the “Page Speed” tool (very creative right?) in your Webmaster Tools account.

You’ll find it in the “Labs” section in the “Webmaster Tools”

So what will this little widget do for you?

- It will check your overall page’s loading time with a visual representation of how the page has been loading all this time.

- Selects the pages that are giving problems. So you know which to focus on.

– Offers ways to improve those pages that are loading slow on your site.

Bottom line it will compare your website to standard page loading times, and then offer help to you in improving your pages. A faster page load after all will equal a happy web surfer experience which is Google’s goal at the end of the day anyway. It’s time to get those pages faster!

Evan Obijiofor is the webmaster of www.helpmysmallbusinesswebsite.com which offers small business website help.  Atlanta Website Design solutions don’t have to cost an arm and a leg. Contact him and get the help you need today.

Atlanta Website Design Advice, google, page optimization

As a webmaster I am always trying to keep up to date on the ways to keep my websites, and the websites of my clients as high on the search engine ladder as possible. So I was quite surprised when I came across a test ran by one of my favorite blog sites (www.seomoz.org) that proved that links with the “Nofollow” attribute may indeed carry more weight than Google leads us to believe.

What they did in a very clever nutshell…

They tested 5 popular methods of PageRank sculpting which included:

Rel=‘nofollow’ - The standard mechanism for nofollowing a link. <a href=’http://www.example.com’ rel=‘nofollow’>example</a>

Link Consolidation – Consolidating low priority pages. You can read more about link consolidation here.

Iframe - Include a standard link in an iframe that is blocked via robots.txt or meta robots so engines can’t follow it.

Javascript – An external Javascript file (blocked from robots) that inserts links into divs when the page renders.

Control Case – Null test with standard links.

They then built 5 websites similar in structure, but unique in content of course.  Each website utilized the methods of PageRank sculpting listed above. They then duplicated this 8 times over, and let it run for 2 months. Any takers as to what the actual results were?

Find out below. The results of their experiment may have you scratching your head…lol

TEST RESULTS

Evan Obijiofor is the webmaster of www.helpmysmallbusinesswebsite.com which offers small business website help.  Atlanta Website Design solutions don’t have to cost an arm and a leg. Contact him and get the help you need today.

Atlanta Website Design Advice, google, link strategies, pagerank

Have you ever wished that your Google results had twitter updates in them?

Well don’t count the possibility out just yet.  Word is Google has already been testing ways to incorporate having tweets show up in their search results. Example would be:  Go to Google and search for “Avatar” the movie, and all of a sudden you would have tweets from the actors in the film, or advertising tweets from movie theaters in the Atlanta area.

Sounds like an awesome idea right?

Well there is a dark side to all of this. One of which would be spammers would have a field day. There are no safe guards in place for Google to be able to have a handle over all the spammers that would open their thousands of Tweet accounts to promote Viagra, and magically have their Tweets appear as number 1 on the search engines. Oh…did I say search “engines”…yea both BING and YAHOO are in a race to incorporate this into their search results as well.

So maybe having a twitter account might not be so bad after all if you are a small business website owner. If you are destined to achieve results such as landing top placement on the search engines. Fortune here we come!!

You can read more here:

Google may increase potential for libel by including Tweets in search results

Google Enables Real Time Spam and More

Evan Obijiofor is the webmaster of www.helpmysmallbusinesswebsite.com which offers small business website help.  Atlanta Website Design solutions don’t have to cost an arm and a leg. Contact him and get the help you need today.

Atlanta Website Design Advice, google, twitter