Your Google Place page link is needed when you ask your customers to give you reviews on that page. It can be hard to find. Below is a video that walks you through how to find it.
One of the continuing challenges that we've found that local business owners face with online marketing is the endless complexity of how the technology companies have set things up.
Why does it have to be so damn complicated? Seriously… why? I surely don't know; what I do know is that it certainly hasn't gotten any better since I started online in 1994. It seems like the rule is that everything has to have it's own unique way of doing things – intricate little steps, convoluted pathways, secret gotcha's. By everything I mean hosting, video, email, software, wordpress, etc., and don't even get me started about seo!
So to attempt to make things a bit easier to navigate, please check out the above video showing how to access your Google Place page link. You need this link in order to send it to your customers, in order for them to give you a review.
Remember: Google Places Reviews are very important; both for your local search rank and to get more customers into your business.
Filed under Blog, Local Search, SEO Ranking, Website Conversion by . 
Giving Google Places Reviews
The interweb is moving ever more towards a social environment; ideally a place where your opinion and insight is both valued and effective.
One of those places where it can have a big effect is in Google Places which are found in Google Maps. (I know its complicated but they're engineers and they love complicated stuff…)
A small business that has more customer reviews will generally benefit by ranking higher in local search. Frankly if they are doing a good enough job for you to review them, I think they deserve a better, higher ranking.
Here's a quick video on just how to do it:
Filed under Local Search, SEO Ranking by .
One of my clients asked me some great questions recently…
Does the link building have to be done every month? If I don’t do it every month, does that mean my site will fall by the wayside again?
Once a site is optimized, does a person have to keep re-doing the optimization? If they don’t keep paying an SEO… does it mean the site will again fall into ether-land?
Below Are My Answers:
Think about your online efforts – website, optimization, link building and Facebook, etc. as marketing and advertising. In comparing and assuming the ads work, if you stop buying ads, do they still keep working?
You stop buying ads and the customers you get from the ads stop! So it all takes maintenance and attention… either you do it or you hire someone.
Link building gets it's best results to increase your position on all search engines from being ongoing. Just like your website is never done, adding links to your website is never done either.
If you were to just not do any link building, your site would eventually fall in rank for 3 main reasons – 1. Google gives sites with increased links and new content better ranks; 2. The competition is doing online marketing, and… 3. Some of the old links will disappear.
Your rank comes from the content on your site and the links to that content. That's the big picture. There are lots of details after that but in the big scheme, continually adding content and getting more links to your site will keep your rank growing or stable.
A simplified but useful way of looking at things is to examine your current linking. In this case, the site being discussed shows about 60 links right now… (these numbers are approximate from Yahoo Site Explorer)
To compare, the top 10, page one SERP competition for "keyword term" pages – range from 70 to 7,000 links to that page on their sites (not the whole site.) To get you on the first page for that term we have to get you more than 70 links to your subject page. That guideline applies to each page and subject.
We could build you thousands of links in the next week, but I know that will get your site sandboxed (penalized) by Google, ie. not showing at all in search. We do it gradually, safely and through watching the traffic, attend to each part of the site as needed.
Another thing to keep in mind is what will the competition do in response to your increase in web marketing? Chances are they are going to spend more money and time optimizing and advertising! It's competitive out there.
For instance, I know from many conversations that business people are pulling their ad money from YellowPages and using that to do online marketing. Google and Facebook are the new YellowPages for local small businesses.
Once your pages are optimized there is no need to redo them. We don't use any gimmicks – what we do on-page works now and for many years to come.
What about you? What do you think?Filed under Blog, Link Building, SEO Ranking by .
Filed under Blog, Local Search by .
Local Google Plymouth « Local SEO Tips and Website Design Plymouth …
Google Places prefers a local phone number, not an 800 number, and it needs to be the same number that appears on the front page of your website and elsewhere on the web…just like the name and address. …
Publish Date: 06/30/2010 14:19
http://www.abfabnewmedia.co.uk/google-local-plymouth-devon/
When our company optimizes your Google Places listing, we start with these basic steps and then do a lot more: like getting many citation links, making kml and hcard files for your site, optimizing your site for speed, making and distributing videos about your business… and even more.
It's a lot of work, but that is what produces results in an increasingly competitive online market.
Agree or disagree?Filed under Local Search, SEO Ranking by .
More Smartphone Owners Using Local Search And Social Networking …
More people are increasingly using their smartphones for local search, social networking and gaming, according to a new survey from Compete. Nearly one in three smartphone owners has called or stopped into a local business after finding it using a loc… … SEO Keyword local search …
Publish Date: 07/06/2010 12:23
http://www.internet-marketing-tips.bobbybeaulieu.com/11463/more-smartphone-owners-using-local-search-and-social-networking
If you think of anything I left out of this post, please feel free to put that on the comment.Filed under Local Search by .
Site Navigation
One of the most powerful things you can do to make your site rank is how links are distributed ***within your site!*** While most of the SEO advice on the internet is talking about "on-page" factors, sitemaps and link building, etc., (and these are important…) the site navigation that you build your site with and then use to focus attention from customers and the search engines is one of the most important SEO steps you can take.
Planning With Site Navigation in Mind
One way of looking at it is like this. What site naturally has major authority in the given subject area you are covering? Yours! So internal links to and from your most "important" pages will help other pages on your site rank.
Shaun Anderson over at Hobo SEO use an easy to understand analogy to describe this. Think of links like a heat transfer system.
To quote, "Links are like lasers. When you link to a page, you heat the page you are linking to. If your site was measured in heat, you could see the heat-map of your site pages, once all the links have been accounted for.
Links to a Page Heat It Up
You control where the heat is by which pages you you choose to link to and by which pages you link from – it’s a simple premise which seems to get results.
Once you have created a search engine friendly navigation system for your website and Google has crawled and indexed it, you now have “hot” and “cold” pages according to Google.
Internal Links Transfer the Most Heat
Hot pages are created when you link to them. The more you link to them the hotter they get. The more links to a page from the others, the hotter that page.
Typically, you’re home page is hotter than the rest of the site, and indeed this is generally the hottest page on the site. In my example, I only have a couple of real sales pages – the rest are just introductory pages to my sales pages – these are generally a bit more targeted and geared to the theme of this site – seo. Anybody interested in my services or looking to hire the company will definitely want to read these pages so I make sure I tell Google, these are important pages I’d actually like the visitor to be presented with.
In the model above, I wanted to ensure my sales pages were the hottest pages on the site, so made sure my site tells the search engine this. If I can’t be bothered telling a search engine what’s the most important pages on my site, can I expect Google, Yahoo or MSN to figure it out for themselves? Actually, Google wants you tell them what’s the hottest pages on your site in Webmaster Tools these days.
Sure, you want as many pages in the main index as possible. A new site however doesn’t have a lot of heat to spread around, so ensure your sales pages are optimized properly and are the hottest pages in your structure, because odds are some pages will be marked “cold” and put into the supplemental index.
Cooler pages can be drawn into the main index by increasing the heat of your site root by getting links from other websites – other hot spots.
You can heat up a cold page by linking to it from the home page.
I make sure my “hot pages” are as optimized as possible for the type of search engine result pages I’m chasing at any given time.
At the beginning of projects, I like to get a handle on which pages are or need to be hot, especially with new sites or sites without a lot of link-love. You can’t control much, but this you can do.
Thinking like this when I am thinking about navigation helps me, I think, build a site for visitors, which is the ideal scenario. I want visitors to see my sales pages. Same with Google.
Once you’ve optimized a site, it’s time to get those hot pages optimized for your main keywords and get some links from other sites."
Read more: Optimize Internal Website Navigation For Google | Hobo
What about you? What are your thoughts on this subject?Filed under Blog, Link Building, SEO Ranking by .
Keywords and Keyword Research
Keywords are the terms and phrases that your customers type into a search engine in order to find your product or service.
One of the most important things you can do to get free traffic online is to populate your site with the terms that your customers are using to find you.
Planning With Keywords in Mind
Search engines crawl or spider your site and store what they find. Once your site sends clear signals showing what it is all about, you will be found be people searching using keywords you have optimized for.
Unfortunately, these terms are not always what you, as the business owner think they are. The analogy I use is a hot dog cart. Where would you want to put your hot dog cart: in front of people who are full… or starving people?
This is where keyword research becomes important. Keyword research shows you where (the words they use) the starving people are (searching) for what you sell. The Google Keyword Tool is a fine place to start and it can get you going in the right direction. Using the tool is easy. Here's a video on how to use it.
It's labeled as an adwords keyword research tool, but it works just fine for natural search as well. The one serious fault with the tool is that it uses a bar graph to show an estimate of searches. Another free tool that is excellent and has a detailed training program of both text and video training is Market Samurai. Highly Recommended!
So you've found keywords and more importantly, keyword phrases… where do you use them?
First — you must have planned to have text on your pages. How much? 200 – 450 words per subject would be ideal.
Second — More is not better in this case. Do not optimize a page for more then 3 keywords and only that many if they are directly related. Our policy is to not go above 2 keyword phrases per page.
There are "on page" places to use keywords: in the Title tag in the html code; in the Meta description tag in the html; in the "H1" tag on the page; and in the written content, once or twice more.
Keyword research is one of the most time consuming tasks that an SEO company does. It's an art as well as a science to dig deep and find the intersect point of high traffic, high conversion and least competition.
In Part 4 we will discuss Site Navigation.
What about you? What are your thoughts on this subject?Filed under Blog, SEO Ranking by .
42 Ways To Use Video To Grow Your Business
Jimm Fox over at One Market Media has written a close to definitive post on about all the ways possible to use video to promote and grow your business. He didn't just list them; he added explanation for each of the 42 ways. Fantastic post!
Puzzled about using video in your business? How might it work? This post from Jimm will give you context and plenty of ideas. I've printed it out and will use it with clients from now on.
As Mark Robertson over at ReelSEO commented, I'm not so sure on the basis of the popularity and growth potential comments, but they are mostly accurate to my eye and the rest of the information listed there is pure gold.
I've summarized the 42 ways below here – but I encourage you to check out both articles for more!
Customer Reference Videos
1. Video Customer Testimonials
2. Video Success Stories
3. Video Case Study
4. Man-in-the-street Interviews
5. Customer Presentations.
Product and Service Promotions
6. Product Presentations
7. Product Demonstrations
8. Product Reviews
9. Visual Stories
Corporate Videos
10. Corporate Overview
11. Executive Presentations
12. Staff Presentations
13. Corporate facilities or equipment tour
Training and Support Videos
14. Training
15. Overnight expert videos
16. Just-in-time learning
17. Post sale support and maintenance videos
Internal Communications Videos
18. Internal Communications
19. Event/Conference and Trade Show Communications
20. Employee orientation
21. Health, Legal & Safety
Advertising, Marketing and Promotion
22. Commercials
23. Viral Video
24. Email Video
25. Infomercials
26. Content Marketing
27. Landing pages and micro sites
PR Support and Community Relations
28. Video Press Releases
29. PR Support Materials
30. Community Relations Video
Event Video
31. Event Presentation video
32. Round table Sessions
33. Q&A Expert sessions
Other Uses of Video
34. Recruitment Videos
35. VLOG
36. In Store Video
37. Company Lobby / Waiting Room Video
38. Mobile Video
39. Market research, focus groups and polling
40. Website FAQ Video
41. Video White paper
42. Video Magazine
As an added example (for inspiration), WIND Mobile just passed another hurdle to create another national mobile telephone provider here in Canada… Good on them! Here's one of their excellent videos from YouTube… this one cracks me up.