Below find an info-graphic on how this is rolling out in the area of link building. This is from the esteemed (IMO) Aaron Wall over at seobook.com – highest recommendation to read his blog for more search geek wisdom BTW.

The challenges of link building continue. These are highly problematic challenges for small businesses. These are challenges that we research and experiment with, untangle and solve every day.

SEO Infographic by SEO Book

[mc src="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPJ5meBPxNI" type="youtube"]Finding Your Google Place Link[/mc]

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.

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:

[mc src="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnfOTfjOOqM" type="youtube"]Giving Google Places Reviews[/mc]

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.

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.

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

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.

[mc src="http://www.youtube.com/v/eU6-0W9PTqQ" type="youtube"]Google Keyword Tool[/mc]

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.

Part 2 – Planning With Naming in Mind

Nomenclature – A site URI web address that looks like www.your site.com/?=zlsi43yrsbc is missing a large search engine signal as to what the indicated page is all about. Compare that to www.yoursite.com/widgets or even www.yoursite.com/index.php?tpl=widgets These naming conventions are both easier for search engine spiders to understand and more importantly, for your readers to understand.

Now the “official” word from the search engines is that they parse and understand any sort of web address that you use. While that may be the case, the reality is that we see over and over that the best rankings are for sites with easy to understand naming conventions.

In competitive business niches, sometimes we are competing with other SEO teams who are matching us step for step in optimizing. We’ve seen that this seemingly small change (easy to setup beforehand — a ton of work once the site is already online!) can allow us to rank better.

An important part of this process is to map out in advance, what categories of site sections you are going to have. There are the obvious: about us, privacy policy, etc. pages as well as the different aspects of your business. How do you decide what to name them?

For many of the businesses that I’ve worked for over the years, the naming of sections use accepted industry jargon. Why not, everyone in the business uses the same language right? Over and over, I’ve seen after doing keyword research that the customers do not use the same words! Going with the industry jargon is costing you money.

In my opinion, it is critical to do or have done keyword research prior to deciding on your naming of site sections. If you use the words and descriptions that new customers use when searching, your site will rank higher, sooner and easier.

Plan your naming convention to be easy for customers to understand and the search engines will like it better too!

In Part 3 we will address keyword research.

The overall simplified description of how to get good rankings is more content, more links. Let’s dig into those concepts and then see how much deeper the rabbit hole goes.

Part 1 – Planning With Content in Mind

More Content – You probably have a core set of pages for your site that you agonized over getting just right. However, most business sites that I see have far too little content. One of the core reasons that we like blogs as your website is that they make it much easier to add more content to your site.

Fresh, unique content can come from a number of angles. There’s news, reviews of others content, your take on the latest issues in your industry, new developments in your business, how to articles, expert information articles, video articles and audio articles.

You can also add press coverage that you receive, image sections, reviews, even story and testimonial sections to your website. You can have user generated content in the form of comments, and forums.

The more content you add, the more hooks you develop that might grab traffic and search engine indexing. Most people don’t realize that search engines rarely index all of your site; if they do and the information isn’t evergreen, it often is supplanted by fresher, more authoritative content, and then search engines will delete your content from their database.

The problem search engines face is that there is too much content being made for them to find, store and make sense of it all. It takes to much processing power and time. Many people are still coming online and creating new websites.

The bigger problem is that there’s just too much crap from the article spinners, content factories, content scrapers, software generated content, multi translated content, etc., etc., all built to fool the search spiders. They cannot index it all. So search engines take shortcuts. They don’t index all of your site unless there’s specific signals that guide them to index it… We’ll get to those later.

A good working strategy is that when you create new, valuable, interesting and unique content you attract both humans (traffic and links) and the search spiders, and that spurs greater indexing of your website.

Plan your site to have easily added sections that you will add content to. More unique content almost always gives you a big advantage over your competition.

Part 2 Directory Naming

• Boost your local authority with the Google Local Business Center (Google Places)
• Gets relevant local links about your business to your website
• Being listed in these increases your chance for a customer review on the sites that offer that increasingly important feature
• Each of these directories get visits and your listing will be seen and you’ll get more visitors

One of my favorite online bloggers on local search and online marketing is Tom Crandall of Phoenix. His blog is called SemReportCard. His posts are long and detailed… kinda like some of mine – but his are filled with more meat!

Tom recently published a killer article on 30+ Online Business directories To Ramp Up Your Local Search Marketing Campaign . It’s good and his illustrated explanations of how it works are worth a read.

Unfortunately, most of the Directories cited in his article are US only… we just don’t seem to be worth the effort up here in the frozen north. That’s OK; we’ll be friendly as heck while we do our best to dominate the upcoming Winter Olympics.

Here’s our list of 24 or so Canadian/Vancouver useful citation sites that we use for our clients… Most of these links go to the signup page and some you’ll have to look for!

If you have any to add, post them in the comments below!

411.ca
Shop in Canada
Canada Direct info
CanPages
ZipLocal
WebLocal
AllPages for BC
GreaterVancouverWebDirectory
GoLocal BC
BC Business Directory
Profile Canada
Vancouver Net
Really Made in Canada
Canada Space
Local Vancouver
Genie Knows
Vancouver Web Search
Shopping Finder
Hot Frog
Daki Taki
N49
Brownbook Canada
Find Here
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