By Richard V. Burckhardt

Trying to see your way past all of the local search results? Here are some SEO tips.

This is a boon to local businesses as they now have the opportunity to appear on page one of the Google serps through their Google Places profiles. Of course, this is a big, fat middle finger pointed at non-local web-only sites without the local offices and locations that many of the big chains can leverage. (Image below)

Emphasis on local means fewer organic results appearing above the fold.

So, what is a web-based site to do? Here are five SEO tips that I have come up with to cope with this love affair with local that Google is having. I’m hoping that readers will contribute some of their own.

1. Stay in the Top 3: Yeah, this is a no-brainer, but Google has put the pressure on more than ever before to keep top rankings. They’ve always been the goal, but now they are a must. You can’t be content with being in the top five anymore.

2. Leverage Universal Search: Remember that all kinds of media can appear in the serps – video, images, news, etc. Optimize for all. You might not appear in the top three, but your images or videos might appear somewhere on the page. The more exposure for you, the better. (See image below)

3. Go for the Longtail: The local search results appear to come up more frequently for less specific queries like “tires” and not for more specific information like “snow tires” so optimize around keyword phrases for related queries. (See image below)

4. Cozy up to your PPC person: Do some research using Google Correlate and Google Trends and find out where you might want to target local PPC campaigns. This is a perfect example of SEO and PPC working together. For example, according to Google Trends, Burlington, VT would be the top city searching for “snow tires” so that might be a good target for local PPC if you sell that type of tire. And, of course, Google will be more than happy to take your ad money!

5. Submit a feed: If you offer items that qualify for Google Merchant Center, create and submit feeds so that you have the opportunity to appear in the Google Shopping results. Frequently these are at the bottom of the page, but sometimes they are higher up. Again, it’s one more opportunity for exposure on page one of results. (See image below)

Local search results don't appear to kick in on more specific queries.

OK, that’s what I have come up with so far. I’d love to hear ideas from readers, so please, post them here.

This is a post from The Web Optimist – SEO in The Desert.

+Richard Burckhardt

Five Non-Local SEO Tips is a post from: SEO in The Desert | More about Palm Springs SEO

By Wayne Barker

What will the new year bring for your SEO?

So what is going to be big for SEO in 2011? In my opinion two of the biggest changes that have occurred this year were the changes to Google Places and the Google Page Previews. If you are unaware of what these are then I suggest you continue to read. If you are already familiar with the changes you need to make sure you are one step ahead of the crowd and get your thinking caps on.

The changes to Google Places

One day it was all fine and the next…Google made a massive change to the way they return the search results for location specific queries. It was a massive change and if you haven’t already it is time to start thinking about how you carry out your local SEO.

There were three major way in which the search results changed:

• The map for the old 7 or 10 pack jumped over to the right and started to scroll down the screen as you did (most of the time anyway – it looks like this may be dependent on screen resolution)
• If you had good organic SEO (and if it was locally good organic SEO that was a plus) we started to see blended results in the search engine results
• We started to see extra information in these blended results, this included addresses, photos, reviews and a link to your Google Places page

This was a huge leap for Google (and as normal panicky SEOs, well, panicked) but there are some steps that you should take if you have any localised search queries for your site. So for 2011 it is time to get local:

1. If you haven’t yet (if not, why not?) claim your Google Place page listing and get it verified via a quick phone call.
2. Optimise your Google Place page – you need to make sure it is 100% complete (include photo, video and the oft missed extra services section at the bottom)
3. Make sure your Places page has both a localised telephone number and address – you are not going to rank without them.
4. Make sure you have local signals in your organic SEO (the usual places – Title Tags, Meta Descriptions, Alt Tags, Headings, Copy)
5. Get your address and LOCAL telephone number in the footer of every page. If you have freephone or toll free numbers hide them in an image.
6. Make sure your Google Places pages have relevant categories – i.e. make sure that you choose two that Google recognises.
7. If you aren’t already get featured in local directories, try and get mentioned on the site of the local newspaper or government (and a link would be nice)
8. Actively seek out reviews from customer and point them towards the big review sites like yelp, tripadvisor or the ones that are relevant to your business.
9. Get on the sites that provide local data to Google.

Exhausted with the local stuff? It isn’t over yet! A lesser change that recently happened in Google that I feel is worthy of mention is the recent addition of the Google Page Preview. It could turn out to be another game changer for 2011.

Google Pages Preview

You may have noticed a little magnifying glass appearing next to the search results, you guys in the US saw this before us in old blighty (you always do!) Well hovering over the little magnifying glass will give you a nice big preview of the page before you even visit the site – which is great, or is it.

Screen shot of the new Google Page Preview feature.

If you think about it from an SEO point of view, now the searcher has an extra factor to consider before visiting your site. Before if you had your content right and the SEO right you could get onto the first page (maybe!). If you had a compelling Meta Description that backed up the content and the SEO then maybe you could further encourage people to click.

Now they get to see what the site looks like before they choose to click through to your site. We all love to say that beauty and aesthetics don’t influence our decisions that much but who are we kidding Design should not be a strong part of your SEO plan. Simple colours, appealing design – the box isn’t that big so you need to keep it simple to attract and pull searchers in. At the end of the day if a searcher isn’t convinced by the title and description of the search results the design could be a massive deal breaker.

It’s worth thinking hard about.

This article is an original post from The Web Optimist – SEO in The Desert.

What’s Going to be Big for SEO in 2011? is a post from: SEO in The Desert | More about Palm Springs SEO

Does your business have multiple locations? Does each local location want to do its own PPC marketing? Then each local site needs its own domain to do local paid search marketing.

Quick SEO Tip: Domains for Local PPC is a post from: SEO in The Desert | More about Palm Springs SEO

It's easy to forget these simple, yet frequently overlooked SEO tips.

Create a robots.txt file. This is a simple text file telling the spiders what they can crawl. Assuming you want the entire site spidered, it’s as easy as typing this into Notepad and saving it as robots.txt:

User-agent: *
Disallow:

Drop it in the root of your site. Without a robots.txt, Google reports an error when trying to access the non-existent file. This will take care of that.

Naturally, the robots.txt is much more powerful that this, but so many sites flat out don’t have one at all. More on the many uses of robots.txt can be found at http://www.robotstxt.org/.

Get local. If you haven’t already, register your site in Google Local Business Center at http://www.google.com/local/add. It’s free and gives your site the opportunity to possibly show up in local business results listings in Google search (like the map area below).

Sign up for the Bing version as well at https://ssl.bing.com/listings/ListingCenter.aspx.

Customize the 404 page. This is the page that appears when someone tries to go to a non-existent page on a domain. You can currently find it by trying to get to any page on your site that you know doesn’t exist. Instead of a scary Server Error (insert blood curdling scream here) default 404 page appearing, create a sitemap page with a directory of your pages. Link to this in your footer as your Sitemap and use a non-spidered copy as your 404 page (Frequently this can be done in your web hosting control panel or by uploading a 404.html page). This will help keep visitors on your site by giving them a chance to find what they are looking for and it also creates a table of contents for the search engine spiders to follow.

You’d be surprised how many great sites I have come across that somehow missed these, so here’s a quick reminder!

Read the Spanish translation: Tips de SEO, simples, y frecuentemente olvidados

This article is an original post from The Web Optimist – SEO in The Desert.

Simple, Frequently Forgotten SEO Tips is a post from: SEO in The Desert | More about Palm Springs SEO

If there is any part of SEO that is currently ripe with opportunity it’s Local Search. A huge portion of search is for information local to the searcher (Palm Springs movies, Houston pizza, etc.), but a ton of local mom & pop businesses simply don’t know that there is such a thing as “local” search. Many folks think that search is, well, search!

So, now is the time to take advantage of this lack of understanding about local search and get your business in there! It takes more than just a web site targeted to a local audience. Rather, you need to know about about how local search works.

For instance, searchers are basically lazy and tend to search for a city name rather than narrowing down to a neighborhood or zip code, so instead of “pizza 92262″ they’ll start their search with the city as in “palm springs pizza” as the query.

Also, take a look at what you get in a local search result:

So, let’s jump into some tips to help you with your local search optimization.

1. Include your physical address. Make sure it is on every page on your web site. if you think slapping a postal address into the HTML address meta tag will help you get found in local search, think again.

2. Be central. Unfortunately, the search engines tend to focus on the city center, meaning that the first results that come up for a search like Boston bars will be those in center city. If you’re lucky enough to be centrally located, you’ve got a leg up on the competition. If not, you could try getting a mailing address that is centrally located, but the search engines will definitely frown on that. All it takes is one disgruntled person going to that location and finding a mailbox to report you. And, businesses without street addresses can’t get listed in Google local listings.

3. Optimize your web site. Regular SEO can have an influence. Be sure to use the name of your city in your content (our Palm Springs office, not just our office). Use your city name in your image ALT attributes and anchor text. See my S E O 101 series for general optimization tips. Make sure your classic SEO is location specific.

4. Optimize your local listing. In Google, go to Local Business Center. For Yahoo!, go to Yahoo! Local. For MSN (or Live or whatever they call themselves today), go to Windows Live Local Listing Center. Fill out the forms with all relevant information. Provide links, web pages, photos and coupons if available.

5. Get reviews. Reviews can have an effect on how you rank in the results. Lots of good reviews can only help you. Enlist friends, customers, relatives, business partners or whoever you can to write good reviews to get you started, but don’t spam. You’ll get caught.

6. Get listed in trusted sources. The search engines pull some reviews and listings from what they consider trusted sources like Superpages, Yellow Pages, Info USA, Localeze and Yelp. Some are free, some are for a fee, but listings in these can help. In Yahoo, del.icio.us rankings might also have some influence.

7. Make sure your data and category are accurate in #4 & #6 above.

8. A keyword-rich domain name can’t hurt.

9. Do local videos. These tend to have great click-through rates and can come up in Google blended results.

10. Cross link with maps on a trusted site like Mapquest.

11. Create a local listing for all locations. If you have more than one, don’t just create a local listing for the main one. Get them all in there!

As always, this barely scratches the surface of local SEO and is intended to get you started in the right direction. I go into more detail in my SEO workshop, offered to web site owners and small businesses. Check my blog at http://www.weboptimist.com for more information or contact me to set up a custom workshop for your business group of five or more people in the Palm Springs area of Southern California. Travel is possible for large groups.

This article will be updated periodically.

See my related S E O 101 posts .

SEO 101: Local Search Optimization is a post from: SEO in The Desert | More about Palm Springs SEO