10 Practical Actionable SEO Tips To Boost Your Website Visibility

Today’s post covers ten practical actionable SEO techniques that can give your site a major boost and help it achieve better visibility in the major search engines. These observations are made by Whitespark, a SEOmoz member who attended the recent SEOMoz PRO Training series.

These tips are easy to implement and will suit a majority of the businesses on the web. With paid traffic getting more expensive with each passing day (and yet providing only 12% of traffic on the web), it is high time all website owners started ramping up their organic seo efforts. These tips will certainly help in improving a site’s natural search visibility which still accounts for 88% of the traffic on the web.

There are a few proprietary tools (created by SEOMoz) that are mentioned in the post. These tools do a great job of automating the mundane tasks thus saving valuable time and giving great results to help you plan your strategy. You have to be a paid PRO member to access these tools.

1) Request for a link in customer communications:
There are many opportunities arising in the course of a site owner communicating with a customer in the entire buying cycle. In your emails, you will be well advised to ask for a link in a courteous manner.

It could read – “If you have a website or blog, we would appreciate if you could link to us by copying this code Anchor text that suits your business.”
NOTE:
a) Vary the anchor text subtly in your emails
b) If possible, get links to your inner money pages

2) Use of Top Pages Tool To Identify Competitor’s Backlinks:
The Top Pages tool is a great way to see your competitor’s backlinks by just plugging in their site URL. The screenshot below helps you get an idea.

You can then create suitable linkbait that can attract links from those sites that are already linking to your competitor. Else, you can email the powerful domain owners and request for a linkafter you have referenced their site post or article on your own blog or your site. This will help answer the other domain owner’s question – “What is in it for me?” and thus incentivize her to link to your site.

3) Use Adwords Tool To Find Keywords That Have High Search Volume And Low Competition:
Many of us are prone to miss the obvious Adams in many things we do in life. This point is a classic example. In most cases, these money keywords are long tail keywords that can be optimised through on page factors and made to rank well in the major search engines.

A search for pet collar using the Adwords keyword tool results in the following screenshot:

The term

pet collar supplies

has a search volume of 49500 with limited advertiser competition. If your site is in the pet industry business, this will be a good keyword to target.

4) Use of Top Pages Tool To Find Linking Pages To Your Domain That Need A Redirect:
The Top Pages tool mentioned in (2) above is very useful to identify links from external sites to pages on your domain that are currently maybe showing a 404 Error or temporary redirects etc, whatever the case maybe.

You can then use 301 redirects to preserve and forward the inherent link juice on such pages to the latest updated versions on your site. I am reproducing a screenshot of the original post which clearly explains what I have written.

If you are the site owner, then the access to Google Webmaster Central will help you identify the 404 pages. It can be a problem if you are doing research for a potential client.

There is another instance where an entire domain has been 301 redirected to a new domain. If the old domain had pages with 404 errors, then a 301 redirect to them is still going to show up as 404 errors as far as Google is concerned. These are lost pages and will not show up in the Webmaster Tools when the new domain is analyzed.

But Top Pages tool does show up these lost pages. It is invaluable data to rectify the lost pages and gain their link juice by 301 ing them to the appropriate pages on the new domain.

5) Competitive Link Finder Tool To Build Your Site External Profile:
The new Competitive Link Finder tool released by SEOmoz is a powerful aid that helps you identify the linking sites that link to multiple competitors in your industry.

You have to plug in your site URL and atleast three of your competitor sites to get the best results. You can always email such domains that link to your industry competitors and get a link to your site as well.

6) Optimize Your Google Local Listings:
Google local listings are a huge asset for any business to be listed on the first page for the most representative search phrase of their industry. It is helpful if the business is physically located close to the city.

I have found that a good local backlink profile boosts a site on Google local search. This can be achieved by submitting to local directories and other businesses in the same local geographical location in which the business operates.

David Mihm is an authority on local search issues and his points at the SEOMoz Pro Conference are outlined below:
a) Claim your local listing on Google (even if you make a multiple submit). This is given more value by Google than a bulk upload that is susceptible to spam.

b) Use keywords in the business title when submitting a local listing. Avoid keyword stuffing the title.

c) Add custom categories that your business offers. This can be a helpful ranking factor. Use the maximum number of permitted custom categories.

d) Citations are the links of Google Local rankings. Get listed on Localeze, InfoUSA, Openlist.com, etc. Americans should check out this list of places to get citations

Others should check out David’s guides to citations in Canada, UK Citations, Citations in Australia and Continental Europe Citations

You can use the search engines to find even more citation sources:

• yourcity, st blog
• yourcity, st directory
• yourindustry, st blog
• yourindustry, st directory
• yourindustry yourcity, st blog
• yourindustry yourstate directory

7)Buyind paid advertisements on Google Content Network:
There is a tip on buying advertisements on sites listed on the Google Content Network. Sites listed there are maximising their revenue through Adsense and would be more open to paid link advertisements. It is each individual site owner’s call whether to adopt this strategy or not.

8. Increase Link Love By Becoming A Green Business:
If a business goes green online, it is a good way of attracting links from authoritative domains. There are many sites like Ethical Directory, EcoFirms.org, Guide Me Green etc willing to give your site a link provided it is a green one. This also reflects on a business owner’s willingness to be eco friendly. With global warming taking centerstage, this issue is all the more vital.

9) Work on Your Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO):
A good majority amongst us (especially in the SEO industry) are obsessed with rankings and traffic. Conversion of visitors into paid customers often takes a backseat. Ben Jesson’s CRO presentation provided a wealth of information and lot of food for thought.

You could make a good start by learning your customers’ needs once they land on your site. This can be done by implementing tools on your website from which you can learn what your customers are looking for.

Get some unbiased feedback from other folks who are not your friends or relatives. The more the site is torn to shreds, the better it is as an eye opener for you to take instant remedial action. A good list of tools for learning from your customers are:

• GoogleTalk Chatback (I just added this to my site and it is super easy to implement)
• Tell-a-Friend-King
• Kampyle
• iPerceptions 4Q
• Distilled Reputation Monitor
• CrazyEgg (I have used this, and it rocks)
• SurveyMonkey
• Ethnio
• ClickTale
• Google Website Optimizer

You would be well off checking these great Conversion rate optimization articles and sign up for the newsletter on their site.

10) Seth’s Marketing Opportunity Calculator:
To help you in your sales pitch efforts, it is worth your effort in taking a look at Seth’s Marketing Opportunity calulator. You can download his slides and spreadsheets at How to Win SEO Budget and Influence your CMO

Whitespark’s entire post titled 10 Valuable, Actionable, Take-Aways From the SEOmoz Pro Training Seminar is a great read on which this post is based.

My post titled Next Frontier In Search Marketing gives the traffic figures for seo and ppc.

Ravi Venkatesan is a senior SEO consultant at Netconcepts, anAuckland search engine optimisation company offering both natural search and Auckland pay per click marketing services to their customers in New Zealand and Australia.

Optimizing for Bing

Over at the official Bing blog, Principal Group Program Manager Rajesh Srivastava is offering up some tips on how to conduct search engine optimization (SEO) for their engine.

Much of Srivastava’s advice is your basic SEO tips that you would apply for Google or Yahoo! But for you beginners out there, drill these SEO principles into your head:

Develop great, original content (including well-implemented keywords) directed toward your intended audience
Use well-architected code in your webpages (including images and Sitemaps) so that users’ web browsers and search engine crawlers can read the content you want indexed)
Earn several, high-quality, authoritative inbound links
Bing has a Webmaster Center, similar to Google’s Webmaster Central. Use it to help Bing index your site and improve your results even further. Here are tips for using Bing’s Webmaster Center:

Review the Bing official guidelines for successful indexing document for various recommendations on technical and content issues as well as known problems that can affect your site’s rank
Visit the Webmaster Center blog to keep up with the latest information from the team (you can even subscribe to our blog’s RSS feed to automate this process)
Register all of your websites with Bing Webmaster Center tools, where you can use our tools to see all sorts of data to your website pertinent to webmasters
Participate in our Webmaster Center user forums to ask questions and provide us with feedback

Google Maps Dashboard a Boost for Local Businesses

Just a few weeks ago, Google announced the addition of a new analytics dashboard for local business owners. You can only see it if you log into your Google Maps profile, which means you must first claim and verify the Local Business Listing associated with your enterprise.

Why?

As people have moved online in their searches for local business information, Google has done a spotty job of providing it. Google Maps has come under criticism for having incomplete and inaccurate local business data. Ideally, every local business owner would claim, verify, and enhance information about their enterprise within Google Maps, serving to make the data much more trustworthy and up to date.

A couple of summers ago, Maps began a program to help with this by offering a few bucks to anyone who could get retailers and service providers to sign up for Local Business Listings. I don’t have the numbers on this. Since it was discontinued, I suspect it was not very successful.

It appears that Google’s main motivation behind its new analytics dashboard is to entice more business owners to claim their listings. However, aggressive intervention to control the worst of the spammers is needed, as well. It’s difficult to get people to play by the rules when competitors are gaining an unfair advantage by obviously thumbing their noses at them.

Dashboard Features

Maps’ new dashboard is similar to others we have seen from some online yellow pages, profile distribution services, and private enterprise solutions. The statistics it provides are rather basic and simple to understand:

• Top search queries people used to find your listing.
• How many people viewed the search engines’ results pages where your listing appeared.
• How many people clicked through to view your Maps listing.
• How many people clicked through to get driving directions to your location.
• Zip codes of the searchers who requested driving directions to your location.
• How many people clicked through to your Web site.

It’s very likely that Google will continue to add useful features to its dashboard, similar to the way it’s expanded the value of Webmaster Tools over the years.

Advantages

Google’s official blog post and video introducing the dashboard offer some suggestions as to how businesses might use what they learn from the dashboard. Resourceful entrepreneurs will undoubtedly find other ways to leverage it to their advantage.

Owners also gain other advantages by claiming their Local Business Listings. They are likely to get a bit of a boost in the Maps algorithm by providing this indicator of trust to Google. They are also assured that they are controlling the information displayed about their business, rather than leaving that up to someone else.

For Marketers

People seeking local business information are very likely to be in a buying mindset, but until now, it has been impossible to show business owners any meaningful data on this. As a marketer, I find the new dashboard’s greatest value to be the way I can use it to visually impress local business owners with the impact that search is having on their bottom line.

We’ve always said that people were searching online and buying offline. This data gives us a way to prove it. Few people are likely to ask for driving directions unless they are serious about getting in their vehicle and going to the location. With enough numbers about different cities and niches, we may eventually be able to come up with some meaningful metrics to use for benchmarking the impact of local online search independent of what happens on a company’s Web site.

What About Profile Distribution Services?

Go ahead and use one of the profile distribution services designed for local businesses. It will feed your data out to many places across the Web that you may not have the time to attend to manually. Most of the local platforms they push to will send you a bit of traffic and, when considered all together, they may send a nice chunk of targeted visitors to your Web site and/or your location.

Profile services make it easy to update your information in these places, as well, and will probably give you a few more citations that can help you to rank better in Maps. However, these should only be used to supplement your local efforts and not be your main avenue for local search marketing. In other words, don’t just pay your money, build a profile, and call it done. Most of you still need to do the work of managing your own profiles in Google Maps and Yahoo Local. This is where most people are searching for you, so it’s definitely worthwhile to put in the effort to get it right.

Are Phone Books Outdated?

06/16/09 – 03:12 PM

Associated Press

RSS Feed

No More Phonebooks?

The Public Service Commission will hold its regularly scheduled conference on Tuesday.

One of the items on the agenda includes a proposal by AT&T Florida to discontinue their policy of giving customers a printed copy of residential listings up front. Customers will continue to receive a copy of the yellow pages but must request a free copy of the white pages by calling the company.

This will be a cost savings and help to reduce waste. People are increasingly turning to the Internet to find local services and using sites like Facebook to keep up with personal contact information.

Even though physical phone book usage is on the decline across the nation, phone companies continue to print and deliver 540 million unsolicited directories a year. Although the decline in advertising that has plagued the rest of the publishing industry is affecting the yellow pages business as well, and many books are a lot thinner this year then they were in previous editions.

SEOBYLARS – ITS ABOUT TIME WE ALL MOVED INTO THE DIGITAL AGE! SAVE 50% OFF YOUR LOCAL ADVERTISING BY CALLING SEOBYLARS TODAY! 714-600-1865

ATT seeks to cut some 10 million White Pages phone books

More fingers are tapping through the telephone listings online, and fewer are flipping through the phone book.

So AT&T is taking advantage of the trend – and the fact that more young people are foregoing landlines for cellphones – to go green, and save money by providing printed versions of the White Pages only upon request.

On Tuesday, the Florida Public Service Commission is expected to consider AT&T’s request to exempt the phone giant from a requirement that it must furnish one copy of the residential listings to each of its roughly 10 million landline subscribers in the state. (In Palm Beach County alone, that’s about 1.6 million phone books that AT&T could save.)

The move is part of a national trend to which many states have already signed on. What’s more, key Florida consumer interest groups appear to have lined up behind it.

” I definitely think it’s a good idea based on phone calls I get from people saying that we don’t need this, and it would save a lot of paper,” said Lourdes Ferris, executive director of Keep Palm Beach County Beautiful.

But PSC spokesman Todd Brown said the commission staff has recommended against it. He said while there may be merit to the waiver request, AT&T Florida has not shown it would suffer the required “financial hardship” without the waiver.

Still, AT&T Florida plans to move ahead with a Yellow Pages-only distribution in four markets this fall: West Palm Beach; Jacksonville; Orlando; and Miami.

Come September, AT&T subscribers in those areas will receive a new Yellow Pages directory that will also include the business white pages and a CD-ROM of residential listings.

A paper copy will be provided upon request by calling a toll-free number. The pilot program is permissible under the rules because customers would receive the CD-ROM, Brown said.

Public watchdogs and the AARP have no objections, so far.

“I can certainly understand the desire to be greener and reduce printing,” AARP spokeswoman Leslie Spencer. “We would want to make sure that for those people who do not have computer access, for whom a CD-ROM would be meaningless, that they would receive adequate notification.

“If they were completely going to get rid of the White Pages,” she said, “that would be a problem.”

AT&T spokesman Don Sadler said in areas where the Yellow Pages-only delivery has been tried, an average of 1 percent of subscribers requested paper copies of the White Pages. Test markets have included Austin, Texas, and Atlanta.

Sadler, while declining to say how much money AT&T would save under the new system, said it makes sense to provide the White Pages only to customers who want it. “We are constantly looking at ways to balance the needs of our business with the impact we have on the environment,” he said. “This is one way we feel we can make an impact.”

Moreover, Sadler said demand for the White Pages continues to fall as more young consumers opt out of landlines.

“A lot of younger people are … sticking with cellphones, which are not listed in the White Pages directories,” he said.

The trend towards eliminating printed copies of the White Pages is taking hold around the country, with changes already taking place or pending in states including Kentucky, Ohio, North Carolina and Oklahoma.

Earl Poucher, spokesman for the Office of Public Counsel in Tallahassee, said this fall’s pilot plan notification is sufficient.

The toll-free number will be printed on the front of the Yellow Pages, and in four other spots in the directory and the CD-ROM.

SAVE 50% OFF YOUR YELLOW PAGE ADVERTISING BY MOVING TO DIGITAL MEDIA! CALL 714-600-1865 TODAY TO FIND OUT MORE!

Google to Test New Product Ads on Prize Real Estate

Getty Images

It’s all about the shoes (in product ads).

Local search on mobile up 51% in March

The new comscore report shows a dramatic move to local search on mobile devices. And across the board, local search-focused Internet brands have been developing mobile content at a feverish pace. AT&T Interactive has made a significant effort to expand its YELLOWPAGES.COM online experience across several mobile platforms.

The strongest growth in the category is coming from downloaded applications, followed by SMS at 72%. However, developers, carriers and device OEMs remain the least popular access mode for mobile access of local information. A marginally more often used channel for obtaining local information is SMS, with an impressive 72% growth rate. Overwhelmingly, though, the preferred mode to access local content remains the mobile browser.

Subscribers Accessing Local Mobile Content by Access Method(Three-Month Average Ending March 2009 vs. March 2008; U.S. Mobile Subscribers Age 13+)
	Number of Mobile Subscribers (MM)
	Mar-08	Mar-09	% Change
Any Access Method	21.5	32.5	51%
Browser	15.4	20.7	34%
SMS	6.8	11.7	72%
Application downloaded to phone	6.2	11.3	83%?
Source: comScore Mobile Local content defined as searching for information on maps, movies, business directories or restaurants.

Serge Matta, comScore senior vice president, says “…it would not be surprising within the next six months to see the number of people using downloadable applications surpass SMS for the accessing of local information via mobile devices… “

Among the various local content categories, the number of people accessing online directories has seen the greatest increase during the past year, followed by restaurants, maps, and movies.

Growth in Local Mobile Content by Genre (Three-Month Average Ending March 2009 vs. March 2008; U.S. Mobile Subscribers Age 13+)
Local Mobile Content Genre	Y/Y % Change
Online Directories	73%
Restaurants	70%
Maps	63%
Movies	60%
Source: comScore Mobile

Across the board, local search-focused Internet brands have been developing mobile content at a feverish pace. AT&T Interactive has made a significant effort to expand its YELLOWPAGES.COM online experience across several mobile platforms.

Local search brands seeking to capitalize on the trend are looking to mobile to extend consumer reach and attract incremental ad dollars. Joining YELLOWPAGES.COM within the past six months, Idearc’s Superpages, R.H. Donnelley’s DexKnows and Yellowbook’s Yellowbook.com have all released iPhone applications.

Deborah Eldred, Director, Mobile and Personalization for R.H. Donnelley concludes that “The mobile medium is an ideal fit for local directories… we have seen a significant increase in queries specific to visiting a local establishment, as people are looking for information about where to eat and what to do when they are out and about… they look to a trusted brand to provide the confidence that consumers need… “

CUT 50% 0ff your old telephone book advertising with SEObyLars’s Fast Search Local service.

For more info email lars@mrpersson.com

Need help promoting your business? Email me today lars@mrpersson.com

Microsoft Corp. filed a lawsuit against three people that it alleges committed a form of “click fraud” by improperly manipulating Microsoft’s online advertising service for profit.

Microsoft of Redmond, Wash., filed the suit in federal court in Seattle on Monday against three people and several corporations under their control. The suit seeks at least $750,000 in damages for an alleged scheme last year to drive up advertising costs for legitimate Microsoft advertisers while creating an advantage for the defendants’ own businesses.

Microsoft’s complaint alleges that three defendants in Vancouver, B.C. — Eric Lam, his mother Melanie Suen and his brother Gordon Lam — made more than $250,000 in profits through the scheme.

Reached by phone, Gordon Lam said he wasn’t aware of any lawsuit by Microsoft and refused to answer further questions. Eric Lam and Melanie Suen couldn’t be reached for comment.

Microsoft said it’s taking the action to crack down on click fraud, in which automated computer scripts or large groups of people click on online advertisements without having any interest in the services or product being advertised. The company alleges that the defendants engaged in “competitor click fraud,” one form of the ruse in which a perpetrator seeks to exhaust a competitor’s advertising budget while boosting the prospects of their own advertisements. Online advertisers pay based on how many users click on their advertisements.

Microsoft said starting last year that legitimate advertisers using its online advertising service began experiencing waves of fraudulent clicks on their advertisements, which were promoting auto insurance and virtual currency used in the online game World of Warcraft. After an investigation, Microsoft said it traced the source of the allegedly fraudulent traffic back to the defendants.

The scheme allowed advertisements for the defendants’ own Web sites to displace their competitors’ advertisements, creating higher traffic and revenue for the defendants businesses, Microsoft alleges.

Need help promoting your business? Email me today lars@mrpersson.com

Organic Search Click Growth Outpaces Paid Clicks

The results of an analysis of search referral activity to prepaid wireless sites shows that while both paid and organic search are driving increased referral activity, organic search is substantially outpacing paid search referrals on the whole, comScore noted, adding that this dynamic suggests that the underlying consumer demand for prepaid wireless services is not just being driven by paid search marketing expenditures.

The analysis also revealed that a few of the sites performed also particularly well in obtaining growth from organic search referrals compared with paid search referrals:

• Organic clicks to BoostMobile.com grew 31%, while paid clicks grew 11%;
• Organic clicks to MyCricket.com grew 123%, compared with 63% growth in paid clicks
• Organic clicks to MetroPCS.com grew 148%, compared with 17% growth in paid clicks.

Organic Search Click Growth Outpaces Paid Clicks

Need help promoting your business? Email me today lars@mrpersson.com