Archive for the ‘SEO’ Category

Here is a paraphrase of conversations I’ve had with several local businesses recently:

Them: “How do I get on the first page of Google?”

Me: “Show up in the local business results.”

In each case, these businesses have no real hope of cracking the first page of Google’s web results. They are relatively small, local businesses that sell products that are also sold by large national or international companies. These large companies have a much better shot at ranking well in Google web results and likely have significant search engine optimization (SEO) budgets as well. But in each case, Google is also including local listings along with web results for queries relevant to the businesses I’m talking to. Below is an example of the results I get from Google when I search for “office furniture”. You can see that in this case local listings show up after the third web result. Google shows local listings when it thinks I may be interested in finding something locally, and uses my IP address and other indicators to determine what “local” means to me. Sometimes local listings show up at the top, and sometimes they show up further down the page. While Google has had local listings for a while, they have been putting more emphasis on these listings in the last couple of years, and this trend is likely to continue. This is fantastic news for local business. (And kudos to Google for supporting local businesses in this way.)

It can take a bit of work to show up in the local listings. Depending on the search term and other variables, Google presents local listings in groupings of one, three, seven or ten. Assuming you are not the only business of your type in your area, the tasks below will help your listing to be among those top results.

Before getting to the list, there is one dynamic you should understand about Google local business listings. With local business listings, Google seeks to establish external verification of the content that appears on a business listing page (also known as a “Place Page”). Google uses public records of business data for verification, as well as business listings on yellow pages and other local sites. This verification process helps to prevent non-local or questionable businesses from showing up in the results, but it also means that you should be consistent in how you represent your name, address and other information about your business. For example, if your business name is ACME Plumbing, but you write it as “ACME Plumbing and Free Beer” in Google Place Pages, Google may not be able to verify your business name elsewhere, which could hurt your ranking.

I have organized the work in to a to-do list format, with explanations pertaining to each to-do list item. I also created a simple PDF to-do list for printing, without all of the explanations.

1. Claim your listing: if your business has been around for a while, Google probably already has a listing with basic information. If your business is relatively new, they may not. In either case, you need to claim your listing to be able to edit most of the elements described here. Here is a post I did a few months back describing the basics of claiming a listing: Adding a Google Local Business Center Listing
2. Enter Your Business Information
   1. Pick an Address – you may not have much choice about this, but you will be better off if you can specify an address in the largest town or city in your area. Google favors listings that are in the city a user searches, versus towns and cities nearby. This factor is so important that it may be worth considering opening an office or somehow establishing a central address if you are near-to but not in a big city. But don’t be deceptive, Google is on the lookout for businesses that falsify locations with P.O. boxes and such. It is also important that the address you specify is reinforced by mentions of your business on other sites. For more on this, see Citations below. Google also allows you specify service areas for your business, but at the time of this writing doing so is more likely to cause harm than good.
   2. Pick Categories – the categorization of your business listing is very important. Google uses categories to associate product and service search terms with your listing, even if those keywords don’t occur in your description or elsewhere. Google allows you to come up with your own custom categories, but it’s best to stick with standard categories as much as possible. As you are typing in category keywords, Google will suggest categories that relate to the keywords. These are the categories Google recognizes, and are likely to match to a wide variety of search terms. If you do feel that your business merits its own category, only do so if the category you create is a phrase people are likely to search. And don’t choose or create categories that are not directly relevant to your business. If the categories you choose do not relate to your web site or descriptions of your business on other sites, Google may penalize your listing.
   3. Pick a Business Name – you should stick with your registered business name or a registered DBA, but keywords here do matter. For example, if you offer physical therapy but your business name is just “John Smith”, you could consider getting a DBA of “John Smith Physical Therapy” and specifying that as your business name.
   4. Write a Description – the description can have a lot to do with whether or not your business gets a visit or a phone call, so above all else it should describe what you do in an accurate and compelling way. Try to introduce relevant keywords that are not in your business name or category selections, and avoid repeating category keywords unnecessarily.
   5. Pick a Phone Number – it is better to have a local phone number than a 1-800 number in your listing. And it helps if the number you specify is consistent with your business listing on other sites. It is also good if the number is unique to your business, so if you operate more than one business get more than one phone number.
   6. Add a Website Link – it is best if the link you specify points to a page that includes your business address. A “contact us” page is often a good choice, or if you have multiple locations you should create landing pages for each location and point to those with the corresponding Place Pages for those locations.
   7. Add Additional Details – Google allows you to add “additional details” to your listing such as brands carried or specific services. This is a great place to add lists of services offered or products carried, but don’t use this feature to repeat keywords you’ve already used in your categories or description.
3. Add photos: the completeness of a listing has an impact on ranking, and photos are an important part of being complete. As far as the ranking algorithm goes, the photos don’t have to be particularly good or interesting, but your goal is not just to rank, it is to have people visit or contact you. Many business owners upload poorly composed photos taken with a phone or similar low-fi device. It is worth making a little effort to get photographs that stand out. Google Place Pages are not very attractive on their own; good photos can help your listing convert visitors in to customers.
4. Add a Coupon: adding a coupon won’t do a lot for your ranking (it will do a little), but it gives visitors to your page a reason to take action, and helps turn comparison shoppers in to buyers.
5. Check for Completeness: as mentioned above, one of the metrics Google looks at when ranking listings is overall completeness. Make sure that you have filled out all of the information fields that are relevant to your business, and added additional content where possible.
6. Ask Your Friends to Review Your Listing: Google’s Place Pages UI feels like it is designed by robots and for robots. It is easy to get caught up in their drab world and forget that your goal is to share the excitement of your business with prospects. Have your friends look over your listing to make sure you are capturing what makes your business great.
7. Enjoy a Cold Drink and Wait for Our Next Checklist!

Extra Credit

1. Create a Video: while video belongs as part of a complete listing, I put it under Extra Credit because video takes effort to produce and plenty of listings do very well without video. Having video does not have a big impact on ranking, but video content can make your listing much more personal and it may be easier to create than you think. Production values are much less important than sincerity in a context like this. Below is an example of a small business video that has been wildly successful, with over 200,000 views. It is a bit over the top, but I also think there is a good lesson to be learned. Let your passion show and people will respond. You probably don’t need to swear as much as the man in the video, but he does make me believe he loves printing and I would give him my business if he was in my area.
2. Get Citations: It will also have a big impact if you get more listings and mentions of your business online. Being listed on the major directory sites and local sites such as Chambers of Commerce and local guides will help your Google Place Page ranking. If you have not done so already, create listings on the sites included in our article Top 10 Free Places to List Your Business. Also have a look at the David Mihm, Dave Cosper and Rand Fishkin articles below for more ideas on how to get mentions of your business.
3. Get Reviews: When you ask customers for feedback about your business, point them to an online review site such as Yelp or Superpages.com or your Google Place Page and ask them to provide feedback there. Google crawls many sources for reviews, so reviews almost anywhere can benefit your Place Page ranking. Some businesses are nervous about online reviews because a bad review can just sit out there forever-and-ever. If you are one of those, get over it. By encouraging your customers to review your business, the sum of feedback will provide a fair portrayal of how you are doing and you will appeal to a new generation of shopper that values reviews above all else. For more on soliciting reviews, see our article Unhappy Customer: Judge, Jury and Executioner?.

Click Here for the Printer-Friendly PDF To-Do List

Additional Resources:

• Local Search Ranking Factors – Various Contributors
• 8 Steps to Building an Optimized Local Business Listing – Dev Basu
  This is the 3rd article in a series of three. The first two are worth reading as well and linked-to from the top of this article.
• One Dead Simple Tactic for Better Rankings In Google Local – Rand Fishkin
• Local vs Traditional SEO: Why Citation Is the New Link – David Mihm
• Optimizing Your Business Listing for Local Search Supremacy – Dave Cosper

Google released an algorithm change early this month that has been dubbed “Mayday”. The name references the timing of the release, but it also describes the panic expressed by many SEO consultants who have invested much time and effort into optimizing sites according to their theories of how Google’s crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms work.

SEO forums such as WebmasterWorld are abuzz with the prattling-on of search engine optimizers who are debating how to take advantage of this latest update. I can’t respond to this chatter any better than the excellent advice of Vanessa Fox on Search Engine Land:

Focus on what Google is trying to accomplish as it refines things (the most relevant, useful results possible for searchers) and you’ll generally avoid too much turbulence in your organic search traffic.

On the heels of this update I have had various conversations with local businesses who hope to achieve top ranking for competitive keywords. To those businesses I have two pieces of advice:

1. Play to your strength – focus on local optimization.
2. Invest in content, not SEO.

Play To Your Strength

Google and other search engines are getting increasingly better at recognizing local intent in user’s queries. For example, if I do the query “industrial supply”, I get Google local results after the first two listings. I was talking to a client recently who has a small business selling industrial supplies and hoped to show up on the first page of results. Maybe it would be possible for a small business to show up on the first page of organic results, but not without a considerable investment in link-builing and content development. On the other hand, the competition for local results is not that strong.

Many SEO consultants will take your money and do their best to improve your ranking in the organic results, but the return on investment is likely to be much better for local optimization, and you are less vulnerable to the whims of the next Google update. Look for a marketing consultant who has experience with local optimization, or read up on Mike Blumenthal and Matt McGee and work on it yourself.

Invest In Content, Not SEO

Or, at least, invest more in content than SEO. The goal of a search engine is to deliver the page that best matches a user’s query. There are a number of best practices that help ensure that a search engine can crawl your content, and that you are getting credit for the good content you offer. But pick any one of those and I can find an example of a page with good content that doesn’t comply and still shows up in the top results. It is possible to game search engine algorithms and rank well with poor content, but the safer and better long term investment is to provide content that is useful to searchers.

I was responsible for SEO for the social/local community Guidespot.com (my involvement ended about a year and a half ago), and we did incredibly well in organic search. But my job was easy, because we were investing a lot in fostering good content. If you are striving to achieve a top ranking, you should ask yourself if your content is more comprehensive, funnier, more informative, more engaging or in some way better than all of the other content on the web. If not, you are polishing a turd, as the expression goes.

I don’t think it is possible to give an exact ratio, but if your SEO budget is more than 1/10th of what you spend on content, you are probably spending too much.

In summary, you should not care about any given algorithm update if you are a small, local business. Focus on showing up well in local search before trying to compete with large, national businesses in the organic search engine results, and invest in good content on your web site if you want to attract visitors.

Make sure you can be found: seeing site content and navigation from the point of view of a search engine.

I’ve mentioned a few times on this blog how compelling content and links from other sites are the most important factors if you want to show up in search engines. That’s true, but they matter little if a search engine can’t even find the pages on your site. This may sound obvious, but all too often I look at a web site and find that the navigation is actually hindering or preventing search engines from getting around. I could go into a long-winded explanation of how search engines crawl sites at this point, but thankfully there is a much easier way to demonstrate. There are a number of tools available that give you a view of how a search engine sees your site. Once you’ve seen a site the way a search engine sees it, it all becomes pretty clear. The simplest, most accessible tool is provided by Google itself. To use this tool, search for a page in Google. As an example, I will search for one of my recent posts by copying its URL into the Google search bar: http://twooctobers.com/2010/03/rocky-mountain-viral-3282010/

Here is the result in Google. The next step is to click on the “Cached” link to the right of the URL in the listing.

Once there, click on the “Text only version” link in the grey bar at the top. Voilá! You are now seeing the page pretty much the way Google sees it. Here is the text only version of my post:

Search engines have a pretty boring view of the world, huh? Overall, this page looks good in terms of how the content is laid out. Things to consider when evaluating the search engine’s view:

• Does the page include links to other important pages on your site? The links on the page are like signs telling search engines where to go. Just as highway signs list major landmarks, your navigation should point to the pages you most want found.
• Is it obvious what the page is about? All too often, sites include boilerplate content at the top of pages, or try to tackle too many things at once. Pages that have a clear focus tend to rank better. If you have to scroll down to find unique content, you have a problem.
• Is anything important missing? Page elements such as forms, Flash, JavaScript and iframes can hide content from search engines. You don’t need to know what all of this means, but if there is important content missing from the search engine view, you need to talk to a developer.

If you find yourself wanting to see a search-engine-view of a lot of pages, using the method described above can get kind of tedious. I use the Foxy SEO Tool Add-on for Firefox instead. It is free and has a lot of great functionality. In particular, it has a “Search Engine Spider Simulator” that enables you to quickly switch to a search engine view of any page.

More on Navigation

To the right is a sign that sits outside of the Rock Rest Lounge in Golden, Colorado. Can you imagine having to find your way around if all signs looked like that? At the opposite extreme would be a post with no sign at all. The first would be so confusing as to be useless. The second would be just plain useless.

This is what we often put search engines through. Search engines use links to find content, and as an indication of what is important. Too many links and a search engine can’t tell what matters. Too few and it can’t get around.

Also, search engines look at the text used in a link as an indication of what a page is about. Imagine if road signs just said “city” or “big city”, instead of “Colorado Springs” or “Denver”. You’d have a hard time finding your way around. Or imagine if you were crossing the border into Utah and saw a sign that said “Sigurd 200 Miles”. Sigurd is about 200 miles from the border, but you probably don’t know or care what Sigurd is unless you are one of the 400 people that live there. From far away, it is much better to signpost major landmarks that everyone will know. Conversely, what if you are in Denver and trying to get to the Rock Rest Lounge in Golden, and you see a sign for “Salt Lake City 535 Miles”? Maybe you know that Golden and Salt Lake City are in the same direction, but still not a very useful sign. When smaller towns and cities are close by, it’s good to include them on signs.

Think about navigation on your site like road signs for search engines. Link to your most important pages from all over, and make sure the links clearly describe the content they are pointing to. Link to more specific content from close by, again using descriptive text. And don’t put too many links on a page. There is no hard-and-fast rule for how many is too many, but more than one hundred is definitely too much. For most kinds of content you should try to keep it well below that.

Lastly, look at your pages the way a search engine does: a colorless world where text is all that matters. It may be a bleak view, but the view is even bleaker if you can’t be found.

Building a Restaurant as an Analogy for Constructing a Search-Engine-Friendly Web Site

The topic of how to plan for search engine optimization (SEO) often comes up when I am talking to small businesses and has been the topic of several discussions in just this last week. SEO is a very complex subject, but I like to frame the conversation with a high-level paradigm for how to think about and plan for ongoing success. With that in mind, here is an analogy:

Imagine you are opening a restaurant in an ordinary town on an ordinary budget, but you want your business to be an extraordinary success. Let’s look at three steps to achieving that success:

• Building the Restaurant
• Creating the Ambiance and the Menu
• Promoting the Restaurant

Building the Restaurant

Since we are making the analogy to building a web site, we will assume that you are building your restaurant from scratch. Will you hire an avant-garde architect who specializes in hay-bale construction, or stick with standard building materials and a straightforward design? Unless you are not concerned about budget, you will probably choose the latter. Building a web site is similar. At this point, there are a number of established content management systems (CMS’s) that provide all of the tools necessary to build a solid, feature-rich and search-engine-friendly site. I have been involved in web site projects recently that built upon WordPress, Joomla and Magento – all well-documented platforms with templates readily available that get the search engine basics right. Be very wary of a web developer who wants to build a site without leveraging one of these or a similar standardized tool set. In my experience, a web developer with self-described expertise in SEO will almost always do a worse job than what you would get with an unmodified WordPress template-based site. That is not to say that you can’t do well with a custom-designed site, but this advice is written for someone starting out and on a budget.

And as with the restaurant, getting the construction right will have little to do with your ultimate success. If you don’t follow standard design practices, or even worse if you don’t follow building codes, you are starting off on the wrong foot. But getting those things right just puts you on level ground with most of the other businesses in town. Using a platform or technology that follows search engine best practices will position you for success, but the content you create is what is going to attract visitors.

Creating the Ambiance and the Menu

How your restaurant is laid out and decorated will start to differentiate you from the competition. And even more important is what’s on the menu. Creating an ambiance that is pleasant and inviting will make visitors feel comfortable and encourage them to come back. And an interesting, original and well-executed menu is above all else what gets people interested in the first place, and it is what is going to get word of your restaurant to spread. The analogy here is to user experience and content.

Using one of the standard platforms I described above is the first step towards providing good user experience, but choosing where content will go and how users will navigate your content is a critical part of your success. When laying out your site, think about how people search for and find what they are looking for. For example, labeling a section “grub” rather than “menu” may sound cool, but by doing so you are asking people to think. People don’t want to think when they navigate, so make things as simple and obvious as you can. This reflects how search engines will evaluate the site as well, since few people search for “grub”, but many search for “menu”. Words on your web site are like ingredients to a restaurant. Get too weird and you will have a very small audience.

Your content is like what comes out of the kitchen. Make it interesting. Make it original. Make it so that visitors will want to tell their friends about it. Most importantly, don’t rely on an SEO consultant to develop your content for you. You know your business and you are passionate about what you do. It’s good to get the advice of someone who understands how search engines work, but get in the habit of creating and updating your own content. That isn’t to say you can’t hire a chef – but that person should be part of your business and share in your vision.

Promoting the Restaurant

Last but not least is getting out there and making sure that people know you exist. How many restaurants with great food have failed because people didn’t know to try them out? SEO is very much the same way. THE MOST IMPORTANT FACTOR in search engine ranking is the number of quality links you have pointing to your site. And keep in mind that the context and authority of the source of the link matter a great deal. Just as a restaurant review written by a random blogger matters less than one written by the local paper, you want to get links from authoritative sites in your subject matter domain or geographic area. If you sell running shoes, get out there on the top running-focused sites. If you sell accounting services, make sure the most popular local business-resource sites link to you.  Good content is key to this process. If you have interesting, original content, people will want to link to it. If you have thin or boilerplate content, you are going to struggle to get every link.

I have simplified things quite a bit, but I believe that small business SEO is not all that complex. Some people like to make it complicated because it serves their personal interests. Search engines put a colossal amount of effort into determining who genuinely has the best content to match a user’s query, and for the most part do their job well. But I won’t deny that there is benefit to understanding the minutiae. There are a number of great sites dedicated to the details and latest developments in search engine optimization, including several of those highlighted in my blog roll to the right. I recommend that you check those out if that’s where your interest lies.

To recap, here is how you can position yourself for ongoing success:

• Start with a standardized, well documented platform (Building the Restaurant)
• Lay out your site so that it is easy to understand and navigate and fill it with original, interesting content (Creating the Ambiance and the Menu)
• Get authoritative, local and topical sites to link to you (Promoting the Restaurant)

Before the web, the vast majority of consumers found local business by opening up the yellow pages and searching by category. This made it easy for businesses to ensure that they could be found. Buy a yellow pages listing and your job was pretty much done. While consumers are increasingly looking for businesses online, there is no comparable authoritative source for local business information on the web. Consumers look to a variety of channels to find businesses, which makes the job of getting found a bit more difficult. I have compiled a list of what I view as the 10 most important sites on which to list (for US businesses), with the important qualification that doing so is free in all cases. I looked at a variety of factors, including overall traffic, domain authority, share of local search and depth of listing content in compiling the list.

All of these sites also have paid advertising options, but first you should take advantage of what they have to offer for free. Note that in most cases, you will need to be able to verify a phone number and/or a physical address to add your listing. I have included traffic figures for each site, using Compete.com January data. I have also noted cases where web site links are nofollowed, with an explanation of what that means at the bottom of this post.

1. Google Local Business Center

By adding your business to the Google Local Business Center, you show up on Google Maps. As I’ve mentioned before, this is one of the most important things a local business can do to get found on the web. Here are a few reasons why:

• It is the most popular mapping service on the web, period.
• Google Maps results show up first on Google.com for many local searches.
• Google Maps is the default local search app on the iPhone (for now) and of course Google’s Android phone.

Google Maps is currently at 182 million visits per month. To add your listing: Google Local Business Center
My post describing adding a Google business listing

2. Facebook Fan Page

Apart from being the second most visited site on the internet behind Google, 1.5 million businesses have created fan pages on the network, and 20 million people become fans of pages every day (source). Facebook is a long way from being where consumers search for businesses, but it has quickly become the most likely place for consumers to connect with local businesses online. According to Compete, Facebook received almost 3 billion visits in January, but little of this constitutes local business search traffic. Web site links nofollowed. To create a page you must be logged in to your personal account, then go here: www.facebook.com/pages/create.php
My post describing adding a Facebook Fan Page

3. Yelp

The review site Yelp is now the most trafficked site focused on local business search. Given its emphasis on social content and interaction, Yelp tends to do better than other directory sites when it comes to attracting younger, more social users. Currently at 50 million visits per month. To add your listing: Yelp signup page

4. Citysearch

Citysearch.com has been holding steady for a number of years now in terms of on-site traffic, but they have been growing their network of distribution through syndication and the recently announced CityGrid blows their distribution opportunity wide-open. Currently at 34 million visits per month. Web site links nofollowed. To add your listing: add business – note that you must be logged in to a personal Citysearch account to see this page.

5. Yellowpages.com/YP.com

AT&T owned Yellowpages.com rebranded as YP.com, and it’s not your parents yellow pages any more. Under pressure from the likes of Google and Yelp, YP.com has a fresh look and more social content and features. And they are beta testing a new social-local search site called Buzz.com. They also distribute listings to a number of syndication partners. Currently at 28 million visits per month. Web site links nofollowed. Claim your listing.

6. Bing Local

Microsoft has long struggled behind Google and Yahoo! in the world of web search, but the tides have turned of late. Since Microsoft launched Bing.com last year, they have steadily been gaining search share. And recent regulatory approval in Europe clears the way for a long planned partnership between Microsoft and Yahoo. As a result of this partnership, Bing will replace Yahoo’s own search engine on Yahoo properties. Bing currently accounts for a relatively small portion of local search, but expect that portion to grow. To add your listing: Local Listing Center

7. Yahoo! Local

As with many things Yahoo!, Yahoo! Local is on the way down. But they still provide a very popular service, so worth making sure you are listed there. Currently at 12 million visits per month. Web site links nofollowed. To add your listing: Yahoo! Local add a business page

8. LinkedIn

LinkedIn isn’t exactly a place where people go to look for local businesses, but it does offer rich business listing functionality, and the domain carries quite a bit of authority. LinkedIn has also been adding many useful features for businesses, such as the ability to announce promotions, share articles and blogs, and list open jobs. Currently at 63 million visits per month, but very little of this is local search traffic. Web site links nofollowed. Add a company.

9. Superpages.com

Superpages also went through a significant redesign recently, but doesn’t seem to be keeping up with Yellowpages.com or the others. Their traffic figures indicate same, with a fairly consistent downward trend. Nonetheless, they get 9 million local search visits a month, so deserve to be on this list. Web site links nofollowed.  Get your free listing now.

10. Local.com

Local.com is another directory site, less well-known, but with a great domain name and considerable traffic. Local.com has an extensive syndication network, but is primarily focused on promoting paid listings. Currently at 14 million visits per month. Add your listing.

There are many benefits to getting your business listed on other web sites. Four important ones are:

• Links – links pointing to a web site are major factor in how that site ranks in search engines. I would say the most important factor, but linking is a complex and nuanced topic. Links are not all created equal. Where a link comes from is important. For example, a link from the home pages of nytimes.com is worth a lot more than a link on a page buried deep within a blog like this one. And some web sites put a “nofollow” attribute on links. This attribute is a way of telling search engines not to follow nor associate value with a link. However, there is still some SEO value in a nofollowed link, in particular because user behavior is also a factor in Google ranking. And Matt Cutts of Google explains more about the value of nofollowed links here.
• Web site traffic – this one is kind of obvious, but your listing will include a link to your web site, which will result in more traffic. Many consumers like to visit a web site before visiting a business. If yours isn’t listed, you lose out.
• In-store traffic – as mentioned at the beginning of this post, consumers are using the internet more, and print yellow pages less.  According to one study, print now accounts for less than a third of local business search. Listing your business on the web is now the best way to get people to walk in to or call your business.
• Placerank – PlaceRank is a measure Google uses to understand location-based relevancy. It is not very well understood, but as location is increasingly becoming an integral part of search, expect optimizing for PlaceRank to become an important part of local business SEO. The short version is that businesses that are strongly associated with well-ranked places will benefit. SEO expert Ash Nallawalla has an excellent post explaining PlaceRank in detail.

Now that I have compiled this list, I am going to go through the process of adding a business to each of these sites. Look for posts in the coming weeks as I describe that experience.

As if local businesses needed the playing field to be any further out-of-level, Google is solidly tilted towards big business. Do some local searches and you will see what I mean. Google’s own map results favor big chain stores, and the organic results favor directory sites, which tend to put the big-spending advertisers first. I did a search for “pharmacy boulder“, and the first locally-owned pharmacy showed up on page seven of the organic results. Since very few people even go to page two of the results, I am probably the first person to see that listing in quite a while.

This is not due to any ill-will on Google’s part, it is just a function of how Google’s ranking algorithm works. Much of how Google ranks sites is based on the number and quality of external links pointing to a domain and specific pages on the domain. The SEO resource site SEOmoz.org publishes a bi-annual report of search engine ranking factors, which puts 4 of the top 5 ranking factors as having to do with external links. National chains and directories will generally have more external links, and so rank better.

But there is something you can do about it: start showing some link-love to your neighbors and partners. By link-love, I mean create links on your web site that link to other local businesses. One way to do this is to create a “resources” page or similar. An example of this can be found on the Builder’s Appliance Center web site. They link to a number of local businesses on their trade partners page. This page would have more SEO value if they added a one-sentence description to each link, for example “Plush Designs kitchen designs in Colorado Springs,” instead of just a logo. Google looks at link text as an indication of relevancy, so including the type and location of the business will help the site rank for those keywords. It can’t hurt to add a personal touch as well. For example, saying “We’ve been doing business with ACME Plumbing for 30 years and always get great service,” leaves a good impression of both you and ACME Plumbing. Of course, you will only benefit if your neighbors and partners reciprocate by creating their own links back to you. If they need convincing, point them to this post.

This truly is a case where you can help level the playing field by being neighborly. And check out Yahoo Site Explorer to see who is linking to you now. You may find that you owe someone some link-loving already.

I’ve talked with a few businesses recently whose Google Maps listing is either incorrect or out-of-date. I suspect that this is true of most local businesses. The good news is that this is free and easy to correct. If you are involved in marketing a business, go to Google Maps and search for the business. Find your business in the results, click on the “more info” link next to the listing. On the business listing page, you should see either “Owner verified listing” or “Business owner?” If it says the former, you’ll need to find out who at the company has already claimed your listing. If it says the latter, click on “Business owner?” and you will be stepped through the process of editing and claiming the listing. Here’s Google’s video describing the process:

And if your own a small businesss, Google Maps loves you just as much as Walmart. As long as you can validate an address, you can create a listing in Google’s Local Business Center.

Also keep in mind that what you put in your listing affects whether or not it will be found when people search Google Maps. Use keywords in your description that reflect how people search, and make sure to select all categories that apply to your business. And you can use additional fields to list brands carried, services offered and other search-friendly content. In addition to its success on the web, Google Maps is the most popular local search application on the iPhone and on Android phones. This is going to be an increasingly important way to get your business found.

I’m helping local business Bosom Buddies improve their web visibility, and in so doing came across the Firefox add-on SimilarWeb. When you browse sites and pages, SimilarWeb displays similar sites in a sidebar.

This is a handy way to browse around looking for sites that provide good opportunities to create in-bound links, inbound links being a primary factor in search engine ranking. I also found many sites that feature vibrant discussions among expectant and nursing moms, which is Bosom Buddies’ target market. By joining these conversations, Bosom Buddies can extend their reach well beyond their own web site.