Local Search still has a ways to go

Enquiro commented recently that Local Search is growing and improving in features and functionality. Despite the cool features such as satellite imagery, movable maps and mobile phone gateways, I find Local Search severely lacking because the results aren’t consistently good. For example, try searching Google Local for web design company near Madison, WI (under the Find businesses link). The top result is “Cookies by Design”, a company that sells cookie gifts. That’s followed by “Covance”, a drug research lab. There are even 2 “Best Buy” locations listed in the top 10. Not exactly relevant results! Where is Netconcepts? Where is Netphoria? Where are the other big web agencies in Madison? Not one of them is listed in the top 10.

In their article, Enquiro offers the hypothetical scenario of needing to get to the hospital in a hurry and using Local Search to do it. Heh, I don’t know about you but I certainly wouldn’t bet my life on Google Local to point me to the nearest hospital! (e.g. search Google Local for hospital near Madison, WI and the #1 result is “Cancer Connect Resource”)

It’ll be fun to see Local Search enhancements like traffic reports via cell phone, but it doesn’t really matter a great deal until the relevancy and ranking algorithms get overhauled.

Sticky blogs work best

Stickiness is a primary goal for most websites. A site that is sticky gets people coming back again and again, and staying longer too.

It is easier to build a relationship and engage your reader if your site is sticky. My blog’s reasonably sticky because the author is so good and has such insightful things to say.

But seriously though, there are things you can do to engage your readers in some of the dialog. For instance, you can form a community where they are all talking to each other — most blogs are really abysmal at that. Even my blog really doesn’t do a very good job of bringing readers together and getting them to talk to each other.

So how do you get off your soapbox as a blogger and start conversations without finishing them, and let your readers take over?

Performancing has a nice list of practical things you can do to build online community of your blog:

1. Design for repeat visits
2. Keep advertising minimal for repeats
3. Provide a recent posts list
4. Answer your comments
5. Use the right language
6. Post frequently
7. Have a private message system
8. Allow member posts
9. Include members in decisions
10. Don’t neglect the distributed community

This free ebook will help you become a Google power-user

The second edition of my e-book on power searching with Google is out! Published by MarketingProfs. It’s the first major update since 2004. It’s completely updated and contains the latest, greatest Google features and services (with the exception of Google Finance and Google Calendar. Grr… the folks at Google Inc. sure do make it hard for me to keep my ebook up-to-date with their damned incessant unveiling of new services!). MarketingProfs have graciously given me permission to share the ebook (a MarketingProfs Premium member benefit) with my readers.

So don’t waste any time and download it now. Enjoy!

Some great advice from a new SEO blogger

The web team at Verizon Information Directories who operate the top online yellow pages site SuperPages.com, are really clued in to SEO. (I should know since they’re one of our clients!). So you could imagine my delight when Chris Smith, who heads up the team there, accepted my offer to become a contributing blogger at Natural Search Blog. Chris has entered the blogosphere with a bang, contributing some awesome posts on SEO over the past couple of weeks:

• Need more traffic? Try Image Search Optimization
• New Domain Names for Brands – Very Limited
• Afraid of Click Fraud? Try Pay-For-Call
• Google Releases New Related Links Feature
• Plenty of Traffic
• Optimize your roof ads for Google Maps (a tongue-in-cheek post)

Great posts! The ones on optimizing for Google Images and on pay-per-call are particularly meaty.

I am looking for a couple more contributing bloggers for Natural Search Blog. So if you fancy yourself an SEO expert and would like to blog, please drop me a note at stephanmspencer@gmail.com.

Advertising that adds value

Your advertising and marketing should add value. It should help your target audience make their life (or business) a little easier, a little more productive, etc. This is exactly the sort of thing I preach to our (Netconcepts’) clients: deliver something useful to your target audience through your web site, your search ads, your email campaigns, your blog, your RSS feeds, and so on.

Here’s an example of value-added advertising that I stumbled across last week. State Insurance, an insurance company in New Zealand, has an ad campaign called “That’s helpful.” They’re running TV commercials and have print materials, like posters at their offices, supporting the campaign. Each poster offers a very practical and useful tip, like…

• Chewing gum while cutting onions will stop you from crying.
• Remove scuff marks from wooden floors with an eraser.
• Dangle a tennis ball from your garage ceiling. It will show you where to stop.
• When on holiday, get your neighbor to clear your letterbox.
• Instead of washing your paintbrush, wrap it up in a plastic bag and put it in the freezer.
• If you want visitors to take their shoes off, leave extra pairs at the door.

I quite like that campaign. They could do a lot more with it though. They haven’t used their website to support the campaign at all. The phrase “That’s helpful” doesn’t even appear anywhere on the site. What a missed opportunity! They should have compiled a big pile of helpful tips into a free e-book and made it available for download on the site and then promoted the e-book in their print materials, commercials, email campaigns, and of course on the website itself.

In-house SEOs hard to find

I am hearing from a lot of business people who are trying to hire an in-house search engine optimization expert that they’re having a heck of a time finding people.

All the SEO experts are gainfully employed and already earning a heck of a lot of money, making it very hard to lure them away from their existing positions. This seemed to be one of the key challenges echoed over and over again in the hallways of the last Search Engine Strategies conference in NYC. It seemed like practically everybody I spoke to was on the hunt, or being hunted, or both.

The problem is the easiest people to headhunt are the ones who are working for a search agency or are independent, working from their bedroom.

If they’re working for an agency, they are probably being paid really well, getting to work on a variety of stimulating projects and being given lots of upskilling opportunities. So it is hard to lure such a person away.

However, it may even be harder to lure away the independents who are out there on their own working from home, sitting on their back porch in their pyjamas, charging a lot of money and getting to set their own hours and priorities.

One of our clients, Ritz Interactive, recently sent me a job notice for an SEO specialist, since their in-house specialist has just left. I offered to post their position on my blog in the hopes they get some inquiries. So here it is:

Title: INTERNET MARKETING / SEO SPECIALIST

Position Objective: Ritz Interactive, Inc. has an immediate opening for a smart, hardworking, entrepreneurial individual to join us as an Internet Marketing / SEO Specialist. This person will help manage Internet marketing initiatives supporting our network of ecommerce websites.

Knowledge, Skills and Experience:

• Minimum 2 years of SEO and SEM experience
• Knowledge of search engine algorithms and ranking strategies
• Experience in web metrics (tracking, reporting and identifying opportunities based on pages visited)
• Experience in optimizing Pay Per Click (PPC) programs
• Strong quantitative skills including the ability to understand return on investment
• Strong analytical skills and attention to detail, ownership of own work
• Strong project management and communications skills
• Self-starter, strong team player
• Ability to work in a fast-paced, aggressive growth environment
• HTML / Meta Data working knowledge experience (a plus)

Duties and Responsibilities:

• Help develop and implement search engine optimization strategy and produce reporting
• Manage and analyze web analytics data producing actionable recommendations
• Interpret and make website enhancement recommendations based on research and analytics
• Help optimize and manage paid search and shopping comparison engine marketing programs
• Conduct online competitive intelligence and market-based analysis
• Collaborate with internal content managers on the development of optimized landing pages

Compensation and Benefits:

• Base salary and bonus (competitive)
• Vacation and Personal time
• Medical and dental benefits
• 401K plan plus a company matching percentage
• Life insurance
• Long-term disability
• Great Orange County, California location

Sounds like a great job. Contact them directly if you’re interested.

Oh, and of course my firm, Netconcepts, is always looking for SEO specialists too. So if you’re really good, send us your resume too!

So what happens if you can’t find an in-house SEO? I guess you are forced to use an agency such as Netconcepts, which isn’t such a bad thing.

My first screencast: installing and using the Google Toolbar

I’ve produced my first screencast, using TechSmith’s excellent software program Camtasia Studio. In it I show how to install and configure the Google Toolbar in the Firefox web browser to display PageRank scores on any web page that you visit. I also show how to change the display of the Toolbar and some other settings. If you don’t have the Google Toolbar installed on your PC or Mac, this little 6 minute video will show you the process along with some of the benefits.

I’d love feedback on how to improve my screencasting. I intend to do quite a few more of these, so feedback early on will help ensure that these screencasts are the best they can be.

Note that I will be providing beginner, intermediate, and advanced level SEO tips and tricks. This particular one is beginner level.

Download the screencast as either a 5 megabyte WMV file or a 6 megabyte MPEG-4 file (iPod video compatible)

Blog SEO Tip #9 (for multi-author blogs): Pages and Links for the Authors

If you’ve got a multi-author blog and those bloggers have their own independent websites, they’ll probably want and appreciate getting links from you.

Include links to all your author’s websites in your sidebar rather than at the bottom of your page, because footer links don’t get as much weight by the search engines. Or better yet, only include your list of author links from the home page rather than making it a site-wide link, which will also get partially discounted by the search engines.

Within every post that they author, include a link to their site. That will motivate them to post more often.

Also include with each post a link to their profile page (hosted on your blog). Each author profile page should contain a link to that author’s site, a biographical statement (taken from the “About Yourself” field in their profile), and the posts that they’ve authored. Here is my profile page on BusinessBlogConsulting.com, for example.

Let them define the anchor text of the link to their site, since anchor text is such an important element for SEO (see my Blog SEO Tip on Anchor Text). The way I did it for BusinessBlogConsulting.com, which runs on WordPress, I had them specify the anchor text they wanted in the Nickname field on their edit profile page and I used that instead of their name.

Blog SEO Tip #8: Adding emphasis within your posts

Using bold, strong, or emphasis tags within the body copy of your blog posts will help identify to search engines like Yahoo! which words/phrases should be given more weight. This is a useful technique for blog optimization. Notice that I made the phrase “blog optimization” bold in the previous sentence. That’s an example of this tactic in practice.

Feel free to emphasize multiple phrases in your copy. Even make use of Heading tags if your post is particularly long. Just don’t overdue it. If it seems overoptimized when you read it, then it is!

Blog SEO Tip #7: Heading tags

Heading tags (H1 through to H6) are given more weight by search engines than regular body copy. So they should be used wisely to reinforce the page’s overall keyword theme. The posting date should never be within an H1 tag, because you’re NOT trying to rank well in the engines for a date. Instead, wrap an H1 tag around your category name or tag name on your category page or tag page, respectively. Then make the titles of your blog posts H2 tags, so that on a category or tag page, the category/tag words can be the only H1 on the page and thus can convey greater emphasis than the post titles.

You could even take this idea a step further and make the post title display within an H1 tag if it’s a Sticky post, and within an H2 if a normal post. (See my last post for more on the benefits of Sticky posts for SEO.) Check out this example category page on BusinessBlogConsulting.com where I did just that.