Free Local Search Engine Optimization – Are you interested in getting some free local search engine optimization for your company?  If so, you’ve come to the right place.  Just post a reply to this blog with just a few sentences about why you need it, or what it could do for your company, and we’ll provide our free $197 real value, Local Search Blast TM submissions.  We’ll submit you to all of the important sites for you to be found on in order to do well in the search engine listings, especially with local search, Google Maps, etc.  We’ll submit you to sites like InfoUSA, Yelp, 411 and yellow page sites, directory sites, and, this is REALLY exciting considering the massive importance of mobile search, etc. we’ll add you to mobile search databases, GPS databases, even OnStar….  Beat your competitors to the punch and in many cases, you can be the only one in your niche in GPS and OnStar databases.    Simply post here, or e-mail me, Mike, and let me know why you want me to do this, how it will benefit your business, and what you intend to do with all of the extra business you get as you start to dominate the local search and maps.   We’ll randomly pick some,  and set them up.  We may even use your site as a case study for the results of this, getting you even more exposure and high quality links. 

Another thing – for a limited time, those who e-mail or post here can get a free Top 10 Ranking Report – It will tell you EXACTLY what you need to do to get into the top 10 on Google for your chosen keyword – GUARANTEED.* 

Just let us know why you need it, and what your site is, and your wish is our command…  If we pick your site/e-mail/blog post.

Search Engine Optimization – First Things First – Local Search – I’ve been becoming more aware of and having to deal with a few specific things lately with SEO and campaings for clients.  Must of the time in the past, I’ve done the hosting and had clients sites created for them by my web developers, etc. and their hosting has been on my servers or hosting accounts, with known enviroments and dependability.  Over the past six months, I’ve had a few clients here and there whom I’ve done the same amount of link building and same work I’ve done for the rest of my clients, based upon competition for keywords, and have gotten way less than optimal or expected results, and thus less happy clients.

When I first start on a site, especially if it’s already built, there are a few things that I check for,  www. vs non www, i.e. checking that only one version of their site resolves, or make the appropriate entires into their .htaccess file and creating 301 permanent redirects, and insuring that they have either 100% uptime or 99.9% uptime.   A few of the clients I’ve picked up over the past year have had hosted applications for  their professions (i.e. online scheduling systems, or industry related services as a hosted application) and have found a few with DISMAL uptimes….  97% uptime, 98% uptime, etc.   A few percentage points as far as uptime can have huge consequenses as far as the ability to rank a site.  It a search engine spider goes to your site repeatedly and the pages either take a long time to load, or even worse, your site is down, you need to do something immediately about it, or assume you aren’t going to rank where you want to rank.

There are a few tools out there and uptime monitors you can use to over time, find out your actual availablity.  One free one is www.uptimedog.com .  When checking uptime, the more frequently they check, the better off you are.  The paid service I’m using now checks every 5 seconds.  I’ll find out what the name is and update the post with it, but I’ve found that a few of the sites I was working on wouldn’t rank regardless of what I was doing because of their downtime…  The paid service I use is called Service Uptime.  it’s very reasonable, will send e-mail notifications, and it’s been a HUGE help, both from my own standpoint, and being able to provide documentation to my clients from a neutral third party.

You need to make sure you have a hosting company who either has 100% (or 99.999% ) uptime or find one who does.  It’s not asking that much these days for those percentages of uptime.  Check to see if your hosting company has SLA’s (service level agreements) in regards to uptime, or see if they monitor or guarantee in any way.  If not, find someone who does.  The hosting company I use has awesome uptime, and I frequently have clients move over to them now.  The hosting I use and recommend can be found here.  I’ve used it for the past years and host literally hundreds of sites on it, and it’s rock solid, good uptime, and very reasonable.

I was checking my log files today, and noticed that someone found my site by searching on the term:

“we would like to get your website on first page of google. all of our processes use the most ethical white hat search engine optimization techniques that will not get your website banned or penalized. please reply and i would be happy to send you a proposal.”

Someone had posted some comment spam containing the above string.  The post had since been deleted, but it was on my page for a while and got indexed.  When I searched Google for the above string, it returned 71,000 results (at least it did about 30 min ago), and most of them were places that I could easily put my link.  They were forums, blogs, etc.  Most of the heavy lifting of finding a place to post comments to gain incoming links had been done.  All of the sites were laid out right there for the picking.  I’m going to check into them a bit further later on, but I’m sure I’ll get some nice incoming links.

There are all sorts of good things you can find by checking your referral logs, search terms people land at your site with, etc.  Link Building is just one of the things you can work this angle on.  What other places can you find information you can use to build your backlinks?

I’m working with a developer right now on a tool that will help with this.  it’s pretty simple really, but you just put in a search string, and then it will return the results, check the PR of the homepage of the sites listed, and then link the links in order of PR of homepage.  You can then go through the list, click on a url, and either post a response to a blog, create a social media account and then publish links, etc.  It should be available very soon, check back..  It will literally provide tens of thousands of high pr sites where you can post your links.  I’m anxious for it.

When going down this line of thought on building backlinks, what would be the easiest ways to find the most amount of available links?  What platforms are routinely used to create the sites that you can post on, what terms are used in comment spam on your own blogs that you could maybe search for to find other places to post links?

You can pass this information along to someone and outsource the creation of backlinks, or if you have time, do it yourself.  Get ya some links…..

Link Building by WordPress themes – very easy method that could easily create hundreds and even hundreds of thousands of backlinks to your site.  Go browse what the most popular wordpress themes or templates are by going to various wordpress theme directories and figure out what the most popular are.  Then, if you are familiar with creating wordpress themes, create a theme that you think might fit into the most popular categories of downloaded wordpress themes.  Create a link at the bottom of the page on the wordpress theme with your anchortext and then a link to your site.  “Created by ……”  Or “Theme created by…” or something similar.  If you don’t know how to create wordpress themes, you can easily outsource the creation of a theme as well as hire someone to post it to all of the wordpress themes.  If you create a theme that turns out to be popular, you can easily amass a huge number of backlinks in a very short period of time.

What is your number one question about search engine optimization? 

If you have a question you’d like answered post it here and we’ll get it answered for you…  What’s been on your mind?  What is holding you back?  Also, if you have a question that may need a personalized answer, or if you have a question which we may need to clairify, please use the e-mail address that is easiest to contact you with, so that we may give you the fastest answer.

We also have a similar post about internet marketing.  If you have an internet marketing question post it here:  http://coolbubba.com/blog/what-is-your-number-one-question-about-internet-marketing/150/

What is your number one question about internet marketing?  What is holding you back or stopping you from moving forward?

Post your question here and we’ll get an answer for you.  Also, if you have a question that may need a personalized answer, or if you have a question which we may need to clairify, please use the e-mail address that is easiest to contact you with, so that we may give you the fastest answer.

If you have search engine marketing question, we also have a blog post for that.  Go here: http://coolbubba.com/blog/what-is-your-number-one-question-about-search-engine-optimization/151/  with search engine optimization questions, and we’ll get those answered for you as well.

Before you begin your quest for local search domination, and begin working to list your company in the major search engines local searchs and maps results, you will want to identify what data set and what format you will want your company to be listed, and make sure that your information is identical in all places that it is listed. 

In other words, if your business is named My Business, you’ll want to decide if you want to be listed as “My Business” “My Business, Inc.” “My Business, LLC” or “My Business L.L.C. “.  You’ll want your information formatted identically both on your web site and in the local business listings, in the yellow pages, and everywhere that you are listed or identified.

There are MANY factors to consider when trying to rank in and attack the local search market.  One of the first steps is to check to see if you are already listed in Google Business Center, Yahoo Local, and Bing Local.  If you have a current yellow pages listing, or your business is listed on InfoUSA and/or Acxiom, you will most likely get picked up by the three major search engines’ local listings.

If you ARE currently listed, you will want to claim your listing immediately.  You will also want to make sure that your company information is listed as you want it to be, and correct it so that it is in line with how you want to be listed.

Kill local search rankings – If you have and are submitting multiple business locations for your business, insure that they all have their own phone numbers.  If you list the same phone number for different business addresses, you are sure to kill your local search rankings.    There are a few things that you will want to consider and figure out before you begin your quest for local search domination, which we’ll discuss in the next blog post.

Last night I went to the DFWSEM monthly meeting at the Renaissance Hotel in Richardson, Tx.  DFWSEM – Dallas Fort Worth Search Engine Marketing Association.  It was a really interesting meeting.  The room at the hotel was full.  I arrived about 7pm, the group was scheduled to begin networking around 6pm, with the meeting beginning at 6:30pm I believe.  It was the first time I’d gone to the group.  I’d heard of the group a few years ago and have wanted to attend for some time.  When I arrived it appeared that they were just starting the main parts of the presentation, which basically covered a brief history of SEO/SEM and then covered the basics of SEO.  It definately was basic material, but that was the point of the topic, and they covered it very well.  There were three different speakers, each adding a different angle to it.  They then had a break, and then picked three websites to analyse and make suggestions for monetization and optimization.  Shelley Ellis was there, who is very good and well known for her PPC, especially content network targeting and her work with Perry Marshall.  Sean Jackson of Ecordia, Dennis Hart, VP of Sales and Marketing for SE Jones, and Mark Barrera (Client Services Manager of Vizion) were all in attendance, some of them being Board Members of DFWSEM.

The meeting ran from about 6pm to about 9pm, and then moved into the bar area of the hotel, where the discussions there were better than the actual meeting, which is frequently the case.  Not taking away from the meeting at all, which was good.  I stayed and enjoyed the conversation in the bar area until well after 11pm. 

On the way home, I ran into Dennis Hart in the parking lot of a gas station, and had another good conversation.

The content that was presented was basic, which was the premise for the presentations, which it hit right on the head.  The material was solid and definately worthwhile to attend.  Next month’s meeting, Feb 17th at the same location is going to be about back to basics PPC, which I can’t wait to hear, and the March one is about local search.

DFWSEM is most certainly worthwhile to both those involved in the SEO/SEM/etc industries, as well as people looking for information for thier own sites or companies.

I will be signing up as a member in Feb for sure, at least as an individual, and I”m considering getting a company membership for Coolbubba.  I hope to see you or meet you at one of the upcomping meetings.

I was just checking the stats for one of my SEO clients this morning and saw some very decent results – they are on the first page of Google, Yahoo, and Bing for converged voice and they are number one on Yahoo and Google, and number 2 on Bing for converged messaging.  What is something like that worth a client?  How much is a service and results like this worth?  It’s hard to say and varies very much between industries and between actual search terms.    There are many factors to take into consideration when determining the value of SEO, rankings in the search engines, etc.  One is on page factors that contribute to conversions.  You can get a page ranked number one for every term in the world, but if the pages they land on don’t compel them to take action, or do some sort of action, input a name and e-mail for futuer contact, sign up for a free report, sign up for a service, etc. then there really is no inherent value in ranking, other than possible branding, or brag rights, etc. 

One inportant factor to take into consideration is comercial intent.  Microsoft has developed a tool to determine commercial intent for a keyword/keyphrase.  You can also use this tool Market Samurai: http://bit.ly/vSRj4  to determine the commercial intent of keywords as well as MUCH more information.  I use this tool with every client and project I work on.  I consider it mandatory pretty much.   Check out more abouit commercial intent at Microsoft’s site:  http://adlab.microsoft.com/Online-Commercial-Intention/   Basically it tells you the percentage chance that someone typing in that keyword or keyphrase is going to buy.  You can use Market Samurai to determine this for large groups of keywords at a time.

Besides the “commercial intent” of a particular keyword pharse, you have the PPC values for it, or pay per click values.  How much others are currently paying to rank for a specific term.  You can also get these values in the  Market Samurai keyword module here, and you can get them also at the Google Adwords keyword tool.  With the google adwords tool, select average PPC values from the drop down menu on the right.

I’m going to do a more complete post about how I work with clients to determine the value of an SEO campain with them soon.  Sign up for my e-mail list to the right to be notified when it comes out and good luck.