If your business is one that serves the local community rather than the entire US or world, you may wonder if a lot of the money spent on search engine optimization will be wasted.  Not at all!  There are lots of ways to optimize for local search. 

This is mainly accomplished by adding city, state, or neighborhood names to your keywords, for example “Atlanta search engine optimization.”  Another small thing you can do is to add your full address to the footer of your website template so that it appears on every page of your website. 

Adding your listing to Google Maps through the Google Local Business Center is another way to obtain high rankings in local markets.  If you’ve ever done a search and seen a map image with listings to the right of it on the top of the search results, then you’ve seen the impact that Google Maps can have. 

Google has also teamed up with coupon giant ‘ValPak’ to offer localized coupons for those listed in Google Maps. By adding setting up coupons with Google for your customers, your listing to the right of the Google Map will have a link labeled “coupons” below it. 

Localizing search terms can increase your 1^st page visibility

Even if you do serve more than the local market, lots of people may be searching for with local keywords attached.  For very competitive industries and terms, this can greatly increase your number of first page listings.

We are an Atlanta search engine optimization company and although we work with businesses throughout the US and around the world, we also optimize for local search which and hold first page rankings for the terms Atlanta search engine optimization and Atlanta SEO. 

So give it a try - localize!

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There are lots of SEO Tools out there to help you gain perspective of your website from a search engine’s point of view. Perhaps the most fun and intriguing are those that allow you to learn more about your competitor’s SEO strategy.

Get ready to spend a few hours going down this rabbit hole… here are 5 of our top picks for tools that reveal SEO insight on your competitors:

Spy Fu:

Find out who’s paying what for online advertising among your competitors. Spy Fu is the follow up to Googspy.com and offers tons of features. Because SpyFu is currently in Beta, some of the data may be a few months behind, but incredibly insightful nonetheless.

Cost: Free

Niche Watch

Before you go spying on your competition, you have to know who they are. Niche Watch gives you a quick overview of the top 20 sites you must compete with to take the top spots. You’ll also get an overview for each competitor about of the number of backlinks to the page, backlinks to the domain, on-page keyword count, number of pages indexed in Google, and more.

Cost: Free

SEO SpyGlass

Shows you at a glance all the techniques your competitors are using to gain a foothold in the search engine rakings. By analyzing their tactics, you can formulate an optimization strategy that’s a step ahead.

Cost: $87 for a professional license

NeboWeb Search Engine ScoreCard

This nifty little tool allows you to size yourself up next to your competitors. Compare page rank, inbound links, on-page optimization factors, and ranking position for keywords in Yahoo, Google, MSN, and AOL. This tool doesn’t offer too much information you can take action on, but shows how you stack up to the competition.

Cost: Free

The Way Back Machine

There is something very rewarding about looking back on your competitors websites over the years. You’ll see how their websites have changed and gain insight about how their strategy has changed over the years as well.

Cost: Free

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Not every company can afford an SEO team right now. And chances are good that if your running on a tight budget, you’re also running on a limited amount of time. For you, we’ve compiled a list of 5 fast and simple things you can do to optimize your website:

#1: Break up long pages of text into multiple shorter pages.

Not only do search engines tend to favor shorter pages and smaller file sizes, but shorter chunks of content are also more user-friendly. By breaking up your longer pages of content into multiple shorter pages, you’ll bulk up your website with more pages of related content.

#2: Use keywords in H tags.

Instead of bolding text and increasing font size for your page headings and subheadings, use your Heading tags (H1, H2, etc). When you use keywords in your H tags you are telling the search engines that these are key terms for this page and worthy of a prominent ranking in the search results.

#3: Add a Sitemap:

From an SEO perspective, the goal of a sitemap is to ensure that every page on the site can be easily indexed by search engine spiders. Because spiders “crawl” websites, they need to be able to reach each page of the site from any one page. A good sitemap ensures that this is possible.

#4: Add content frequently:

When you add new content, you are essentially inviting spiders to come back and visit more often. Even if you’re busy, find the time to write at least 250 to 300 words of relevant content to add to your site on a weekly basis. Just think, if you did this every week, your site would have 52 new pages by the end of next year!

#5: Optimize title tags:

Title tags are such a simple thing but can be very effective in terms of SEO. The title tag for each page should be unique. Make sure your title tags include the specifics keyword or keywords you are targeting on the page.

A full scale website optimization project can take months of work by an entire team of software developers, copywriters, link building specialists, and a project manager with an extensive knowledge of SEO to oversee the entire project. More than likely, the competitors holding the top spots for your target keywords employ an SEO team.

We hope however that these simple SEO friendly adjustments will give you a rankings a boost and jumpstart your online success. We wish you the best in your online business building!

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If you’re working with Google Adwords, you can use Google’s advertising materials to promote your own services like PPC campaign management. Instead of simply linking to Google Adwords, you can cite their success stories on your site. It’ll help your visitors better capture the value and benefits.

You can touch on every case highlighting the strengths of PPC over other online advertising alternatives. Give examples of successful PPC programs from as many different industries as possible so more of your audience can relate to their field of business. Of course, you must prove that your company is worhty of managing their PPC campaigns.

Besides telling the success stories, you can also talk about tips for successul PPC which is all available on Google Adwords site. As a smart marketer you can work in tandem with Google in a joint effort to promote PPC which by all means is beneficial to Google and your company.

This is also true with Yahoo! Search Marketing (formely Overture), Amazon PPC (Clickriver Ads), and MSN AdCenter. This is definetinely will save you lots of time searching and researching information on PPC management online. You’ll also get the most important key points right up front.

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Many of our customers get confused about the term “Off-page Optimization.” The fact that there is still a great deal of confusion about this topic motivates us to publish more information about off page SEO so that more and more small business owners and web developers can be better at SEO and enjoy its benefits.

So What is Off-Page Optimization & Why Do We Need It?

Off-page optimization refers to links from other websites that point to your site. For a site to achieve high search engine results (10-1 positions) search engines must regard yours as an “authority” website.

The term “authority” in SEO refers to links from outside pages (other websites) that point to yours. Not every type of link carries the same weight though. The more inter-connected your links are with websites that relate to your industry, your interests, your business, and your topics, the more authority you have from a search engine’s perspective.

A critical error that many make is thinking that off-page optimization means simply exchanging links with other websites (link exchange), but link exchange is much less valuable than it once was. Search engines consider one-way in-bound links much more significant than the reciprocal links gained in a link exchange agreement.  Search engines are smart and have a technique to uncover reciprocal linking and don’t assign these links as much value as a one-way link.

The interconnection or linkage with other websites in this case means websites linking to your site without a specific request to back-link (or link back). These links are non- reciprocal.  This hints to the search engines that your page must offer some real value, because another site owner felt compelled enough to share it with his or her audience without getting anything in return.

The art of attracting one-way inbound links is the topic of our next discussion. In brief, you can buy links, rent links, or bait for links. Generally however, your website must provide high value in order for other website owners to feel compelled to link to your pages. When your content is great, the link building task will be much easier.

There’s a debate over which is more important: on-page or off-page optimization. The answer: you can’t have one without another

Hopefully explains the concept and the value of off-page optimization. If not, check out our “WHAT IS SEO?” section for more details or drop us a line via the CONTACT FORM.

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