The realm of local search is a burgeoning and rapidly evolving space. And since everyone is local somewhere, it’s a topic worthy of some consideration – whether you’re the mom-and-pop sandwich shop, or the multinational drugstore chain. This post is the first of a two-part series, in which I’ll introduce the concept of local search, and highlight some of the unique differences between optimizing for visibility in local search results versus traditional organic search results. Part two of the series will delve into some tactical “nuts-and-bolts” of local search optimization.

Before I go much further, let’s define what I mean by “local search”. Local searches are those made in pursuit of something tied to a particular geography, often with the intent of taking some sort of action offline. Really, you can think of these as the sort of queries one might have made (or still make) within printed yellow page directories. In response to the increasing use of search for local purposes, search engines evolved to serve up specialized results when they think the searcher is interested in a local result. Because of Google’s 72% domination of the internet search market, I will almost exclusively addresses optimizing for visibility within Google’s answer to local search – Google Places, which are displayed via Google Maps search results.

Search results for "brew pub ann arbor", serving up Google Places listings.

Local search is, in a certain sense, the great equalizer of internet search marketing. At times, traditional, purely concept-driven SEO might be seen as favoring the “big guys” – those who can afford substantial and wide-reaching SEO undertakings to establish their authority on a given topic and propel themselves to the top of the SERPs (content generation/syndication efforts, linkbuilding campaigns, sizeable online PR, etc.). Local search, on the other hand, favors, well… localness. And you don’t have to be big to be local.

This essential difference in the thrust of local search (compared to more general organic search) is driven by a distinct set of factors. Those factors prioritize the local significance and legitimacy of a business just as much as its topical relevance. As I mentioned above, Google will return location-driven Google Maps results on the SERP when it’s fairly certain the searcher is performing a local search. Those search results are populated by listings within Google Places, so much of the focus of local search optimization (for Google, anyway) is placed on tuning up those listings. Once you’ve tackled that, the key is making sure other aspects of your business’ online presence (local directory listings, customer review sites, your own landing page, etc.) are in proper alignment with your Google Places listing(s).

In my next post on this subject, I’ll go over ways specific ways one can demonstrate the legitimacy, topical relevance and overall significance of your local business to Google, resulting in improved visibility in local search results.

Getting ranked well in MSN is relatively easy. The engine still puts heavy weighting on more traditional SEO techniques. It picks up sites quickly and allows new sites to rank with older sites. MSN doesn’t analyze the quality, age, changing nature of links as thoroughly as Google. Getting ranked well in MSN is as easy as:

1. Write title tags with keyphrases.
2. Write meta description tags with keyphrases (and probably meta keyword tags as well. Meta keyword tags are borderline useless in Yahoo! and Google; they are good for misspellings or non-competitive phrases that are related to a site’s content. They may still be given weight in MSN.)
3. Put keyphrases in the body text.
4. Get links from free generic directories with keyphrases in the anchor text.

Step four is really the key for quick MSN rankings. There are hundreds of free directories,and MSN appears to give just as much weight to them as it would to a link from an industry-related site.

The key to writing for the web is the old writing rule – know your audience. To serve that audience, you have to provide them

1. valuable information,
2. that they can find (search engine optimized), and
3. that they can understand (optimized for on-screen reading).

I will leave creating valuable content for a different post, and today I’ll address items 2 & 3.

2. Do your keyword research: reflect your reader’s language

Writing for your audience means using their language, not yours. And, what’s amazing is you can find out what they’re saying by asking the search engines.

Search engine records provide real time information on what people are looking for in their own words. What a treasure trove!

All you have to do is ask Google to “listen in” and you’ll get guidance on how to speak to your audience, and how to help them find you all at the same time. Keyword research is market research.

The image on the left is a screenshot from Google insights for search comparing “writing for the web” “seo writing” “web copywriting” and “search engine optimized writing”. On the right is the Google AdWords Keyword tool, started with four key word phrases and expanded the list to give me data on 100 phrases based on the words I started with. Try these tools out.

To improve your web writing:

• Explore the words used to describe your product or service, no doubt you will learn something valuable.
• And then, write content that emphasizes the high traffic phrases that fit your content. While this sounds like a “duh” you would be surprised by how unconsciously folks revert back to their internal-speak when they write for the web.

3. Write for reading on a screen

Your dear reader might have several applications open. She might be reading on a smartphone on a bus. She might think she’s concentrating, but multitasking is less effective than focused attention, most likely her attention is diffuse.

Additionally, reading on a screen happens more slowly and with less comprehension than reading from a page. Jakob Nielson has compiled a meaty list of web reading studies and information.

So, copy written for the web needs to be more scannable.

• Prepare bullets and lists instead of long discursive paragraphs,
• Break up long text with images and illustrations to get your message across, and
• Use simpler language than you might for a reader with more focus.

There are several online readability tests that allow you to get feedback on the grade level of your web copy. But, Microsoft Word will also tell you the grade level of copy in your file, so there are lots of ways to assess this. You might take this a bit further and assess your copy against your competitors’ web prose, and compare to more general online sites you value (such as the New York Times online) to give you a general target level. You might find you’re writing at way too high a level to be digestible on the web.

Build on Success

Do your research – research the words and double check the scanability and reading level of  your web writing before you publish it. And then, in the best tradition of the web, assess what is successful and keep on making it more findable and valuable to people and to search engines alike.

The keyword density ratio, that is, the total times a targeted keyword appears in the overall text of a page, is still something we hear mentioned as an important consideration in SEO from many firms and agencies.

It’s not. The strategy has been firmly and consistently debunked by the leading thinkers in the industry. This is not to say, by the way, that adding your targeted keyphrases to a page’s content isn’t good for SEO. Of course it is. There just isn’t any secret formula for determining how often you should add them.

So why do people keep talking about keyword density? It is one of the most persistent myths in online marketing for four important reasons:

- It was true once. Before search engines really started to grow in sophistication, a lot of spammy strategies would get traction, the most famous of which was “keyword stuffing”, or the inclusion, in meta tags and on-page copy of huge blocks of repeated terms or repeated synonyms. In a bizarre nod to “usability” often  these blocks were made invisible to the user through formatting tricks like making the text the same color as the background.

Algorithmic changes started to make this strategy increasingly ineffective as early as 2001, but the approach had been so successful, and so low-effort, that it persisted as a strategy for years. These days few people think “stuffing” is a good idea, but the attraction of a low-effort “magic bullet” remains so appealing that the sanitized “keyword density” approach has replaced it in the SEO mythology.

- It makes a lot of logical sense if you think about SEO as a way to fool web crawlers. If the use of a keyword once helps with ranking, wouldn’t adding it a second time double the effectiveness? The problem is that the web crawlers — and, more importantly, their underlying algorithms — are extremely sophisticated, and grow more so every year. Even if keyword density were a real input into search engines, it would be one of 200 or more signals considered by Google alone.

- It is easier than writing copy properly. Who wouldn’t want to get a nice list of keywords, drop them in appropriate ratios on a page, and watch the traffic roll in? Modern crawlers, however, are much more focused on the actual content of the page and the relationship between that content and other related pages. A good way to think about keywords now is as a guidepost to the crawlers who are trying to contextualize the content.

In that regard, one keyword is most likely enough, and in fact it is more appropriate to mention context-appropriate synonyms rather than repeating the same phrase.

- It is untestable. You’d think this would be a detriment. However, those who persist in talking about keyword density argue that it cannot be seen as a single input, so the variation is hard to lock down. This is less than useless, and creates ranges of appropriate “density” as low as 1% and as high as 8%

We would argue that this attraction to untestable strategies is a huge red flag. What is the point of a theory if you can’t test it, especially when your marketing budget is on the line as the bet?

These four reasons are not just a problem with keyword density; we think they are indicative of the biggest problems in the SEO field today, in that they allow people to get away with doing SEO badly. In reality, these four reasons can apply as the motivations behind many shady SEO recommendations.

The cynical side of me believes that SEO often attracts people who are excited about the complexity of a system but don’t like the intensive work in the trenches necessary to make it work. In that way, the myth of keyword density captures the essence of how this problem can be part of many SEO worker’s attitudes about their efforts, the results, and, most importantly, your money.

As an aside, if you are interested in doing SEO right, just dive into the SEO section of our blog. There are many great articles there about how to improve and optimize your site’s organic visibility.

The 2010 Winter Olympics are underway and my own home television glows each night with these fantastic displays of human strength and achievement. Tonight, I find my mind unable to avoid a cross over of thoughts between the day to day (specifically, my job as a relationship manager for an internet marketing company) and the Olympian marvels that I am viewing. This particular evening I find myself comparing the sport of curling to SEO. I mean, think about it. It shouldn’t be that far of a stretch to equate SEO to a sport.

Let’s look at this in the most simplistic way. Let’s say you are the head of marketing (maybe a CMO or a director). That makes you the thrower in the game of curling. As the head of marketing, you have the obvious goal of achieving more conversions. In the sport of curling, this would be like getting the most points. In general, with SEO, the idea is that you can increase your conversions by being higher on the search results; being on the first page and being higher in the list. With curling, you receive more points by first getting stones in the ‘house’ (the target) and then these points can be higher if you are closer to the ‘button’ (the center of the target) than your opponent. Now what really struck me as being much like an SEO effort is the well thought out strategy and active play of the stone on route to the target. The thrower is a part of a team and the team consists of two other people who are actively engaged with the stone, listening to the thrower and responding accordingly. They adjust the ice as needed and thus the path of the stone as it works it’s way toward its resting spot. This struck me as being much like our SEO engagements. Each day, we are actively maneuvering a client’s site toward the desired position within the search results. We listen to our client for feedback as we roll out a strategy. We determine the best approaches to navigate obstacles or knock the components out of the way. Basically, we are continuously engaged with our customers and their sites and we are continuously correcting as necessary to achieve optimal results; to get more conversions – to win! So if SEO is like Olympic Curling, I can’t wait for our gold medals!

I was recently working on an SEO engagement that began with an extensive phase of keyword research and analysis.  As we worked to categorize, organize, and generally make sense of the terms that populated the language of our client’s industry, we began to notice clusters of search terms for which no corresponding content could be found on their website.

Did our keyword research efforts somehow run amok, inadvertently pulling in keyphrases unrelated to our client’s business?  That was certainly a possibility, and can happen quite easy if you’re not careful.  Another, more exciting possibility is that we uncovered niches within our client’s market (perhaps even potential products or services) that they weren’t even aware were worth considering.

The beauty of well-executed keyword research (using some of our favorite tools like Google’s Keyword Tool), is that the keywords you come across often paint an interesting picture of the subject you’re investigating.  Looking at the language used by searchers can give you insight into their needs or motivations (consider, for instance, the different needs associated with the search terms ‘buy dog leash’ vs. ‘dog leash training’).   And better still, Google’s Keyword Tool doesn’t just give you keyphrases related to your subject, but the traffic volumes associated with them, as well.  With this information, you begin to understand the degree of interest associated with the terms your keyword research uncovers.

Of course, this is a very simplified demonstration of the potential for using keyword research to aid in market research, but it’s a beginning.  With the right tools and know-how, there’s a strong case to be made for using keyword research to kick-off your quest for new market niches and opportunities for new products or services.

As fellow entrepreneurs, Linda and I are often meeting with friends and colleagues looking for the best way to get started with a new website. And the great news is, today’s tools for building websites are remarkable equalizers. Here are a few of our favorite tips and tools, written with entrepreneurs in mind. If you’re a large corporation in a competitive space, your “to-do” list will be more complex. However, many general principles apply across sites of all sizes.

Be Findable
The easiest way to be findable as an entrepreneur on a limited budget is to use tools designed from the ground up to be easily read by search engines such as Google. WordPress is a great choice here. You can start with a freebie version and customize things along the way as you have budget and time. Yes, there are other similar tools – although comparing them is a job for another article. Trust us when we say that few platforms have a vibrant community of coders and designers that support them like WordPress, so among other advantages, it’s simply going to be easier to find people to help you when you adopt a mainstream platform.

Keep Your Design Simple
Because we’re a little biased toward making sure you’re findable, we’re going to encourage you to focus on content and moving forward with the simplest design possible. Save your energy for the content. Custom design is awesome and great, and we love our design friends and we want you to keep them busy! We also want you to get started as efficiently as possible, to which end you may consider starting with a ready-made WordPress theme. More than a simple template, themes allow you to customize many aspects of a site formerly left to true coders.

Did We Mention Content?
Being findable is all about having content on your site that your target audience will be searching for. This requires understanding the language of your target audience, as well as having some volume of content that fits that audience. Building your site in a framework such as WordPress encourages blogging/content generation, and blogging naturally adds a diversity of keywords and keyphrases to your site. Even blogging once a week is enough to make a difference, and as you add new content, you’ll find that your site is found for a wider variety of searches – without having to pay to show up in search. There’s a lot of nuances we’re skipping here, but none of them matter if you’re not generating content in the first place. Writing is your secret weapon. If it’s not your bag, hire a copywriter to interview you and write articles. It’ll be the best investment you’ve ever made.

Include A Call to Action
What’s a call to action, you might ask? Just conjure up an old Billy Mays ad: “Call Now!” “Order in the next 15 minutes, and get a second one a free!” etc. If you’re bothering to attract someone to your site, you need to know what you want them to do when they get there. That’s your call to action. Make it clear. Make it big. Make it bold. Just like Billy.

Measure!
When you’re starting out, it’s tempting to say that you’ll know when this is all working because the phone will ring. While true, that’s a lagging indicator that doesn’t provide sufficient feedback to guide systematic improvements to your site. To gather that data, there are two free tools every site needs: Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools. There are others, but if you’re only going to do two, start with these.

In addition to installing those tools (start collecting data now, even if you don’t plan on using it right away) we recommend measuring a couple more things:

• Track phone calls. Eliminate guessing. Know exactly which phone calls came from the web. One of our favorites tools for phone tracking is Mongoose Metrics, which scales nicely from a single phone number designed to track all web leads, to enterprise class solutions with staggering numbers of unique phone numbers and sophisticated tracking that integrates with other systems like Google Analytics and Google AdWords.
• Use contact forms. Avoid using simple email/mailto links like the plague. Use a contact form to collect information – just enough information and no more. In the early days, chances are you would prefer to follow up and ask a few more questions than risk losing the lead because the form scared a prospect away. And if at all possible, make sure the contact form flows automatically into some sort of customer database / CRM tool. With tools like salesforce.com this is cheap and easy even for small organizations. And it’s a lot easier to implement when you’re still small. Do it now.

While this list may not sound very “SEOy”, that’s the ironic thing about how Search Engine Optimization has evolved. It used to be about title tags and such, but these days those tactics are often just the cost of entry. It you want to turn your website into Your Online Sales Engine, you’ll need more than the “traditional” SEO tactics – you’ll eventually need to build a system like the one we’ve outlined here.

Keep us posted on your progress – we can’t wait to hear your results!!

Search engine marketing is generally better when using a combination of strategies, but marketing budgets are not infinite. How should your company choose between Social Media and Search Engine Optimization strategies? One major consideration that can influence your choice between SEO and Social Media that is not often discussed is the impact of  product maturity.

Products and product categories are generally tracked on a life cycle curve that describe phases of a product’s development. From a marketing perspective, the primary aspect that needs to be considered in each stage is the way that it can be described, and the level of awareness the public has about that product. A Product in early stages often doesn’t have a commonly understood name, and the public has lower awareness about it. Think about how, in the last thirty years, the “mobile cordless cellular handheld telephone” has been shortened to “mobile”, “cell”, or “cell phone”, and think, as well, how many more people are aware of what these devices are.

How does this relate to search engine marketing? Well, each stage matches to a particular marketing strategy. Early stage product growth is driven by the enthusiasm of early adopters who can evangelize to the larger community. They also create the language of need and desire around the product that can be used as the product matures and grows. This makes it a good candidate for a social media campaign, since social media is most effective when being used by enthusiastic, authentic promoters through their online communities.

Mature product growth, in comparison, is driven by effective marketing and branding of known features, most of which can be simply and clearly expressed through simple, short, phrases. Since SEO focuses on widely used and understood keyphrases to generate visibility, it is a strong fit for later stage products.

So what do you have? A new, innovative idea that is going to take the world by storm, once people understand how to talk about it through your cadre of enthusiastic early adopters? Or do you have a well made, high quality or high value product, which just needs to win visibility against its existing competitors? The answer to that question — and how you can take advantage of it through Search Engine Marketing — can provide a lot of interesting ideas for your marketing team’s strategy sessions.

Now that Google incorporates video into their universal search results pages, and YouTube is the #2 search engine in the world, high-quality video is an essential component to any strategy for increasing online visibility. How can you make sure you get the most out of your YouTube uploads?

Create Content That Gets Results:

1. Create compelling content

You don’t have to be quirky and viral to create successful, high-ROI video for your business to promote on YouTube. Successful examples of video content that work for most businesses and brands include:

• Product demonstration: to show your wares in action
• Introduction to your team: to build a more personal connection
• “How to”: to highlight a product or service in action, to decrease customer support burden
• Office/factory tour: to highlight your capabilities, to bring your business to life
• “Hot topic” discussion: to show your expertise on cutting edge and controversial topics

At the moment, YouTube limits videos to 10 minutes in length for most users (some partners may get special privileges). Make sure to keep your video to this length. If you want to create longer content, make sure to divide it into coherent sections of less than 10 minutes each.

2. Record high-quality video

Use H.264 or MPEG-2 encoding. Record at an “HD” level resolution – this is 1920×1080 (1080p). Record in 16:9 aspect ratio if possible. Thumbnails are now set to show in 16×9 (prior wisdom used to be to upload in 4×3 because thumbnails showed at this ratio, this is no longer the case).

3. Highlight your brand

Don’t forget to include your company name in the video, both verbally and in writing. You can include your logo and company name as a title card at both the beginning and end of the video, or you can overlay it at the bottom or top of the video throughout. If you do not have video editing software, you can include these additions after you upload the video via YouTube’s Annotations feature.

4. Include a call-to-action

Your customer watched your video, now what? Let them know how they can contact you by highlighting your website and phone number in the video. Once again, this can be shown at the beginning and end or it can be displayed as an overlay throughout the video. Using YouTube’s Annotations feature, you can create fields in your video that display your phone number or URLs for relevant areas of your website.

Rank High:

1. Research keywords.

First, you must know which keywords you want to target. You want phrases that are relevant, descriptive, and are searched on. You can determine search traffic on keywords using Google’s Keyword Tool.

For example, more people search on “how to use chopsticks” than “using chopsticks” even though it is a longer query. Also, more people use the compound “chopsticks” than “chop sticks” with a space between the words. This knowledge helps determine which words are best used in title, description, and tags.

2. Use keywords in title, description and tags.

Make sure to keep themes tight and relevant. For instance, you would not want to target “how to use chopsticks” and “Chinese restaurants” at the same time. Instead, you might target “how to use chopsticks,” “chopsticks demonstration,” and “learn to use chopsticks.”

3. Choose the right category.

Make sure to review all the categories before choosing where your video fits. Once you have looked at all the categories, choose the most relevant one.

4. Share your video!

Don’t be shy about promoting your new video. If you use twitter, tweet about it. If you blog, blog about it. Embed the video into your site. Link to it from your email newsletter.

5. Don’t stop at YouTube

Gain incremental traffic by uploading your videos to Metacafe and Vimeo as well. Vimeo allows for significant customization of their channel pages as well as longer-format video uploads than YouTube. Videojug.com and 5min.com are also great sites for uploading instructional and how-to content.

Look Your Best:

1. Be aware of character limits on YouTube.

• Title: Keep your title to 45 characters or less to make sure it is not cut off (…) when displayed in search results.
• Description: Optimize the first 140 characters of your description to include keywords and encourage clicks. This is likely all that will be displayed within YouTube search. Include a functioning link to your website within the first 200 characters of the description. To ensure that it functions, do not remove the http:// from the URL. If the URL is longer than 27 characters, it will be truncated, so it is probably best to link to your home page. You may need to remove the “www” to save characters.

2. Make sure to select the best thumbnail possible.

The thumbnail is the image preview of your video, and the right thumbnail can make a big difference in views. In YouTube, you will be able to choose from three thumbnails, which are taken from the frames at 1/4, 1/2, and 3/4 into your video. In most cases, at least one of these thumbnails will represent your video well. However, if you find yourself having to choose between three bad choices (frames that are unclear, unrepresentative, etc.), then you can slightly modify the length of your video and re-upload. You will have new thumbnails to choose from.

In nearly 15 years of writing for the web, one thing I’ve seen change dramatically is the role of meta tags in Search Engine Optimization (SEO). This post is specifically about keyword tags – and their slow, painful death.

Today, Google doesn’t use meta keyword tags at all, as Google Engineer Matt Cutts explains in this short video:

While this topic has been hashed out in all the professional SEO forums, the death of the keyword meta tag is still not common knowledge – despite Danny Sullivan’s heroic attempt to bury the keyword tag way back in 2002. Here’s a quick history of how keyword tags evolved, and why Danny is right.

Back in the “good old days” when I started optimizing, there were FAR fewer web pages, and even fewer companies cultivating the web into a viable sales channel. Google didn’t exist yet, and neither did paid search. Hand-curated directories were still prevalent, and search engine algorithms were nascent. Back then, title tags and keyword tags ruled. Submitting your site to prominent directories and creating well-written pages with thoughtful keyword and title tags might be all you needed Own Page One®.

Over a decade later, the web is MUCH bigger (here’s a nice Google post on how big the web has become) and consequently the algorithms used to rank sites are far more complex. In addition to handling more content, algorithms have evolved to increase fairness and avoid attempts at gaming the system.

Those attempts include “keyword stuffing”, a practice used by less-than-scrupulous optimizers to gain visibility by showing up for popular but irrelevant searches, such as for pop stars, or (forgive me) porn. So basically, Google gave up and doesn’t use keyword meta tags anymore.

Among other things, one of the more important factors in Google optimization are back links (hence Google’s original name, BackRub). Back links used to come exclusively from other websites – in today’s world, they often come from social media sites. Links from social media sites show recency and relevancy – which are factors currently favored by most algorithms (roughly speaking).

That said, is it possible other search engines use keyword tags? The short answer is “no”. No major search engine uses them. Even Yahoo! – the last holdout – admitted to (nearly) ignoring the keyword meta tag in an industry conference in October of 2009. As with nearly everything in SEO, it’s possible to find an edge case where you might actually want to use a keyword tag, but for all practical purposes, it’s time to put it to rest.

In summary, our advice is to invest in more fruitful SEO activities, and skip the keyword meta tag.

Happy optimizing!