Browsing all articles from January, 2010
Jan
30

Google Local Citations

Google Local Citations

Google local has gotten a lot of love in the last year. If you are a retail business or brick and mortar and have not added your site to Google local than please do yourself a favor and add it now. It is super simple to do and with the internet basically replacing the Yellow Pages  it can drive a lot of highly targeted traffic to your site.

Lets say that you live in Atlanta and are looking for a place to store some furniture. You type in the term “storage atlanta” and you will see that above the organic results and below the pay per click results is the Google Maps. I am sure you know what a Google local map looks like but in case you are not familiar with them below is an image to illustrate.

Google Local Citations
Google Local Citation

Adding your site to Google local is the easy part but getting your business in the maps section can be a little bit tricky if your business is in a large city, this is were citations come into play to help you get noticed.

A citation is similar to a back link for seo purposes but it is more of a reference from another site. Lets’ take a look at what a citation is using the same example of “storage atlanta”.

Local Citations
Local Citations

If you will notice the arrow is pointed to a citation that is coming from another site www.atlantaga.areaguides.net which is a site that lists local businesses. The citation from the areaguides.net is like a back link in the world of Google local.

One of the keys to making sure that your business is listed in the google map section is to get as many relevant citations to your listing as you can. Getting citations is typically easier than getting a back links to your site because there are many websites that will allow you to list your business for free. Once Google and the other search engines pick the citations up it will be counted in the local listings.

Depending on how Google displays the map section for the keyword the traffic that your website can receive can trump the amount of traffic that you may get from an organic listing.

To list your site in Google Local go to: www.google.com/local/add

Jan
29

Adding Effective Title Tags For SEO

Effective Title Tags

Search engine optimization is one of the best ways to get your site known throughout the web. There are numerous reasons search engine optimization is a must have for any type of person looking to get their website known to the search engines and add customers.

If you are the owner of a business, you are definitely going to want to get your website search engine optimized by adding effective title tags into your website coding. This will help you get a nice ranking on Google’s first page for certain keywords. It is a great way to receive free traffic and get known on the website. There are numerous advantages to getting your website indexed on Google and search engine optimizing it!

The first advantage is that you can get people to come to your website for free! As long as you can rank high using search engine optimization by implementing effective title tags and other methods, you are going to get traffic from Google. Also, you can optimize your webpage for certain keywords; this means that you can choose which keywords you want to get traffic from the search engines. You are going to obviously want to get something with a lot of searches and little competition! Advertising is expensive, so this is a great way to shave your advertising cost!

Another advantage of having effective title tags to promote search engine optimization is because people do not have to know your website to visit it. They might be doing a random related search near your topic and land on your website. You do not have to tell them to go to your webpage in order for them to view it.

One of the methods in using search engine optimization is using effective title tags. Google bots will scan your website for tags, and these tags are where you can insert keywords that will help your site be recognized. Google will read these tags, and realize that your website is important for keywords related to this.

Another method aside from using effective title tag is by making sure you have a lot of related content on your website. If your website is about a certain topic, make sure you sprinkle in your keywords that are related to that topic.  When Google scans your website, it will also take the amount of keyword density into consideration.