SEO Copywriting Tips

SEO Copywriting is a critical facet of online marketing. We are constantly giving our writers SEO copywriting tips to help them deliver better content for our customers.

SEO Copywriting Tips from RoboScribe

As such, we’re going to start giving SEO copywriting tips right here. Some of these content tips may be more applicable to our writers, some may be appropriate for the general public.

Writers: Please give us your feedback and let us know if there’s anything you’d like our guidance on. Chances are if you have an SEO copywriting question there are many others who share that concern.

Results Pagination in Google Places View

For a while now, Google has been showing “Related Places” AKA “The Competition in places view.

Google Related Places - AKA The Competition

While looking at the results for one of our clients who has recently opened a new office for his law practice in a New Orleans LA suburb I came across this.

Paginated Google Places Results

Clearly Google is trying to offer some alternative results for “Metairie Divorce” than our guy Will Beaumont at 3814 Veterans Memorial Blvd #302, Metairie, LA 70002 – (504) 834-1117.

You’ll have to click through as I can’t figure out how to link directly.

Local Search Ranking Factors 2011

It’s always interesting to see the outcome of the annual “Local Search Ranking Factors” study. As contributors we have strong opinions about many elements, and like you, we’re always learning as well.

Now that we’ve had a chance to review, we’ve identified:

• Places where we agree
• Criteria where, for us, the jury is out
• Things we question

The Top Ten from This Year’s Local Search Ranking Factors Study:

• Physical Address in City of Search
• Manually Owner-verified Place Page
• Proper Category Associations
• Volume of Traditional Structured Citations (IYPs, Data Aggregators)

Yellow Pages & SEO - Print Dollars for Internet Dimes

The Pets.com Sock Puppet

I was having a conversation today with one of our clients for whom we do Yellow Pages SEO, and I swear I was transported back to the year 2000. It’s amazing to me that more than a decade after Yellow Pages companies first started getting their feet wet on the internet, they still don’t quite get it.

“Trading print dollars for Internet dimes,” they say.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. The online opportunities are immense for well established brands like the Yellow Pages for SEO, websites, paid search advertising, social media. With feet on the street combined with the power of SEO, the Yellow Pages, if they could ever get their act together, would eat our lunch.

Reviewing the Yelp Review Filter

I’ve just published a longer article on the Yelp Review Filter, what it is, how to manage it and, of course, how to spam it.

Since I wanted to make it a page rather than a post it doesn’t have comments so I’m putting up this post to collect comments.

Are you a business who is stinging from being Yelped? Tell us about it and we’ll do a follow up blog post with the best stories.

And even if you’re not a business owner I’d love to hear your opinion of the Yelp Review Filter in the comments.

Actionable Social Media Analytics: Likes to Leads

Last week I had the pleasure of presenting on Social Media Analytics at SEMpdx SearchFest.

Most of our customers have no interest in Likes and Followers for their own sake. What we’re interested in most is Leads. In other words, do our Social Media Analytics enable us to track actionable data, most importantly, leads?

Barnacle SEO - Local Search Engine Optimization for The Sam's Club Crowd

This post is republished here since the site on which it was originally published is now offline. Originally published. Many of the examples are no longer valid, but I hope the screenshots are still useful.

Small business owners are generally a frugal lot.

Of course there are some who’ve got the budget to invest heavily as long as they see a return, but what about those who don’t?A long time ago someone coined the phrase “Parasite SEO” talking about the abuse of Blogger and WordPress.com to get better search term positioning.  I love the term, but “parasite” is just so ugly sounding.  I prefer “Barnacle SEO”.

Foursquare Survey Contest Winner Announced

We’d like to congratulate the winner, chosen at random, from our respondents to the first-ever Foursquare advertiser study.

Environmental Education Programs - The Urban Ecology Center

In order to be completely fair, we picked the entry at the halfway point (#65 of 130 respondents). And the lucky winner was Jeff McAvoy of the Urban Ecology Center.

Social Media Widget

The Urban Ecology Center offers Environmental Education Programs for Milwaukee residents in two Milwaukee County parks. These guys are clearly very social media savvy with a presence on Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, LinkedIn and an email list.

Influencer Profile: Rodney Hess

This is the first of what I hope will become a regular series in which you, our readers, get to know a little more about the most important thing at Search Infleunce, our team members.

Rodney Hess keeping Angie Scott entertained at our night out on / at Oak

Rodney Hess is on our Account Management team, supporting Paula Keller and maintaining customer relationships and strategy for his own group of customers. Additionally, Rodney is the guy who is leading the charge to get our other teammates (you know who you are) to blog more. In fact, due to Rodney’s efforts, a brand-new team member Sara Soriano penned her first post in her first week on the job (way to go Sara)!

CityGrid Media (an Orange Soda Investor) Scummy Lead Generation

CityGrid Media, who recently invested significantly in Orange Soda (an SEO/PPC firm out of Utah) has chosen to use the favored tactic of Nigerian princes and Offshore Link-Exchangers to drum up business for their new partner Orange Soda.

CityGrid Media (Orange Soda) Form Spam Image

I’m very surprised to see this kind of thing from a company of this stature.

I’m glad to see that the address is in New York and not American Fork Utah as I’m fairly confident the folks I’ve known at Orange Soda wouldn’t condone this behavior.

Full text of email message follows: