Website Promotion is not Voodoo

We’re back with another thrilling installment of our bi-monthly series: Top 10 for the Weekend! Keep reading to find out tips and tricks, as well as what’s new in the world of SEO

Great Apps to Customize Your Facebook Fan Page

Facebook recently hit a new milestone: 500 million users! With this high volume it is a perfect platform for marketing, and people are already taking advantage of this opportunity. Here is a list of great apps that allow you to customize your fan page to its fullest potential.

As we reported in an earlier post, there are things to consider now that the Bing and Yahoo alliance is coming so near. Starting sometime in August or September, Yahoo’s organic search results will be fully provided by Bing, which will increase their organic search market share from 11% to 27%. Wouldn’t it be great if this meant an end to Yahoo Local, leaving you with only Bing and Google local listings to worry about?

Google Maps… the Local Business Center… Google Places… so many faces, so many problems. While it brings me great happiness once an issue is resolved, when trying to work them out, it seems like it’s never going to end. In the past, I’ve used a puzzle as an analogy for local search. I never really did like puzzles, and if Google Maps was a puzzle it would be a 2,000 piece box full of 1 inch pieces, 50 of which have been eaten by your kitten and thrown about the house by your children.

Putting Together the Pieces of the Local Search Puzzle

Search Influence is honored to have once again been invited by David Mihm to take part in his annual study on Local Search Ranking Factors. The best part of this collaboration is that the questions have remained fairly constant from year to year in order to study the change from year to year that SEOs have observed in Google’s local algorithm.

1. Why Local Businesses Can No Longer Ignore Foursquare

For some reason businesses are hesitant to jump on the social media bandwagon. It’ll never make sense to me because even if you don’t believe in its power, your customers do!  By simply adding a little prize for the mayor or a special for just checking in, you are almost guaranteed loyal repeat customers looking to catch a deal. It’s a game for these people! Make your business the board!

2. The Rise of SMB Reputation Management

I can’t fight this feeling any longer. I need to profess my love of Google Maps. Our relationship was a tumultuous one, but she won me over in the end. Living in New Orleans, where some street signs are still missing from their respective corners, Google maps was a saving grace. They also recently started to include bike routes, which guides bikers through the least traffic-laden areas. Though this feature still needs some work, I think it’ll be a great asset to this ever-expanding program.

A quick thanks and a link, for your information, to an interview Mat Siltala did with me on Search Engine Journal.

Picture of Mat Siltala and Will Scott at SMX West

Mat and I often speak about search, local, social media and his favorite viral marketing. I appreciate the opportunity for the exchange of ideas and am always happy to spend time with Mat.

In the interview we talk about some of the Top Local Business Listing questions we receive.

Local search experts share secrets, tips and tools to dominate local on March 23, 2010 at SES New York.

Local search marketing is a different animal than typical search engine optimization. (Is there such a thing as “typical search engine optimization”?)  The semi-annual Local Search Summit will be held March 23, 2010 at the Hilton New York, and provides an opportunity to listen in as the top thought leaders in the industry discuss the most up-to-date local search techniques and tricks.

Super SEO secrets being shared …

Local search ranking factors can rock the search results.

Your Google listing and its Google Place page is a great central depository for all information about your business.  It is the compilation of business owner provided data as well as user-generated reviews. The Place page is an incredibly valuable tool for a small or medium size business owner.  The Places page URL is friendly to users, easy to share, and easy to find …

You will want to search for your company + geo modifier.

For example, “Search Influence, New Orleans, LA” will get me here:

Google’s idea of giving small businesses their own page through their project, Place Pages for Google Maps, has got local search buzzing with the SEO implications of this move for small business websites. Could Place Pages provide competition in the SERPS for the small business website? It’s possible. Will they be bad for business? That’s not so clear.

For one, a business without a high ranking or optimized website would benefit from the obvious boost of having Google display “all the information for that place in one place” on its very own Place Page. On the other hand, the fact that Place Pages also provide user-generated content, in the form of reviews, has just made the task of online reputation management that much harder.