Does your location matter to your business? The answer is yes. Whether you are looking to promote a local service, your business offers a service targeted to only Canadians, or you want to establish your company as a global brand, your location matters. For effective SEO, you need to harness the importance of your location to your target audience.

Here are 4 effective strategies:

1. Local Search
Major search engines such as Yahoo! and Google allow you to register your business as a local business. The benefit to doing this is that your site will show up in the local search results that are highlighted at the top of general search engine results. Registering your business is free. Check out Google’s local business center to sign up.

2. Local domains
Website domains have certain conventions: for example, .com for businesses, .org for organizations, .edu for educational institutions, .gov for government sites. However, countries also have conventions to help search engines identify their location: for example, .ca for Canada, .us for USA, .uk for the United Kingdom. An important caveat is to set up one domain as your primary domain, for example, .com. then for a business that serves Canadians, also set up the .ca domain, but have it permanently redirected to the .com. A side benefit is the brand protection that owning multiple domains will provide you.

3. In Bound Links
Search engines place great value on in bound and out bound links from websites within a similar industry or with related content. When establishing a location, this network of related websites helps too. A network of links from our website to Vancouver based websites, and vice versa, helps to establish our website as a Vancouver-based business.

4. Content
It may sound like an overly simple recommendation, but content is often overlooked when establishing a geographic location online. To make sure that your site is recognized for your location, ensure that your location is mentioned on all pages of your website, not just the contact us page. An easy way to do this is to feature the address in the footer text that appears at the bottom of the page. Placing the address in the footer helps search engines to find the address easily, and it also helps your website visitors quickly identify if they have found a business in their desired area. Be sure to include the identifiers that best suit your goals, whether your city, province or state, country, or even multiple metropolitan centers for a global presence.

The majority of web users visit Google to search on the main search page using their keyword term. More advanced users venture to the image, video, or map search functions of Google. However there are a great many more tools that Google offers which aren’t necessarily advertised on the main site, or even in their ‘more Google products’. They’re usually found in the Google Labs and one of these tools in particular can help one in the beginning phases of an SEO upgrade – and it’s called Google Trends.

Google Trends allows you to view search trends of multiple keyword terms and compare them. This allows you to see where the trends lie for your specific industry in terms of keywords and what your target market is looking for. This tool can be very powerful depending on what you use it for. It can allow you to see seasonal trends and steady traffic patterns that you otherwise may have missed.

For example, you can search for yearly events like “xmas gifts” that you think may have seasonal trends:

 

These results should have been exactly what you were expecting – that people search for “xmas gifts” around Christmas time.

It’s also possible to browse trends based on calendar dates rather than searching for them by viewing the Hot Trends. For example, by browsing the top 100 hot trends of November 4th, 2008 it’s obvious you’ll see the majority of results circle around the 44th presidential campaign between Barack Obama and John McCain.

It is important to remember that just because a certain search term is a ‘hot trend’ does not mean that you should put into your keywords or website content if it doesn’t fit with your topic. If it isn’t already apparent to why it’s a bad idea to incorporate content that doesn’t fit your topic or audience I strongly suggest you revert back to either my post on copywriting for SEO or Jess’ post on building the right audience.

When building a website, it is always helpful to keep SEO goals in mind for development decisions. In particular, SEO has been an important consideration for website developers when deciding how to create a website’s navigation system. SEO best practices have encouraged using search engine friendly menus based on HTML and styled with CSS because the primary language of search engines has been HTML. However, Google has now unleashed the ability for its spiders to crawl and read JavaScript, allowing websites to have dynamic dropdowns and snazzy effects without sacrificing SEO.

An example of a JavaScript menu system is the Monitronics website. They recently launched a new website built with DotNetNuke and the Solpart version 1.7.2 menu system. DotNetNuke’s Solpart menu system relies on JavaScript to run. What this means is that with scripting disabled, no menu items are visible, thus this would have been strongly discouraged if SEO was a consideration. However, now that Google can spider the new JavaScript menus, the links will appear in the Google cache and count toward SEO value for the site.

Even though Google spiders can now index JavaScript, this level of accomplishment is yet to be seen for Yahoo!. Yahoo! has successfully cached the text rendered by the JavaScript but failed to read the JavaScript code itself therefore failing to spider the drop down menus and the menu links. Thus the main menu text is visible but not any subsection pages access by the drop down menus.

A July 2006 study showed that while web users prefer Google (at 43.7% of usage) to Yahoo! (at 28.8%), Yahoo! is still a predominant consideration for SEO. Thus, web developers still need to consider the SEO limitations of navigation menus built with JavaScript, but this is definitely a very large step in the right direction and good start to 2009.

SEO is a process of increasing your website’s visibility online; but really, it is not just about your website, it is about your business. It is about claiming a presence online, with your own website, or the help of other sites too. Social media websites provide free services that allow you to easily promote your company and the message that you want to convey.

In my opinion, the best opportunity for free social media promotion is LinkedIn. This website is a business networking site with an international presence. Membership to the site is free; however website visitors do not have to be members to view your company’s profile. In fact, company profiles on LinkedIn often come up in the first page of search results for a company’s name. Once a member, you can create a personal profile, as well as one for your company. I recommend that you do both. 

Your company profile includes your address, a link back to your website, and a company description. Your personal profile allows more flexibility to not only describe your company, but to expand on that description with details, specialties, and a description of your role in the business. Social networking allows colleagues, associates, and business partners to search for you (and vice versa) and establish connections. You can build out your profile further with recommendations from your connections. The real power and influence of a social media website comes from the participation and engagement of its members.

The benefits to SEO from LinkedIn include:

• Content: Social media websites provide the chance to provide more content that describes your business to search engines.
• Backlinks: Search engines value networks of links between related websites, such as two websites that both describe your business.
• Visibility: LinkedIn is a website with a good reputation for business networking. It also has great rankings in the search engines!

 

The reality is that social media websites provide an opportunity for you to promote your business, improve your online presence, network with business professionals, and benefit your SEO. Seize the opportunity!

View the Netgenetix Media LinkedIn Profile

Professional SEO usually focuses on improving your corporate website’s results for industry keywords rather than company-specific terminology. This strategy aligns well with most business growth plans, because it promotes your company to searchers that may not know your company name yet. It can be critically important to harness the power of this new audience in order to earn new business; however, keep in mind that you also want to remember those searchers that do already know your company’s name.

When was the last time that you looked at the search results for your company name, rather than the results for your preferred keyword? Top placement is not what you are looking for here, but rather to see how your company looks to searchers who know your name. These searchers may be past clients, a new contact that you met at a networking event, or better yet, someone referred to your company by a client, friend or colleague. You want to ensure that these searchers see you at your best.

Search for your own company and see what comes up. You may be surprised what you see. If you find something you don’t like, contact the webmaster to see if they are willing to change the content. If you discover outdated information, see if you can update the information so that it is current.

Next search for your own name. Surprised again? You may need to consider modifying your privacy settings on social networking websites like Facebook and MySpace. You may want to take the opportunity to promote your professional image online with social media websites like LinkedIn.

For extra credit, search for your competitors by name. Are they doing something well that your company can learn from? Is there press section prominently featured? Are they promoted on industry blogs? Are they listed on respected directories? Learn from your competitors.

The business potential of SEO is greatly enhanced by using search engines as tools to learn about your industry, your competitors, as well as your own company. Check back regularly for best results.

To some smaller organizations, the decision to add a blog to their website isn’t a hard one. What about those larger, more conservative companies? They stand to lose a lot more and aren’t generally a fan of the risk factor. Their fear is well justified though – employees have been dooced for posting confidential information or information that would be embarrassing to the organizations they worked for (like Heather Armstrong). Many companies are mainly worried about losing control of their company message and reputation.

However, there are many advantages to blogging for your business. They’re great for bringing traffic and links to the company website as well as promoting new products or services. Search engines love web pages that are constantly updated and include a lot of content - a blog caters to these search engine obsessions. A blog is also an easy way to measure success and receive feedback on a business’ products and services as visitors can easily comment (unless this is opted out of) on posts and link back to information they find valuable or interesting.

Before starting a company blog there are several things to consider. For example who will write for the blog? Should there be rules for writers? Which blog software should be used? A full-time blog takes a lot of work to maintain and writing interesting or valuable posts at a consistent rate can be difficult for any one regular employee to maintain. However if several employees are to contribute to the blog then it would be wise to establish some guidelines and policies for them to follow while writing. Staff availability and dedication is something that is essential to a successful corporate blog. Depending on the size of the company and how active the blog will be there are several different choices for blog software platforms. Some popular choices tend to be Wordpress, Blogger, and Typepad.

Even though there are several risks to starting a blog for large companies there are also a few ways to mitigate that risk by adding things such as comment and post moderation – so that nothing goes live until it has been approved. Another way is to determine a low-risk focus to the blog while keeping it interesting and valuable to the readers. This keeps employee bloggers focused on safe topics that are unlikely to cause any large ruckus in the blogosphere.

Blogging for a business tends be very beneficial to companies if it’s done properly and with care - rushing into a decision such as this is likely not a good idea. If you plan on starting a blog for your business I highly recommend reading Publish and Prosper: Blogging for Your Business by DL Byron and Steve Broback, as it will give you a great base for business blogging the smart way.

The internet is crowded. Your website does not exist in a space on its own, waiting to be found by your perfect customer. It exists in a crowded space, with many other websites that are competing for exactly those same customers.

How can you set your website apart and be found?

The answer is not just SEO techniques, but SEO strategy. This strategy is the important planning and analysis that should preceed any implementation of any changes to your site. This strategy will focus on your goals for your website and how these goals translate to SEO.

There is an important step in this strategy that should never be overlooked when planning your SEO changes - competitor analysis. It is my belief that any SEO strategy needs to have a considerable focus on the competitive landscape - the results for your business will speak for themselves.

How do you evaluate your competitive landscape for SEO?

1. See how your competitors place

Simply perform searches as a user on search terms that you have identified as important to your business. You will easily find the most prominent online competitors - and may even be surprised to discover a few new ones. Better to know who you are up against in order to better understand how to set yourself apart.

2. See what your competitors are doing well

The search results page itself will  shows trends itself. For example, the top ranked sites will likely have the keyword in their page title. If you look at the first page of search results, and click off to each site, you can get a glimpse of the true competitive landscape. Learn from your competitors and you can level the playing field.

3. See what your competitors are doing poorly

Each competitor site can offer a good list of 'don'ts'. Perhaps a competitor has focused too much on SEO techniques, rather than SEO strategy, and the professionalism of the site has eroded. Always remember that SEO is the first step to get visitors to your site, but once there, they need a reason to stay.

4. Identify the opportunities for your site

Perhaps a known competitor does not appear in the first few pages of results. Perhaps you notice a trend in the SEO techniques of successfully ranked companies.  These scenarios are opportunities for your business.

As in all other areas of business, competitor analysis is exceptionally powerful. Learn from your competitors, and continue to learn about SEO, and you are already on your way.

Effective search engine optimization is based on understanding your target audience - not the target audience you have, but the target audience you want.

For example, I may have a website that gets reasonable traffic, but doesn't seem to be driving my business. I try SEO to improve website traffic, but still do not get the benefit that I seek for my business. What's wrong with this picture? I am not accurately targeting the website visitors that I want with my SEO efforts.

So today, I have two simple questions for you about SEO for your business:

1. "What keywords do your current visitors search on to find your website?"
2. "What keywords do the visitors that you want search on to find the website they want?"

The contrast in these two questions will make all the difference in your SEO strategy.

Step 1 - Find out what keywords visitors use to find your website

The easiest way to do this is to add Google Analytics code to your website. Once this simple code is added, you can monitor your website traffic patterns - and learn from your visitors. You can see what search engines they are using, what keywords they searched on to find your site, how long they stayed once they arrived at your site, and even the path that they took through the content on your site. 

Critical information can be gleaned from this very simple step. For example a peripheral keyword may be driving most of your traffic, but the keyword is not central to your business goals. Thus website visitors arrive at your website, then realize they are at the wrong site, 'bounce' off to the next one.  You can view this scenario as an opportunity to refocus - either capitalize on the current patterns by shifting your business offerings, or replace your SEO efforts with keywords that your desired website visitors actually use to find websites like yours.

Step 2 - Identify the visitors that you want, figure out their goals, and most importantly, speak their language.

Essential to this exercise is that you know which website visitors you want. Once you know this, you need to figure out what goal they seek to achieve. By understanding their goals, you can view the search from their perspective, and then you are that much closer to understanding their language.

How do you learn to speak their language? Try to use words that your customers would use to describe your business. Would they call describe it by its official term, or would they use more informal casual language? Ask your current customers how they would describe your business  - you may be surprised by the answer. Also try variations on the theme to see where the competitors are grouping, and where they may be gaps and opportunities for your business.

In summary - Build the right audience

SEO is not about simply increasing rank and building website traffic, it is about increasing rank for the right keywords that will build the right kind of website traffic that will help your business.

Copywriting for the web is an exercise in balance. Too wordy, and you’ll lose the attention of your audience. Too short, and you aren’t providing enough substance to sustain repeat visits.

The conundrum gets more complex when SEO is also a goal for your website. The reason is that text-based content is the food of search engines. As a result, content that is keyword rich is sure to get you some headway when it comes to search engine optimization. However, it isn’t as simple as loading a page with keywords.

The key to copywriting for SEO is balance. There are 4 factors to consider:

Keyword Density
Keyword density refers to the quantity of keywords seeded in your content, compared to non keyword phrases. Too many keywords in your content and you will do more harm than good. We recommend no more that 5% keywords.

Readibility
SEO will only get visitors to your website, it won’t make them stay. Misplaced keywords and unnecessary content will only frustrate your readers once they get there. Good well-written content will help encourage your website visitors to stay, explore, and even return again later, rather than bounce right off to the next site.

Value
Google values content, but it also highly values in bound links to your site. Link-based popularity means that other people like your site enough to link from their site to yours. To gain this popularity, you need to create value for your website visitors, not just for search engines.

Popularity
In-bound links not only help SEO, they also help drive website visitors to your site from referring websites. This is a great endorsement, and one that harnesses the true power of the web – your website visitors spreading the message about your website simply because they like it.

In order to fully optimize a website for search engines, it is necessary to do a full and thorough evaluation of relevant information about the website. This can often be a long and tiring task but several tools and resources can help make your job a lot easier. I’ve put together a list of the top 3 tools that help you gather information easier and faster than on your own.

Google Analytics
Google Analytics gets top marks in my books because it is not only a helpful tool for search engine optimization, but for user experience and information architecture. By adding the Google Analytics code to your website, you can track not only your page views, but also what your users are searching for, how they’re finding your website, how long they’re staying, and even the path they take as they navigate your website content. Other useful information includes a dynamic map that displays the geographic location of your website visitors, globally as well as locally. Another useful (and fun) feature is a site overlay that shows you exactly where people click when they visit your website. Yes, I love this tool.

Search Engine Simulator
How does a search engine view your website? Now you can find out. With this Search Engine Simulator tool, you can see your website the way that a search engine robot does: no images, no flash; only text. It is an enlightening experience! This is a good way to evaluate simple changes to improve your site, such as rewriting content to add meaning to often over-looked text, such as footer navigation and copyright statements. There is no sign up, simply submit your website address to the simulator, and immediately see the results – and learn from them. Now you can see like a search engine robot, and your website will love you for it.

SEO website grader
Are you curious how your website compares to your competitors? SEO website grader evaluates not only your website, but also those of your competitors. You can see how each site is valued by search engines for content, keywords, site structure, … It can be a humbling experience, but also exceptionally useful – it takes the guess work out of understanding your website, and how it matches up to the competition. You can learn from this tool, and from your competitors – and you can improve your SEO.