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.

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.

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.

Today’s topic is about CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and why it’s a better option for developing a website with good search engine optimization.

Spiders are sent out by search engines to crawl websites and index them in the search engine’s databases. These spiders use what is called “top down” logic, which means they index websites and crawl the content from the top of the source code to the bottom. Considering this, developing websites using techniques like tables and frames hinder your search engine optimization, because they add bulky unnecessary code that makes it harder for a search engine to read.

Using external CSS separates content from presentation which in turn will put the content higher in the source code. This also makes for less code altogether, making it easier for spiders to index apparent important information displayed through tags such as headers and titles.

Separating content from presentation also provides more time for making changes to presentation and/or content without searching through an endless sea of code, leaving more time to update the website with new and fresh content and/or presentation. Making updates, another thing search engines love!

Search engine spiders, as much as we’d like to believe of robotic things, are not stupid. Spiders can see the tricks you try to pull, so adding extra content with keywords and using CSS to hide them won’t help your ranking (putting white text on a white background for example).

Another thing that weighs down website code is JavaScript. Developers sometimes use JavaScript to make flashy navigation and menus; however, remembering the “top down” theory, this doesn’t help the spiders find your content. Good navigation and menus can be made just as easily using CSS and they don’t weigh down the code like JavaScript does, so it’s definitely an option to think about when developing your website.

So, in conclusion,

• DO separate content from presentation using CSS
  
• DON’T try to cheat the search engines by hiding content with CSS
  
• DO use titles and header tags
  
• DON’T use too much JavaScript where you can use other methods such as CSS
  
• DO keep the “top down” theory in mind
  
• DON’T write messy, hard to read code
  
• DO update websites often