With the current trend that the search engines have become the new Yellow Pages, Google, Yahoo and MSN have been altering their algorithms (a fancy word for how they determine who ranks for what and how high).   They are altering the algorithms to provide better local results. 

 Just 3 years ago trying to find a shoe store or gift store on a particular street in your town would usually yield maybe, 1 accurate result.  As more people began to search for local stores and businesses the search engines realized they had to improve their local search results and now they are competing to be the best as they know the site that provides the most relevant results could gain a serious edge in the searchers market share that Google dominates.  Google is trying to hold on to it and MSN and Yahoo are trying to capture it.

 Google has implemented the Google map results for local searches.  For instance, search for “carpet cleaning” in any city and you will get a list of results mapped on a mini map before the top 10 natural rankings.  So the question begs, where does your site show up for local searches. 

So how do you help your business to show up for local searches in addition to some good SEO. Make sure you are displaying a full address including zip code on your website along with phone numbers.  The search engines will use this information to map your business. 

Not only does this help but it also increases the “trust factor” for your website.  Search Engines are moving away from companies that hide behind contact forms and no direct address or phone number so having your full address and phone numbers will help to show the search engines that you are a legitimate, reputable business. 

 Home based business may want to consider a box office or an executive rental to ensure you have an address on your site, but don’t include your home address on your site for your own safety.

 In addition to this you need to make sure your site is appropriately optimized for your most related keywords and city name. 

This will help to ensure you are optimized for local searches.  Nothing complex, but you may want to consider having an SEO company optimize your pages if you aren’t comfortable doing this for yourself to ensure that it’s done properly and ethically.

One question you may not have thought to ask is “Who is doing my SEO work”? A dirty little secret that many SEO companies hide is that they actually farm out their work offshore or to other companies.

Troll through the postings of any of the big freelance websites such as Get A Freelancer, Elance, Guru and the many others and you will find many postings that read like this:

We are a web design company in Canada. We are looking for one or more SEO partner companies to whom we can send work, and build a long-term relationship.

or

We are a consulting firm looking to sub contract our SEO work.

or

We are a web developer and  will be providing a number of customers with SEO services and would like to strike up a relationship with an Indian or Pakistani based SEO company.

So the questions begs…who is doing your SEO work?  Are you paying high prices with a company only to have them send the work off shore at a fraction of the cost. 

Off shore optimization also presents quality issues that the company would need to make sure they stay on top off.   Meta Tags and content may be written by someone who’s first language is not English resulting in poorly written tags and content, lower quality links like forum and blog postings are typically used which provide quick short term results but hurt a site in the long run.

If a company is outsourcing their SEO work than there are some things you need to judge:

• Are they outsourcing only menial tasks and are they telling the company what to do?
  Why this matters: If this is the case they are in control and are outsourcing tasks that are time consuming like link building, but as long as they are incontrol of what link building is being done that this isn’t too bad.
• Are they outsourcing all tasks and do they seem knowledgeable in SEO?
  Why this matters: If they are outsourcing all tasks this is a sign that they don’t know much about SEO, start asking questions about what methodologies they use, where they build links, what tools they use.  If they can’t answer the question without specifics and speak more in generalities (i.e. “we use the most popluar keyword research tools available” instead of  “we use Word Tracker”) than you can easily deduce that this company doesn’t know enough to manage and choose a proper outsourcing company and is only in it for the money it brings in.

Don’t pay premium prices for a North American, UK or Australian company if you aren’t sure where the work is coming from, ask them if any portion of the work is outsourced and judge accordingly if you feel the value is worth their cost or not.

By now most people who own or run a website have heard about Search Engine Optimization, otherwise known in it’s abbreviated form SEO.  

Most have second hand knowledge from someone who has explained some of the tricks and wizardry behind getting a site to show up in the search engines.  Many SEO clients recant the little they have heard about SEO as putting white letters on a white back ground, making sure your pictures have tags, sharing links with as many sites as you can find etc.

There are many myths about what SEO work is and what really is done.  In this posting we intend to explain what is SEO and what work constitutes SEO. 

SEO is comprised of two components, On-Page SEO and Off-Page SEO. 

On-Page SEO is the work done to your actually website pages.  This may or may not include (depending on your SEO company):

• Keyword Research - Keyword research is the work done to determine the best keywords to target with each page.  Depending on the industry there may be one or two dominant keywords or there may be may different ways people search.  For instance in the real estate industry people may search using the city name combined with Homes, Properties, Real Estate, Realtor, Agent, Realtor Agent, Listings, Property Listings and so on.  With proper keyword research it can be determined how people are searching in your industry or geographical area. 
• Meta Tag Writing - Meta tags are the Title, Description and Keywords associated with each page that the search engines use to generate rankings.  Without good meta tags that are written properly, conforming to the rules and using the keywords your site is trying to target all the other work will be useless.  These drive the rankings, but meta tags alone can’t do the job.
• Content Optimization - Content optimization is changing the written content on the page so that it uses the keywords targeted in the meta tags. 
• Alt and H1 Tags - Alt tags are used to describe to the search engines what the images are on your website.  The search engines can’t see images or graphics used on your site, so for instance if you have “Special Sale” written in a graphic instead of text on your website the alt tag can be added “Special Sale” so that the search engines know what that graphic says.  H1 Tags are the use of putting your important titles, category names or important text that you want both the readers and the search engines to see as important.  H1 is mainly a technical term to making the font bigger and bolder but seen as important by the search engines and by readers as you clearly want this text to stand out.
• Clean Code - It’s important to check the code of each web page to ensure that there are no major errors in the code.  When search engines visit if they have trouble “crawling” your site through the code as they keep running into errors they will leave and your full site will never be visited and they will visit less often.
• Page Creation - for sites that don’t have enough pages or content additional pages may be created to allow for more keywords to be targeted.
• Sitemap - Some SEO companies if they feel the navigation can’t be seen by the search engine may create a web page that is a sitemap to all your pages of your site to ensure they can find all your pages (this is different from a Google and Yahoo sitemap which are in special coded form and separate pages that only Google and Yahoo see and are not linked to anything else on your site)
• Resources Page - Some companies may suggest adding a resources page to trade links with other websites.  There are still some SEO companies, individuals and freelancers out there that believe reciprocal linking is a good thing, therefore may suggest to add a page such as this, we suggest you read our other posting on How to Choose an SEO Company

Off-Page optimization includes all the work done to build inbound links to your site and submitting the site to the search engines.  This may include directory submissions, paid blogging, reciprocal linking, buying paid links and various linking schemes.  Submitting your website to the search engines and submitting Google and Yahoo sitemaps.

Note: Be careful as there are many linking strategies that can seriously damage your site with the search engines, make sure you are using a company that uses ethical and honest linking practices.  

SEO work is not wizardry or a set of tricks but serious work when done professionally will ensure good long lasting results.