Google 2011: Impacts on Local Internet Marketing

My Favorite Recent Local SEO Posts from 2009

Here are my choices for 8 of the best local search engine optimization posts for 2009. What do you think? Do these local sem posts cut the mustard?

Framework for Local Search by David Mihmorandum

Local Search Ranking Factors 2009 by Andrew Shotland

Aleyda Solis has a fabulous post which is phenomenal in its coverage of local seo ranking factors and small business marketing.

How to Do Local SEO for Your Website in Five Minutes or So by Tad Chef on Andrew Shotland’s Local SEO blog has great tips for web video.

Matt McGee’s post about Launching a New Small Business Website on an affordable budget of $3000 is quite good. (I think he should have added some wise caveats about pay per click marketing and management, but otherwise a fantastic article on small business marketing and social media strategy) Lisa Barone has similar, but not as specific advise at Outspoken Media.

61 Pre-SEO Campaign Questions is pretty extensive (I think I would cull it down, but is helpful for those thinking about the pros and cons of outsourcing SEO work)

This post by Bill Slawski at SEO by the Sea about small business marketing is entertaining as he wraps it around his passion for blues music.

I would also check out Matt McGee’s favorite search engine optimization blog posts of April 2009, which includes Blumentals explanation of tracking results for local SEO campaigns with Google analytics.

As an Oldie but Goodie Bonus: My earlier comprehensive post aboutlocal seo tips and tactics is quite extensive and a virtual checklist of web citations to pursue.
Do you have a favorite local SEO, big brand SEO, or social media optimization post from 2009?

If you would like to contact Creative Fusion Media, contact us at (615) 974-9662 or via email.

Ethical SEO Tips for Local Small Business

Interested ethical seo or social media and social marketing optimization?

Here is my ethical SEO presentation at Barcamp Birmingham. Here is the black and white version of my powerpoint deck I did for the informal unconference section of Barcamp Birmingham 2009. Its not pretty, but pretty information rich (aka useful) for the introductory or intermediate SEO. Although some of the tips I extemporaneously added that you don’t get here–despite all this I got a request to post the presentation and lots of complements. Enjoy this ethical search engine optimization goodness.

Feel free to link to the presentation here on my blog and embedded the code, which is available at Slideshare on your blog. Also, check out the rest of my local seo and ethical seo posts as well. Check out my ethical link development tips for bloggers. For those interested specifically in issues of local seo, you will want to check out the fantastic local seo tips and techniques. Also knowing your search ranking factors and local search ranking factors is a must.

Matt Cutts, who is head of web spam at Google and guru of search engine algorithms suggests that unethical and whats called grey hat and black hat techniques may be gone from Google the near future.

If you need help with search engine optimization or if you are a social media or search engine marketing firm in need of outsourcing your seo needs, feel free to contact me at (615) 974-9662

Social Media needs Local SEO

Social Media Marketing needs Local SEO for Real Success

There are lots of so called social media experts and consultants out there, but very few who have driven traffic and sales. And many will babble on about engagement, but what does that mean for your bottom line. How do you evaluate the ROI of community engagement on your accounting sheet. Don’t get me wrong, social media is all well and good. Thats part of the package we offer. However, its just one piece of the puzzle. And unfortunately, 95% of social media marketers won’t fess up to this simple fact.

With that in mind, its important for your social media campaign to keep in mind your role as a local small business. Small businesses have a unique role to play in our economy and luckily Google recognizes this. What does this mean for you and your small business? Whether you are a plumber, a lawyer, a real estate agent, a restaurant owner, a african basket artisan, or you run a cleaning service, its important to take into account the role of local search in your overall marketing package.

Google, Microsoft Live, and and Yahoo Local all offer free local listings for your business. And in the case of Google, these listings show up in normal search results when you. And its simply amazing to think that small businesses are leaving this money on the table. Its free small business marketing The opportunity to be frontal lobe mind share, let alone have an almost free lead from search engine results is certainly something to be valued and followed up on.

Once you plug your information into the 3 search engines, you will also want to plug in your information in local search directories as well. If you would like help with this, please give me a call.

17 Tips for Ethical SEO for Real Estate

17 Fantastic Types of Content for Ethical Real Estate SEO and Link Development

Whether you are a real estate agent or broker, in our current economic system, you know that your online marketing strategy is critical to low cost customer acquisition and creating a better relational way to create an effective online sales funnel for your real estate business. For the next 6 to 18 months, customers aren’t exactly going to be walking in the door. In addition, in order to beat your real estate competition to market as social media and real estate seo strategies ramp across the country its critically important to Carpe Diem or in this case Carpe blog, Carpe social media, and Carpe SEO. Here are a couple of on point tips for amping up your ongoing marketing efforts with real estate social media and seo:

• Professional Interviews are Quality Unique Content-interviews (linked up to relevant content on and off your blog) (bonus for interview series or 1 to 6 questions asked to a handful of industry experts, your customers, or your readers) memes perform the same function.
• Aggregated Visual Content Helps Real Estate Buyers-By aggregating your best house pictures (appropriately optimized) your highlight your best properties or sold properties. You can also use visually attractive photos to highlight individual neighborhoods, which helps buyers pick between local communities and geographies.
• Page Rank and Trust Rank are Alive and Well-Quality directory submissions help your Google ranking. For a relative low cost you can get trusted links without having to wait on page 10 while your site grows. Paid directory submission can turbo charge your early seo efforts in a flash. However, you have to pick the right directories to submit to.
• Original SEO Friendly Content-The linkerati, as the people who have websites are often called enjoy controversial, funny, useful, relevant, surprising, different, and unique perspectives. This web masters will appreciate interesting, engaging, or visually stimulating photography.
• Linking to your sources is great for SEO- Researched and linked content (with citation/bibliography and block quoting). Given that Google is based on an academic model.
• Diagrams Bring Life to Your Content-Original content thats researched with numbers (aka charts, graphs, or info-graphs) is also likely to garner links from readers and industry leaders. Also the linkerati are a highly technical crowd, who loves visual diagrams. Especially if those diagrams are useful for their readers.
• Stories of Experiments and Personal Journeys-personal experiments (makes it automatically unique and “real”) It also says something about you as a person.
• Focus on Your Best–Focus your readers on a series or aggregation (ie aggregation of the best or top 10) . Google and your readers will appreciate having the information all gathered in one easy to find, read, and access location.
• Solving Problems, and Answering Questions-answer questions that are very RELEVANT to your audience. Much of what people do in the search engines is ask questions. By answering questions not only are you likely to answer a query that your customers are making, but also you are likely to gain customers trust by putting them at ease.
• Free Goodies and Strategic Giveaways-free stuff thats REALLY valuable to your readers (see also: contests). Free stuff that goes beyond mere text is likely to get more links. One great example of this is ebooks or wordpress themes.
• Virtual Neighborhood Comparison and Tour-neighborhood specific details (pictures, content, stats, etc..)
• Community events-Its easy to rank in Google for community events and it provides a unique service to potential clients.
• Local History = Real Estate SEO. history of city or community, linking to relevant historical documents or landmarks can be both interesting and increase your search engine ranking.
• Everybody Loves a Top 10-how to/tips/top 10
• Pictures Rock My World-how tos with pictures are better
• Easy to Understand = Great Real Estate SEO-sussinct diagrams that simply explain an issue easily and simply
• Personal and Authentic Content Creates Relationship-personal pictures, personal life

Bonus: guides and whitepapers (oh…and posts that have photos/visual and over deliver)
Bonus #2: Start a contest powered on WordPress and widgets and $$$. (actually just money and widgets)

Real Estate SEO and Social Media Resources:
• Interview with real estate agent blogger on Search Engine Land

PS. I hope this post helped you!!!!!

Hotel and Travel Social Media Tactics from Mashable

Marketing with travel 2.0 is the latest trend in travel and destination marketing. Along with hotel and travel seo, travel social media offers a great way for small travel businesses and big brand destinations to market themselves and connect with customers in a human way. Mashable has some great social media marketing tips that apply to hotel and travel social media:

From my experience of trying to get big brands to embrace the social revolution, there are a number of reasons why they have yet to embrace the real opportunities that involvement can deliver:
1. Social Media is often viewed as just another marketing channel: It is of course so much more; it is a completely different approach to interacting with consumers and customers. Of course, you can advertise in a social media environment, but the true return on investment comes from developing communities, creating content to be shared, and talking and listening directly with consumers.

2. It does not fit into current structures: True social media falls somewhere between marketing, PR, communications, content production and web development. No one is quite sure whose responsibility it is and who should ultimately deliver their organisation’s social media strategy.

3. Communities and content are global: Users of social media connect, consume, and share content globally with little care for international borders. Marketing and PR departments and objectives are set up nationally or regionally. Very few organisations have a truly international structure and perspective.

You can check out the other travel and hotel social media marketing tips out at Mashable.

SEO Optimization Tips for PDFs

Search Engine Optimization Strategies Tutorial for PDF Files

I’m working with a client who has a plethora of PDFs and wanted to make sure we did a bang up job on the SEO for the files because their packed with great content for users. In doing my background research this article from Matt ranked high in the Google SERPS and I think three of his tips were particularly helpful from an SEO perspective:

1. PDF optimization is similar to optimization for a regular content page. Try this: good use of keywords/phrases, appropriate headlines and sub-headlines, solid content that reads well to a human eye, etc. If the PDF will include images, a caption underneath each image would be a good idea, especially if the caption includes a targeted keyword/phrase. (Of course, don’t overdo it.)

Also, take advantage of the document meta data that PDF-creation software or Adobe Reader itself offers.

2. The most important thing where PDFs and SEO is concerned is how the PDF is created. Don’t use Photoshop to make your PDF, because when you do that, you’re actually making a big image file, not a true PDF — and the spiders cannot crawl or “read” the text from that image file. The PDF should be created with a text-based program, like MS Word or Adobe Pagemaker, so that the final product is text-based and can be crawled.

Matt also suggests using a keyword friendly title. Additionally (although Matt talked about it in #1) you will want to pepper your key phase such as “improving search engine results” in various forms throughout the document. Equally important, remember to focus on longtail keywords as per Aaron Wall’s advice for search engine optimization:

Longtail keywords are easier to rank for. If you can pick off mid-tier phrases and rank at the top of the search results then you can build a revenue stream from them, which can be reinvested to further buy marketshare and distribution.

There is more value in…

* using your core pages (and link anchor text) to target lower competition variations of your core keywords (like best credit cards or compare credit cards) rather than targeting just the core competitive keyword credit cards
* ensuring that each particular deep page is well optimized and can pull in relevant traffic

than there is *almost* ranking for credit cards.

Core keywords require domain age, good anchor text, trusted links from a variety of sources, and perhaps links from within your topical community. It takes time to build all those external signals of quality. You can rank for longtail keywords much faster, because you control your on page optimization.

I think Aaron’s right on 95% of the time, especially when starting out a website. At the very least it helps the ego when you rank for a couple of key terms instead of just floundering on page 2 or 2,000 on the search engine results pages. Its also critical to keep in mind the other SEO link factors Aaron talks about in the second paragraph. An SEO strategist who forgets those will likely have their business strategy crushed, at least in the short run.

How do you find long tail keywords and how do you determine which ones are best? That is a discussion for another day. Feel free to add your tips about SEO for PDFs and long tail keywords in the comments.

Real Estate Marketing Strategies for a Recession

There are three key ways to market in a recession for real estate agents.

The first real estate marketing strategy is to start a blog. However, you want to be strategic about your content development, your marketing strategy for your blog, and your search engine optimization for your blog.

The second strategy is to advertise with Craigslist. Craigslist gets decent search ranking and decent traffic. This is a fantastic and free way to advertise to a diverse audience base.

The third strategy is to advertise with Local Feet. Local feet feeds to 125 newspapers nationally.

What creative ways are you doing real estate marketing in the recession?

Event Coverage is the New Black | DC Tech Events.com Covers Washington DC Social Media

DC Tech Events and the Washington DC Social Media Scene:

A friend of mine Ross Karchner built DC Tech Events up over the last 18 to 24 months and aggregated all the tech event related information for the greater Virginia (I think he may just cover Arlington, VA and Alexandria, VA on occassion) and Washington DC area.

I think Ross provided a real service to people in the Washington DC social media, start up, and web design community. It also made his website a real hub in the Washington technology and startup networking scene. Here are the visitor analytics for DC Tech Events on Compete, which doesn’t include all the info people read in their RSS reader. Ross has even developed another resource to supplement and enhance DC Tech Events by creating a calendar on Google.

I think the only way he could have made this better is to provide a stream of photos from tech events or by asking people to tag their photos with “DCTechevent”. Congrats to Ross on putting together a great website thats a real resource to the Washington DC community. I see it playing the same role in Washington DC that the Digital Nashville events board does locally here in Nashville. (although they also have DC Technology)

What DC Tech Events Means To You and Your Social Media Strategy:

How can your company cover networking events and seminars, perhaps including virtual events on your company blog? Why not launch a small independent blog to experiment for 3 to 6 months to see if it gets traction?

FYI: Black as in fashion, not as in Black Hat.

SEO for Attorneys, Law Firms, and Lawyers | Attorney and Lawyer SEO

SEO for Attorneys, Law Firms, and Lawyer | Attorney, Lawyer, and Law Firm SEO and Marketing

At Creative Fusion we provide search engine optimization for lawyers.

For starters, what is search engine optimization?
Well search engine optimization is simply the strategic creation of content to help websites increase or rather optimize their search engine rankings.

What can search engine optimization do for my law firm?
Search engine optimization can massively increase the number of customers you have visiting your website and have calling for your legal services.

Some reflective questions for strategic legal marketing:

• Where do you practice?

• What types of law do you practice?

• Who are you partners?

• What types of legal issues are you passionate about?

• Do you have a law blog or BLAWG?

Choosing the right SEO for Marketing Your Law Firm
Why should you work with me for marketing your law firm? Well, I have experience working with other law firms with their search engine optimization and marketing efforts. I understand the language of lawyers. I understand legalese and most legal jargon. I’ve spent more time on Lexis-Nexis reading legal argument on critical legal issues from the Violence Against Women Act and Title 7 employment law to the International legal nuances of the International Criminal Court and the Chemical Test Ban Treaty. I can translate the language of Google into a language you can understand and easily leverage in your business practice.

Affordable Web Marketing and SEO for Lawyers and Attorneys:
Why don’t you give us a call at (615) 974-9662 and see what we can do for you.

Attorney and Legal Resources

• National Association for Legal Career Professionals
• American Bar Association

Marketing for general contractors

Marketing Assessment for General Contractors

Social media marketing for general contractors in tough bugetary times:

Of course the first step is focusing your marketing efforts:

• Where do you want to focus your marketing efforts? What cities and communities does your general contracting business serve?

• What type of general contracting you do focus on? Who is your ideal client? Why? How are the marketing efforts for your contracting firm targeted toward that sector?

Assess how you are marketing your general contracting business online:

• How are you marketing yourself online? How are you connecting to new customers through low cost online marketing solutions?

• For instance, do you have a Yahoo Local, Microsoft Local, and Google Local listing. When is the last time your website design was updated? How about the copy? How many customer hits do you get on your general contracting website?

• Or perhaps you don’t have website and you need an affordable website hosting and design?

Web marketing solutions for general contractors and you: Whatever situation you find yourself in as a general contractor, we can help you advance the web and internet marketing for your business. We can help optimize your marketing outreach online.

SEO Secrets for Realtors, Lawyers, and Small Business Owners

SEO Tips for the Local Small Business Owner:

Here is an assortment of posts I made at Active Rain which reveals several SEO secrets and tips for the real estate agent, attorney, or the local small business owner. Its a great way to provide affordable online marketing and high return on investment that is so critical in tough economic times.

• Fundamentals of Ethical SEO for Small Business

Twelve Critical Search Engine Optimization Tips for Real Estate (and other small business)
• Social Media and SEO Productivity Top SEO Tips for Saving Time and Staying Productive with Social Media
• Tips and Tutorial for Ethical SEO Ethical SEO Buyer’s Guide
• Dive into Social Media and Ethical SEO By Paying it Forward: Social media marketing and ethical seo tips for real estate agents

One critical SEO secret is to apply the 4 Ps for better content optimization:

P-Product (product specification, product differentiation, product pictures)
P-Problem(s) You Solve
P-Place (community, city, and state)
P-People (target the type of people you serve, happy customers, and customer created tips)

What is your favorite ethical seo tip or technique for realtors, lawyers, or small business?