Google Maps and Local SEO

Why Small Businesses Need Google Maps

It can be well explained with an example. Today, law firms comprise a large portion of small businesses that also have online presence. One specific characteristic of law business is that it has regional boundary. Even though there are international laws, lawyers mostly practice in compliance with the law of a specific country, state or territory. A lawyer just can not get away by providing online support only. It requires offline meeting and discussions in person to turn a visitor to a client.

So, it’s important that your prospective clients find your location with ease. SEO for lawyers makes sure that the law firm’s site ranks well while optimizing for Google Maps can help you rank in local search (with place name in the key phrase) and pull in visitors who are looking particularly for the service you offer. In a way Google Maps relates online negotiation to offline business activity. This is applicable for other businesses as well.

Advantages of using Google Maps…

It’s free: Some major advantages of Google Maps are that it is free and easy to use. Website owners don’t have to be expert in search engine optimization to ensure optimal use of Google Maps.

Multiple map views: Google Maps gives users three options of viewing maps – normal view, satellite image and terrain view which they can utilize according to their needs.

Protected data: My Location feature can be utilized to determine your geographic location with advanced privacy settings to keep your data secured.

Geo-tagging: With geo-tagging application you can provide accurate information about your geographic position in the photos and images you upload on Google Maps.

Provision of Meta data: Meta data including appropriate title and keywords can also be fed with the uploaded images/photos on Google Maps to improve ranking.

Online reviews: With ‘Review Businesses’ option in Google Maps you have a chance of receiving customer reviews online. Positive reviews with your business related keywords can boost your ranking on Google local search as well as help in your brand marketing.

Dedicated mini-site for integration: Now with dedicated mini site ‘maps.google.com/getmaps’ integrating Google Maps to a website gets faster and easier.

Updating your Geographic Data on Google Maps…

You can update your geographic data on Google Maps to display the correct and updated information about your business location from time to time. However, it is advisable that when you are targeting a particular region or city as your market on Google Maps search, you should have your office/showroom/outlet physically located their.

Adding Google Maps to your website’s contact page is easy even if you are not an SEO professional. Common users can select the Quick option and then follow the step-by-step instructions to fill up the necessary information fields.

Bing-Yahoo Merger: More Time for SEO Strategic Thinking?

Search engine optimizers and marketers have long started speculating on the outcome of the merger. Let’s take a look how SEO and SEM will be affected with this merger.

More time for strategic planning…

Well, you don’t have to spend time for the big three – Google, Yahoo and Bing. Rather you’ll have only two major search engines to focus from now on. The time saved can be utilized for studying the Microsoft-Bing platform and interface, installing Bing Webmaster Tool, which was so far a bit neglected, and developing effective strategy for adCenter.

A little bit of adjustment…

Those who are currently running their advertising campaigns on Yahoo Search Marketing platform will have their accounts automatically transferred to adCenter with slight adjustments in functionalities.

Lot of expectations…

As the experts say, SEO professionals have a lot of expectations from Bing. If Microsoft can improve the user interface and adCenter Desktop Tool for Bing the alliance might prove to be a profitable one, both for the companies and for the webmasters.

Location Sharing and Social Media Marketing

Recently Twitter has launched location sharing feature, Twitter Places , which enables users share their physical location in their tweets as soon as they activate this feature. As you turn on this feature your geographic coordinates are shown via Google Map.  While Twitter is all set with this new attribute Facebook has kept location sharing (Facebook Places) limited for iPhone users as of now.  As you check-in to different places on Facebook it gets listed on the News Feed and on your friends’ home pages.

But are users ready to accept this exposure? It is learnt that many Twitter users are against going overtly public with personal informaton sharing. Well, it is still an optional feature. Even though people are apprehensive regarding misuse of location information many are glad to share their whareabouts with frinds and acquintances.

Shifting focus from personal view point if we concentrate on the commercial aspect we’ll see that location sharing can add new dimension to social media marketing. Just as search engine marketiners are turning to geo-targeted or Local SEO with the help of Google Places, social media marketers can make use of this new features on Twitter and Facebook  for their campaigns. It can be a great tool to catch up with the potential local customers in their network. The target customers can easily find them out as they search for tweets from their locality. It will be easier for companies to advertise about their local offices, events and meetings and create their brand awareness locally through social media. Thus location sharing online may drive off-line sale as well.

May be Facebook and Twitter’s location sharing feature is primarily designed for personal user accounts but with these two social networking behemoths competing each other we wouldn’t have to wait too long to see what’s more in store for business entreprenuers.

Addition of some new tags for in HTML 5 promises improved page segmentation that was not possible with this presentation language so far. Let’s take a look as how HTML 5 is going to benefit SEO page segmentation. As page segmentation leads to more accurate understanding of a particular page’s relevancy the new tag elements in HTML 5 are expected to prove beneficial for optimized web design.

Let’s take a look what’s HTML 5 has to offer.

• <Article> tag: The new <article> tag can be used to mark any sort of online entries including forum post, blogs and articles. In a way it will help the search engine to concentrate on the main content of the page. It gives a relief from using several <div> tags for better display and management of on-page content.
• <Section> tag: The new <section> tag for marking different sections of a page can have its own HTML heading. The tag can be used to exploit the relevancy factor. The search engine will treat the section containing the keyword in greater number as more relevant than any other sections and focus on it.
• <Header> tag: The <header> tag similar to existing <h1> tag in terms of functionality ensures greater flexibility by allowing marking long texts, even an entire paragraph as well as hard-coded links in addition to common header elements such as H1, H2, H3, etc.
• <Footer> tag: Similarly the <footer> tag can contain all the important information at the bottom of a page as well as a section.
• <Nav> tag: Navigational elements are important factors from SEO perspective. The new <nav> tag can be used to point out the set of links to other pages to the search engine.

With these tags it will now be easier for the webmasters to direct the search engine about how to segment the page. The coding will be much cleaner resulting in faster crawl of a page by the search engine robots. It not only adds to flexibility of the presentation language but also makes it easier for the search engine to decide importance and assign relevancy of a particular section with respect to a particular search term.

When you do SEO, you have to understand your client’s website. Few basic things you have to do before starting SEO for a client:

• Understand their target audience and country
• Understand their objectives – traffic, conversion or clicks on ads
• Understand the business – special features, how are they different
• Study the market; watch the competitors and their online behavior
• Start keyword research – consider client’s input and use your own knowledge to decide on the keywords
• Think of article topics that can create a buzz for the client
• Think of niche-specific online platforms where you can promote your client
• Find out web spaces where you can place banner ads to have a strong online presence
• Decide which social media channels can be good for the client
• Find target audience on Social Media and reach to them

With no understanding on how your client does business, you can do a lot of article submission and directory submissions, but you cannot think out of the box. To stand above the average you have to go that extra mile, do your own homework and prepare yourself to take up the project. And while preparing the marketing plan, apply your understanding in it. Unless you know the terminologies and industry-specific terms, you cannot write an acceptable Meta tag even!

And when it comes to Social Media Marketing or community building, this domain knowledge becomes more important. Without a fair understanding about the market, the product and the service, you cannot engage the customers in a conversation.

Stand out of the crowd, study your client’s business properly, know about the product, do some basic research and then start working on it.

It is the reader who goes through the website content and then buys the product or service you are selling. So write for them, address their requirements and make the content presentable and informative so that they find it appealing and helpful.

Few suggestions to make your content useful for visitors and crawlable for search engines as well:

1] Divide the content into different headings and sub headings.

2] Use <h1></h1>tag to define the heading.

3] Use <h2></h2>, <h3></h3> and so on to define the sub-headings.

4] Keep the paragraphs short – long paragraphs are difficult to read.

5] Keep the sentences short. Simple and short sentences are easy to read online.

6] If you are using images on the page, make sure the image has proper alt attribute and title attribute. This will help people understand the content of the page even when the image does not load.

7] If you are using video or audio files on the website, have a transcript available. Readers who are physically challenged will find it helpful indeed.

8] Use readable font size and font color.

9] Make sure you are using a soothing color combination. Font color should match with the background color.

10] Link to other pages of your website where relevant information is available. Interlinking is good for search engines and useful for readers too.

11] Make sure the page content has the terms that your readers may use to search the service or product that you offer.

If you want to add something more to this list; feel free comment. Let’s build up the best content writing guideline here.

You simply cannot ignore social media anymore; if you do then you are going to lose something for sure. Google has integrated real time search with its web search. Logged in users can see relevant updates from their social networks.

In a video Google has described that this integration will help people find ‘What’s happening right now?’ and ‘What’s happening nearby?’ very easily. Watch the video here.

Now comes the SEO point of view: isn’t it an easy way to make it to the first page of the search engines? If your website is new chances are high that it will take some time to rank high for relevant searches; but if you have an active network, you can actually appear on the first page throughout the day. For this you have be a super-active node on various social media platforms preferably on those Google is fetching data from.

Even if someone is not getting quality traffic from social media, they can get a strong web presence by staying active on social media and networking websites. Now, how to get quality traffic from social media is a different topic; will discuss more on it later. Keep visiting us.

What is content optimization?

Content optimization is the process of presenting the content of a website in such a way so that it becomes useful and attractive for the users and easy to crawl for the search engines. And here comes the next question – optimize for whom?

Why content optimization? Optimize content for whom?

First priority is readers of course. Present the content in a proper way so that your readers find it easy to comprehend. At the same time, make it understandable for the search engine bots too. Especially when you are dealing with non-textual content such as image or video, you have to be very careful on how to make it understandable for the search engines.

Is it different from on-page optimization?

It is a part of on-page optimization; but on-page optimization includes many other things. When we discuss content optimization, we just talk about the part within and .

And then comes the most important point – how to do this. Let’s see:

How to optimize content?

1] Know how people read web pages. Process of reading a web page on computer screen is different from that of a book or newspaper. Short and simple sentences and small paragraphs make web content more readable for human beings.

2] Arrange the entire text under various headings; use H1, H2 and H3 tags for the headings and sub-headings.

3] Use keywords in the content and in H1, H2 and H3 tags. Do not put in keywords in the page content so that it looks like keyword stuffing; maintain a healthy keyword density. You can just think of various words that your readers may use while searching the type of product, service or information you offer and use those words in the text; it should make sense!

4] If you are linking to another page of your website or an external website, use meaningful words as the link text. This will help your readers understand where they will be going.

5] Use link title attribute properly to help your readers know about the destination.

6] While presenting image, make sure the alt attribute and image title attribute are properly used; put meaningful and relevant text in image alt and title attributes. This will not only help the users understand the image, but help search engines to tag the image properly.

7] Use relevant terms as image file names; this may increase the chances of the image to appear in the image search.

8] If you are showing content in video, use proper tags or place a transcript just below the video. This will be helpful for those who are physically challenged; good for search engines too.

Do you want to add more points here? Feel free to comment.

It is true that some SEO clients ask for guaranteed and instant result. It is the responsibility of the SEO company to supply proper study materials to the clients so that they can understand how search engine optimization is done. Once the clients understand that SEO is a long process and no company can guarantee top position, they will not make such demands.

It is not right to apply unethical black hat techniques just to satisfy the demands of your clients. White Hat SEO may take some time to deliver the result; but it covers the ground so well that the optimized websites continue to perform well and sustain the performance.

Therefore, while taking up search engine optimization projects, it is important to know how much understanding the client has about SEO. Do they expect something that is not achievable? In that case, talk to the client and let them know that SEO is an array of ethical strategies to assign higher visibility to a website.

Things that fall under white hat SEO are:

• Meta tags optimization
• Content optimization
• Code optimization
• Content creation
• Making websites more crawlable
• Proper navigation for users
• Creating a strong web presence

Do you want to add more points to this list? Please comment.

If you are still not convinced, just click on the link to check internet usage statistics of the world. Remember the computer savvy generation of India is no more in school. Internet penetration is likely to increase like anything in next couple of years. The TREND of searching information online and doing transaction online is supposed to become TRADITION in the South Asian countries too.

Therefore, not having a website is a no-mercy ignorance. If you have already covered the ground and hosted your own website, jump start and start promoting it online. It can be difficult for you to understand the whole process of web marketing, so take help from a reputed web marketing company.

It may not be possible for a small business owner to hire a web marketing expert; assigning the web marketing jobs to a reputed SEO company is the best thing one can do. This way you can get the expert minds work for you and at the same time you can avoid the hassles of setting up a whole new department.

If you do not have a website yet, do not feel bad – you can actually turn this situation in your favor. Contact SEO web design company and let them develop your website following all the SEO guidelines. See if the SEO web marketing company you have chosen to work with can guide the design team on how to build search engine friendly website.

Once you have a website that offers easy navigation to search engines and to your visitors and satisfies all on-page factors you can expect better visibility and higher ranking.

If you already have a website, professional SEO consultants will conduct SEO audit to find out the areas of the website that needs improvement. This way they help you prepare a search engine friendly website. With a flawless website, it becomes easy to promote your brand, products or service online.

Contact professional SEO company today and know your options; any delay may result in more loss.