By BrianHanson

368 of the Best Places to Get Citations

Citations are a great way to get a thumbs up from Google. A citation is not to be confused with the Chevy vehicle that went bye-bye in 1985. A quick and easy way to get attention online is by creating it yourself. Kicking in the citation machine that I’m giving away to you will get you results. This list is a great list and quite possibly the biggest list online.

If you’re lazy like me, you’ll need all the help you can get. Instead of doing all the work yourself, I’ve made it super simple for any Internet marketer. 

I created this list while sipping a Corona on the beach. 

The best part about getting a citation is that it takes no work. Instead of typing information into directories all day, you can easily hire someone on oDesk for $3.00 per hour to do the work for you. You just need to use your exact information that is listed in Google Maps to get citations to work to your advantage. It’s literally a cut and paste job for an outsourced worker.

368 of the Best Places to Get Citations 

This is just the icing on the cake. I don’t want to bog down my website with too many outbound links. Enter your email address into the box on the right sidebar of this page. I’ll give you the full list of 368 citations. It’s full of PR 9, 8 and 7 websites. I’ve never seen another website that offers this many citations for no cost. I hate searching for citations and that’s partly why I created this list.

Want the rest of the list? Just drop us a like below to get it!

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I hope you enjoy the list and are able to put it to great use!

Do any of you already use some of these? Let me know in the comments below.

By BrianHanson

Meta Keyword Tags

If you read through our on-site SEO series, you may have noticed that we left out the meta keyword tag. This was on purpose. Why? Because the meta keyword attribute doesn’t have any effect on your search engine ranking. This is because the tag is too easy to abuse. Unscrupulous SEOs were able to stuff these tags with keywords that were invisible to the reader but were still factored into search formulas. Removing rankability for meta keywords refocused weightings back to relevant content and authoritative backlinks.

So, should you use meta keywords tags or not?

The answer is…maybe. Google has removed keywords from consideration but some search engines still include it – for now. History shows us that most search engines follow suit shortly after Google leads by example. For now, there is still some benefit from including a meta keywords tag. But there are risks, too.

While search engines may or may not notice your meta keywords tag, there is a certain group that will: your competitors. If you’ve played your cards right, you’ve probably spent a good amount of time and effort carefully researching your key phrases, and it’d be a shame for someone to drop in, view your page source and copy and paste your keywords for their own campaign.

On that note, if the competitor is you, you should be careful about stealing traffic and key phrases. Particularly, you should avoid using your competitor’s brand names as a keyword. This is not only unethical, in most cases, it’s illegal, too.

If you do choose to create a meta keywords tag, stick to 6 to 8 generic, relevant terms. Instead of including your “money phrases,” just include a couple keywords that give a general idea of what your topic is. This is helpful for content writers and coders as well, as it gives them a better idea about what the focus of the article is. It’s also a good idea to include locations.

You can include the meta keyword tag right after the meta description tag. It should look like this:

<META name=”keywords” content=”keyword 1, keyword 2, keyword 3, etc”>

Make sure that you separate your keywords with commas, otherwise they’ll appear as one long keyword.

Conclusion

So, to review:

• Meta keyword tags aren’t valued like they used to be. Using them or not using them won’t affect your Google search ranking.
• If you do include a meta keywords tag, stick to generic terms to avoid having your research stolen by competitors.
• Don’t use brand names or other trademarked material as a keyword – it’ll land you in hot water.

Meta keywords are somewhat of a vestigial leftover from the rough and tumble days of SEO. They have a much smaller place in today’s strategies, but the landscape is always evolving. You may want to continue using meta keywords as a habit, just in case they come back in vogue down the road.

By BrianHanson

Internet Marketing Campaigns – Part Two: The Website

In Part Two of our overview of the different parts of a local Internet marketing campaign, we’ll be taking a look at the website. The website is the keystone to your entire Internet marketing campaign. Just like the cash register is where the sale happens in a storefront, the website is where the conversion happens.

There are certain strategies you can do on-site that both attract traffic and drive conversions. These fall into two main categories: on-site search engine optimization and user interfacing. Again, sometimes these two disciplines overlap and other times they are at odds with each other.

Here’s a brief overview of the basics:

Keywords

Keywords (or key phrases) are the central hub of your search engine optimization efforts and the way you include them – both in terms of frequency, placement and formatting – matter big time. The two keys to keywords are research and application:

• Keyword research – The keywords you choose must be relevant to your business and heavily searched. “Attending to octogenarians in the residence” and “elderly home care” mean essentially the same thing, but the latter will get you infinitely more mileage, both with humans and spiders. For local businesses, the need to include location information arises, which introduces an entirely new dimension to keyword research as well.
• Using keywords – How many keywords do you choose? Where do you place them (in tags, in headers, as anchor text)? And how often should you use the keywords (i.e. keyword density)? There’s an art and science to building a website around keywords that affects both its indexability and its readability.

Copywriting

The challenge of writing for two audiences comes to a head for copywriters. Copywriters must juggle the twin responsibilities of creating content that is compelling to humans as well as robots. Philosophies differ among writers, SEOs and web developers, but from a sales perspective, making that human connection is absolutely vital. To achieve this, copywriters employ the age old art of sales and persuasion which has changed little since the birth of commerce. Except they have less words and less time than ever to make their case. Attention spans in the digital age have shrunken significantly and the “Back” button is always just a few pixels away.

But while copywriters must also make their content extremely hooky on a personal level, it must also be conscious of its other, arguably more important audience: the search engine spiders. This introduces another, meta-level set of requirements on the writer such as how many words he or she can use, which words to use and how to construct sentences, links and formatting. In this way, SEO copywriting is a bit like formal poetry – except instead of meeting the structural requirements of a sonnet or a limerick, the writer must neatly and efficiently pack their message into a format that is readable and relevant to search engines.

Web Design

Actually, web design is increasingly becoming an insufficient term for describing what goes into creating a conversion-friendly website. Perhaps web architecture is more apt. Websites must encompass:

• Aesthetic appeal – You’ve got 5 seconds to convince visitors that you’re a professional, reputable business. Looking good has never been so important.
• Technical integrity – Search engine spiders don’t see colors and videos and layouts the same way as we do. It’s more like the way Neo sees The Matrix – lines and lines of code. Ensuring that this invisible layer of your website is readable to search engine bots can make or break your search engine page ranking (SERP).
• Functionality – Your visitors want to get in touch or buy your product. Make it easy for them by designing intuitive navigation and a user-friendly interface. Otherwise, they’ll click away upon their first encounter with frustration.

The Overall Website Experience

When building a website, you must always be conscious of how users and search engines will view it and use it. How did they get here? What terms did they use to find you? What questions do they have and what is the best way to answer them? When constructing a website for your business, it’s all about crafting the right kind of experience for your two audiences. You want your site to be both search engine friendly and conversion friendly. An in-depth of how the search engine spiders work and how users interact with the web is key to creating landing pages, internal link structures, calls to action and other website aspects that meet the expectations of everyone that visits your website.

Creating an effective, conversion-friendly website is instrumental to your local Internet marketing campaign. But how do you get people to visit your website in the first place? Stay tuned – we’ll be going over the basics of off site Internet marketing in our next blog post.

By BrianHanson

On-Site SEO – Part Five: Filenames and URL Structure

In our previous post on the topic of on-site SEO, we discussed the importance of choosing well-branded, SEO-friendly domain names. This is the crux of creating well-optimized URLs for your website, but the details matter, too. There are numerous opportunities to introduce keywords into your URLs by following best practices for filenames and directory structuring. Here are a few bases you should definitely cover:

Dynamic URLs

Many dynamic websites, such as blogs, will generate notoriously user and search engine unfriendly URLs. The default WordPress permalink structure is a common example. Posts are typically numbered, rather than given proper filenames and will show up in your address bar like this: www.yoursite.com/?p=16.

This is a big missed opportunity for including keywords. Instead, setup your permalink structure to read www.yoursite.com/category/post-title and populate both those elements with keywords (without repeating). So, instead of having just one keyword in your URL (from your domain), you can have www.KitchenSupplies.com/Cuisinart/Pressure-Cookers, a total of three quality keywords.

URL Length

Brevity rules in almost all aspects of marketing. Shorter URLs tend to rank higher in search engine rankings and are easier to copy, paste and share. Some email and IM clients make it difficult to click URLs that span more than one line and the more gobbledygook that’s in your URL (numbers, symbols, etc.), the less trustworthy it looks.

Keyword Location

Just like search engines prefer keywords to appear early in the content, they also give more weight when they appear closer to the front of a URL. Avoid introducing lots of folders and subfolders. The KitchenSupplies.com example from above is better than say, www.KitchenSupplies.com/merchandise/C/Cuisinart/Pressure-Cookers.

Subdomains

The jury is still out on how search engines will treat  subdomains in the future. In the past, setting up a keyword as a subdomain was beneficial for SEO (i.e. microwaves.kitchensupplies.com) as they could be read as a different, highly relevant keyword relevant domain. But this opened the door to some abuse, since webmasters can register a virtually infinite number of subdomains free of cost.

Today’s best practices are to use directories and folders rather than subdomains unless you’re trying to clearly cordon off a section of your website with distinctly different content. For example, blog.KitchenSupplies.com makes sense, since it’s a different section from your merchandise. You won’t be penalized by using subdomains – but you likely won’t see any real benefit from abusing them, so it’s better to stick with what’s logical and intuitive.

Hyphens

Spaces in domain names must be separated by hyphens, but there’s a little bit more leeway for filenames and directories. You can choose underscores, periods or plus signs, if you want, but convention dictates the use of hyphens. There is little question regarding the fact that search engines read hyphens as spaces, and consistency is best practice as policies develop.

Image Filenames

You should pay careful attention to the filenames of all of your website elements, but images represent an even greater opportunity. There’s much web traffic to be garnered via image searches and the filename plays a large role in how your pictures are indexed. When uploading digital photos and other images, it’s easy enough to keep them with their default and generic filenames (DC00012.jpg or image2.png) but you’ll get much more mileage by giving it a short, descriptive filename (red-kitchenaid-mixer.jpg or granite-countertop.png).

Conclusion

The takeaway lesson when it comes to optimizing URL paths is to stick to what makes organizational sense and take every opportunity to include a keyword. Avoid obviously spammy tactics or exploitative “tricks” – the benefits from these tactics will likely be short-lived and may ultimately detract from the usability of your website.

By BrianHanson

On-Site SEO – Part Four: Domain Names – Rankability vs. Branding

One of the fundamentals of stirring calls to action in traditional marketing campaigns is to have a memorable phone number. Hooked on Phonics (“1-800-ABCDEFG!”) and 1-800-FLOWERS are perfect examples. On the web, the equivalent to a catchy, easy-to-remember phone number is a URL that is both memorable for human web users and relevant for search engine spiders. Read on to learn how to create effective URLs, domains and web addresses.

Domain Registration

Your domain name is extremely important to your overall search engine ranking. There are two main considerations for choosing your domain name: rankability and branding.

Depending on the scope and approach of our business, one or the other may take precedence. Let’s look at both of these facets individually.

High Ranking Domain Names

Search engines take important cues from your URLs when determining the relevance of your website. Because of this, it’s highly advantageous to include a keyword in your domain name as well as throughout your URL structure (more on this in later posts).

This is hardly breaking news – and because of that, most of the high value domain names are already taken. You won’t get cars.com or creditcards.com or even helicopterpilots.com in a million years (unless you have a million dollars).

So, you’ll have to compromise. There are a few graceful ways to do so:

• Get specific – ITConsultants.com taken? Play to your strengths by going after CertifiedITConsultants.com or EnterpriseITConsultants.com.
• Add a location – This is helpful for local marketing as well as edging your way into competitive keywords. While you might never get lawyers.com, YourTownLawyers.com might be within reach. It also helps if other local businesses are doing the same with their URLs. For example, many Pittsburgh companies might add “pgh” to their URLs such as thelibrary-pgh.com or parkwayflorist-pgh.com. By following this convention, you can help target your traffic and help deepen the sense of community across local businesses.
• Hyphenate – This is admittedly not the best way to go – but it works in a pinch. Search engines read hyphens in URLs as spaces, so they’ll see “www.fresh-fish-depot.com” as “fresh fish depot.” However, hyphenated domain names are less attractive and harder to remember.

On that note, there are some methods for getting domain level keywords that you should avoid:

• Numbers – Nothing kills a brand and credibility like arbitrarily inserted numbers. This is okay for usernames and email addresses, especially when the number has some significance to your identity (i.e. the year you graduated), but it evokes shadiness in URLs

Well-branded Domain Names
In some cases, having a well-branded domain name will trump an SEO friendly domain. There are certain professions – such as doctors and lawyers – that lend themselves better to a business name than a keyword. This usually mimics the way these businesses typically advertise themselves offline. You’re much more likely to see signage for Dr. William Thompson, D.D.S or Steinberg, Bosco and Wilson, Attorneys at Law than something generic, such as Orange County Dentists or Jacksonville Law Firm.
Choosing a well-branded domain name also makes sense if you already have a well-branded business name. For example, if you’re using your website to supplement an aggressive print or television campaign, people are much more likely to type in your business name – TheWaterHeaterDudes.com, for example – when trying to find out more information. Asking them to remember a domain name like HopewellAreaWaterHeaterInstallers.com makes things more difficult and more prone to leaks in word of mouth marketing.
If you don’t already have a business name, take this opportunity to craft a meaningful, memorable and SEO friendly dba name to also use as your domain name. A good formula is to use a generic term – such as your keyword – and add something to differentiate it. Examples:

• PlasticSurgeonsSource.com
• Travelocity.com
• BakeryWizard.com

Other Considerations
This is the main ground to cover when it comes to choosing a domain name. But there are other factors that may help you get the most mileage from your domain name. Keep the following in mind:
Register your domain name for more than a year. Domain age factors into search engine ranking, and there is some indication that registering your domain name for a longer period adds credibility. Plus, you won’t have to worry about anyone buying it out from under your nose down the road.
Advertise your URL offline in a memorable way. On billboards, bumper stickers and other print material, include www. before your URL to signify that it’s a web address. Also, add capitalization to aid retention, (OhiosBestPlumbers.com) since URLs aren’t case sensitive.
Purchase multiple domain names. Register YourDomain.com, YourDomain.net and YourDomain.org to protect your brand and catch mistyped traffic. Pointing these other sites back to your main site is an acceptable practice and you won’t be penalized by search engines.

Conclusion
Choosing your domain name is an opportunity to boost your brand awareness as well as your search engine rankings. Select your domain name carefully to serve your marketing strategy the best. If you garner more word of mouth buzz than search engine traffic, focus on creating a well-branded, memorable domain. If you want to reach out to more first-time customers and gain more leads from search engine users, focus on a keyworded domain name.