This is a two-part SEO video course for local business owners. In this part we will be covering

1. How to please Google Human Reviewers
2. SEO Terms Defined
3. 5 Tips on how to choose your local business domain name
4. How to analyze your local business competitors
5. How to structure your website content for better SEO
6. How to do proper keyword research for your local business
7. Top Positive SEO factors that will boost your rankings
8. Top Negative SEO Factors that will ruin your rankings

How to please Google Human Reviewers

One of the real tests to maintaining your page 1 rankings for any particular keyword is being able to please Google’s human reviewers. With the top 3 ranking sites getting 80% of the user’s clicks, Google wants to make sure that they get quality information and therefore these top ranking sites will get manually reviewed by Google Staff.

What this means is that once your site hits those top positions, a Google staff member is going to open your website and manually read through your content to see if you are offering genuine and valuable information. This is a way to stop internet marketers from gaming the system to get high rankings yet having nonsensical content on their websites that doesn’t benefit the end user.

Here are a few tips to make sure your local business website aces this human review test:

1. Look like a real business– this may seem obvious to you, but there are so many people trying to make a dime online that you need to look as legitimate as possible to the human reviewer. They need to know that you are a real business so make sure you include details such as:

• Your physical address – you may want to include a Google map
• Your postal address
• Your phone contacts
• Your business accreditations to professional bodies

2. Have well designed and organized layout– this doesn’t mean you need to have a website design worth thousands of dollars, but you also don’t want your site to look cheap and spammy. Make sure you always include a privacy policy page, about us page and contact page. Organizing your content into categories is a good idea too such as services, products, menu, online shop etc.

3. Post real customer reviews and testimonials and have multiple posts about them. You can include photos, videos and excerpts from your customers.

4. Do not litter your website with too much commercial content such as advertisements. A good question to ask your self is- “If all the advertisements and ecommerce content was removed, how much content would be left for a visitor?”

5. Avoid the temptation to overstuff your keywords all over your website content in your titles, page URLs and article content. This will appear fake and spammy to the human reviewer.

6. Encourage genuine online participation on your website by allowing blog commenting or installing a forum as this shows that your website adds true value to users by providing them a place to communicate with you or others. It could be as simple as having a section where users can ask you questions about your niche. For example, if you run a plumbing service, you can have a blog forum where people can ask you questions about any plumbing issues they may be having problems with.

 

SEO Terms Defined

One of the most confusing aspects of marketing your local business online is trying to understand the various internet marketing terms. Here are some SEO terms and their definition to help shed some light.

• SEO – this stands for Search Engine Optimization and is a general term used to describe methods and strategies that will help your site rank better in the search engine listings.
• On page SEO– these are methods and strategies a site owner uses internally on their own site to help their site rank better.
• Off page SEO– this covers methods and strategies a site owner uses externally on other people’s websites and blogs to help his website rank better.
• Backlinking– this off page SEO method involves creating links on other people’s websites that point to your website. These links are called back links.
• No follow links– these are backlinks that do not carry the “power/authority” of the page rank of the site they are located on.
• Do follow links– these are backlinks that have the page rank of the site they are located on flowing through them to the back linked site.
• White hat SEO – these are ethical SEO tactics used by a site owner to promote his site, that are looked upon favorably by search engines
• Black hat SEO– these are unethical SEO tactics used by a site owner to promote his site, which are not desirable and may result in getting banned by search engines.
• Backlink profile – this refers to the mixture of the different type of backlinks a webmaster uses.
• Backlink Value– this is a calculation of the power of the backlinks a site owner has build. It equals the number of backlinks built  multiplied by the strength of each backlink( based on the page rank of the site where the backlink is built)
• Anchor Text– this is the clickable part of text within an article or other piece of content which when clicked will direct the user to another page or site.
• Page Rank – this is a search engines measure of a webpage’s authority on a scale of 0 to 10. Search engines rank individual web pages not websites as a whole.
• Contextual links – these are back links that are embedded within the text of piece of content and are surrounded by other content. They are the most powerful type of backlinks especially if they appear on a sites homepage.
• Keyword density– the number of times a keyword appears in a piece of content, expressed as a percentage. The ideal mark is 3%.
• Outbound Links– these are links a website owner creates from his website to external websites as opposed to a backlink that links from external sites to his site.

Indexing – a term used to describe when a search engine finds content on the web and lists it in its search results. Some content gets indexed faster than other types

 

5 Tips on how to choose your local business domain name

Your local business domain name or website address is one of the key components in any SEO strategy. If you haven’t registered a domain name, here are a few tips to guide you in choosing one:

1. Whatever domain name you choose, make sure it ends in .com. However if that is not possible you can also use .org and .net extensions. These three extensions are the best ones to use for theUSonline market.
2. Avoid using hyphenated domain names. For example, just because you the domain name www.doctorsinnewyork.com is already taken, don’t register a hyphenated version like www.doctors-innewyork or www.doctors-in-newyork. Hyphenated domains don’t give the impression of being authority domain and have a low grade image in SEO. Instead try adding a prefix or suffix such as www.doctorsinnewyorkonline.com or www.emergencydoctorsinnewyork.com. Needless to say if you really want to hyphenate, use no more than 1-2 hyphens.
3. Keep your domain names short and don’t elongate them to longer than 3 or 4 words. For example if you run a hardware shop called “Anthony Bradley and Sons Hardware & Electricals”, you may want to use www.abradleyandsons.com or www.bradleyhardware.com. You definitely don’t want to register www.anthonybradleyandsonshardwareandelectricals.com!
4. Even if you operate as franchise or dealership for a major company, avoid using branded company names in your domain as this is illegal and you could get sued. If you want to use brand names in your domain always get written permission from the brand owners.
5. It’s wise to build a site using your keywords in the domain for additional SEO leverage. Let’s say you run a pizza joint called Papa Pedro’s Pizza and your keywords “pizza in nyc”, it would make sense to register both www.papapedrospizza.com and www.pizzainnyc.com. In this way you can have multiple website rankings from one keyword using the two sites. Just imagine if you registered all your keywords as domains- you could easily own the first page of Google for those keywords with proper SEO!

How to structure your website content for better SEO

How you structure your website content is one of the keys that ensures your on page SEO is a success. Here are a few tips on how to organize your content correctly that will score you points with the search engines:

1. The length of your articles – gone are the days when a 300 or 500 word article was enough. In the post Panda era, 1000 word plus articles are the new standard. Make your content interesting and readable with plenty of sub headlines, bullet points, images and video so that it is user-friendly.
2. Use unique content – duplicated content is a big no-no, so stay away from PLR (public label rights) articles that everyone has access to. Using your own knowledge of your business you can come up with interesting and original articles, but if you can’t do this, then invest in a quality article writing service to produce your content for you.
3. Keyword density– its best to keep your keyword density low at about 3%. This means that your keyword should appear no more than 3 times for every 100 words of text. If your stuff your keyword in the text, titles,Meta tags and alt tags, it will do you more harm than good.
4. Internal backlinks – make sure to create internal backlinks on all your content. This means that you create interconnecting links from one page to the next, especially from your home page to the inner pages. This shows the search engines that all the pages on your site are interrelated to each other and improves your SEO.
5. Keyword placement– when writing your article, it is important to place your keyword in certain strategic areas:

• In your main title
• In your first sentence, preferable towards the beginning of the sentence
• 2-3 times in the body of the text especially in sub-headlines
• In the last paragraph

6. Outbound links– it is equally important to have at least one outbound link in every article. An outbound link is a link to an external website from your site. The best types of outbound links are to high Page rank sites with a lot of authority and trust such as websites run by universities, government agencies and media outlets. All you need to do is find an article on these sites that is related to the content on your site and link to it.

 

How to do proper keyword research for your local business

Keyword research is the foundation of your websites on page SEO. Get it wrong and all your online marketing efforts will be wasted. Get it right and you’ll witness better search engine rankings, more traffic and increased business. Proper keyword research can give you a huge jumpstart and make you leap ahead of your competitors, while poor keyword research will leave you financially crippled even after many months of hard work.

Here are some tips on how to do proper keyword research for your business:

1. Come up with a number of combinations-the first step in keyword research is to list all the possible different combinations of keywords that your potential customer would use in a Google/Bing/Yahoo search. For local businesses, the most common combinations are based on:

• The geographical location you operate in E.g. town, county, city, state, zip code, streets/avenues
• Your profession e.g. dentist, barber, nurse
• the kind of services you offer e.g. Lasik surgery, daycare
• the products you sell e.g. Jewellery, Chinese food, used Nissan Maxima

By combining these factors together you can build a list of possible keywords. For example a car dealer can build a list of possible keywords such as:

• Nissan dealer 5^th Avenue
• Nissan dealerAustincounty
• Used Nissan Maxima for sale inAustin
• Nissan repair service

2. Use Google’s Keyword Tool to do further research on your list of keywords and choose the keywords that:

• Have the highest search volumes per month
• Have a buyer intent e.g. cheap cars Austin, emergency plumber
• Have longtail keywords – these usually have less competition and since they are usually several in number, you can use them to build additional pages on your site so that your business website looks like an authority. An example of a long tail keyword is “where to buy Nissan Maxima inAustin,TX”

3. Using your list of the best 10-20 keywords, have a separate page/post written for each keyword or combine related keywords into one page. You can also use your keywords to help create different categories on your websites with pages assigned to each category.

 

Top Positive SEO factors that will boost your rankings

There are certain factors that Google, Yahoo and Bing and other search engines place great importance on that when properly applied can positively boost your rankings.

1. Keyword Factors

• Include your keywords in the title tag as this important text is what shows in the search engine results as your page title. Let the title tag be no longer than 6-7 words and make the keyword appear near the beginning.
• Include your keywords in your URL so make sure your permalink settings are correct. E.g. If your keyword is “Nissan dealer inBoston”, the post URL about that keyword should be www.samsplace.com/nissan-dealer-in-boston.html
• Check that your keyword density is between 3-7% and doesn’t cross into the danger zone of over 10%.
• Use your keywords as the anchor text in your backlinks
• Use your keywords in sub headings or in the <H1>, <H2> tags

2. Backlink Factors

• Back links are one of the most important factors to get good rankings so use your keywords as the anchor text.
• Backlink from reputable sites with high Page rank and that have been around for some time as search engines place a value on the origin of your  backlinks
• Try and get backlinks from sites in a similar niche as it shows that sites within that niche are voting for you.
• Get valuable and highly rated .edu and .gov backlinks as they are more weighty and harder to get.
• Get a good number of backlinks to your site, while paying attention to their quality too.

3. Content Factors

• Search engines value relevant and unique content that differs from what is found on other sites.
• Get into the habit of consistently adding new content as this will help getting your content indexed plus new content is favored by search engines more than old content.
• Format your content using larger font, bold and italics o that your keywords and other important words are emphasized.

4. Domains and URLS

• URLs for domains and files that are keyword rich are very important.
• Make sure your site is fully accessible for indexing. There should be no broken links, errors, password-protected areas that make it difficult for search engines to index.
• Your website should have a sitemap (in whatever format) as search engines spiders love to crawl them.
• Build a large site instead of a small mini- site as these bigger sites are seen more as an authority by the search engines. You can do this by building up your keyword list with a lot of long tail keywords and structuring your content around categories.
• Older domains are more trusted by search engines than brand spanking new ones, so when you can try and buy old/aged domains at domain auctions or from other businesses.

 

Top Negative SEO Factors that will ruin your rankings

There are certain SEO factors that are not looked upon favorably by the major search engines and that can ruin your search engine rankings.

Keyword Factors:

1. Keyword Stuffing- this is the worst practice to do as it results in an artificial keyword density of over 10% and may result in getting your site banned from the search engines.
2. Keyword dilution- this is when you are trying to SEO for an excessive number of keywords and most of the time the keywords are unrelated to one another. For example if you run a local bakery and your main keyword is “bakery in Tulsa”, trying to target 500 keywords on one site and  targeting keywords such as includes “shoe stores in Tulsa” is keyword dilution.

Link Factors

1. Try to avoid having too many outbound links from your site to other sites because the search engines will think you are involved in link buying or spamming. One outbound link per article to an authority site is about right.
2. Outbound links to suspicious or unethical sites will tremendously hurt your rankings.
3. Cross linking is a big no-no as far as SEO is concerned and will result in getting your site penalized. Cross linking is when your site links to site A and site A links to site B and site B links back to your site.

Content Factors

1. -Duplicate content is one of the most negative factors that can result in penalties. You should never have the same content on several pages of your website.
2. If you use Flash for movies on your site, remember that search engine spiders can’t index this content so provide a written description to accompany the movie.
3. Do not use Flash as the sole content on your homepage or any other page. Even though it looks artistic and beautiful, it is SEO suicide since those pages will not get indexed.

Domain and URL Factors

1. Redirects such as 301s and 302s are sometimes seen as black hat SEO techniques and can hurt your rankings. But they are completely valid for the purpose the have been designed to. HTTP 301 is a permanent redirect, telling the search engines that a page or domain have permanently moved to a different direction. With the 301 the new domain/page inherits the value of the the originals. HTTP 302 is similar to HTTP 301, but  a temporary redirect, and has not the same “heritage” power as HTTP 301; why should a temporal page inherit the SEO value of the original?
2. If you have a poor hosting services provider with a downtime below 97-98%, your content will have lower indexing rates and your pages will not get ranked.

That’s it for the first part. The second video course , SEO Basics Video Course -2- Backlink Building Strategies, will go into another principal aspect of Search Engine Optimization, off-site SEO commonly known as (back)link building. It comprises the following chapters with the corresponding videos.

9. 4 Tips on How to structure your backlinking campaign
10. 6 Qualities of a good backlink
11. How to build backlinks from Article directories
12. How to build Press Release backlinks
13. How to build blog commenting backlinks
14. How to build blog network backlinks
15. How to build guest blogging backlinks
16. How to build forum backlinks
17. How to build web 2.0 Backlinks
18. How to build Edu and Gov backlinks
19. How to Build Social Bookmarking Backlinks
20. How to build RSS Backlinks

Well! That’s it for part 1 of the SEO Basics Video Tutorial Course. Move on to part 2…

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