Local Search Can Increase Profits

According to a local search study at SBI+M: * 97% of American internet users use the internet to shop * 90% of online commercial searches result in offline bricks and mortar purchases * 82% of local searchers follow up offline via an in-store visit, phone call or purchase * 80% of budgets are spent within [...]

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Small Business SEO Homework

Hopefully you read the Small Business SEO Checklist and now you’re ready for your homework. If you spent any amount of time typing search queries looking to see if your business, or your competitors show up, you’ve noticed something. There are a lot of “directories” out there that just list businesses. They range from Yellow [...]

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Small Business SEO Checklist

When you decide to build a website, yes I’m talking to you mister small business owner, you probably hired someone who showed you a cool mockup of what your site would look like. A few weeks later, when your site was up, you were happy because it looked just like she promised. Then you waited [...]

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Moving Beyond Traditional SEO

Last week, Rae Hoffman wrote a fantastic article about the need to think beyond traditional SEO practices. She explains clearly and with a compelling example why you can’t just optimize your site then sit back and wait for the traffic to pour in. A few weeks back we launched a little site called Tweetwasters. It [...]

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Top 5 Things For A New Website Owner To Do

Everyone needs to be on the web. Even if it’s a one page site that just lists the address and phone number of your brick and mortar store. Hopefully, you want to do a bit more that just a page with your address and phone number on it. Small business owners need a checklist they [...]

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Google Updates PageRank On The Last Day Of The Year

If you don’t follow Matt Cutts on Twitter, you should, because you can get confirmation of Google Toolbar PR updates. Google’s PageRank is not the big deal it once was, it is now just one piece of the puzzle, and they keep adding more pieces. With that in mind, it still gives you some insight [...]

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Top 5 Sources For SEO Education

I realized a few weeks ago that I have a number of sites that I really value for straight-to-the-point SEO information. When I have a question that is slightly off and I feel like I need a little more confidence before I answer, I almost always turn to my first choice, SEOmoz. One of the [...]

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SEO During an Economic Downturn

I’ve been talking with people lately who think that they don’t have the extra money right now to spend on search engine optimization. I don’t understand that thinking, unless it’s just code for, “I don’t have any money”. As Forrester’s Kim Le Quoc and Jaap Favier succinctly stated in “How to Stimulate Consumer to Buy [...]

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Google Gives Out SEO Friendly Documentation

At the Official Google Webmaster Blog Brandon Falls has linked to a 22 page PDF that is what Google considers SEO best practices. Our Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide covers around a dozen common areas that webmasters might consider optimizing. We felt that these areas (like improving title and description meta tags, URL structure, site [...]

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Basic SEO Essentials

If you want your title tag tags to fully display in the search results at the major engines, try to keep it around 65 characters. Google & Yahoo! both display between 62-68 characters (there appears to be some various depending on both the country of origin of the search and the exact query), and MSN/Live [...]

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SEO as an afterthought

Working for one of the largest newspaper companies in the United States is sometimes surprising. When McClatchy bought Knight-Ridder I was in the trenches of moving those KR sites off their existing platform to ours. We thought through some things, but some we just completely ignored. SEO was one of them. About a year ago [...]

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