Posts made in December, 2010

Getting to the top is hard work. It doesn’t seem like it sometimes when you start a new venture that is in a realm that you’ve already mastered. But we forget that it seems easier because we’ve mastered the parts that seemed so hard before. Take the WordPress site I made recently for JOEY | Hair Salon Tacoma, my hair stylist in Tacoma, WA. I’ve worked pretty intently on WordPress sites for about a year, so the speed at which I was able to plan, construct, and optimize JOEY’s site surprised me. The first thing I did was look at who was ranking for keywords I wanted to go after. The same websites tended to show up in several searches; not surprising. I extracted keywords from all of them and used Rank Tracker to see how they ranked comparatively. More surprising is how quickly I’m able to get niche sites like this to rank for specific terms. I have a formula of sorts, but every site is unique so there’s no real formula you can apply everywhere. But there are certain things you must do to optimize for local search. Google Places and Bing Local Listings are indispensible. You’re not going to rank well locally if you don’t set up AND optimize those two accounts. Google now has the Magnificent Seven. The organic rankings are getting pushed farther down the page when you search on a keyword phrase that includes location. You have three sponsored listings at the top and then seven local listings before you get to the organics. Of course, the local listings are organic but they’re optimized for local search. They have Google Places or Bing Local accounts and if the space is competitive, they’ve gotten happy customers to leave reviews. If you’re optimizing a Google Places or Bing Local account, don’t forget to use images and as many categories as there is space. JOEY is already ranking well for some of her keywords and her Yelp reviews are positioned well too. She’s extremely good at hair color such as bleaching and is well known for this. This is a very fun exercise in local...

I thought I knew lots about local search but I’m learning more every day. I’ve started a project that is yielding great results and I want to share some of how I’m getting visibility for one of my local clients. My hair stylist is amazing. She’s sunny and funny and extremely talented. Her clients absolutely adore her. She’s the kind of stylist that everyone tells their friends about a swear they’ll use her for life. Full disclosure: she’s my niece. That said, I’m much too vain to have her do my hair if she wasn’t as good as she is. When she moved to Tacoma, WA this year from Seattle, she had clients following her. If you live here, you realize that is a long haul through traffic to get your hair done. So I said, niece, we need to get you online. She’s renting a chair at Salon Baroque, a beautiful shop in a very cool neighborhood. I began looking for a domain name and was astonished to find that hairsalontacoma.com was available. Keywords in domain names do make a difference. I’ve seen instances where that can help a site rank well above various other factors, especially for place names. I’m going to detail some more of the things I’m doing to get her rankings in future posts but within only TWO WEEKS, we’ve got her ranking on Page One  for a few keyword phrases. If you’re in the Tacoma area, I encourage you to visit JOEY at Hair Salon Tacoma and come back here if you want more tips on local...

I’m officially amazed at how important both Facebook and local search are becoming. I shouldn’t really be amazed because all of who do SEO have been watching this train barreling down the track for some time. I have found, however, that most anything I read in the SEO world doesn’t become fact in my head until it affects websites that I’m optimizing for the search engines. First Search Results on Facebook Example, for the first time, I have a client whose initial visibility on the web is on Facebook. Given that his e-commerce site is tiny (five pages and a slowly growing blog), it’s difficult to get visibility because there isn’t much content there to optimize. But if you Google his product name, his Facebook page appears number three on the SERP (search engine results page). Need I say it: Facebook is important. Social is important. Google Places, Bing Local Listings The other example was optimizing my site for local search. Many searchers today include place in their searches (e.g., “copywriter SEO seattle”). It’s much easier to compete in local search because there’s not as much competition generally (depending on the industry) as there is globally. We always push Google Places and Bing Local listings on our clients. We want them to sign up and optimize those listings. They matter. They get you local visibility and that means traffic, either over the phone, on foot, or to your website. If you don’t already have listings in Google Places and Bing Local Listings, do it now. Make it as complete as you can. It’s free, it’s easy, and it will help you get seen on the...