My name is Terry Reeves and I am a Small Business SEO Specialist. I specialize in local small business SEO and I offer affordable SEO services to businesses of all sizes. Small business search marketing works for local one man operations to online business enterprises that employ hundreds of people. I can help with your small business search engine marketing or local search engine marketing needs no matter how small or large your business is.

Local SEO marketing and small business search are a rapidly growing trend. Small businesses across the globe are reaping the benefits of local community search traffic. Your neighbors are searching online for local business services and products, can they find your business in the search results?

The majority of all local search engine optimization work needing to be done for your website can be complete in four to six months depending on the number of search phrases that need to be optimized. More competitive small business search rankings can take 6 months to 18 months to rank satisfactorily. I believe your website should rank for as many keywords as possible. For many local small businesses, this can total a handful of keywords. Ecommerce websites can literally need optimization for many dozens and even hundreds of competitive search phrases. Just remember, it can take many months to optimize a website for a large number of keywords. Ultimately, my work for your website is done when you are satisfied with your sites rankings and traffic.

My Results!

Give me a call or email me to view some of my SEO results.

My Rankings!

I believe you should rank for something if you claim to be a SEO professional. You can view my personal live website rankings here.

My SEO rates are very affordable for businesses of all sizes.

I also offer very affordable maintenance services for businesses wanting continued monitoring and rankings after the initial SEO service is complete.

If your business website need better natural search rankings and placement beside the Google local map, contact me today.

Call Terry Reeves at 615.984.4216 if you are in Nashville or anywhere in the Middle Tennessee area or at 888.795.1667. You can also email me for more information today.

Relevance is the best SEO! The process of optimizing your website for search engines only enhances what your customers are looking for online. Relevance to your products or services and relevance to your location if you are a small local business seeking customers in your community.

I just received this email from the Big G.

Dear Google user,

We’re getting rid of over 60 different privacy policies across Google and replacing them with one that’s a lot shorter and easier to read. Our new policy covers multiple products and features, reflecting our desire to create one beautifully simple and intuitive experience across Google.

We believe this stuff matters, so please take a few minutes to read our updated Privacy Policy and Terms of Service at http://www.google.com/policies. These changes will take effect on March 1, 2012.

Just thought I would share.

Almost half of churchgoing Americans say their life has not changed a bit due to their time in the pews, according to a new survey by the Barna Group.

The Barna Group is an evangelical company based in California and found that 46 percent of “Americans” reported no change from attending church. About a quarter of Americans said their life was greatly affected by church attendance and another quarter said it was somewhat influential.

Two-thirds of respondents said they had felt “a real and personal connection” with God while attending church.  This should be the headline for this survey but the media loves to portray Christianity in a negative light.

Among weekly church attenders, 44 percent said they felt God’s presence every week and 18 percent said they had that experience once a month.  Three out of five church attenders said they could not recall an important new religious insight from their last church visit. Of those who attended in the previous week, 50 percent could not recall walking away with a significant new understanding.

This survey sample was only 1022 random adults.

You go to church to learn how to be better, how to forgive and how to live out what Jesus died to give us.  If you are successful with that, you will feel a “real and personal connection” with God (Jesus) in your everyday life. If you are attending church to have a personal connection with God, you are doing it all wrong. You may also be at the wrong church because you definitely have not learned anything at the church you are attending.

I personally believe Newt is one of the smartest people in modern day politics. This video shows him at his best.

John 3:16

For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.

If it looks like a coincidence to you, it looks like Jesus to me.

Has Tim Tebow made a believer out of you yet? Relax, I’m talking as a football player.

Much fun has been made about Tim Tebow’s devotion to Christianity. Some people complain that the Denver Broncos quarterback mentions God and Jesus too much. But even when he remains silent on the issue, Tebow gets his message across. Just take a look at a couple of items from Sunday’s 29-23 overtime victory over the Pittsburgh Steelers.

1. He passed for 316 yards against the Steelers.

Which brings to mind perhaps the most famous Bible verse of all, John 3:16. Who needs a rainbow-haired guy holding up a John 3:16 sign when you have Tebow?

2. Tebow set an NFL playoff record with 31.6 yards per completion.

31.6? John 3:16? Stop, it’s getting spooky now.

3. His favorite receiver Sunday was Demaryius Thomas.

Thomas had 204 receiving yards and was responsible for the game-winning touchdown in overtime. And when was Thomas born? Dec. 25, 1987. Hmm, who else has a birthday celebrated on Dec. 25? (The answer is not Santa Claus.)

So, you may be able to silence Tim Tebow, but apparently you can’t contain him. Somehow, some way, his message comes through.

It’s Tim Tebow’s world, and we are just living in it.

Source:  Tim Tebow delivers John 3:16 message without saying a word

I received an interesting email this week from a very trusted source related to all things Google Places. Apparently there are four Google Places Technical Reps calling on businesses in Kansas City and one of his clients had the good fortune to meet with and quiz this official. Here is a summary of what was conveyed during this meeting.

Google Places Technical Reps

This technical Google Places manager confirmed that Google has 4 reps in Kansas City and is rolling out similar resources elsewhere across the country in the coming months.

Google Places Reviews

Google is going to begin advocating to businesses that they set up computers/workstations where clients can post live reviews in their place of business. There is no penalty for “same IP address” moving forward, assuming a “reasonable number”. The technical Places sales rep indicated 10 or less per would be acceptable, and more if the business type warranted it.

I have already advised some of my service clients to start carrying laptops or tablet computers to solicit reviews while on the job. The reviewer will need a Google account of some type to post a review for your service.

Multiple Listings Stuck in the “Pending” State

If you get to a point of multiple listings, and they just seem to be stuck in pending, this technical Google Places manager confirmed our long-standing belief, just start over in a new account.

Google Places Account Suspension

Once again, this technical Google Places manager confirmed that if you get your account suspended, it will NEVER get fixed. Just start over with a new account.

Facebook Fan Pages and Google

Tie your Places Page into your Facebook Fan Page. Do this by copying the link from within your Google Places page and pasting it in your actual Facebook Fan Page, should you have a page for your business. The Google Places manager indicated it was a VERY good thing to do and strongly recommended every business serious about Google Places do it. Enough said!

Question. Is it better to be at the top of the Google Places listings or anywhere within the listing layout with more reviews than my competitors?

Every business wants to be on the first page of a Google search result when people are searching for their products or services. The top of that search result page to be exact. It is common knowledge that the listings at the top of the search result page receive the majority of the search traffic to that page. For local businesses, this means the A, B or C position within the Google Places listings.

This week I was forwarded an email from a friend whose company is heavily involved in market research for small businesses. One of their clients commissioned a study to see what local listing people clicked on first in a number of search results where one of the businesses within the Google Places search result was not at the top of the listings but had a greater number reviews compared to the other listings. The results? Regardless of the positions of those sites with the greatest number of Google reviews, those high review sites were clicked on first more times as those sites in the A, B or C positions.

The report concluded that having a greater number of reviews showing on your Google Places listing, regardless of the actual position of your listing, provided more first clicks on that results page than the local business listings that were in the A, B or C positions.

Reviews matter and influence searchers regardless of your Places Page listing positions. You may never attain a A, B or C position within the Places listing layout but you can out review your competitors with a little effort. My next post will explain exactly how you can do that.

1. You believe everything you read on the Internet about SEO.
2. You need to be on the first page of any search engine next month.
3. You expect to dominate page one in the search results for all of your keywords in less than 90 days.
4. You can’t commit to anything for longer than 30 days at a time.
5. You feel like the cost of SEO is an expense and not an investment.
6. You think all of your backlinks should come from websites directly related to your particular business niche.
7. You believe that authority websites will link to you.
8. You believe your secretary/brother/cousin/uncle/whoever can do as good a job with your SEO as anybody else.
9. You think $300.00 a month is too expensive.
10. You think SEO is the cure for what is broken with your business.

500 algorithm changes a year!

A Google spokesperson recently stated:

We’re continuing to iterate on our Panda algorithm as part of our commitment to returning high-quality sites to Google users. This most recent update is one of the roughly 500 changes we make to our ranking algorithms each year.

Did you catch that last part? 500 changes to their algorithm each year. This means having a website is useless if you are not making that site visible within search. This statement was offered in regards to the most recent Panda update; a update that I have not seen drastically affect local business websites. However the statement does signify the importance of regular work to make and keep your business website relevant to the search results you need to be a part of. Doing nothing is a recipe for invisibility within all of the major search engines.

As a sometime Facebook advertiser, I receive an email newsletter every so often. Mostly I ignore it. However, today the newsletter caught my eye just before I was about to hit the delete button. A link to a PDF provided info on optimizing Facebook pages for search. Unfortunately, it took several attempts to get the PDF to open. I thought this info might be of interest to some of my readers so below is what Facebook recommends to optimize your Facebook page.

1.) Link your website homepage to your Facebook page. Facebook recommends you link to your page with your business brand as the link text. Facebook also recommends you link to the short url.

This is great advice. If you are a local business you might want to consider using your main keyword in your link text. Your Facebook url should include your business “brand” name and/or possibly your city and service as well. Example: Facebook.com/Nashville-Cosmetic-Surgeon

2.) Use your brand name on your Facebook page. Facebook recommends you match your page name to brand name and you should claim your vanity name, the short version of your page name without all of the numbers. You can do that here.

This is probably obvious to most who have Facebook pages. Once again, including your location and service keywords would be a smart idea.

3.) Get likes to accumulate links. Facebook recommends you add a Facebook fan box to your website to encourage “likes”, stay active on your page to to appear in news feeds and to use Sponsored Stories to promote your page and drive likes.

Sponsored Stories is actually a very cool marketing opportunity. It goes well beyond the basic ad platform offered by Facebook.

This info is all very basic and simple. I would add link building. to the recommendations. I have had very good results ranking Facebook pages for local search results. This was done exclusively through a link building campaign. I find some Facebook pages rank much quicker than a business website. Link building is the key to optimizing any page for search. This also includes your local business directory sites like Yahoo Local, Manta, Merchant Circle etc.