By far, the most often asked question I get by local business owners is; “How do I get my Google local listing beside the map?”

I have read many theories but the most common belief is that getting reviews of your business on sites like Yelp, City Search or the Yahoo local directory will influence your positioning beside the map in Google. I believe this is probably one of the factors Google uses when other factors are not available. However, I know from experience that links play a much more important role in getting your local business website beside the map in Google.

Believing that links are the biggest factor in getting your site beside the local map, I have read that the links with the greatest ranking abilities are those from local businesses websites within the geographically located city you wish your listing to be displayed for. I also believe this is a factor in getting your Google local listing beside the map.

I am sure there are many factors that are used by Google to determine which local business is listed by the map. I am sure reviews and local links are very important to these listings. In my experience, I have been able to get businesses positioned beside the map by the use of geo-targeted anchor text from inbound links.

Example:

To be positioned beside the map on a search for Las Vegas Chiropractor, you will need a good number of inbound links to your business website with “Las Vegas Chiropractor” in the anchor text of those links. Using a variety of anchor text helps to make the link profile look more natural and aides in the effectiveness of the linking. “Chiropractor in Las Vegas”, “Chiropractor Las Vegas” or “Vegas Chiropractor” would all be great anchor text for inbound links to help your local business website to rank in natural search for those search phrases but will also help to get your business website listed beside the map.

If you have a local business that needs the benefits of being listed beside the map, contact me to get started today. My linking will get your business listed in natural search rankings as well as a listing beside the map.

36

have been accused

of spousal abuse

7

have been arrested

for fraud

19

have been accused of

writing bad checks

117

have directly or indirectly

bankrupted at least 2 businesses

3

have done time for assault

71 repeat…

71 cannot get a credit card

due to bad credit

14

have been arrested on

drug-related charges

8

have been arrested

for shoplifting

21

currently are defendants

in lawsuits, and

84

have been arrested for

drunk driving in the last year

Can you guess which organization this is?

It’s not the NBA or the NFL!

It’s the 435 members of the

United States Congress…

The same group of idiots that crank out hundreds of new laws each year designed to keep the rest of us in line!

I received this in my email today, not sure how accurate it is but I believe it probably only scratches the surface. I thought I would share it here. My blog posts tend to get some very good visibility in search results so it is my hope that this bit of information is seen by many.

Please feel free to post a comment below if you found this post in a search.

Thanks to a reliable source, I have been educated on the practices of LocalAdLink. If you have not already done so, you might want to start by reading this post.

For starters, LocalAdLink is not relying on any natural search traffic. It didn’t take me long to figure this out. Their traffic comes from a variety of Partner Websites include Photography.com, Davesgarden.com, CNN.com, Facebook.com, and Myspace.com. These are paid marketing channels.

LocalAdLink has also partnered with over 100 Search Engines, such as Google, Yahoo and MSN, allowing local business owners to be displayed in searches targeted to the zipcode of the local business. Yahoo may send a small amount of traffic, MSN will send literally no traffic at all so LocalAdLink is relying on Geotargeted ads in Google as well as the lesser used search engines to send traffic to their geotargeted pages. This traffic, which has been bought through PPC buying is then resold to the local business who has paid to be listed in the LocalAdLink network. As I stated in the previous post, LocalAdLink is just another middleman and one of the worst kind at that.

Any service that provides website traffic to a client, in this case small business owners who are probably not very familiar with this type of rip off, are definitely very low in the bottom feeder world of internet marketing. Basically the scam works like this. LocalAdLink sets up geographically targeted ads in cities across the country. Searchers seeking local businesses or services in Google, Yahoo or MSN see a sponsored listing and click on that ad. The ad takes the searcher to a LocalAdLink page where the searcher than has the opportunity to view and click on additional listings on their site. If your business listing happens to be the one that is clicked on, you are charged a pay per click charge that pays for the Google ad cost, the LocalAdLink fee and a commission to the “account rep” that has sold you and your business into the network. Instead of paying Google for the click, you and up paying the search engine and two other middle men for the visitor.

Obviously, this means the cost per click is tremendously higher than if you had a PPC campaign setup in Google, Yahoo or MSN.

Long story short. LocalAdLink is a ripoff for the small business owner and quite possibly a total scam altogether. If your business need help with pay per click marketing, contact me for the help that will make your paid spending return a profit for your business.

Even worse, LocalAdLink is apparently offering their “marketing opportunity” as a business opportunity to those who feel good about taking advantage of small business owners.

There is a new local search directory in town, so expect to be cold called.

I learned of LocalAdLink through a press release that was forwarded to me by email. I had never heard of the company before but I read the release and visited the site hoping to find something worthy of the small business owner’s hard earned money.

I was disappointed.

From the press release:

LocalAdLink is a provider of services that enable local businesses to reach local customers with targeted Internet advertising. The customer facing Web site, LocalAdLink.com, is a local search directory and acts as the central hub for the LocalAdLink technology. When a customer visits LocalAdLink.com, proprietary geo-targeting software identifies the customer’s location and displays relevant local business listings. In addition, LocalAdLink has created an Advertising Network that publishes local business listings on its owned and operated sites, as well as partner sites.

Nothing new there. Sounds like a Reach Local clone. The release goes on to say…

In the past ninety days, over 30,000 small businesses have chosen to advertise on LocalAdLink. We expect over 100,000 more small businesses to begin advertising in the next 90 days. In addition, the i-SUPPLY division will begin its exclusive phased rollout to LocalAdLink’s Independent Salesforce the first week of May. We anticipate revenue growth from both product sales and advertising space created by this new division.

From my visits to LocalAdLink since the press release was released, there really does not seem to be much interest by local advertisers. Many searches returned the dreaded “No Results Found” page. I got this page time after time from searches that should have provided me with some form of a business listing. I even got this page when searching for specific cities.

Obviously, there is more to do at LocalAdLink than the press release would reveal. This is understandable. It is better to get something online than to wait for everything to be put online. This, however, is not understandable.

http://www.localadlink.com/directory/search/hotels-and-motels/Nashville%2C+TN+37201%2C+USA/

That is the link to my local Hotel and Motel category. Do you know what that is? It is an ugly URL. Specifically, it is not SEO friendly. Now it’s not the ugliest I have ever seen, but to be a local search marketing directory, you would expect to see something a little more SEO friendly than that.

As if that was not bad enough, I made one final observation that says all that needs to be said about LocalAdLink. The page title for every page on their site is, LocalAdLink. Nothing more. This makes it almost impossible for any of their pages to rank for the categories or local listings they are selling. This means no natural search rankings that will send searchers to your category or business listing.

Titles on web pages are extremely important. No page title or worse, page titles that are all the same is the death of a website’s natural search rankings. Spending money on any listing within the LocalAdLink is literally like throwing money away.

Do you have money to trash?

LocalAdLink has three packages. $49.95 a month, $99.95 a month and $199.95 a month. None of them are worth a dime.

If you are considering advertising with LocalAdLink, contact me first. I do not do high pressure sales. I specialize in local SEO and my SEO rates provide real contact with a SEO professional that can increase your website traffic.

These search directories offer to send you traffic from their website for a monthly fee. You will pay this fee even if there is no traffic to the pages in the directory. Don’t let the middleman conn you from money that is better spent optimizing your own business website.

FYI: LocalAdLink is hiring!

Marketing with blogs is a very smart decision for any business needing increased online exposure and website traffic.

I am not talking about blogging about your business. I’m talking about using other blogs to market your goods and services. Marketing with blogs is much easier than getting businesses to blog, believe me, I know from experience.

Having a blog as a part of your business website is a very smart idea. Posting info about your business on a regular basis is the best use of a business website blog. However, the blog on your business website domain is only one blog. Limited to only the visitors that know it is there. This means it probably has very little broadcasting power when it comes to getting the word out.

A better use of blogs, one which thousands of bloggers participate in daily, is to market products and services offered by businesses all across the net.

Marketing With Blogs the Easy Way!

Bloggers need revenue. Unfortunately for the average blogger, their income potential from blogging is very limited. Many blogs only have a few hundred visitors a month and only a dozen or so regular readers. It can be very hard to monetize such small amounts of website traffic through the programs available to blogs. Bloggers need additional sources of revenue to make their blogging profitable. For this reason, any serious blogger has buttons or banners promoting ads and sponsorships on their site. This is the real power of blog marketing for businesses needing to increase their website traffic.

There are blogs about every topic under the sun. No matter what you sell or offer online, you can easily find hundreds if not thousands of blogs about your business niche. Google provides a cool blog search tool to help you locate these potential marketing channels.

A quick search with this blog search tool will easily provide you with a list of blogs to investigate further. Visit and save as many as you feel may meet your marketing needs. This would be blogs that directly relate to your businesses niche. These blogs will also need to have at least a few comments on the posts on the blog. No comments generally means there are no regular visitors to the blog unless the blog’s comments have been turned off. You do not want to use any blog that has comments turned off as this generally means the blog has very low traffic of is maintained on an infrequent basis. A real blogger wants comments and the discussion they bring to the table. Comments are the life of a blog.

Once you have your list, email each blogger to see what their rates are and what types of marketing opportunities they offer.

A banner or a button on a blog is a affordable way to put your business website in front of very targeted visitors, however, getting a blog post about your products or services is a much better way to get website visitors now and in the future. Buttons or banners cannot be indexed into search engines like a blog post will. Generally, you can but a blog post or a blog post review from bloggers for a very affordable cost.

The best thing about marketing with blogs is the cost. A small business can effectively market their products and services using blogs for as little as $25.00 to $50.00 a month. For those who don’t have the time or inclination to do the work themselves, I offer a blog marketing service that can very affordably put your business products or services on the pages of blogs that will send you visitors.

Email or call me to learn more about my blog marketing service today.

877.321.5718

Online directories offer many options when submitting your site to their directory. Most common are paid listings, reciprocal listings and free listings.

Paid listings are a waste of money and time. The only directories worth paying for are BOTW and the Yahoo directory. The traffic within the directories are minimal so there is really no need to spend money for a prominent placement within the thousands of directories available online. Directories are really only good for the one way links. Free listings are worth the effort, however, free listings can take many weeks or even months to show up in the directory. To get your listing reviewed and posted within the directory as quickly as possible, you should select to do a reciprocal listing.

With reciprocal listings, the directory will list your submission in a much quicker time, sometimes within hours, after you post a link to the directory from your site. So, I discovered a way to use a reciprocal links page to get those directory listings listed in as quick a time as possible.

When you select to reciprocate the directory link, you must first post the directories link on your website. The directory will immediately check to see if the link in on the selected page you submitted when you submit your listing. Once they find the link to their directory, your listing will be reviewed within a few weeks if not days. Listings without a reciprocal link can take months to be reviewed.

The benefit of this technique is getting the approved listing as fast as possible. The drawback is having all of those directories listed on your reciprocal links page. So, I cheat a little.

Once the directory has visited the website and approved my listing, I wait a couple of weeks and then delete the listing from my reciprocal links page. After they have checked for the reciprocal link on your site, 99% of the directories will never visit your site again. So, you expedite your listing and end up with a one way link from almost every directory you post to without taking months to get the link. Once the directories you have posted to have listed your site you can then go back and remove their listing from your links page. This keeps your links page manageable and in time all of the directories you have linked to will be removed.

Of course, you could always just leave the directory links in your links page, but why? The visitors to your website, if they actually do find your links page, are probably not there to visit online directories. More than likely, they are looking for websites that are very similar to yours.

Use online directories for what they were intended for, a source of one way contextual links.

With many SEO specialist there is a theory that there’ is no such thing as a worthless link. Every link has some value as long as the link comes from a respectable site. This would include directory listing websites. I would be one who believes that there is no such thing as a worthless link. Some links carry a great deal more weight than other links but any link you can get is better than no link at all.

Online directories allow you the opportunity to place a contextual link in a related category with the anchor text of your choosing. The opportunity to place one way contextual links within a targeted category in large numbers seems almost too good to be true. Actually, it is. Directories no longer carry the ranking weight they once did. However, I can tell you from experience, directories can still help to position a website in search results for less competitive search rankings and are very good for local business websites.

Directory listings are always a very good starting point for SEO. Pick four or five title phrases that make sense for your website. These phrases should be four to six words in length and should contain very good targeted keywords for your website. Alternate these four or five phrases in as many directories as you have time to submit to using a different description for each of the four or five title phrases.

I usually submit to 100 to 300 directories for any site I am working on depending on the website topic.

Results will vary. Directory listings are worth the effort. I recommend submitting to 10 to 20 directories every week until you have submitted to several hundred. Unfortunately, it can take many weeks or even many months to get accepted into the directories you submit to so be patient.

I recommend using a reciprocal link when you submit to the directories. Learn how to use reciprocal links for speedy directory listings.

Keywords research is the foundation of any website optimization plan. Without this research, there will be no focus to your rankings. Rankings take a concentrated effort to achieve or they will never materialize. Knowing which words and phrases need to be optimized for is the first step in ranking any website for the visitors we all want.

A quick scan of almost every SEO company online will give you the impression that 10 keywords are all it takes to increase your website traffic. I say this because almost every SEO company on the Internet sells it’s services based on the number of keywords you want optimized. The more keywords you need to rank for, the higher the cost.

Honestly, 10 keywords are not enough for almost every business I work with. I do not base my service rates on the number of keywords your website needs. I rank every business website I work with for as many keywords as makes sense for your business. For some, there are hundreds of keywords being optimized for.

Your business website may very well need to be optimized for many dozens and possibly hundreds of keywords to create a significant increase in your website traffic. SEO is, after all, the process of doing what is needed to increase your website’s traffic. That being said, lets take a walk through a keywords research example.

Keywords Research 101

There are many keywords research tools available online. However, there is only one that tells you what people are searching for in Google, where practically everyone searches for everything. That tool is the Google Adwords Keyword Tool and it is available here…

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

There are other keywords tools available but you are optimizing your website for Google so you might as well see what Googlers are looking for since the majority of all website traffic will come from Google.

I will use a local business example for this post.

Let’s see how people looking for plumbers in Los Angeles. Click here to open the screen shot.

By entering los angeles plumber into the search field and hitting the Get keyword ideas button, Google will return a long list of actual searched for and bid on keywords that appear in Google. The top list will show those keywords that most relate to your query, the bottom list will be search phrases that relate to your search. Generally the top list is what you want to focus on, the bottom list could provide you with additional possible search phrases that relate to your business.

This report will show you the average monthly search volume for specific keywords for your website. This is a good gauge of potential traffic numbers but keep in mind, these numbers are only approximate, actual search volumes will change daily and monthly.

In this example, a plumber in Los Angeles will want to target several of these keywords for his business website.

This list only includes 8 keywords but generally local businesses require fewer keywords. Adding additional geographic modifiers such as the state,  “california plumbers” or communities within Los Angeles such as Hollywood, Brentwood or Studio City will help your site’s rankings for plumber searches within those locations.

The -1 means there is not enough search volume to report, however, that does not mean that you would not want to use those keywords. Remember, you want to optimize for as many keywords as make sense for your business.

Hopefully, this has provided you with a basic understanding of keywords research. This is the process I use on every website I work with.Once you have a good long list of keywords that you would like your website to rank for, next comes the linking. Google loves to find targeted, one way, contextual links pointing to your website, it just so happens that my SEO services are centered toward these highly coveted links. So, if you need help with your keywords or your search engine optimization, please contact me today.

Search Engine Optimization Any Small Business Can Afford!

Local Small Business SEO does not have to cost a fortune.

• * No contracts! You pay month to month and can cancel at any time.
• * Local Small Business SEO starts at $300.00 a month!
• * Most jobs take 3 to 4 month to complete! $900.00 to $1,200.00 total.
• * I make myself personally available for those small business owners needing a greater presence online while maintaining a search marketing budget that does not break the bank.

My Very Affordable SEO Services will increase your website rankings and website traffic starting at $300.00 a month. This service consist of complete website review, SEO Consulting, onpage optimization and a very successful linking strategy that optimizes internal linking and points trusted, contextual, editorial links to your website.

Linking is the key to website rankings.

Keywords in your meta tags will not rank your website. High keyword density will not rank your website. On page optimization will not rank your website. So what will? Targeted links pointing to your website is the number one influencing factor in website rankings.

To reach the first page on Google’s search results you need large numbers of contextual links with targeted anchor text pointing to the pages of your website. For the majority of local small business websites, inbound links alone can rank your website. For business websites in larger cities where the search competition is greater, larger numbers of targeted inbound links and additional website content will out rank your competition over time. The number of inbound links needed and the additional website content needed to rank higher in search results will depend on your competitions link and page numbers.

This information will be supplied in my initial survey of your website’s ranking potential.

What Makes My SEO Services Affordable?

I am a one man operation. My office is in my home just south of Nashville Tennessee. I have no employees or other business expenses that can drive up the cost of my services.

I have been a small business owner. I know that most small businesses are operating on a shoestring budget. Many small business owners get paid whatever is left in the bank every month if anything at all. I have been there. I understand the needs of small business. I also understand the the vast majority of small local businesses cannot afford the extreme rates many SEO firms charge.

My SEO Rates

I charge $50.00 an hour and bill a minimum of six hours a month for my services. Most small businesses will need no more than six hours of service a month to achieve the desired results. My rates are not in line with the industry standard. Most professional SEOs charge a minimum of $150.00 an hour and rates as high as $500.00 an hour are not uncommon. I can live quite comfortably on $50.00 an hour and my rates can be afforded by even the smallest businesses operating online.

My SEO services are more affordable because the needs of local small business are much easier to address than a large online operation looking to dominate the Internet. Small Business SEO does not take teams of people working long hours every day to see results. The minimum of six hours a month I devote to your search needs allows for research, reporting, consulting, content creation for link building and all of the communication you require.

So, if you need better placement in search results for your products or services, you need to speak with me. If you need affordable small business SEO, I can guarantee you, I am your man. Call or email me today.

Call Terry Reeves at
615.439.0902 for more information today.

Its funny how fast some trends can change.

I joined Facebook on May, 26 2007. I didn’t know anybody personally on Facebook then. For me then, it was primarily used as a way to network with other IM professionals and since I was a nobody in the Internet Marketing world it was pretty useless for me then. However, things have changed. Now, almost everybody I know personally is on the book. Below is an article I received in my email about the exploding popularity of Facebook. I thought some of my personal FB friends might find it interesting.

Is MySpace Toast? Officially googled by Facebook

If it’s lucky, MySpace is the new Yahoo. If unlucky, and it is unlucky lately, MySpace is AOL. Facebook has supplanted it, and will continue to do so, in much the same way Google ran past Yahoo, and for many of the same reasons.

The suspicion was there from the start of the social networking phenomenon MySpace spearheaded. When it stops being cool, what then? Well, then is now, and MySpace is a strip mall in a sleazy part of town. Traffic is down. Revenues are down. Executives are stepping down.

Back in 2005, when the buzz first came on about MySpace, I took a look and said, simply “meh.” The profiles seemed ugly and pointless. It seemed faddy and a lot of work just for the sake of coolness. In general, the site reminded me of slap bracelets, Beanie Babies, and acid washed jeans mixed with red plastic cups, bathroom walls and booty calls.

And then News Corporation took it over.

But I wasn’t 15, so what did I know? I regarded it like one of those teenage nightclubs creepy old men go to for no good reason at all. I just didn’t have any business there, and that may be just one of the problems leading to MySpace’s eventual peak.

High school student Jacob Ruffman, quoted today by McClatchy, has his own more teenage reasons. “I can go to the Facebook home page and see what’s going on with my friends. Then I flip over to MySpace and I get kicked in the face with colors and flashing penguins.”

Jacob’s at odds with my stepson, who’s 15 now and recently lamented that all his friends, like Jacob, had switched to Facebook. He could really customize his MySpace profile they way he had once customized his abandoned Gaia profile. And his parents and grandparents weren’t on MySpace the way they were on Facebook.

Coincidentally, about the same time he told me that his friends had all switched, a friend my own age had worried he’d not hear important news from home if he wasn’t on Facebook like everybody else. About that time too Facebook had started to overcome MySpace in terms of visitors.

Compete.com shows the shift began late last year. Facebook equaled MySpace around December, and by January had surpassed it, a huge feat considering how MySpace dwarfed Facebook this time last year. Compete says MySpace traffic is down by 5 percent for the year, though it still attracted over 58 million unique US visitors. Facebook on the other hand is up 125 percent for the year, and grabbed over 68 million visitors. On an international level, Comscore says Facebook is outdrawing MySpace by 110 million monthly visitors.

Taking a direct hit from MySpace’s woes is Photobucket, another Fox Interactive (News Corp.) property. MySpace had helped propel Photobucket to holding 45 percent of the online photo sharing market–just half a year ago. In February, Photobucket traffic declined by 24 percent, according to Hitwise, and Flickr is near to supplanting it as well. How quickly things can change.

I guess now, the question is why things turned around completely in just a couple of months. A year ago, Facebook wasn’t anywhere near MySpace, no threat at all. Well, part of it is, I think, MySpace’s time has come and gone. That doesn’t mean it won’t stay a reasonably popular and trafficked site, but, like Yahoo, MySpace will be a distant second at least.

Effectively, MySpace has been googled by Facebook for much of the same reason Google googled Yahoo. Facebook is cleaner, more intuitive, and has better features. Its members are rabid devotees who freak out at the slightest provocations. But they don’t leave. They protest until things change. Facebook has loyalty MySpace never did.

And while Facebook is opening up more and more, and making, as CEO Mark Zuckerberg said last week, “hundreds” of upgrades over the coming weeks, what has absentee landlord MySpace been launching?

Ooh look, an HP cosponsored print button, and a MySpace cobranded credit card.

Pretty yawnable, if you ask me.

Here is the link to the original story.