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Online businesses that have been around for a while would already be included in local search engines, since they compile data from aggregators and other online directories. Once a business’s listing is loaded in local search engines,  it must determine how to get the business to rank higher when users search for industry’s keywords.

Optimizing your website for local search engines all basic SEO factors can come into play and can help influence rankings. These factors include having good, specific text in  each page’s title, H1 tags, meta description, page content, IMG ALT attributes and inbound links. But some are specific to local search, such as:

– Companies that have multiple locations, it is not necessary to have a standalone website or subdomain for each outlet. It is better not to, since each business location would produce similar web content. However, it probably would be helpful to create a separate profile web page on the site for each distinct location. Many sites with chain outlets will list all outlets on one page– that is not optimal. It is better to have one page be about one store location and another about a different location so as to leverage all the on-page elements to create a page focused on location.

– Have page title, H1 tags and content include the business name, type of the business and location name example “Ben Tech: consultants, India.” For multiple locations, change the title on each location’s page. Include the neighborhood, street address, area nicknames and other location-distinguishing information.

– Home page and or / contact us page should have the main location’s basic listing information (street, city,state,zip code,phone numbers etc.) displayed somewhere in HTML text. Also basic listing information in hCard microformat, which is a method of encoding address information on web pages. For multiple locations, display the basic information on each location’s profile page.

– Place differentiating information on each store’s pages , including  a map. hours of operation, brand names, product photos, menus, pricing, ratings and similar information.  Also include specifics about the physical location.

– Beware of proximity to the city’s centroid (location that search engine defines as the center of the city). When the company is moved to a new location, take into account where the city’s centroid is located so as to find a place closer to that point. Most map search engines will display businesses located closest to the centroid first for a particular category or keyword search.

– Proximity works the same way for zip codes. If user’s search for businesses closest to the zip code area centroid will likely be displayed first in the list.

– Good user ratings are one of the biggest factors for ranking high in a number of  local search engines, particularly in Google Maps. Google maps has compiled ratings from many other directory sources to get a universal rating for a business.

– Develop external links pointing to your website. The best links to support local search come from other locally and topically oriented anchor text. Example,  “Mumbai rental cars” is better anchor text than “rental cars”.

– If local business has a blog , add a blog map or feedmap to it. This will add a local signal to the blog, as well as bring it to the attention of other bloggers in the same area participating  in feedmaps.

–Community interaction can assist in online promotion.

-local charity races/walks, particularly if they list sponsors or sponsor logos on a page on their site. Inbound links from these sites are very beneificial.

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With Googles’ fresh update, retailers and marketers hoping to boost their natural search rankings in the coming months, this new year could be dubbed the Year of Content. The relationship between original, updated and popular content on an e-commerce site, and potentially higher search rankings for a brand, merchant or product page, is hardly unknown.

In 2012, however, is how Google’s'  latest major update to its search algorithm—those mathematical formulas that carry so much weight in digital marketing—is pushing retailers to offer stronger content on their web sites, update that content more often and encourage those in-bound links that signal page quality to the search engine.

With relatively little original content most retailers are scrambling for more, while those web merchants that have long had staffers producing how-to articles, product demonstrations and the like are working toward improvements.

Another Google update called Panda was designed to punish what Google views as low-quality web sites, which includes those with unoriginal content, such as retail sites that rely on the same manufacturer product descriptions that many other e-retailers display. It also sought to downgrade sites that web users seemed to find of little value.

E-commerce site are likely to be downgraded if it fails to attract links from reputable sites, without paying for them. Paid links are worse than no links at all—if a retailer gets caught by Google.

Retailers used  manufacturer-supplied descriptions on its site instead of original content.  Retailers have worked to improve rankings by hiring  copywriters to write original product descriptions that contain keywords that consumers use when searching for products.  They also removed content that caused pages to load relatively slowly—another negative signal that can depress a site’s position in Google organic search ranking.

But now retailers will have to do even more  than they did to protect themselves from demotions in search rankings under Panda. Fresh is meant to help shoppers find the latest product information— and that points to all kinds of content-related improvements for e-commerce sites.  That includes, for instance, a steady stream of new user reviews on product pages. Merchants should rethink both their own product descriptions and also make sure that user reviews are happening whenever possible, especially when they are good reviews. Retailers should continually update content, starting with best-selling products and pages that already rank high in search results.

Google’s fresh update will kick in around April or May, after Google finishes testing the changes. But retailers need to prepare their content efforts now. By studying what consumers search for, along with comments left by consumers via Facebook, e-mails and even phone calls to sales agents.

That old wisdom of search engine optimization hasn’t changed too much with Fresh, but the update, with its emphasis on new content, drives home how important a social media campaign and retailer-produced blogs are for retailers. engages consumers on  Twitter and Facebook, the search engine update will require even  more posting and communication via those social networks. It also underscores the importance of paying attention to Google+, the search engine’s own social network. A strong social presence, one that demonstrates a loyalty among consumers that can translates into links, is another sign of good content, and therefore another way to earn the good graces of Google.

Retailers are on the right SEO track if they are putting more effort into social media. The ‘freshness algorithm’ is Google’s attempt to continue to provide more relevant, real-time results for search queries, further highlighting the need for marketers to accelerate their focus on integrating SEO and social marketing practices to ensure pertinent, up-todate content is accessible to Google. Retailers can maximize the impact of their content by making sure they have the “social
share” buttons embedded on their sites, enabling consumers to pass on appealing content to friends and other shoppers on social networks, which also encourages links and builds credibility.

Retailers and marketers are increasingly using a variation of this mantra as both social networks and updated content assume more importance within e-commerce: SEO is social media, and vice versa.

Besides participation in social networks, retailers hoping to keep ahead of Google’s changes will want to invest in such marketing services as price optimization—technology that can help a retailer better compete with competitors’ off ers—and display ads based on consumers’ behavior.

Whatever the effects of the algorithm change over the next few months, retailers hoping to keep up or improve their rankings should embrace another concept besides fresh—speed.  That means getting fresh content onto a site quickly.

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Make the most of video content since video content is a great way to expand your market visibility as well as drive traffic to your website. Often, publishers think first and foremost about contextual content and overlook the value proposition of video. Although video content has become popular in the last several years, many marketers upload video to YouTube, but they really don’t know how to exactly leverage this platform for optimal online marketing results. Video is content, and content should be leveraged and syndicated. This helps with back links, SEO, website visibility, branding, traffic generation, and buzz.

The best video-sharing sites to upload your videos to are YouTube, Google Video, MetaCafe, Blip.tv, and DailyMotion. These sites are extremely popular and get the most traffic and visitors.

Don’t forget that you can also syndicate your video content through Really Simple Syndication (RSS), if you have it on your website. Following are some quick tips for optimizing video for killer search engine and marketing results:

(A) Keep clips less than 5 minutes in length, and make sure they’re relevant, beneficial, and interesting to users. Your video clips also could be teasers (excerpts or snippets) that link to a fuller-length video on your website.

(B) Give your video a powerful, eye-catching title. This is where good copywriting skills come into play. Try to think of a great headline that would stop you dead in your tracks. This is the most important element of the video, because you only have a few seconds to grab your prospect’s attention and make him or her click to watch.

(C) Pack your title and description full of your top keywords—keywords that are in your video and that your target audience will search for.

(D) Make sure your video is tagged (metadata) properly with your keywords to get picked up by search engine spiders.

(E) Make sure your video includes either your company logo or your URL, for branding.

(F) Cross-market your video in your e-newsletters, on your website, and in your social media accounts (Twitter, LinkedIn), to drive traffic and create buzz.

(G) If the video is on your website, encourage other users to republish it by offering the proper code that makes it easy for them to copy and paste. This helps with viral marketing.

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The meta page title is the second most important factor in all of SEO (search engine optimization). When your website was first created, whoever was programming it had to fill in a section of the coding called the meta page title.

The reason this primitive bit of information matters so much is because search engines have, for a while now, considered the meta page title to be the one true description of a website. The meta page title is like the headline of a newspaper story or the front cover of a book. It encapsulates a web page in about 15 words or fewer.

Google’s decision to make it such a huge factor in ranking websites is pretty arbitrary. They could have made the meta description title, the meta keywords, or any other section of the website code the defining attributes of a website. But because they decided that this area matters so much, we are compelled to pay attention to it, too.

The meta page title is that code at the very top of your internet browser, above the address bar. The only other place you will encounter meta page titles as a normal internet user is when you are looking at search engine results. Those blue underlined headings on the first line of every Google result are simply a direct copy of each site’s meta page title. Google also uses a site’s meta page title as the heading for its search results.

When creating a meta page title, you need to know only the following three things:

–Keep it to a maximum of 100 characters, although Google will show only 65 or so.

–It needs to summarize what your site is about in a simple way for the sake of visitors but also contain keywords so that  Google knows which terms your website should rank for.

–After you’ve finished formulating it, make this sentence the meta page title of my site’s home page.

Effectiveness of Meta Page Titles: The key to a really effective meta page title is including all your most valuable keywords in a human-friendly and Google-friendly way. Lets assume that for a website to show up at the top of Google whenever someone is looking for a criminal lawyer in Mumbai. After doing  research, it was realized that all keyword phrases contain the words lawyer, attorney, Mumbai, criminal, and defense. In other words, if you combine these words in different ways, you will end up with the various keywords that people type in when they are looking for a criminal
lawyer in Mumbai. For the website to rank high for searches related to criminal law representation in two areas outside of Mumbai: Pune,  and Goa. Add those three city names to the list of words that a potential client might enter into Google
and it could be  more than 20 different keywords. That’s a lot of keywords to stuff into a 100-character title.

Earlier keywords would be placed in order of importance, in the meta page title tag.

Mumbai criminal lawyer,Mumbai criminal attorney, Mumbai criminal defense attorney,
Mumbai lawyer, lawyer in Pune,Goa

That type of meta page title is not only unfriendly to visitors, but would probably get your site labeled as spam and dropped to the bottom of the results. The main thing that this meta page title lacks—other than adherence to the character limit—is the fact that Google can read words in any order as long as they are written one time. With that rule in mind, here is a perfect meta page title, the Mumbai criminal lawyer:

Mumbai Criminal Lawyer | Defense Attorney in Pune and Goa

This meta page title incorporates all the words to rank for, and Google doesn’t care about word order. This means that if someone types into Google Pune defense lawyer, Google will consider website an ideal match. Same with criminal defense attorney Mumabi or any other permutation of the words in his site’s meta page title.

So far I’ve been focusing on just your home page meta page title. But nowadays, especially with Google’s newest algorithm updates, it is important to get many pages of your site, not just your home page, to rank. This means you should be specifically concerned with the meta page titles on all the pages of your website, not just your home page. ave a specific page that focuses just on criminal defense in Goa, and the meta page title of that page could be “Goa Criminal Defense Lawyer | Attorney in Goa.” Creating separate pages, all with unique meta page titles for every keyword, is a good idea because it gives visitors a page that specifically suits their search, whatever it may be. It also gives Google lots of opportunities to rank your website’s pages for niche keywords.

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A PDF is a Portable Document File created by Adobe Systems. It’s simply a file that you can create in one application that contains text, images, drawings, and more.

Most people like to upload documents (especially important content-rich documents like press releases, articles, interviews, transcripts, and similar) in PDF format to their website for its universal access, ability to maintain document
integrity either viewed onscreen or printed, and security features (files can be protected by making them read-only, so readers can’t add to, change, or cut, copy, or paste material from them).

There’s a misconception out there that search engines don’t read (index) PDFs. They do. Of course, HTML pages are faster to index than a PDF, but PDFs can be indexed. The trick is to know how to set up the PDF to make sure you get maximum pick-up by the search engines.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for PDF Files

(1)If you have a large PDF file, consider breaking it into smaller relevant groups, sections, chapters, and so on. Tag these sections accordingly with accurate, relevant keywords. This works not only for human readers, but also for search engines, it takes longer to spider a PDF than HTML.

(2)Make sure each PDF file is text based and has the correct document properties set up. When the search engines index (or spider) a PDF, they extrapolate the text from the information fields within the PDF. That means the metadata and keywords you choose for these fields are critical. The important fields are the author, document title, description,
file size, and modification date.

(3) Remember to tag the PDF and use anchor text and links within the file. The same SEO best practices for websites apply to PDFs. In addition, make sure your links aren’t buried deep within the PDF file. Have them at the root level, easy for search engines to find.

(4) Check the PDF file format version number, and make sure search engines can read it. Typically, you want to use Acrobat 5/Adobe XMP (PDF V. 1.4 or 1.5).

(5) Finally, make sure the reading order in your PDF is logical and flows. Again, this is user-friendly for humans and search engines. However, from a search engine perspective, your reading order gives you an idea of what will be displayed in organic search results. To do this, first open your PDF and select Advanced, Accessibility, Add Tags to Document. Then select Advanced, Accessibility, Touch Up Reading Order. This displays the reading order of the PDF.

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Inbound Links from Other Sites can help a website move up in natural search rankings. But if the search engines conclude that your website is  stockpiling links solely to move up in search results, your website may be penalized and see the  site virtually disappear from search engine pages.

Links had evidently been purchased solely to enhance search engine rankings, in violation of Google’s rule against buying links in order to manipulate search results. Google typically gives more credit to links from educational sites with .edu domains because they are deemed to be more objective than commercial sites.

Only Google’s own Webspam team knows exactly what search engine optimization tactics raise red flags, but certain SEO practices are known to be risky.

Manipulated anchor text in inbound links: Search engines can easily identify inbound links that contain manipulated anchor text, the highlighted word or phrase in web content that someone clicks to get more information. A
classic example of this violation occurs after you identify a specific keyword phrase or group of phrases that command high search volume, and then you attempt to own these phrases by purchasing many identical links that use the exact words in the targeted phrases.

When search engines see unnatural repetition of precise keywords within the text of these links, originating from hundreds or thousands of sites, they may deem this to be an indicator of manipulated anchor text.

Links from irrelevant sites: Relevance is one of the most important aspects of any link portfolio. Just as search engines evaluate each site in terms of its relevance to particular search terms, so, too, do they evaluate sites linking to that website. If the linking sites tend to be relevant to the website and the products it sells, this provides a greater boost than links from irrelevant sites.

However, garnering many links from sites that have little or nothing to do with your site content not only provides little benefit, it can be seen by search engines as an indication of unsavory SEO practices and lead to penalties.

Links from unrelated foreign sites: Links from sites based in countries where a you do not do business can also raise a red flag. If you do not sell in Russia and China, Google may look askance at links from sites using the domains .ru
(Russia) and .cn (China). Though these links can occur naturally, and are not under a retailer’s control, the rapid acquisition of many such links may suggest intentional link manipulation and trigger penalties.

Link Spam: Each inbound link your website can be evaluated for the contextual relevance of the linking source page. But if that source page also links to a number of other unrelated sites—most likely taking payment for that link spam—it can raise a red flag and get labeled by search engines as an undesirable inbound link for your site.

Links from bad neighborhoods: your site can be evaluated for links from sites with low PageRank scores and or questionable incoming link portfolios. Google prefer sites to avoid links to web spammers or ‘bad neighborhoods’ on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.

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YouTube also looks within your video’s title for keywords that match viewers’ queries, so optimizing title, description in YouTube search is a requirement.  It’s more difficult to fit keywords into a title, however, because you’re limited as to the title’s length. Specifically, a title can include no more than 100 characters, so writing a title that is both descriptive and includes a number of keywords is challenging.

Optimizing your Title: Learning how to incorporate your most important keywords into various text elements, while maintaining the usefulness and integrity of those text elements is a part of SEO. The best titles describe the video’s content in a way that appeals to the target audience. They also include a handful of the most important keywords, those words that target viewers are most likely to be searching for. Ideally, these keywords are also the best descriptors of your video’s content.

What you don’t want to do is randomly insert keywords into the video’s title. One, that makes the title less descriptive, and thus less useful for prospective viewers. Two, it reeks of keyword stuffing, and YouTube won’t reward that. Instead, work the keywords into your title in an organic fashion; if you can’t do so, then don’t include them.

Optimizing your Description: Adding keywords to your video’s description is much like performing SEO on your website’s body copy. You have lots of space to work with, so you’re not as limited as you are with the video’s title. Yet you still need to incorporate keywords in an organic fashion; they have to feel natural, not artificial.

Fortunately, it’s easier to work keywords into descriptive copy than it is into short titles. The extra length works wonders. Again, make sure that the keywords aren’t just inserted randomly, or in a list at the end of the description; that’s keyword stuffing, and that’s a no-no. Instead, write your copy to include as many keywords as genuinely fit. If your keywords are indeed descriptive of your video’s content, and not just chosen to attract a certain audience, then this shouldn’t be a problem.

Optimizing Embeds and Links: In traditional website SEO, the number of inbound links to page will increase that page’s ranking. The same thing goes for YouTube videos. The more web pages that link to your video, the more likely it is that your video will appear higher in YouTube’s search results. Likewise, you can increase your search ranking by getting your video embedded in more external web pages.

The links to and embeds of your video will affect its YouTube search rank. The challenge is, you have little control over how many sites link to or embed your video.

First, the more unique and authoritative the content in your video, the more likely it will be linked to or embedded. It all comes down to quality content; you need to make your video as “linkworthy” as possible.

In addition, you will want to encourage viewers to link to your video. The more you spread word of your video, the more people who will be exposed to it. Have your PR department push your video to influential bloggers, encouraging links or
embeds. Email related websites and encourage them to embed or link to the video. Encourage recipients of your email mailing list, readers of your company blog, fans of your Facebook page, and followers of your Twitter feed to do the same.

Optimizing Views: Here’s another important factor in determining YouTube’s search rank—the number of times your video has been viewed. Fair or not, YouTube will rank a popular video higher than a less popular one. This is just another good reason to try to push more people to view your video.

Optimizing Comments and Ratings: The final factor in YouTube’s search rank are the comments and ratings your video receives. A video with more comments and ratings (assuming it’s a net positive rating) will rank higher than one with fewer comments and ratings. For this reason, you need to activate comments and ratings for your videos, and then encourage viewers to voice their opinions.

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How people find new videos on YouTube?  How do people search for new videos? Do people search for videos by topic or type of video? Videos that display high in search results get more views. It is important to optimize videos for YouTube search results. Video search optimization is similar to search engine optimization (SEO).

YouTube searches Videos: Search online is about keywords. Keywords or phrases are entered as a search query.

Example, If people are looking for videos on golf, they might enter the keyword golf.

YouTube, then, tries to match the keywords entered by a user with those videos that best fit that query. YouTube has no
way of analyzing a video itself to determine its content. YouTube must rely on the description of the video to determine
its content. YouTube analyzes the text you enter to figure out what your video is about—and match it to the appropriate search queries. That means you need to focus on three fields when uploading or editing your video: tags, title, and description. They all matter, to some degree, and will affect how your video is ranked when someone is searching for a related topic.

Choose the right keywords: Whether it is the tags, title, or description, you need to determine the right keywords to use, and then include those keywords in all three fields, as best you can.

It’s vital, then, that you learn how to create a list of keywords that best describe your video, in the way that users will think of and search for that video. The art of determining which keywords to use is called keyword research, and it’s a key part of SEO, whether you’re optimizing your complete website or a single YouTube video. When you know which keywords and phrases that your target customers are likely to use, you can optimize the description of your video for those words and phrases.

It’s all a matter of determining how viewers search for the information they need. When you figure out the keywords they’ll most likely search for, you have the most effective keywords for your video.

As such, you probably need to come up with a combination of both generic and specific keywords. For example, if your video talks about the differences between incandescent and fluorescent lighting, you should include generic tags such as
lighting, light bulb, energy efficient, and the like, as well as more specific tags such as incandescent, fluorescent, and your company name. In this way, you attract viewers that are essentially browsing or just getting interested in the topic, as well as make yourself known to those viewers that have more specific needs in mind or are searching specifically for your company.

Optimizing Tags: there are three places where you can include keywords: your video’s tags, title, and description. What YouTube calls “tags” the rest of us call keywords; it’s just another term for the same thing. So naturally you should enter your keywords into the Tags field when you first upload your video, or later via the editing function.

Tags box has plenty of room for all the keywords you might want to target. Enter individual words with spaces in between. To enter a multiple-word phrase, enclose the phrase within quotation marks, like this: “multiple word phrase”.

YouTube recommends additional tags, beneath the Tags box. These are based on the tags you’ve previously entered and the video’s title and description. To add any of these suggestions to your official tags list, just click the tag. The tags field is perhaps the most important for optimizing your video for search; it’s where YouTube looks first. Without the right tags, great content will go unfound.

Tomorrow I will complete this post in the second part (Title, Description, embeds & links,views,comments and ratings).

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Optimize images for search engines to target your site better. When a search is done for any topic on a search engine , links  for images, videos, news, information and blog posts are displayed. Search engines display blended search results. Search engines provide preferential treatment to images that are included in search engine results.

SEO optimized images are more likely to appear in search engine results, optimizing images in coordination with web pages boosts search engine rankings for both. SEO relies heavily on search engine optimized text to raise a page’s profile and facilitate indexing. Since images contain no text describing them, search engines rely on tags, metadata, captions and file names and other contextual clues to identify and properly index images.

When placing images on web pages focus on appearance, placement and SEO.

-Use search engine preferred formats PNG, JPG and GIF.

-Give image files  recognizable names such as opel-sail.jpg,  do not use cryptic names like opsl2011.jpg. Use dash not underscore to separate words because search engines treat dashes as spaces.

-Always use keyword optimized alt text in the “<img/>” tag.

-If image is used as a link , include keyword optimized title tag.

-Correlate the words in “<img/>”  tag’s alt text with surrounding text , the image name and page title.

-Use width and height attributes to specify each image’s dimensions.

-Store files in search engine accessible folder and insert them via image’s URL rather than through a blog or CMS media library database.

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As people interested in growing website traffic, it is important that we understand social media and SEO. SEO is the one that, through time and understanding, will bring you the most traffic, most consistently. But social media can do some surprising things for your business.

The main way that SEO and social media intersect is in the area of links. Social media sites have them, and SEO needs them. You can use social networks such as Facebook and Twitter to generate inbound links from popular, high-TrustRank websites. You could use social media campaigns to attract links from news sites, social bookmarking sites, and popular blogs.

Social networks like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter represent the masses. And while a single link or status update on one of these social networks has no significance, there is great power in numbers. If you post a link to a video you took, and it strikes a chord in the average person, she will share it with her friends, who will share it with their friends, and so on. If you are the creator of a piece of content that goes viral, your website can get links rained upon it. This is why social media is a powerful complement in the world of SEO. In the future, SEO and social media will evolve together to incorporate our profiles, preferences, and relationships into search results.

The flow of information: Traditionally, the most powerful ways of getting exposure have been advertisements, press, and word of mouth. Although these tools have always been the backbone of marketing, the rise of social media websites has opened up a whole new world of possibilities for online marketers.

In the past,you might see an ad in a magazine, stare at it for a few seconds, and then either remember it or forget about it. Now the same company might place an ad on Facebook. Recognizing the company, you might click Like underneath the ad, indicating your acceptance of the brand. The next day, because of that “like,” you might get a status update showing you a YouTube video that the company made as part of a campaign for a new product. Finding the video interesting, you might then post it on your friend’s profile page. His 1,000 friends might then see it, and 3 of them might post it on their friends’ profile pages. An additional 2 of your friend’s friends might tweet about it, exposing it to their 800 combined followers. One of those peoples’ followers might then submit it to a social bookmarking site such as Digg, where the best content of the day gets posted on the home page. If enough people voted for this video, it would hit the front page of Digg, get 150,000 additional views and 550 comments, and even more sharing would occur. Because of the Digg exposure, 15 blogs might repost the video, including a major outlet that gets millions of visitors per month. And on goes the sharing. That entire journey started with just one click.

The significant event, SEO-wise, in that story was the part where the blogs reposted the video to their sites. If 15 blogs repost a video, that’s 15 links to a single web page. In this case, the web page hosting the content was on YouTube, but it could easily have been hosted on your website. As you know from earlier chapters, acquiring a link can be pretty tough in an age when most webmasters understand the value of linking.