SEO

First off, let me begin by explaining that geo-targeting, or local targeting, consists of enhancing your search engine results to only display sites in a particular state, city, area, etc.

For example, if you’re looking for a massage therapy school in Kansas City, you might begin your search by entering the keyterm phrase, “massage therapy schools.”  However, your search engine results probably would not show results in Kansas City within the first few pages, if at all, because your search is not specific enough.  But, if you search for “massage therapy schools in kansas city,” you will find what you are looking for.

In SEO, when I perform keyterm research for my clients, I geo-target keyterm phrases by adding specific geographic locations, such as city names, to my phrases, so that searchers in that particular area can find the schools, and find them on the first or second page.

I recently took on an SEO client that’s a beauty school in Ludlow, Massachusetts.  Where is Ludlow? It’s in Southern Massachusetts, about 90 miles southwest of Boston, or a more specific geo-target, about 12 miles northeast of Springfield.  Ludlow is considered part of the Springfield metro area, just like Lenexa is part of the Kansas City metro area.

Why is this geography lesson relevant? Well, Springfield has about seven times the population of Ludlow.  A person looking to find a beauty school in the Springfield metro area probably won’t enter the keyterm phrase, “beauty schools in ludlow,” especially if they are not in Ludlow. They are more likely to search for “beauty schools in springfield” or geo-target their search even more by searching for “beauty school in springfield massachusetts,” because of the number of states that have a Springfield. Geo-targeting on this local of a level will draw more qualified visitors to my site, because they are seeking out that school in that specified geographic region.

On a personal, local level, when I did a search for “paddy o’quigleys in kansas city,” I received search results for the Leawood location, in addition to the North Kansas City one.  This location worked better for me, since I live in Overland Park.

Geo-targeting locally helps visitors find my site quickly and easily, even if they are not in Ludlow, MA – or Lenexa, KS.

By Matt Kluemper
There were quite a few updates in search in the past month – especially with Google. If it seems like I write about Google a lot, well, I do! But I guess there’s a reason for that, which brings me to some of the ever-changing search updates.

According to a HitWise study, Google search market share increased to nearly 66 percent of all searches in January. This just goes to show that Google is going nowhere, and – with updates to some of the Universal Search items, they are getting better. Yahoo! (21 percent) and MSN (7 percent) are still coming up short by a large margin.

Of course, Microsoft put the offer on the table to purchase Yahoo! (which would combine them into a 30 percent market share) earlier this year, but was not able to get the deal done. I highly doubt this is the last we’ll hear of a Yahoo! buyout, however…

Google also rolled out a cool edition to their Google Maps feature with the ‘street view’ – very neat (Feel free to mess around with the street view of PlattForm below!).

View Larger Map

Apparently they pay people to drive around and take pictures - Sounds like fun to me!

But it wasn’t all about Google – Ask.com also had some updates – just not as fun as Google’s. Besides laying off 8 percent of their staff, it looks like they are going to change their search strategy to “focus to better answering search queries posed as questions.” (Sounds familiar, right AskJeeves?)

Keep tabs on all of the search updates for the rest of the year – 2008 is sure to be a good one! I know there’s been way more updates in the past two months – have you seen any updates that sparked your interest?

At PlattForm we have a policy that requires each department to blog once a month. I understand why the policy is there, and it’s not too much to ask. One post per month from a department isn’t asking a lot. You don’t want to have a blog that just sits there without ever having new posts on it. The policy is perfectly logical, but is blogging on demand a good policy?

I was reading a book by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel called Naked Conversations. It’s a great book about how to best execute corporate blogging. It stresses disclosure, honesty, authenticity, and other honorable traits. The best part of the book is the Corporate Weblog Manifesto starting on page 192. It’s a concise list of 34 corporate blogging rules. You could skip the book, read the list and speak intelligently on the subject. The first 20 of the 34 results are on Robert Scoble’s blog, but here are some highlights from this manifesto that you might not have considered are:

• Tell the truth. The whole truth. Nothing but the truth. If your competitor has a product that’s better than yours, link to it. You might as well. We’ll find it anyway.
• Post fast on good news or bad. Someone say something bad about your product? Link to it—before the second or third site does—and answer its claims as best you can. Same if something good comes out about you. It’s all about building long-term trust. The trick to building trust is to show up! If people are saying things about your product and you don’t answer them, that distrust builds. Plus, if people are saying good things about your product, why not help Google find those pages as well?
• Use a human voice. Don’t get corporate lawyers and PR professionals to cleanse your speech. We can tell, believe me. Plus, you’ll be too slow. If you’re the last one to post, the joke is on you!
• Link to your competitors and say nice things about them. Remember, you’re part of an industry and if the entire industry gets bigger, you’ll probably win more than your fair share of business and you’ll get bigger too. Be better than your competitors—people remember that. I remember sending lots of customers over to the camera shop that competed with me and many of those folks came back to me and said “I’d rather buy it from you, can you get me that?” Remember how Bill Gates got DOS? He sent IBM to get it from DRI Research. They weren’t all that helpful, so IBM said “hey, why don’t you get us an OS?”

and then I saw this one:

• Don’t blog on demand. Is your marketing department demanding that your write about something? Push back. Your blog is your own. Tell the guys in the marketing department to get their own blog if they think they have something people should know. Always make sure it’s you saying something, not someone else. Your are responsible for the content that goes on your blog.

The last one really struck me because, well..that’s what I do. So what do you think? Is he right or is Robert Scoble an idiot? His argument in the book is that forced posts are easy to spot and sound forced. Is that the case on this blog? Thoughts?

Please let me know your thoughts. I’ll be following up on this post. My next one is due March 3rd.

Web Sites for larger schools can be a huge challenge for web developers and the school’s marketing or admissions department. The sheer size of these sites can sometimes make maintaining good usability very difficult. If your school’s web site has become a usability nightmare, a minisite may have its uses depending on your marketing strategy.

Searching around on the web I found a few that seemed to work well. McMurry University has a pretty good minisite for their school . A local art school, Kansas City Art Institute also has a good one [WJ2] [WJ2]. Both are smaller with better usability and can make navigating around the site a little simpler than their respective ‘large’ sites with hundreds, even thousands of pages.

When to Hold Them, When to Fold Them

These can be great landing pages for ads, and other direct marketing. These sites can also do well for SEO. The key to making these sites perform well in SEO is to link out to them from your main school web site, which shows they are working together to produce one great product for users.

These sites, however, should not be a school’s primary SEO focus, but can be a good marketing supplement to the main site. As always, make sure your primary school web site is well optimized before trying to boost the SEO performance of a minisite.

The key is to have a good online presence on the web, and a minisite can help with that, as long as a proper online marketing strategy is implemented.

Why is linkbuilding such an integral part of any SEO campaign?

Many of the search engines use a link-based algorithm to determine search engine results. It is inherent then, that search engine performance hinges on the quantity and quality of inbound backlinks.

According to Google’s Webmaster Help Central web site, “Link-based analysis is an extremely useful way of measuring a site’s value, and has greatly improved the quality of web search. Both the quantity and, more importantly, the quality of links count towards this rating.” Essentially, an inbound link counts as a vote for that web site. The more votes that you have from similar web sites (relevant sites) the better rankings you should theoretically have.

So we all now know that linkbuilding helps with search engine performance.

Are sales affected by the power of an inbound link?

According to an article found on Search Engine Land the search engines and search engine marketers are not the only ones who benefit from linkbuilding.

It is possible that sales, or to take it one step further, conversions in general, may benefit from inbound links as well. Not only can traffic increase based upon the value of the inbound link, but that highly targeted traffic may convert better.

Therein lies the answer to the original question about linkbuilding. Inbound links can affect a web site’s search engine performance and conversions if the inbound links are from targeted, relevant web sites.

How else could you use linkbuilding as an SEO tool to benefit not just your web site, but your entire online presence?