Unique Content

This has been a good rule of thumb since the advent of Google and other major search engines. It is even more so now. The days of looking at what your competitors are doing and emulating it are gone. Your content now has to stand out from the rest in order to be ranked.

Keep The User In Mind

The experience of the user on your website is being monitored. If users are bounced, pages load slowly, or ads are constantly assaulting them, your website will be ranked lower and lower until it is beyond irrelevant.

Socialize

Google has incorporated social media into its results. No ignoring now. Tweet, Link, create a Facebook buzz, whatever you want, just get going. The more often your business is tweeted or the Like button is clicked, the better your site will rank.

Market Yourself

You are your best advocate. You must market your company and services in order to create a brand and a buzz. Panda will recognize your business and place you higher in the rankings if you are mentioned more often across the internet.

It is becoming increasingly difficult to promote your business online without the help of an outside company. Marketing, social media, and branding are not within the scope of a single persons expertise. It may be time to shop around for the right search engine optimization group to improve your sales and web relevance.

The post 4 Ways To Take Advantage of Google Panda appeared first on LocalGiant.

First, Bing Local provides listings to enabled mobile devices. This will allow any Bing Local listing to be found on a smartphone as easily as a computer. The user can also preview their listing and how it will be formatted on every available medium. This allows a user to tailor their listing for the most effective presentation.

When using the Bing Business Portal to set up a Bing Local listing, you will notice the attention to detail. A wide variety of available categories and sub-categories are available to help you classify a service or business. You can use up to nine images to further customize a listing.

The keyword function is the true value of the service. A user can select as many as five keywords and rank them based on their current business goals. For example, if a contractor would like to be found for their drywall service over painting services, they can assign a higher ranking to the keywords drywall service. The ranking of keywords can be changed as business goals change. This allows effective control, adding a refining element to search engine optimization.

Bing Business Portal seems to be the most innovative an intuitive product right now. No aspect is ignored, including: instant verification. Google and Yahoo both feature lengthy verification procedures, Bing Business Portal immediately verifies the listing and notifies you of inconsistent or missing information. Bing Business Portal may be the wave of the future in local search engine optimization.

The post Increase Your Presence With Bing Business Portal and Bing Local appeared first on LocalGiant.

Add in the fact that Google is placing a much greater emphasis on the Places pages as they try to move into review generation (Hotpot*) and social media and the mix puts added emphasis on local search engine data.
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Here are three reasons why local data will rule 2011:

Accurate data equals more quality citations

Citations are the local search engine equivalent of links for Google Places pages. With the recent Google algorithms changes data accuracy must be of great concern to growing businesses.

Data can prevent break lead generation

Nothing is worse than having all of your marketing efforts stumble because of bad contact information being listed on an unmonitored venue. Inaccurate information may prevent sales.

Data leaves a trail

Nothing on the internet ever goes away completely. If you leave your data accuracy to data aggregators, then you are at risk for having your information look jumbled to the search engines. A jumbled mess will rank low and work in opposition to your marketing strategy.

Insuring the accuracy of your business’s online information is essential to success. Hiring a company to manage those services is the best way to protect your online image and reputation.

The post 3 Reasons That Local Data Will Rule 2011 appeared first on LocalGiant.

Now enters Google. 2011 introduces their most recent evolution called the “Panda” or “Farmer” that promises to weed out low quality and shallow sites that simply wastes the viewer’s time. The new algorithm retains in their high ranks sites that sets the more modern SEO principle of mainly having original and valuable content that the audience can use, refer to or share and “buzz”. This is now applied to all English language queries worldwide and already had a measured 12% impact or effect on the searches made. This is of course continuously subject to updates for a more fine-tuned delivery of quality sites for every query.

Google has released a set of guidelines for three main areas of design and content, technical and with a special emphasis on quality guidelines that are to be followed so that a site wouldn’t be penalized or eventually blocked from being searched on Google. These guidelines boil down to an ideal site that contains good and original, if not outstanding content that is aimed for the user.

A company’s goal should therefore shift from attracting search traffic to that of providing a site whose composition should be well orchestrated and contains enough quality content that is valuable and relevant for it to be “morally” acceptable to Google standards and their new “high quality sites algorithm” as they call it.

The post Site Visibility and the Wisdom Behind What Google Says appeared first on LocalGiant.