URLs with Generic Content

This can be really bad for local directory sites. Many of them contain thousands of urls with generic content. Many have geo-specific categories like ”best L.A nightclubs”. Since many of these directory sites have the same content and a stated goal of Panda is to weed out generic content, many of these sites have dropped to catastrophically low rankings.

Website Not User Friendly

The Panda algorithm takes into account the user’s experience on your site. This could refer to many factors: page speed, ad density, user-interface design, average time on site, etc. If your site has a cluttered design, too many ads, and/or a high bounce rates, you will suffer in the rankings unless all of your competitors have the same issues.

Social Media

A social media strategy was a great boost prior to Panda, now it is a necessity. All major search engines now incorporate social media signals into the ranking systems.

Brand Recognition

For over a year now Google has been making a lot of noise about showing preference through its algorithm. The problem with most local companies and resellers is that they don’t have a brand or one that is not well developed. To Google a brand is recognized as links, mentions on third party authoritative sites, regular queries for your brand name, and social activity around your brand name among other factors. If no one is talking about your brand, it is very unlikely to be highly ranked.

Google’s Panda has shaken things up quite a bit in the page rankings. Some sites have dropped from the first page to utter irrelevance. You may need to hire a company that fully understands the algorithms nuances in order to recoup your ranking.

The post 4 Items Taken Into Account By 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.
.
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.

A recently released study done by BabyCenter of over 5,000 moms has revealed the following interesting data:

59% of the mom-respondents had a smart phone of one sort or other, which is impressive when you consider that smart phone penetration among the rest of the US population is just above 30%.

Additionally, moms’ acceptance of smart phones has grown dramatically over the past 2 years. Just over half of these moms said that they bought a smart phone after having a child, with their mobile behavior being markedly different from prior to starting a family.

The most utilized smart phone features for moms, from highest to lowest, are: the built-in still camera, the video camera, and applications, with just over half of the moms saying that they had over 10 apps downloaded, with nearly a quarter of those related in some way to their children.

Moms use smart phones the most in the following cases:

Health: One-third of moms have used their smart phone for family related health issues in the past 30 days.

Social networking: moms are 40% more likely than average to use smart phones for various social networking activities, such as browsing news feeds, updating statuses, and finding answers to questions.

Shopping: 68% of moms use their smart phone while shopping to check product reviews and prices.

Compared to other gadgets and media, smart phone-toting moms use their phones twice as often as the TV and about 1.5 times more than a PC.

Almost half of respondents indicated they responded proactively to ads on their phones, with almost a third of them buying the featured items later on.

Everybody else uses their phones heavily during evenings and weekends, but moms are heavy morning and early afternoons users.

While the focus of most mobile marketing has been on teenagers and young males, moms are now an emerging dominant force in this area of the market.

The post Moms: The Untapped Market for Mobiles appeared first on LocalGiant.