BigOak blog wrote a great piece on the continued usefulness of Wiki in the Local Search Engine Optimization wars. A lot of site developers stear clear Wikipedia due to it’s no follow policy enacted last year, but it’s extraordinary popularity with Google is still an essential SEO tool, if you use it wisely. So consider this your reminder to not erase Wiki from your Local Search Engine Optimization strategy.

Even though Wikipedia added nofollow tags in early 2007, backlinks you manage to snag there will still help you from an SEO standpoint. Why? One simple reason: content scrapers. Wikipedia is believed to be the most heavily scraped site in the history of the Internet.

Let’s take this example. Say you were able to secure an external link on the Wikipedia page about cats, here. Congratulations. You just snagged a dofollow link on a PR 4 page, here. Answers.com is one of the many legitimate sites that scrapes content from Wikipedia, and it’s an authority one at that. They were nice enough to keep the content they scrape from Wikipedia dofollow. So how many backlinks will you pick up in the future from that one Wikipedia link? Too many to list, provided your link stays on Wikipedia for any length of time

Back on topic, finding sites that scrape Wikipedia is easy. Infinitely harder is getting external links to stick on Wikipedia. Here are two methods:
1.Fill in missing citation gaps. Wikipedia will occasionally have sentences with a “citation needed” link after them. Create content on your site that revolves around that missing citation. If its quality is high enough, Wikipedia may let that pass as the citation.
2.Manufacture a Wikipedia page that has high relevancy to an existing page. Link to that new page from an existing Wikipedia page. Add an external link to the new page as a reference. This has a higher probability of sticking since the page is fresh and needs sources.

Don’t let the fact that Wikipedia added nofollow tags stop you from using it in your link building endeavors.

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Google Trends is a tool that is designed to show the trends in searches for specific keywords. The statistics go back to the beginning of 2004, and are updated daily. If your business marketing relies even slightly on local search engine optimization, then keywords are a big part of your life. You need to know what keywords potential customers are looking for in order to further customize your SEO campaign to capitalize on that.

So to sum up, you need to know the best keywords for your search engine optimization strategy. And Google Trends will succinctly spit back the statistics on any keywords you enter into it.

Robert Niles wrote an entertaining yet very informative article on Google Trends that can give you some nice examples on how the tool can work for you.

If you’ve not yet discovered Google Trends, click over and have yourself a look.
Google Trends allows you to select up to five words or phrases, then shows you how those search terms rate relative to one another in both the volume of search queries handled by Google, as well as news references tracked by the search engine. It’s an addictive site for a data geek, like me, and essential for any online publisher who wants to optimize his or her publication to attract more visitors from search engines, such as Google.
Your site’s traffic logs ought to show you which search terms readers are using to find your website. But Google Trends shows which terms people are using to look for sites. That’s a key distinction. With Google Trends, you can test related search terms that are not showing up in your traffic logs, to see if they are, in fact, more popular than the terms people are using to find your site. If they are, you will have found the terms you need to start emphasizing in your site’s content and navigation design.
Plus, the site’s just fun to play with.

Most companies have the main Search Engine Optimization tactics already memorized. (Not always followed, but always memorized.) Most articles on SEO press the need for headlines, metatags, and alt tags, but there are a few SEO tips that aren’t always included with the ‘Big Guys.’

True SEO can get complicated, and in all that complication, sometimes the little things are forgotten.

Here are some simple hints to remind you take a step back and get a fresh perspective on things. We’ll cover the more complicated stuff in a later post.

Fortune Favors the Bold. Remember to use your bold tags around one or two of the keywords on each page. Don’t overuse it, though! Fortune doesn’t favor the obnoxious.

Ezine Articles: Search out Ezines in your particular industry and offer them good content about your specialty. Ezine’s usually archive their articles and the links stay live for a long time.

Create Multiple Domains. Search Engines often only list one page per domain, so if your company can warrant multiple domains, you just scored yourself multiple listings on the search engine.

Back off on the Anchor Text: With all the pressure of including anchor text, some inexperienced businesses and SEO consultants over do it, to the detriment of the site. Vary the anchor text on your site and published content; don’t always use the same phrases! If it was that easy, the cheap software promising to optimize your site for SEO would cost a whole lot more.

Site Maps: Every site, no matter the size, needs a site map. Why? Because if every page links to a site map, then search engine robots can scan your site in two steps… page, site map, done.

There isn’t any doubt that local Search Engine Optimization Marketing is a primary goal of most webmasters. It is through local SEO that a business can either move to the head of the search engine pack or be lost somewhere around page 27, which might as well be Nowheresville, Invisastate.

Studying the SEO market can be both time consuming and tedious, but when you’re trying to figure out your competition’s strategy in order to beat them, SEO can turn into game of cat and mouse. A successful marketer needs to find the keywords being used for a competitor’s successful site and develop a strategy to get ahead of them in line. You can’t out play another team if you don’t know the rules they’re playing by.

There are new products on the market that can find out what a specific domain’s keywords are, and other products that center on finding what keywords are being used and by whom.

SpyFu offers strategic research and competitive analysis on keywords. It will find out what keywords your competition is bidding on to optimize their own rankings. Once you know this you can narrow your own local SEO campaign and focus on those words. This can save your business costly trial and error keyword campaigns that generate scattered and possibly useless results.

If Local SEO is at all confusing to you though, don’t expect a product like SpyFu to solve your marketing issues. It won’t. It is a tool to help experienced webmasters and SEO marketing execs make the best and most efficient use of their time. A scapel in your hand won’t make you a Doctor, and SpyFu won’t implement the right local SEO marketing campaign for you.

Matt Cutts recently gave a presentation to a techie crowd at a conference and included the PowerPoint presentation slideshow on his blog. To be honest, it’s rather boring, but he did give three really useful tips about how to keep spammers at bay. Here they are (in a nutshell):

• Build trust and reputation
• Don’t be a target
• Frustrate them so they spend time and money

I particularly like tips #1 and 3. If you build your local business as a trustworthy business and one will a solid reputation for good business practices then you’ll be a lot less touchable. Secondly, make it difficult for spammers to easily do injury to you and they will be less likely to do so. But how does Matt Cutts suggest doing that? One way is by using CAPTCHA.

A CAPTCHA is a simple test that a human can perform but a computer can’t. For instance, what is 5 + 4? Any human can add two single digit numbers, but computers can’t do that (yet). They also can’t type a single word that you tell them to type. If you say “Type the word Pickle” then all a human has to do is type exactly what they see. But computers can’t see so they’ll not be able to pass the test.

These simple tests will drive out most spammers so if you put them to use on your local business website then you’ll find yourself deleting a lot less useless comments.

There’s a new search engine in town that hopes to topple Google. It’s called Powerset. I’ve already read two reviews of Powerset, as well as tried it out for myself, and the two reviews could not have been different. Both were by bloggers that I respect and admire.

Greg Sterling of Screenwerk likes Powerset. Andy Beal of Marketing Pilgrim doesn’t. They both make good points.

Andy Beal is right when he says that Powerset simply appears to be another way to search Wikipedia. But I’d hope that Powerset has plans to take their search engine beyond Wikipedia. Just for the record, they do also pull information from Freebase, as pointed out by Greg Sterling. But the overriding question is, does it provide anything valuable?

I’ll have to agree with Greg Sterling and say that there is some value in it. I tested a query that would intentionally be ambiguous. “Poetry schools” can mean all sorts of things. Under traditional keyword-type queries, anything that mentions the word poetry or school, if the query is made without quotation marks, would be pulled into the SERP. If I’m looking for information specifically about poetic movements, which is what the terms Poetry Schools typically refers to, then the keyword-type query wouldn’t prove much helpful. I tested it in Google and I was right. I got a few results in the top 10 that were helpful, but most of them were not.

On the other hand, Powerset gave me exactly what I was looking for, mostly from Wikipedia and some from Freebase, but without the fluff that came in Google. So that’s one query in particular where Powerset was more useful. But what about local search?

Local searchers are going to be looking for information that is useful to them in their particular neck of the woods. For most people, especially rural searchers, Wikipedia isn’t going to be much help. A search for Texas brought up information organized into 4 tabs: Geographically (about the state of Texas), TV Series, Band, and Novel. In other words, somewhat helpful. But what about Sweetwater, Texas? 515 Wikipedia articles that mention Sweetwater, Texas, a community with less than 15,000 residents.

Among the type of entries found for Sweetwater, Texas are:

• Rattlesnake Roundup
• KTXS-TV
• Registered Historic Places
• Libby Thompson (a prostitute and madam of a famous brothel)
• Women Airforce Service Pilots
• Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway
• Bat Masterson (his first gunfight took place in Sweetwater, Texas)
• Clyde L. Garrett
• Asa Earl Carter
• Willie Amos
• Active Worlds
• Pig Show

So does Powerset, or semantic search, have any local search applications? Possibly. I think so in limited terms, but it can’t go on forever relying on Wikipedia. If Powerset could tap into the search algorithms of the major search engines and aggregate them with its semantic search technology then that would prove a lot more useful. It would have to filter out the fluff that is found and simply include useful search results based on the semantic intentions of the searcher - if that is possible. But for now, let’s suffice it to say, it’s off to a not-half-bad start.

Greg Howlett stepped on some toes with his post about SEO being a dying industry. Of course, he was just repeating what Shoemoney said a day earlier. Nevertheless, I like what Howlett said in this paragraph:

I think, however, that you would be better served by largely forgetting about SEO and focusing instead on building your brand.

That’s essentially what Shoemoney said too. Here’s a sentence buried within the meat of his post:

I don’t think anyone can argue that core SEO has gotten less valuable over the years and I see that trend continuing.

The overarching question is, are they right? And if so, what will this do for local search engine optimization?

Well, I do think that Shoemoney’s observation on SEO declining in value over the years is partially correct. It isn’t that it has declined in value per se, but that it has gotten more difficult to achieve for the average business. It is now more important to hire a professional SEO to help you rank better, but both Shoemoney and Howlett may have a point in that the current trend of hiring an SEO who strictly does technical SEO is going to fall by the wayside. If your SEO is not proficient in branding and marketing strategies then you might as well ditch him for someone who is because that is the future of SEO in general and local SEO in particular.

Branding has always been a core aspect of business marketing, whether we are talking local business or global business. Online, it’s even more important because people do not want to do business with someone they don’t know. You can have the best SEO in the world, but if you can’t built trust with your target market then your business will die. That’s where branding comes in. This principle is no less true if you operate a local business, but with local branding you have the added advantage of being able to draw your customers to your physical location to meet you face to face. Still, you’ll need to rely on branding to make that happen.

The future of local advertising online lies in your ability to create a brand that people will trust. SEO will just be a part of that branding process, though I don’t think that SEO will necessarily die out. It will simply be incorporated into the branding process. I think that’s what Greg Howlett meant with his follow-up post, and I can see the same the trending as well.

Debra Mastaler asked a great question on her blog, Link Spiel:

what’s better at giving us the quick qualifying factor like the PageRank toolbar?

In other words, she wants to know if there is a resource that webmasters can turn to in order to find information on authority - a kind of one-size-fits-all way to determine which sites are the greatest authorities within their niche. Then she recommends Myriad Search.

I hadn’t heard of Myriad Search until I read Link Spiel’s post on it. Then I tried it out. It seems a bit limited, but it does do what it promises to do and deliver results from the four top search engines for a particular key phrase. It looks like a good tool for competitive research.

Just for giggles, I performed a search for “Gettysburg Pennsylvania.” I wanted to try the local angle to see what would happen. You can see the results of that search here.

If I were truly interested in building a website to search the local market of Gettysburg Pennsylvania and wanted to use that place name as my primary keyword then this search for that key phrase is very telling. Here’s what I see:

• The most authoritative site for that key phrase is www.gettysburg.com. Not surprising.
• The most authoritative site for my key phrase is No. 1 on 3 of the top 4 search engines.
• It is also No. 2 on the fourth search engine (Yahoo!).
• The second most authoritative site for the local place name I’m interested in is a government website (the National Park Service) - very important to know that for competitive analysis!
• The Gettysburg Welcome Center’s website is the the third most authoritative site on the local key phrase.
• Also, GWCs website has only half the authority as the No. 1 most authoritative site - great information!
• Coming in below GWC are Gettysburg College, Wikipedia (who’d have thunk?), the local newspaper, and various nonprofits, tourism websites, and local businesses.

Now I know what the competitive landscape is for my key search term. But what if I wanted to compete locally for the key phrase “auto mechanic?”

Well, I tried using my first key phrase along with “auto mechanic,” putting both key phrases in quotes and all I got back was a bunch of useless websites. So let’s try it without the quotes. Here are the results of that search.

I can see who the most authoritative site in Gettysburg for the term “auto mechanic.” It truly is a competitor and I know where he ranks in each of the search engines. It doesn’t look like any of my other competitors are even close. After Mike’s Towing and Recovery, it’s government websites and the Chamber of Commerce of Gettysburg. The next real competitor is an About Us page for Eagle Software, which makes software for auto shops. It looks like I have an in here if I was an auto mechanic in Gettysburg.

So you can see how useful this tool is for doing competitive research at the local level. I hope you get some use of it.

Not all businesses that use local search engine optimization are actually local. They also can be larger companies that aim small in order to eliminate much of the competition. While this is a useful technique, it can also be used as spam, so you do have to be careful.

When a bigger company uses local search engine optimization, it is often used to help bring in extra traffic from local searches. There is often too much competition for general keywords like “amusement parks”, but if you go with “Vancouver amusement parks” you will have a far better chance of being ranked.

This is a technique that many businesses are using these days to increase traffic to their sites. Some use specific local search engine optimization on the whole website, others focus on a different area per page and still others actually set up separate websites for each area. Whichever technique is used, it can really help boost your traffic.

Local search engine optimization is probably one of the most valuable things you can do for your business. It allows people in the area to find you while doing a simple search online and it is completely free, unlike regular advertising.

With larger numbers searching for local businesses every year, experts are predicting a 16% increase in local search engine optimization by 2012. That may not seem like much, but it´s extremely fast growth for this area.

With local search engine optimization doing so well, we can expect to see a lot more competition coming up shortly, so it´s a good idea to hone those local SEO techniques now, before everyone jumps into the water!

Are you doing everything with your local search engine optimization to ensure that your website goes to the top of the rankings? If you aren´t sure, read on, there are plenty of tips right here to help you figure out what you ought to be doing with local search engine optimization to make your website really work for you.

Headlines: Are your keywords in your headlines? They ought to be. Whether you have a blog or a static site, local search engine optimization will be boosted if you optimize your headlines.

Meta Tags: Be sure to include your keywords in your meta tags for a boost in local search engine optimization.

Links: Using your keywords as anchor text for links can really help your SEO as well. You should also use the keywords in your link titles for a super boost.

Alt Tags: This is the text that appears when a photo or image cannot be displayed. Put your keywords here and your local search engine optimization will really do well.

These are fairly simple tips, but you can really make your site better by including local search engine optimization techniques everywhere. Use your keywords wisely for the best results and watch your site rise in the search engine ranks.

Have you ever slipped while typing in a search engine? It´s easy to do and the results you get back can be drastically different. However, you can use that to your advantage. You´ll need to change your local search engine optimization for a page or so of your website, but you can bring in quite a bit of extra traffic.

You´ll need a good misspelled keyword in order to pull this trick, however. It´s something that will need a little research. You want a keyword or phrase that has little competition and a lot of searches per day. There are some words that are just more commonly messed up than others.

Once you have done your research and have narrowed your local search engine optimization down to just one or two misspelled phrases, incorporate them into your website. You still want the real word to be the primary keyword, and you shouldn´t have the misspelled ones on your home page, but you can still use this technique to your benefit.

When you think of local search engine optimization, chances are that you think of text content on your website. However, that´s not the only place you should be looking to work your SEO magic! Images also play a very important role in local business websites and their ranking on search engines. Google offers an image only search which many people take advantage of, particularly when planning a trip somewhere. It´s in your best interests to have your photos appear in local searches.

When someone types in the name of your town in Google Image Search, having your image pop up can be a great way to get people to your website. When they click on the thumbnail, they will be taken straight to the page where that photo is on your site.

This type of local search engine optimization is very useful and is quite simple to implement. You just need to add alt tags to all your photos. Alt tags just give a description of your photo and you should always use your keywords in the description. On top of that, make sure that there is more than just a photo on your webpage. Add something to grab people´s attention. This could be a special offer or hotel discount advertised below the photo, or offers of a free map, etc.

The idea is to create multiple methods to draw people to your website. The internet is a very visual place and is something that really lends itself to local search engine optimization via photos. Make sure your photos are working for you.

Local search engine optimization is an excellent way to boost your rankings in the search engines, a very valuable way to get more free publicity for your business and website. In fact, if your website is ranked in the first two or three search results for your chosen keyword phrases, you could end up with hundreds more clients!

Placement of the keywords is very important. The search engines will only be looking at the first few words for important key phrases. In general, you want your keywords to be in the first 15 words of the website. Keep in mind that if you have a title on your site or a tag line, those will pop up first, so include the keywords in those, if at all possible.

Using your keywords in your titles will really help as well, and not just your visible titles. Using the titles on your images and links will help boost your ranking for these keywords as well. It´s a good idea to switch things up a bit, having the same keyword everywhere might make the search engines a bit suspicious.

Local search engine optimization is something that can really help your business make it to the top, so it´s worth putting some time and effort into it and making sure that you have done everything possible to move your website into the top search results.

Local search engine optimization is something that every local business with a website should take very seriously. Local online advertising can only get you so far . . . you need your website to come up in search results, too. This can bring in a lot of traffic that you would otherwise miss, but it is important to aim for more than one search term.

Using just one keyword phrase in local search engine optimization could mean that you lose out on a lot of traffic and potential customers. While it may be the most searched for phrase on your topic, keep in mind that many people will be looking for other variations. For example, “Chicago pizza” might be the most prevalent of the search terms, but some people will be looking for things like “Chicago pizzeria” or other even more specific terms. It pays to use these as well.

Local search engine optimization can be focused around one main search term, but sprinkle other ones throughout the website. This can really help boost your ranking on the search engines and you´ll find that you draw in more potential clients. After that, it´s up to you to convert them!