Any business that has a physical location and is listed in Google Maps has the chance to get one of these great listings. And they are great. Think about it. If someone is searching for any business in your area and you have one of these gray listings, you have the chance of getting in front of that person whether or not they were searching for you. They could have been searching for a competitor or a business in a totally different industry. It doesn’t matter. As long as what they are searching for has brought them to a map page within a few blocks of your business, your business and its location will be in front of them.

Now that you realize how important getting directly on Google Maps is, the question is, “How do I get my business on there?” That’s the rub. At this point in time Google does not have a process to submit your business to get this type of listing. Similar to their organic listings, Google uses an algorithm to find the places that would be most interesting and helpful to people looking for information on a city. And they have not given us a clue to what is in the algorithm. All they are saying is they can’t list what they don’t know about, so be sure to have your Google Local Listing filled out as best you can.

There may come a time in the future when you can submit your business to be including on the map itself. If this does happen, we will let you know right here.

What are your thoughts? Do you think this is fair? Do you think these types of listings are useless? Let us know what you think.

• The earlier you start the better prepared you will be if other things pop up (which they inevitably do)
• You may find that some of your ideas may take time to come together (Do you have some research to do? Do you need other people to make things happen? How much time will they need to get their part done?)
• If you are optimizing for new products or services, it will take some time for your efforts to show up in the search engines
• If there are changes to your website or marketing message you’ll probably want to test a thing or two to make sure you are getting the most out of your efforts (and test it before the holiday rush of visitors hits your site)

Let’s take a look at each one of these points in a bit more detail.

Things Pop Up
When was the last time your business ran as smooth as you planned for an entire month, let alone an entire year? Probably never. Unexpected things happen that take up your valuable time – the time you may be planning on working on the holiday season. If you are able to map out a plan of attack for your holiday season right now, you will be more likely to stick by it and be able to complete it on time.

Most Online Initiative Take Some Time To Come Together
Some initiatives require other resources like designers and copywriters. The earlier they are involved the more apt they are to meet your deadlines. A PPC campaign is often a powerful revenue driver around the holiday season. And sure, you can pull one together over coffee one afternoon in late November. But to really get the most out of your investment you should start early so you can test different keywords, different ads and different landing pages. That way once the holiday traffic is searching for your product or service you are ready to take advantage of it.

Jumping Up The Search Engines Doesn’t Happen Overnight
As we all know, it takes time for solid SEO efforts to show results in the search engines. So if you start now, you may just be #1 for the terms you want by the time we’re all holiday shopping. But if you start in November there is virtually no shot at that.

It’s Better To Test With A Smaller Sample Size
If you’re testing a new marketing message with an email campaign and / or your website, why wait until the bulk of your customers are coming to buy your product to test it? It make sense to test it out when the stakes are not as high. Test a few landing page designs on a small sample (maybe only part of an email list, maybe a month when traffic to your site isn’t that high). That way you have the kinks out when it’s time for the holiday rush.

Are you still under the impression that it’s too earlier to start thinking about Christmas 2010? Or are you all ready starting to plan for the 2011 season? Let us know your thoughts.

Those corporate site bigwigs were nestled all snug in their beds,
While visions of dollar signs added up in their heads.
But MaAndPa.com worried, that when Caffeine soon unwrapped,
They’d be in for something colder than a long winter’s nap.

When away from the PC, the screen did refresh,
Pa sprang from the couch to see what was left.
A look to the screen and nothing new yet,
Time to open more tabs and surf on the net.

The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow
Gave the luster of midday to objects below.
When, what to pa’s wondering eyes should appear,
But a post from Matt Cutts, Oh dear, Oh dear.

With a little hesitation he decided to click play,
The moment had arrived to hear what he had to say.
Without hesitation, he got to the point,
Without further delay it was time to anoint.

“Now faster! Now better! More user friendly for all!
On my PC! On your Mac! They’ll be no slow crawl!
To the top of the rankings go the relevant and fast!
Now search away! Search away! Nonsense is a thing of the past!”

As fast as pa could he got ma from her tea,
They’re going together to face off with Caffeine.
So over to the PC they once again went,
With knots in their stomach, and most of their energy spent.

And then, without warning, IE just shut down,
They looked at each other and said not a sound.
Double click on the Mozilla icon, it had to be done,
For them to see tonight if they’re still #1.

It went to their home page, their business of course,
Of which they were the only labor force.
They got here quickly, as many others before,
But with Caffeine now live, would it ever happen any more?

Google.com went into the address bar,
As they made one final wish on a bright, twinkling star.
Into the search box was typed their major keyword,
Wishing that good things was what they were headed towards.

Pa clicked on ‘Search’ as he had done many times in the past,
They hoped that their site, would be looked on as one of the fast
What will happen right now, we’re not quite sure,
But come back in a few months and we’ll know a lot more.

But the fact that thousands of sites can be linked to by the same main URL domain can lead to a trust issue. How do you know if the link will lead to a safe site that really matches the copy that surrounds it? Is it possible that the link is a spam link, and the enticing copy surrounding it is only there to trick you into clicking on it? Does the fact that you don’t know make you more or less likely to click on it?

Even though the majority of Short URLs you come across will indeed be safe and link to a good page, the truth is that it is tough to be 100% sure that what you are clicking on is safe, and will lead directly to where you want to go. And we all know that one bad click can sometimes ruin a good day. So, what are some tips to keep in mind when you come across Short URLs:

• If you trust the sender or poster (like someone you follow on Twitter), you should be okay. But be wary, as some accounts can get hacked and those hackers may spam people associated with those accounts.
• If you think the link may be spam, don’t click on it. If the marketing message entices you, you can probably find out what is being referenced by searching that website.
• Preview the linked page if possible (TinyURL offers this option – http://tinyurl.com/preview.php).

I believe that the need for a service like Short URLs will always be there, but the exact form the future versions of this service will take is yet to be determined. Do you have ideas of what it will look like? Do you have alternatives to Short URLs? Have you run into any huge problems? Let us know.

And maybe you have put off signing up for an account, or building a fan base, because you were ‘waiting to see what happens.’ Well, it just happened.

Both Google and Microsoft have recently come to agreements with Twitter, while Microsoft has signed a deal with Facebook as well (you know Google can’t be too far behind there). These agreements will allow the search engines to integrate updates on the social media sites right onto the SERPs.

You can read more about these deals here.

So what does this mean for you? If you have been at the forefront of social media, and have accounts on Twitter and Facebook with lots of fans and followers, then you are in a good position to gain more exposure (and hopefully traffic) from these deals.

If you have accounts but have not kept them up to date, or if you don’t have any accounts at all, there’s still time but you have some work ahead of you. These deals are about real-time search, so it’s not necessarily what you have done in the past that will count (although having more fans and followers will probably be a plus, so you’ll want to increase those numbers). You can position yourself for real-time search by:

• Opening or updating your account
• Building up more fans or followers
• Starting conversations on current topics
• Respond to comments and other posts on topics you are an expert in

So what type of situation are you in? Are you ready to take advantage of real-time search?

And of course, they probably have seen the website and have half an idea of what they think about it. But what they may not know until they get involved with it, is what shape the website is in (specifically with regards to the search engines). And some times what they find isn’t pretty.

Even websites that have a good looking exterior can have issues that would cause concern for anyone who wants their site to rank well in the search engines. This includes poorly written code, involvement in link farms, dynamic urls, tons of duplicate content, large file sizes and/or a history of changes that are not well thought out.

When marketers encounter this, they may want to just click out of their browser and submerse themselves in anything that doesn’t have to do with the Internet. But in this day and age that is hardly the best way to approach the situation, and may not even be possible depending on the business or industry. Instead, they should take a proactive approach and use the circumstances handed to them as an opportunity to shine. If gone about the right way, they can turn the website around and look like a company hero.

So what do they need to do? Here are some important steps to take:

• Take a deep breathe, and realize the situation is not their fault. Approach this as an opportunity to showcase some very important skills.
• Document what is wrong, and make sure that everyone knows about it. Make sure everyone that needs to know understands why this is a ‘bad’ representation of the company, and the potential benefits of remedying the situation.
• Get stats and reports that detail the current situation of the site. This will be a baseline, and will prove valuable to show how future efforts have helped the company.
• Learn who within the company can help work on it. Not everyone has the time, knowledge or willingness to help on certain projects. Find a group of people that can be counted on to help get the job done.
• Based on the website, develop an action plan that could include: asking bad sites to stop linking to the site, developing unique content – whether it goes on a new page or replaces duplicate content on site, finding someone within the company to help rewrite the code, see if static urls are a possibility, optimize images.

Yes, it can be scary to see the true shape of a website and how the search engines may see it. But this can be an opportunity for a new employee to show how they handle a difficult situation. Handling the situation the correct way can offer a quick chance to show what type of impact one can really have on the company.

Have you run into this scenario at a new company? How did you handle it?

Then we’d like to recommend that you take a look at the PDFs on your site to make sure that they are optimized. One of the items we find when looking at websites is that the PDFs have been completely ignored. Now to be fair, some of this is probably because up until a few years ago many people were told that PDFs couldn’t or shouldn’t be optimized; that any work done to them would not help the page’s or the website’s ranking. Let’s put this argument to bed right now:

PDFs can and should be optimized for search engines.

Search engines can read PDFs, assuming the text is not an image. So if they are optimized properly, the PDFs on your site can offer a new avenue to gain extra traffic from.

So what optimization tactics should you perform on your PDFs? Here are a few of the main ones:

• Whenever possible, optimize the text of the PDF just as you would any page of your site.
• Be sure to fill out the Document Properties: Title, Author, Subject and Keyword. Treat the Title field like the page title, the Subject field like the meta description and the Keyword field like the meta keyword field.
• Optimize the file name.
• Keep total file size down as low as possible. As with any page on your site, the larger the file size the slower it loads. This starts with any images you include with the original file, and continues through to when you convert the file to a PDF.
• When converting a file to a PDF, be sure to use a program that does not make it one image. For this, programs like Adobe Acrobat, Nitro PDF Professional and Bullzip work well. Photoshop and Illustrator do not.
• Link to the PDF. Make sure the search engines can find it. Use quality anchor text as link when possible.
• Link out from the PDF. Give the search engines a path out of the PDFs to continue to the rest of your site.
• Express the PDF file structure in tags.
• Optimize PDF for fast view web.

So the next time you’re looking for something that might give your website a boost in the search engines, take a look at your PDFs. It may be a hidden opportunity for you to increase traffic to your site.

Have you optimized PDFs and seen success? Still have questions about this topic? Comment and let us know. ]]> http://blog.mannixmarketing.com/2009/08/seo-for-pds/feed/ 4 http://blog.mannixmarketing.com/2009/06/duplicate-content-thought/ http://blog.mannixmarketing.com/2009/06/duplicate-content-thought/#comments Tue, 30 Jun 2009 12:46:16 +0000 brian@mannixmarketing.com http://blog.mannixmarketing.com/?p=1190 Recently I was surfing some SEO blogs when I came across a post on a search marketing conference. I like to see what the other leaders in online marketing are saying these days, so I was anxious to read the entire post, and was well on my way until I came across #13 in their list of top 20 quotes from the conference. It reads:

13. Don’t worry too much about duplicate content.
(Luisella Mazza, Google)

This stopped me in my tracks because as an SEO Strategist, one of the top things we work with clients on is to not only develop content, but to develop unique, high quality content. In doing so we ensure the site of not being hit with the dreaded label of having duplicate content, therefore causing the pages or entire site being ranked low, or worse yet, not being indexed at all. (read some of our previous post on the topic of duplicate content)

So have things changed in Searchland? Maybe. Are we being paranoid? Possibly a tad. Google even says within its guidelines that duplicate content by itself is not grounds for action on a website. In fact, their guidelines read:

‘Duplicate content on a site is not grounds for action on that site unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results.’

I would say most websites out there are above board and not trying to manipulate any system. So should we really not be worried about duplicate content issues? I say we absolutely need to keep the issue of duplicate content in mind when developing site content. If we don’t, we may, even if the chance is ever so slightly, end up kicked out of search engines if they interpret the content as trying to be deceptive. How do we know how they are going to interpret content on a site? What I think is fresh and new copy may be interpreted by a search engine as duplicate content for reasons I might not even know about.

When it comes to duplicate content, it’s better to be safe than sorry. And remember that there is an added advantage of attacking duplicate content – when you develop or rewrite content to be unique, you are erasing the duplicate content possibility, as well as adding unique and hopefully high quality content to your site for visitors. A win – win.

Have you run into any duplicate content issues with your website? Let us know how you were able to remedy the situation.

Yes – local search is seen as such a benefit that the spammers have already taken to abusing it. [Editor's Note: We are not going to give any spammer out there any more publicity, and we will try and keep the details of how to do it to a minimum so we don't give anyone ideas.] Basically what ends up happening is that a spammer’s business ends up with a number of listings within a big town, and/or a separate listing for each town within a large geographic area. The spammy part is that the business only has one actual address – not a number of locations like a bank or chain restaurant might have. So the business shows up in local searches, even when they don’t really belong.

What does this do? Well, if you are a competing business it is another competitor you must overcome in order to crack the top listings on local searches in the Google 10 Pack. Is what they are doing illegal? Maybe. Maybe not. Unethical? Most likely. A headache for other businesses? Without a doubt.

It’s always been the case that the internet has a segment of unethical people who try to manipulate the search results to get their sites ranked higher. Eventually, they will get caught…but until then, they cause a lot of strife for other small business owners out there trying to do the right thing.

So what’s a competitor to do? You can try and contact the company and let them know that what they are doing isn’t right. They may be good people and try and take down the listings on their own. On the other hand, you could also report the listings as spam to the search engines. For Google that is here. For Yahoo! that is here: here. That should do it, but with so many listings out there it may take some time to get the problem fixed.

Hope this helps all of you out there that have run into this. Let us know if you have any questions.

And choosing the right terms to go after is the most important part. You need to target terms that form a balance between phrases that would drive quality traffic to your site with phrases that you have a realistic expectation of achieving some sort of rank with (What I mean here is that I’m sure that a just opened NYC pizza place would love to be #1 for the term ‘pizza’ or ‘New York pizza,’ but with the current competition out there it would not be a realistic goal to achieve in the short term). To help determine how competitive a keyword phrase is, the search engines post on each SERP the number of results a keyword phrase brings up – the higher the number, the more competitive it tends to be.

You also want to make sure you aren’t chasing keywords that won’t drive relevant traffic to your website. As the title of the blog suggests, one of our clients was once in the top 3 from my name. This doesn’t do them any good, and had the possibility of hurting them if search engines started to associate the site with me rather than their products and services (It didn’t appear to hurt them, and we fixed the singular reason why this had occurred). The good thing is that we didn’t spend any time trying to rank for the name, so we didn’t have any wasted energy there. But I think you see the point. If the terms you are focusing on won’t bring your website quality traffic, it won’t matter if you rank 1, 2 or 100 for it. It won’t generate you any business or conversions.

So how do you find the right keywords? There are many tools out there, both fee based and free (and of course Google has one). Just type in ‘keyword tools‘ in a search engine and you’ll find a ton. At Mannix Marketing we use a variety of them, including Google tools, Keyword Discovery and WordTracker. We use these tools to see what people are typing in. Then we check on how a sites currently ranks for each term, see how competitive a term is and how likely optimization for the keyword will lead to a increase in rankings that will lead to increased traffic (i.e., can we go from page 5 to page 1 for a term, can we go from the bottom of page 1 to the top 3, etc.). From there we take the list of keywords and start optimizing.

That’s it. Right?

Well, for an SEO boost maybe. But for a intensive SEO maintenance program we would continue to measure which optimization tactics are working and not working. And every so often we repeat the keyword research cycle to keep up with the latest trends and search patterns. We recommend revisiting your keywords every 3 to 6 months, to ensure that the keywords we are focusing on are up to date.

Have you found any SEO tips, tricks or tools that help you decide on what to optimize for? Let us know.