Analyze your local business competitors

Posted by Admin on February 7th, 2013

How to analyze your local business competitors

After doing your keyword research to find the best keywords to use on your local business website, a very critical step is to analyze your competition for each of those keywords on the first page of Google. The true litmus test of a good keyword is whether you will be able to rank for it easily in about 1 to 3 months. If a keyword is very competitive it could take 6 months to 1 year to see your website on Page 1 of Google for that keyword. Therefore analyzing your competition will help you choose the best keywords that match your financial and time resources.

Here are some tips on how to analyze your competition for each keyword:

1. First of all install SEO Quake on your Firefox browser. This tool will give you important statistics on the each and every search engine result.
2. Enter your keyword term in the search engine. It’s best to use Google since it has the lion’s share of search engine users. Just type in the keyword in plain text and do not use any quotation marks.
3. Focus on analyzing the first page results and particularly the top 3 results since these get 80% of the clicks. After all this is where you want to see your website ranking.
4. First check the page rank of the sites that are currently ranking on page 1 using the SEO Quake tool. If a majority of the sites, especially the top 3 have page rank of 4 or under, that is a green light. However if you see page ranks of 5 and above, then that term is very competitive and will take your 6 months plus to get decent rankings.
5. Next check the number of backlinks that each site has. If the sites have 100 or less backlinks that is a good sign but if the backlinks are over 500 or several thousand, then we may want to drop that keyword. Remember we are looking at backlinks to the page/article and not the website. A website can have many backlinks pointing to its domain or homepage, but not to the page that is currently ranking.
6. Next we want to analyze these backlinks to see if they are from sites with high page rank. If you click on the backlinks link under the result, a new window will open that lists the backlink sources. Look through the list and take note of the page rank of each result. If these are from low page ranks such as 0 to 2, then that shows these are of lower quality and will be easy to outrank if you use better quality backlinks.

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What makes a quality backlink

Posted by Admin on February 6th, 2013

What makes a quality backlink?

Internet marketer cannot emphasize enough how critical it is to build backlinks to your small business website to help improve its search engine rankings. However it is equally important to know what is a good quality backlink so that you maximize the time and energy it takes to create one.

A good backlink should have the following features:

1. It should be from a page or site with a high page rank. If you can get backlinks from a PR4 Site and above, that is an excellent backlink. Page rank 2 and 3 sites are more common on the internet so a backlink from these sites is not bad either. Page rank 0 and 1 sites have less valuable backlinks but including them in your backlink campaign is better than having no backlinks at all. Remember than one Page rank 1 backlink is better than two Page rank 0 backlinks so always aim for backlinks from higher Page rank sites.
2. It should have the correct anchor text based on proper keyword research. For example if you operate a golf shop in Maine and are targeting the following keyword –“ golf shop in Maine”, then use that Keyword as the anchor text for a majority of your backlinks. The anchor text is that clickable text that contains a hyper link to your URL.
3. It should be a long term stable link meaning that the chances of the backlink being deleted should be slim to none. Try to focus on building backlinks that will not be easily removed by blog owners/editors such as those obtained from Web 2.0 sites, article directories, blog networks, guest blogging and profile links. The riskier type of backlinks such as blog commenting and signature links should be approached with more caution and tact as these are the most vulnerable to get deleted.
4. A good backlinks should be a contextual backlink. This is the type of backlink that is surrounded by text content such as in the middle of an article. This type of backlink is more powerful than those that appear on the side bar or footer, so try to use back linking methods that capitalize on this.
5. A good backlink should be on an ethical website rather than a dubious one that has gambling, pornographic, or other illegal or spammy sites. The search engines do pay attention to the sources of your backlinks and will either penalize or reward you depending on the quality of the source website.
6. Finally a good quality backlink should be from an actively used site that has fresh content added on a weekly basis as opposed to a dormant site. Having your backlinks on active sites means the search engines will quickly find those backlinks because those sites regularly get crawled and indexed by the search engines.

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Help to choose your local business domain name

Posted by Admin on February 5th, 2013

Tips on how to choose your local business domain name

Your local business domain name or website address is one of the key components in any SEO strategy. If you haven’t registered a domain name, here are a few tips to guide you in choosing one:

1. Whatever domain name you choose, make sure it ends in .com. However if that is not possible you can also use .org and .net extensions. These three extensions are the best ones to use for the US online market.
2. Avoid using hyphenated domain names. For example, just because you the domain name www.doctorsinnewyork.com is already taken, don’t register a hyphenated version like www.doctors-innewyork or www.doctors-in-newyork. Hyphenated domains don’t give the impression of being authority domain and have a low grade image in SEO. Instead try adding a prefix or suffix such as www.doctorsinnewyorkonline.com or www.emergencydoctorsinnewyork.com. Needless to say if you really want to hyphenate, use no more than 1-2 hyphens.
3. Keep your domain names short and don’t elongate them to longer than 3 or 4 words. For example if you run a hardware shop called “Anthony Bradley and Sons Hardware & Electricals”, you may want to use www.abradleyandsons.com or www.bradleyhardware.com. You definitely don’t want to register www.anthonybradleyandsonshardwareandelectricals.com!
4. Even if you operate as franchise or dealership for a major company, avoid using branded company names in your domain as this is illegal and you could get sued. If you want to use brand names in your domain always get written permission from the brand owners.
5. It’s wise to build a site using your keywords in the domain for additional SEO leverage. Let’s say you run a pizza joint called Papa Pedro’s Pizza and your keywords “pizza in nyc”, it would make sense to register both www.papapedrospizza.com and www.pizzainnyc.com. In this way you can have multiple website rankings from one keyword using the two sites. Just imagine if you registered all your keywords as domains- you could easily own the first page of Google for those keywords with proper SEO!

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