Not too long ago I needed to hire a lawyer. As I looked at different attorneys in the area I turned to Google Maps to find which ones had the most reviews and most positive reviews. Although I could have done a basic search in Google I find that when looking for local services a Maps search gives me a better list for consideration. I went to visit the lawyers in person that seemed credible from the reviews that I read. After visiting with the two different lawyers I found that the reviews online were a fair representation and decided to hire the lawyer that had more reviews than the other.

As we went through our business dealings with this lawyer (I am going to call him Chris from now on to simplify things) I noticed things he did to improve the amount of reviews he was getting online. Although Chris is a lawyer, I feel many of these same tips can be applied to any person or business that offers services locally.

1- Start Early and Look For Clues

During my first with Chris he wanted to know how I found out about him. This is a common practice for businesses because it helps identify what part of their marketing budget is working. I mentioned that I looked at online reviews during this discussion and Chris said he would greatly appreciate it if I would also provide a review when the services were provided.

While a sales person is trying to build rapport with a potential client it is easy to find out how technical an individual is. Once a sale is made to a tech savvy person you can plant the idea early on that it would be great if they would share their experience online through a review or social media.

2- Emphasize the Unique Value Proposition

When I was “sold” on going with Chris he emphasized his Unique Value Proposition (UVP). As I continued through the process with Chris I noticed him talking about his UVP, not in exact words usually but the same idea was expressed over and over. Chris was telling me what I could expect through the process and what he was doing to make sure that he delivered on what I was sold on. By doing this Chris was priming me to see the things that were unique to him and his practice.

3- Repeat it Often

Although my business with Chris was not a long and drawn out process I want to give some suggestions about how you can keep the review fresh in the minds of your clients even if your services stretch over a long period of time. Usually longer service contracts have bench marks or progress points where a client can assess the progress of the campaign. Every time you provide a win for the client, fulfill something you have promised them, or reach a goal be sure to inform them. With tact and preparation, the client-facing individuals in your company can get testimonials/reviews that can be used in sales material, website testimonials, or online reviews. When a client is happy with the progress on the project it is easy to ask them for permission to use what they say as a testimony. This can be as simple as: “Thanks. We try to provide great services here at XYZ. Although we are not done, I am seeing great success in this project. I like sharing successes stories with other clients in similar situations. Can I share part of what you have said to some of my other clients?” At this point you can identify what information can be shared and how many people it can be shared with.

4- Strike While the Iron is Hot

Chris was very helpful throughout the entire process. When we got done I was happy with the end results and so was Chris. Right as we were finishing up our business together Chris expressed his happiness with the results and he said something along the lines of: “I really would appreciate it if you would write a review about the great results we achieved. Can I send you an email with a link to a location where you can write a review?” There it was. He asked for a review right after we had experienced a win together.

5- Keep it Stupid Simple (That is right I switched Kiss to mean it needs to be stupidly simple)

When I got the email that he promised he would send I noticed several things.

• There was a live link to their Google Places page. I was already in my Gmail so I easily went and wrote a review.
• Chris re-emphasized the great results we had achieved together. None of this was new to me or something that had not been mentioned before, but it kept everything fresh in my mind so I did not need to search for things to say about the process.
• He included a brief set of directions on how to provide a review.
• I was thanked for my willingness to provide a review. This made me even happier to do so.

All of this was done in two short paragraphs because word economy is very important. If you have clients with a Yahoo email then send them a link to your Yahoo local listing. Likewise if you have someone with MSN or Hotmail accounts send them to your Bing local listing. If their email is some other type use your best guess. In any of these situations it would not hurt to provide the client with links to multiple locations where they could provide an online review or become a fan, follow, like, etc. These links could include Facebook Twitter or Yelp. Remember to make it as simple as absolutely possible.

Through this entire process I was able to learn how businesses can get better reviews for their sites. If you want more reviews or testimonials it is not always as simple as asking for these reviews. There are many things along the way that you can do as a business owner to encourage people to provide these reviews though the most important thing, of course, is to always provide a quality service.

Chris is an attorney not an online marketer yet he does things that really help out his online campaign. I am not sure that he even concisely did these things to encourage more interaction online. Once a company has a process for encouraging online interaction in place, implementing it could take just a few minutes each day yet have a huge impact in an online campaign.

To learn about how local search works in more detail, watch this webinar Learn the Secrets of Google’s Local Search

This is when my first-grade reading abilities kick in- the skill where pictures speak a thousand words. After walking around for a bit, bumping into people and finding some random store I never knew existed, I exit and realize I parked on the other side of the building. All the way back to my car I’m cursing under my breath, vowing that I will never return to this labyrinth.

My experience with malls is not much different from the way search engine robots might feel when visiting websites. We lay-out what we believe is a perfectly logical website. A search engine robot visits the site, and some weird anomaly in the navigation confuses it, causing the site to be abandoned after a partial index. After a period of having the site live, we realize not all of the pages are indexed in Google.

So, what do we do? Add a sitemap.

Unfortunately, a site map written in Klingon doesn’t help the search engines. Just as I need a readable map in a mall, search engine robots will usually index a site quicker if you have a sitemap they understand.

When optimizing a site, it’s important to include a sitemap in a format that Google and other search engines can navigate. One of the most common is the XML-sitemap.  Another option is the URL list, which includes a text file with one url per line, and is saved as urllist.txt. If you have videos on your site, you can submit a sitemap with all the videos. The same thing applies to sites that provide geo data, samples of code, and news. Google can also use RSS 2.0, Atom 1.0 and mRSS feeds as sitemaps. There are even sitemaps for mobile pages.  As each XML sitemap should contain no more than 50,000 URLs, multiple sitemaps are sometimes required to index an entire site.

As of last December, Google made submitting a sitemap easier. You no longer have to specify the file type. Google will detect the file type and handle it appropriately. There are three different ways to submit a sitemap- which I’ll discuss in my next post.

When placing keywords in the URL you can use hypens or underscores. In the past, the hyphen has been recommended, but opinions vary on which is the best practice for URLs. Earlier this year, Matt Cutts posted a video in which he stated if you are using underscores and they are working for you, don’t worry about changing them. In other words, if you are using underscores, your site won’t be penalized or banned from the search results. However, if you’re building a new site and have the choice, it is still best to use hyphens rather than underscores, because Google treats hyphens as separators between words in a URL–unlike underscores. If you want to listen to Matt’s comment, check out the youtube clip: hyphens and underscores.

I have a friend that registered the domain name coldplaymusic.net. The .com was already bought and was parked by some domainer, so he settled for the .net. If you do a search for “Coldplay music” you will find that coldplaymusic.net is in the second page of results. This is the shocking part… The domain name was purchased about a month ago. There have been no links built to this site, and there is not a lot of content. Even with these aspects working against its rankings, the site has still managed to make it on the second page for a search with a volume of over 200 thousand searches each month.

The content on the site has been optimized, so I can’t give all the credit to the domain. However, it does suggest the importance of having keywords in your domain. Because having keywords in a domain has helped web sites show up for in particular keywords, some domains become quite valuable. Some of you might remember that the domain Pizza.com sold last year for over two million dollars. The previous owner purchased it fourteen years ago for twenty dollars. Now that is what I call a good ROI.

As with everything, you need to be moderate in how you place keywords in your domain.  You are limited to 63 characters or less in your domain (this does not include the .com, .net, or other country codes). Also, you should remember that if you have a domain like cheapviagragamblingpornreplicawatchesandmoneymakingschemes.com it will definitely look like spam to the search engines. Keep an eye out for my next post that will provide other tips to making your domain work for you.

A search engine result consists of a title, description and URL. The URL that shows up is chosen by the search engines but can be influenced by how you link to your site. The other two pieces of information are also chosen by the search engines, but they can be influenced by using several different methods. Yahoo and MSN will usually use the meta description and title for your listing in the search result. Google is more arbitrary with how they display search results and will sometimes use your meta description, but will often pull a snippet of text from elsewhere on your page, depending on the search keywords. When writing the meta descriptions and titles for your site, keep in mind that your site will be judged by these in the SERPS. The better your listing looks, the better chance you have of getting people to click through.

When writing your titles make sure they are:

1. No longer than 70 characters
2. Relevant to the page and compel the reader to find out more
3. Comfortable in their keyword usage

When writing meta descriptions they should:

1. Be no longer than 160 characters
2. Contain a call to action
3. Entice the reader to find out more
4. Read smoothly

Concise titles and meta descriptions will keep your fine work from getting truncated by the search engines. Don’t underestimate the value of a well-written title and description and always take the time to write good titles and descriptions. Never leave your titles or descriptions blank.

If your site has a link in DMOZ or the Yahoo Directory, the title of that listing is sometimes used as the title in the SERPS. If you would rather have your normal title show up all the time rather than the DMOZ or Yahoo directory title, you should include the following meta tag on your site.

<meta name=”robots” content=”noodp,noydir”>

“Noodp” refers to the DMOZ and “noydir” refers to the Yahoo Directory. This code applies to all search engine bots that use DMOZ or Yahoo directory listing data.

Finally, there is the topic of sitelinks. Sitelinks typically appear when someone performs a navigational search for your company or site name. Google determines what shows up in those links by looking at how the site links internally.  Google tries to show the most prominent pages of the site to make it easier for the searcher to find the specific page of the site they are looking for. Although you don’t have complete control over your site’s sitelinks, if there is a page showing up in the sitelinks that you don’t want to show up, you can remove it through your Webmaster tools account.

So if you want people to click through to your site you need to have something good on the SERPS pages.  If you don’t have something good then get in the game and make some changes to make your listing more clickable.

Even with all the things that WShomes.com is doing right, they are not showing up as well as they could be in the search engine results. I took the keywords that WSHome.com was targeting on their home page and did a little research to find out how they were doing. Below is a sample of the keywords on their home page and how they are ranking for them.

I ran this report two different days to make sure that I had a good representation of how they were doing. The numbers on the left side of the dash or arrow show where they show up in Google for that particular keyword. The number on the right of the dash or arrow show how much it has moved (green arrow showing upward movement, and red arrow showing downward movement). For the most part, these keywords seem to be staying about the same. In this report the site has only three keywords on the front page. I used the Google Adwords keyword tool to see how competitive these keywords are. Below is a screen capture showing how competitive the words are.

This shows how competitive these keywords are for paid advertising in comparison to other keywords. By looking at advertising competitiveness and the number of searches for the keywords, it is fair to say that these are competitive terms.

As I looked through this site I felt that there was a need for more content on the pages. The search engines like to see unique content on the site and WSHome does have good content on their individual product pages.  However, aside from the product pages, the rest of the site doesn’t have much content. The pages look good but there is little more than navigation and links into the individual products on most pages.

The navigation needs some changes to be more search friendly. The site uses images in their navigation instead of words. Why not just make it easier for the search engine bots to do their job? At least they’ve labeled their images with alt tags.  However, it would still be better if they changed these images to words.  One benefit of doing this would be to provide keyword rich internal links to the inner pages. The other major problem with the navigation is that it uses Java Script to control the drop down menus. In general it is not a good idea to use a lot of java script in site navigation as it makes it more difficult for the search engine bots to crawl and index every page of a site.

After looking at WSHome.com I wanted to see how other Williams-Sonoma websites were doing. I looked at PBTeen.com, and just like WSHome.com, it did a good job with having unique meta tags on all of its pages. The Google toolbar page rank is only a 4 on this site. There are not as many links to this site either. Google says they have just over 200 links while Yahoo says they have 3,900. With all these numbers I expected this PBTeen.com to be doing worse in the rankings than WSHome.com. The image below shows what I found.

PBTeen seems to be doing very well in the rankings and has a fair amount of number one positions. It would seem same to assume that these keywords must be less competitive, right?  This is what the Google Adwords tool showed:

WSHome.com had a keyword with over 134,000 monthly searches on it in February but averaged 50,000 searches most months. PBTeen.com’s highest searched keyword, teen bedding, averaged over 60,000 searches most months.

Both sites have about the same amount of content on their pages and they both use images in their navigation. So why does PBTeen.com seems to be doing so much better in the rankings? Take a look at this graph showing the difference in traffic the each site.

PBTeen.com seems to have a lot more traffic. I have my feelings as to why these two sites are experiencing differences in ranking and traffic to their sites.  One reson is that PBTeen.com has a better navigation system.  PBTeen.com uses ‘breadcrumb’ naviagation which is more user freindly and also seo friendly as they add keyword rich links.  There are a couple other reasons, but I can’t give away all my secrets in one post!

• Page Title
• URL
• Meta Description
• Alt Attributes for Images
• Content

Before doing anything with On-Page Optimization (or any other SEO for that fact) you first have to choose the right keywords for your site. You can learn more about keyword research on one of our previous posts.

Page Titles

Titles are very important to on-page optimization. The titles show up at the top of the browser and are often used by search engines as the title in search engine results. The title is a good place for keywords. Make the title direct, to the point and ensure that all the pages on your site have their own unique titles. For example, a page about PVC pipes on a plumbing site could have a title of “Cheap PVC Plumbing Pipes | Joes Plumbing Supplies” (I had to use Joe the Plumber as an example, couldn’t help myself). Notice that with one long keyword term many targeted words are included. By using this keyword phrase a search engine is likely to serve this page when people search for PVC pipes, cheap PVC pipes, cheap plumbing, cheap plumbing pipes, cheap plumbing supplies etc.

URL

Often when sites are designed using a Content Management System (CMS), the URLs on deeper pages look like you just spilled a cup of alphabet soup on your desk. Sometimes these URL’s are dynamic so they change every time you visit the page, making it a huge problem for the bots to properly index the pages. Unfortunately the URLs also have nothing to do with your targeted keywords unless you want to show up for po=J0ro57v. Many CMSs have modifications that can be added to make URLs search engine friendly. For example: www.joesplumbingsupplies.com/products/pvc_pipes is a URL that is Search Engine Friendly, because it is short, descriptive, and includes relevant keywords.

Meta-Description

The meta description shows up in the code of the page. Make sure each page on your site has it’s own unique meta description tag. The meta description is often used to describe the page in the search engine results after listing the page title. Having a relevant meta description increases the chances that people will click on your listing. It can also be used to include a phone number or some other call to action.

Code Structure

When structuring the body of the site, use h1 and h2 tags. The Search Engines place a high priority on words in the h1 and h2 tags. Getting ranked first in Google will be of little worth if the content on your site is not relevant or the content is confusing. Sometimes coders forget that people are reading this page and not just some random Google bot. When designing and coding sites, always place priority on the humans coming to the web site over the search engine bots. Be cautious about what content you place in flash. Although Google can now detect the text inside of flash files it is still better to place keywords in the html surrounding the flash. Some sites use Java Script extensively for site structure and navigation. Because bots tend to get confused when reading Java Script avoid using in this way. Many coding geeks have debated whether the bold tag or the strong tag is better for SEO. According to Matt Cutts Google places the same weight on both tags

Alt Attributes

Often times when people do on-site optimization they overlook placing Alt attributes on pictures. By properly describing the pictures on a site the search engines will see that even the pictures are relevant to the keywords. By doing this you are also more likely to show up in the results when people search for images.

Content

The last point is one of the most important. Whether you have content to sell your products or your product is the content it’s important to have enough relevant content all your pages. Make sure the entire page reads smoothly and is understandable because humans buy products not search engine bots. It’s good to link out to other sites as long as they are relevant. Be careful of having too many outbound links on any one page of a site. Many people have the misconception that you build a website and then kick back and watch the money roll in. Building a website is a job that is truly never done. You should always be updating and modifying information on your sites. If you want people coming back to your site you have to give them something to come back for. By adding new content to a site you also improve your chance of ranking well in Google. Regular updates will help your site get indexed faster. Search engines will see frequently updated sites as up to date, accurate and relevant.

On-site Optimization should be the first thing you do after determining your keywords. If you follow these simple guidelines you will find that you will rank much better in search engines.