As a small to medium sized business, it’s pretty common that your or someone on your staff has the responsibility of managing your website in addition to many other tasks.  It can often fall to the bottom of your to-do list as seemingly more important things come along.

However, as you invest more and more in online marketing channels like local SEO, paid search or others, many of your potential customers’ first interaction with you will be your website.  Think of it as your digital storefront. Just like you tidy your office, decorate your store or other ways to impress new customers, your website requires regular upkeep to impress your site visitors to take the action you want them to.

While the list could go on and on and may vary by industry, here are 5 quick website maintenance tips to put on your monthly website maintenance checklist:

1. Contact Information and Forms

There are actually many surprising stats about how many small business websites don’t have their contact information or contact forms on their website.  If you don’t, stop right now and go slap your phone number in your header at the least.

If you do, you should make it a point each month to make sure your information is accurate and that your contact forms work. Whether it’s a technical glitch, a bad email address or some other unknown, it’s possibly you may not be getting those valuable contact form requests.

If you use a call tracking number, dial it from a separate phone to make sure you calls are still being passed through.  You can also review your call tracking analytics to make sure you see activity on your number.

2. Update Promotions and Deals

If you offer coupons, special promotions or other similar ideas, make sure they are regularly updated and relevant.  Let’s say you run an accounting firm and offer a 25% off coupon for personal tax preparation. This is great content and incentive during January-April but can make your site feel dated and unkempt the rest of the year.  Also, if you have an expiration date on your coupons, that’s an obvious sign of a neglected website.

By regularly updating and rotating your promotions and coupons, your site will be more alive and give your fans a reason to keep coming back to get the latest information.

3. Broken Links and Images

The web is constantly changing and evolving which means URL’s change, images change and nothing stays the same. If you link to other people throughout your site which is generally a good practice, you’ll want to verify each month that all of your external and internal links are working correctly. It’s also common that you may link to or display an image from a different website so make sure those are displaying correctly as well. We recommend using some free tools to verify your links like Xenu Link Sleuth.

If you think about your own online shopping habits, how much confidence or trust would you have in a site if you could tell the site wasn’t being maintained and you constantly came across broken images and links? Search engines also take this into account as one of their many ranking factors.

4. Site Speed

The speed of your website isn’t something that most small business owners consider.  However, it is becoming an increasingly more important factor in search engine rankings and more importantly, conversion rates.

Consider these statistics (sources listed here):

• Customers expect your site to load in 2 seconds or less
• 40% of customers will leave your site if it takes more than 3 seconds to load
• For every 1 second of load time, conversion drops by 7%
• For every 1 second of load time, user satisfaction drops by 16%

This is definitely something to consider when building a new site but your site can slow down over time as you add and remove pages, images, badges, social buttons, etc. Check your page load times regularly to ensure you aren’t losing business due to slow load times.

There are many tools to monitor site speed times.  For simple and free tools, we recommend Pingdom and Google’s Page Speed tools.

5. Your Blog

Everyone thinks they need a blog and a blog is definitely important if you’re serious about online marketing. In a survey of 1531 small to medium sized businesses, the 795 businesses that blogged received 55% more website visitors and 97% more inbound links.

However, the key to this isn’t just having a blog; it’s about having an active blog and promoting your content. If you’ve set up a blog in the past but can’t keep it updated, it’s a very quick indication to your visitors that you’ve abandoned your site.

These 5 important areas to check each month will keep your site fresh, search engine friendly and provide a good experience for your website visitors.

Do you have any more tips to add? If so, please do in the comments below.

5 Monthly Website Maintenance Tips for Small Businesses is a post by SEO expert Bryan Phelps. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

It’s no secret that more and more people are turning to search engines to find all kinds of information, including local businesses. In addition to ranking on Google, locally-oriented businesses have to maximize their presence on other popular local search sites like Yelp and for mobile search, a very popular and quickly growing means of finding local businesses.  Local search changes quickly and often and for most small business owners, it’s too much to keep up with.

Due to the increased need for small businesses to have a trusted partner in keeping up with these changes, SEO.com has heavily invested in improving our local search and small business SEO capabilities to deliver powerful results for clients on limited budgets.

SEO.com now helps dentists, landscapers and other small business owners increase their website traffic, phone calls, appointments and leads through various local search channels including SEO, local search directories, mobile and other means.  And to celebrate small businesses, we recently announced a 6 month Local Search SEO Giveaway!

Enter to Win Today!

For the past 2 months and the next 4 months, SEO.com selects 1 locally-focused business who wins free SEO services for 6 months! If you own or work for a small business that wants to see how local search services could help your company, jump over to the contest entry page and get started. Also, check out some of our SEO case studies to see what SEO has done for some of our other clients.

June Winner – CaliforniaColdStorage.com
July Winner – AgentPestControl.net

Who will the August winner be? Stay tuned. If you entered it could be you!

There are still 4 months left to win so make sure you come back each month to re-enter. You may submit your business once per month until the giveaway ends.  We hope to see your entry soon!

4 More Winners To Go: Enter The SEO.com Small Business SEO Giveaway is a post by SEO expert Bryan Phelps. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

In addition to the infamous Panda and Penguin updates, locally-focused business are going through a lot with constant changes to Google Places (now Google+ Local).  Not only is the platform often broken, leaving very little support to small businesses, the local search industry is quickly growing and evolving.  The majority of local businesses don’t have the time, patience or experience to keep up.

Fortunately for small businesses and those interested in local search, some of the most talented SEOs in the industry share their thoughts and findings through their blogs and social media outlets.

So in honor of another gold medal for the USA men’s basketball team (my favorite Olympic sport), I present the Local Search Dream Team.  If you weren’t familiar with the 1992 Men’s Basketball Team (nicknamed the Dream Team), all you need to know is that it was the greatest team ever assembled in professional sports. Period.

David Mihm – Best known for publishing the Local Search Ranking Factors on DavidMihm.com, as the founder of GetListed.org and a frequent speaker at industry events.

Follow David on Twitter and Google+

Mike Ramsey – founder of Nifty Marketing, speaker at industry events and author of this Venice Update post on SEOMoz that I probably reference weekly.

Follow Mike on Twitter and Google+

Darren Shaw – founder of Whitespark, the Local Citation Finder Tool and joint creator of 2 awesome resource: The Best Citation Sources by U.S. City and  The Best Citation Sources by Category.

Follow Darren on Twitter and Google+

Andrew Shotland – formerly from Insider Pages but now the author of LocalSEOGuide.com, one of the greatest resources for local search optimization tips and trends.

Follow Andrew on Twitter and Google+

Mike Blumenthal – Co-founder and presenter at GetListed.org Local University and author of Understanding Google Places and Local Search.  One of the first local search blogs I started following.

Follow Mike on Twitter and Google+

Mihm:

The obvious answer here for me is either:

• Not completing all five category fields
• Not using ANY custom categories

Proper categorization is absolutely huge if you want Google to view you as relevant for your target search terms.  My biggest surprise when I look at most SMB’s, even the ones who have claimed their +Local pages, is the percentage that have not taken advantage of all five category fields.  They might enter ‘attorney’ and ‘personal injury attorney’ and figure that covers all of their bases.  But surely there are additional categories for which they’d like to rank like ‘motorcycle accident lawyer’ ‘dog bite lawyer’ or ‘wrongful death attorney’ as well.

Ramsey:

Categories. I am shocked at how many claimed listings I look at where only one category is chosen. Google allows for 5 category choices and 4 of them can be custom. If you don’t utilize them it’s like denying yourself keywords to rank on. For instance, many dentists will only have the category “dentist” even though they offer “teeth whitening”, “sedation dentistry”, “family dentistry”, “cosmetic dentistry”, etc. The chance of ranking on these terms without having a category associated is extremely slim.

Shaw:

Keywords in the reviews. Getting your target keywords into your reviews has a noticeably positive impact on rankings. One way to get the keywords is to ask your reviewers to mention the service they had completed when you’re outreaching for reviews. Another, somewhat sneaky way, is to do “review exchanges” with other businesses. In Google+ Local you can review businesses AS a business. So, you can offer to review a business you do work with in exchange for them reviewing you. Since you’re discussing the review in advance, you can offer some subtle (or not so subtle) suggestions about what they might want to mention in the review.

Here’s how you can review as a business, rather than an individual (these instructions assume you’ve already set up a Google+ Business page).

1. Sign into your Google+ account.
2. Click the Pages icon in the sidebar (might be under the “More” button).
3. Click the “Switch to this page” button.
4. You’ll see a bar appear at the top that says “You are now using Google+ as a page”.
5. You can now click the Local icon on the left side, find the business you want to review, and leave them a nice keyword rich review.

Getting keywords in reviews on Google+ Local is great, and it’s the first place we start, but once the client has a good set of G+ reviews, we then move on to encouraging reviews on other sites like Yelp, SuperPages, CitySearch, etc. Getting more of your keywords associated with your business at various places around the web is a good thing.

Shotland:

Actually claiming the frigging page.  Claim your page already!

Blumenthal:

I am a big believer in being sure that the basics are covered. All too often SEOs and SMBs seem to only claim and clean their listings at one of the primary data source. They are drinking too much UBL or Localeze cool-aid it seems. The primary data providers (In the US: InfoGroup, Localeze & Axciom) send their data far and wide and it is absolutely critical to get your NAP correct at all three of them. It is imperative to also be sure that there are no dupes or old listings there as well.

In the case of Localeze, the free listing works well if you have a landline but if you have VOIP or mobile it is absolutely essential that you pay to have your listing verified.

Mihm:

Well, obviously I’m a little biased on the first one , but…

1. GetListed.org ( http://getlisted.org ) – We offer a free service that helps business owners (and the marketers helping them) an efficient way to see where and how they’re currently listed, and (I think) the most efficient path to clean up any inaccuracies.

2. Mike Blumenthal’s Category Tool ( http://blumenthals.com/index.php?Google_LBC_Categories ) Related to my answer to #1…if you’re having trouble figuring out the right categories in which to include your business, try typing a couple of your keywords into Mike’s tool and see what categories Google is going to see as related.

3. Google Insights for Search ( http://www.google.com/insights/search/ ) Probably the single best LOCAL keyword research tool out there.  None of the others ever show enough keyword volume for geo-modified searches (cosmetic dentist omaha nebraska or cosmetic dentistry omaha nebraska), so plug in the generic keywords (cosmetic dentist AND cosmetic dentistry) and select your metro area (United States -> Nebraska -> Omaha) to get an idea of the relative importance of each keyword for your market.

Ramsey:

1. http://Getlisted.org – David Mihm’s tool is extremely helpful for SMB’s. The content on the site and his Local University Conferences are absolutely unmatched in the industry.

2. http://sweetiq.com – Michael Mire has been busy at work in the shadows creating an amazing dashboard for big and small businesses with a local focus. From tracking keywords across organic and local rankings to managing reviews the tool is really gaining some serious momentum.

3. http://linkprospector.citationlabs.com – The Link Prospector is a great tool by Garret Finch and Whitespark.ca. Everyone knows of Darren’s citation finder but the value of links for local is extremely high and this tool can help to find opportunities in local markets or specific verticals where guest posts, directories, or sponsorships are possible. A truly hidden gem.

Shaw:

This is a bit awkward, but some of my own tools/services are my favorite.

1. The Local Citation Finder. Analyze your competitors’ citations, your own citations, and find new opportunities.

2. The Link Prospector. We use the “directories” prospecting type to find hyper-local citation sources specifically related to the city or industry of the client. Works a treat!

3. GetListed.org. We always run our clients through GetListed.org to get a sense of their profile completeness on the key citation sites.

4. Can I list a fourth? Our new citation building service. We do this for every client to get them moving up in the rankings quickly.

Shotland:

1. Whitespark
2. Google
3. Yext
4. GetListed

Blumenthal:

1. David Mihm’s Getlsited.org Accuracy tool is a critical piece in making sure that your nap is consistent and in helping you track down the source of bad data.
2. Darren Shaw’s Citation Tool is very helpful in automating a way to assess citation progress at Google and to find new citations
3. Third place is a tie between 4 or 5 tools (The Google & Your Business Forums, my category tool, OpenSiteExplorer, BrightLocal ad hoc ranking report, Google Maps searches, Google MapMaker, the comments on my blog etc etc. etc.)… Ok maybe it’s more than 4 or 5.

Mihm:

Going out on a limb here, but Google will buy Foursquare for $500MM+.  Google is just desperate for mainstream adoption of, and continued activity around, Google Plus, and there’s just no other technology play available that has the kind of mass-market that Foursquare does.  In the short-term, Google will continue to operate it under the Foursquare brand.  They’ll use it in the long-run, though, as a means to gradually get more end-users transitioned over to Google Plus, and over time we’ll see all of those check-ins, tips, and keyword-saturated snippet reviews start to flow into the Plus ecosystem.  And even if Foursquare users left en masse after their favorite mobile service had been bought by the Borg, the historical data alone would be well worth Google’s purchase price.

Ramsey:

We have seen a huge cosmetic shift in the look of local results on Google. That is bound to be followed up with a more algorithmic approach soon. With the weight of the new review system and prominence in search results I can see that reviews from power Google+ accounts could start to carry a lot of weight. Companies who aren’t playing the review game are going to be sorely behind if they let this year go by without hitting it hard.

Socially, I see this year being big for Google+ and less so for Facebook. As more and more businesses realize that customers need to be on Google+ to leave reviews they will become Google’s sales engine for this (though I disagree with Google on how they force G+ usage).

Outside the world of Google, I think that application usage will continue to rise for companies like Yelp, Apple Maps, etc. Businesses can no longer simply focus on Google and think they have the local base covered. When Google Maps loses position to Apple Maps companies are going to need to ensure that they are ranking well in Yelp and have a process established for managing reviews and listings across more places and not simply listing their business there. The day of the citation is dead. Simply having a profile with your name, phone and address is not enough. Profiles need to be fully filled out and used. We are at the point where companies need to maximize every local profile and engage and promoting customers to visit their place of business and leave reviews.

Shaw:

I’m guessing that social factors will continue to gain importance as ranking signals. Specifically in Google+. Google will use its social data to identify the trust and authority of people reviewing and sharing content online. They’ll be able to devalue manipulative tactics and give boosts for real mentions from real people. Engaging in G+ and other social platforms will become a requirement in competitive local niches.

Shotland:

Results will continue to be more and more optimized for mobile searchers where the specific location of the searcher’s device is critical to the result.

In categories with high review volume/density (e.g. restaurants), Google will increase the influence of social factors while tamping down link-related factors.

The Google+ Local interface will be integrated with the maps tab to give G+ a boost.

Blumenthal:

SEO.com wants to thank Mike, Mike, David, Andrew and Darren for participating and sharing their thoughts. If you’re interested in local search, make sure to follow their blogs and social accounts for the latest in the industry.

Local Search Dream Team – Tips, Tools & Predictions is a post by SEO expert Bryan Phelps. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

Rethinking CRO Entirely – Joanna Lord – @joannalord

On the final day of Mozcon 2012 the great presentations continued.  Joanna Lord from SEOMoz shared some great insights about how CRO is changing and how we need to adapt as marketers.  Here are some of my notes from her presentation:

• Testing can take a lot of time and a lot of resources, which we don’t have a lot of time for.
• Historical definition: “CRO was born out of the need for lead generation and ecommerce internet marketers t improve their website’s results”
• It doesn’t really exist anymore that your only focus is lead forms and what happens on your website.
• We want social sharing, bundling, buying related products, spend more time on the site.  We care about things off site like mobile, Facebook, tablets, media, etc.
• We care about people engaging with our brands on social networks like Pinterest, YouTube and others.
• We don’t just need website results – sales, conversion rate, etc.  Sites have evolved to bigger experiences, training, information, and philanthropy.
• Marketers today need to improve in a lot of areas.  The definition of CRO is changing.

What should we be spending our time on? Here are 10 things to start improving and testing.

#10. Your Story

Improve the way you tell and share your story.  How do you want the world to see you?

The Golden Circle Theory – http://bit.ly/dcDsbx, Simon Sinek Ted Talk.

• What? Product/Services
• How?  Value Prop
• Why? The Cause
  • “Empower people to change the way the global economy works” – Etsy
  • “Empower people around the world with a $25 loan” – Kiva

#9. Your Pillars

Elements on your site that never change.  You need to ask about them and push to test changes.  Tweaking small things here and there may never have as big of an impact as making a major change.

It can feel dangerous or risky but can change your business.  It’s hard to get buy off but when you do, people get excited.

#8. Your Relationships

Test your relationships.  Ex. SEOmoz PRO Perks.  It creates opportunities to evaluate partnerships, showcase partners, get new partners.

Test:

• who you partner with
• the words you publish about it
• the placement of your partners page
• the photos of partners
• try videos to better convey the partnership

#7. Triggers, Calls to Action

We have 3 brains.  Test for all 3

• The new brain thinks
• The middle brain feels
• The reptilian brain decides – http://bit.ly/4n7AN3

Your full story needs to hit all 3 of these.  Squarespace is a good example.

#6. Your Unique Value Proposition

It doesn’t just mean making it bigger or more prominent.  Change your UVP by category/product to match that demographic.

Good examples: Zappos, Pottery Barn.

UVP communicates the unique contribution your company, products, and/or services are able provide to the market – in a way that is different from your competitors.

#5. Optimize Your Schedule

• Test your response time on social channels on different days
• When you schedule your social updates
• Your email frequency
• Email delivery days
• Test your outreach – how and when you follow-up
• When you put out your content on your blog
• Test your schedule for revamping different channels

#4. Optimize Your Tools

Are the tools you use still the best tools available? Get out of your comfort zone.  Stop using crappy tools.

What makes good CRO Tools:

• affordable
• feedback
• analytics
• usability
• built-in logic
• contact team
• resources
• easy-to-use

Great tools:

• usertesting.com
• fivesecondtest
• usabilla
• umbounce
• visual website optimizer
• optimizely
• reinvigorate
• luckyorange
• crazyegg

#3. Your Thank You

Test the way you say “thank you” to customers.  Make sure your thank you is helpful and provides more information to the user.  Don’t bore your customers to death.

#2 – Test Your Feedback Avenues

Work with other departments to get feedback.  You can’t succeed as a marketer without getting feedback from customers.

Make it easy for customers to contact you.  Don’t bury your contact info in the footer or behind logins.

Places to get feedback:

• Analytics
• Survey tools
• Live chat
• Cancel forms
• Help tickets
• Listening tools

#1 – Test Your Biggest Success

Dare to change your best performers for more win in less time. We tend to focus on low hanging fruit as scrappy marketers but testing winners on your most trafficked pages can have big results.

Tip: Stop saying “setting up tests”.

Tip: Stop waiting for the resources.  Outsource, build in to the roadmap

Tip: Stop owning it.  It’s a team effort.

Tip: Stop pushing pennies. Go big or go home.  Don’t just test rotating the testimonials, try swapping video and text.  Bigger things.

Tip: Stop stopping. Part of determining your value is how determined you are to being valuable and giving value.

So what is the new conversion rate optimization?

• Engagement optimization
• Story optimization
• Relationship optimization
• Process optimization
• Value optimization
• Loyalty optimization

It’s more than running tests and it demands that we think bigger.

Thank you Joanna! It was a great presentation which got a lot of us thinking about we can also make the web a better place.

MozCon Day 3 Recap – A New Form of Conversion Rate Optimization by Joanna Lord is a post by SEO expert Bryan Phelps. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

It’s been an exciting afternoon at Mozcon.  Dr. Pete (@dr_pete) is blowing some minds with a project he’s been running over the last several months to try to get more insight into the magnitude of Google algorithm changes.  Here are some notes from his presentation:

Do you think Google’s algo changes have been crazy lately? It’s 100X worse than you think.

During 2003-2012, there have only been 20 named updates.  That’s only 2 per year.  However, we do know in 2010 there were 516 changes.  So there are considerably more changes happening than we are aware of.

There are two ways we get info – Matt Cutts/Google, and what we actually observe for ourselves.

What Google Says:

1. Patents – gives us clues about Google’s capabilities. Most often file patents for things that haven’t come into play or won’t come into play until they have the technology.
2. Spokespeople & Social – they tell us what they want us to hear. Matt Cutts and Pierre Far.
3. Official Blogs – Inside Search
   1. Search Quality Highlights on the Blog – shows changes they make each month. Little bit of a game to make SEO’s happy and distract them.
   2. 198 changes reported YTD – most are minor core changes.

Dr. Pete really reinforced that we can’t stop digging because Google gives us a little bit of information.

What We Observe:

1. Webmaster Chatter – forums
   1. Localization and personalization make chatter harder since people are consistently seeing different things.
   2. Search Engine Blogs – Barry’s algo change updates.

What is a normal day at Google?

Dr Pete’s Project: Algo Alert. He tracked top 10 rankings for 1,000 keywords every 24 hours.

There are a lot of great charts/slides with his data findings – download his slides at www.seomoz.com/mozcon-live/

There were actually more winners than losers on Penguin – for every two dropping out, eight moved up.

Dr. Pete noticed big changes on 6/4, but Google didn’t acknowledge it.  He’s since nicknamed it the “Bigfoot” update. Domain diversity dropped noticeably.  For a given search term, multiple domains got 2+ rankings. Domain diversity dropped 2.6% from 6/4 to 6/5.

After seeing this change in domain diversity, he looked back and noticed Penguin also had a big change in domain diversity.  Many people suspect Google may be favoring big brands but Dr. Pete seemed to believe that it may have just been an unintended consequence.

Interesting note on big domains: Wikipedia, Amazon, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter made up 10.7% of the results in the 1,000 that were tracked.

Panda 3.7 appeared to be bigger than the original Penguin.  In fact there, were three days in a row that seemed to be bigger than penguin.

June 18^th was another mystery update – nobody talked about it but there were four days in a row bigger than penguin.

The key phrase “stocks to buy” saw 37 different ranking URL’s in a just a 10-day window. Crazy!  Dr. Pete attributed it to Query Deserves Freshness (QDF).

So what’s a normal day look like? 79.7% of SERPs change every 24 hours in his sample of 1,000 SERPS over two months.

Monday seems to be the busiest ranking change day – weekends are quieter.

The recent Panda 3.9 update appears not very big compared to some other updates.  On 7/23, the day before Penguin 3.9, it seemed to be worse than the actual Panda 3.9 update.

New SEOMoz Product!

Mozcast.com gives you a sense if there is a lot of fluctuation going on in the search results.  It also provides a 5-day and 30-day history.  You can also follow @mozcast for the daily weather update.

Mozcon Day 2 Recap: A Secret Algo Project Launch is a post by SEO expert Bryan Phelps. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

Cyrus Shepard – High ROI Content Strategies – @cyrusshepard

Good morning from Day Two of Mozcon 2012.  After a killer API/Tools presentation by Richard Baxter, Cyrus Shepard impressed the crowd with a great presentation on High ROI Content Strategies.  Here are some notes and highlights from his presentation:

Past, Present & Future

Cyrus started off by talking about the past and the future.  The SEO community has seen lots of changes from Google and Bing targeting SEO.  We’ve seen some techniques vanish, specifically around low-quality link building such as link farms, general directory submissions, article marketing, and others.

Google is changing on some of the non-spammy best practices like title tags.  They regularly change your title tag in the SERP’s. Now they are aggressively targeting popular link building techniques like infographics that are being abused.  Even anchor text is changing.  SEOs are building links with the anchor text “click here.”

Stay Ahead of The Curve

One of the underlying themes to Cyrus’ speech was that we need to stop chasing what Google is changing.  We need to be where Google/Bing are today, not using practices that they are trying to kill.

Google+

Some marketers feel like Google+ is a third sock.  Cyrus realized that it’s not a social network, is a knowledge network.  And Google+ has given us things other social networks don’t:

• Followed profile links in your profile introduction
• Profiles have PageRank and are indexed
• More circles = more links to your profile page
• Links in posts are followed and help get indexed quickly

Tip: Utilize Google+ profiles and posts to support your link building efforts and speed up indexation of new content.

Google+ is real content that’s indexed on the web like a blog, not just a social network.

Google+ is the only major platform with author photos.  Cyrus tested different photos of himself and tracked changes in CTR in Google Webmaster Tools.

The results? He ended up increasing CTR on one of his sites by an average of 35% over time.  There isn’t a magic picture or color that applies to all sites.  It changes depending on your audience and demographic.

Tip: Test and optimize profile image – how many links would it take to increase traffic 35%.

Tool: Allmyplus.com – gives you stats on all your Google+ posts.

Infographics

Cyrus has relied heavily on infographics but says they are becoming overplayed.  Too many people are building poor infographics and manipulating link profiles by forcing embeds with keyword anchor text.

Tips:

• Never use widgets to force anchor text.   Links will instead be natural and editorial.
• Don’t link to the homepage.  If you ever need to cut a page due to a Penguin problem, it’s easy to 404 a subpage but not your homepage.

eBooks Beat Infographics

1.  Easier to produce – like a really great blog post

2. Less expensive – $250-$500 to produce one vs $500-$1000 for an infographic

3. Evergreen content – infographics peak. Ebooks provide value for years if quality is good

4. No saturation – Link sources generally are higher quality

5. eBook Directories build additional links

6. Can be repurposed into blog posts, webinars, etc.

7. Not on Google’s (Matt Cutts) radar yet

Press Releases

Cyurs estimates that 99% earn no editorial links and you actually could be hurting your chances at ranking by putting your exact match anchor text on a flood of duplicate content, low-quality sites.

There are times to use press releases though. Use it the way it was intended by announcing important things and linkable assets, not building links.

• new, useful and newsworthy
• tools
• guides reports and ebooks
• free giveaways
• videos
• data visualizations

You should hire a professional on some services like Contently, odesk, feelancer.com, guru, elance, etc.  Find someone with a history of getting content placed on REAL sites.

HARO – 3 steps to success:

1. Use Gmail canned response for efficiency
2. Link to expert author page to show qualifications
3. Link to your top articles to establish you as an expert, reports may also link to these articles

Anchor Text

Google doesn’t need anchor text as much due to better signals from the linking page:

1. keyword proximity
2. reading level
3. title tag
4. page relevance
5. domain relevance
6. inbound links
7. author authority
8. contextual analysis
9. block analysis
10.  term weighting

Conclusion

It was a really great speech from Cyrus with some actionable tips and awesome insights and theory into the way things used to be, the way they are now and the direction we’re going in the future.

Stay tuned from more 2012 Mozcon wrap-ups today and tomorrow!

Mozcon 2012 Recap – High ROI Content Strategies For SEO is a post by SEO expert Bryan Phelps. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

Another great SLCSEM (Salt Lake City SEM professional organization) event has come and gone and left us with a ton of great information from one of the country’s leading experts in local search, David Mihm.  The timing for a local search meetup and having David as a speaker couldn’t have been more perfect as the local search landscape is preparing for a major shakeup in the near future.  With Apple dropping Google and launching its own maps product, Google Places changing to Google+ Local and Yelp making big moves to embed itself in major search platforms, there was a lot of great information and speculation on preparing for what’s coming next.

I was invited to speak following David to give the attendees an agency’s perspective on fulfilling local search campaigns for small businesses.  Both presentations are available at the bottom of this post.  However, I want to highlight what I thought were some of the most interesting takeaways from David’s presentation and the Q&A session that followed.

1. Website Criteria – In David’ recently released 2012 Local Search Ranking Factors, he noted that Website criteria dropped from #1 to #3 in General signals.  Place Page Criteria and Off-Place Page/Off-Site Criteria moved to #1 and #2 respectively.  While still important, it’s been a common belief that on-site SEO may become less and less effective as it’s easier to game.
2. Fundamentals Stay the Same – Even though we’re going through what could possibly be the biggest change to local search since Google offered a local product, the fundamentals have stayed the same for now. Having a physical location in the right city, using the right categories, building citations and building a good quantity of reviews still have a big impact on local search rankings.
3. Get Familiar with Data Providers – if you’re suffering from poor rankings, a big part of that reason could be that your data is incorrect or not including with some of the major data providers.  Make sure you’re properly listed with major data providers like Localeze, Infogroup, Axciom, Yelp, Google MapMaker and others. Use GetListed.org to check for missed opportunities or incorrect data.
4. Blended Search & Big Business – Domain authority is a major factor for blended local search results which have quickly become the most prominent form of local search results.  Because large corporations generally have strong domain authority, this gives them a big advantage.
5. Keyword Anchor Text – With Google making strong efforts to cut down on spam and over-optimization, the panel of local experts that participated in the Local Search Ranking factors survey believe that using product, service or location keywords in your anchor text to your website or Places page is less helpful than it used to be.
6. Social/Mobile – Social and mobile factors were added to the survey in anticipation of what is coming up for Google+ Local but the experts don’t believe that social/mobile factors play a big role in the ranking algorithm at this point in time.
7. Bulk Upload vs. Manual Verification – The Ranking Factors survey also showed that some of the experts believe there is a ranking advantage for manually claiming a listing versus doing a bulk upload. With a major franchise or multi-location business, that could be very challenging.  Tim Eyre from Extra Space Storage participated in the Q&A to inform us that they’ve done both forms of claiming and haven’t specifically tested it but didn’t feel there was much of a difference.  He also gave us a great reminder to use multiple accounts and bulk upload files in case one gets put on hold or suspended to be reviewed.

Ash Buckles, President of SEO.com, also formally announced that we are offering affordable and effective services for local and other small businesses (see press release here).  In conjunction with that announcement, Ash announced that we will be doing a 6-month free SEO services giveaway to 6 lucky small businesses.  One winner will be announced each month.  Click here to enter and read more about the contest.

If you haven’t had enough talk about local search yet, sign up for our upcoming local search webinar. The webinar will be held June 28^th, 2012 at 11 a.m. MST and yours truly will be the presenter. If you’re entering to win the local search giveaway, you’ll definitely want to tune into this webinar to see what you can expect if you are the lucky winner.

SEO.com Goes Local: Presentations, Giveaways & Webinar For Local Search is a post by SEO expert Bryan Phelps. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

If you follow the local search space, you’ve likely heard by now that Google Places will soon fully be rolled into Google+ and known as Google+ Local.  Those of us who regularly work with Google Places are not strangers to frequent and abrupt changes with their local search product but this recent change is probably the biggest one in the history of Google’s local search.  And if history has taught us anything, we’re in for a bumpy ride as Google fully makes the transition to Google+ Local.

Example of the new Google+ Local listing for Camera Shy in Utah County

Here are some of our initial notes on the changes, new features and strategies to consider as this change fully rolls out.

In most cases, your business listing from Google Places should already be showing up on Google+.

1. Go to Google Plus.
2. Click on the new Local tab on the left hand navigation
3. Enter your business name in the first search box at the top
4. Enter your city in the 2^nd box and search

If you already claimed and optimized your listing on Google Places, you should see everything on your new Google+ Local listing.  Pictures, descriptions, reviews, etc. should all be present.

If you haven’t claimed your business listing, what are you waiting for? Click the “Manage this page” button on the right side which will take you to Google Places where you can claim, optimize and verify your listing.

If you have claimed your listing and see the “manage this page” button on the right, don’t get too nervous.  Google is still working that out.

At this point in time, it doesn’t appear that much as changed in terms of ranking strategy, mostly the user interface.  For most searches, the rankings of businesses have stayed in tact.  With Google aggressively trying to combine Local and Social, we don’t expect this to stay this way forever.

In the mean time, make sure your listing is claimed, accurate and optimized.  Keep creating new citations and ensureing existing citations are consistent with your new Google+ listing.  Even though Google is making it harder for people to leave reviews, keep encouraging your customers to review your business and become a fan on your social networks.

At this point, you still manage all of your business information through Google Places.  However, it’s expected that Google will soon be moving everything to Google+ Local.

Reviews – One major difference is how Google now handles reviews.  In the past, any Google user could leave a review and also utilize a nickname in the process.

With Google+ Local, users now must have a Google+ account and use their real name to leave a review.  While this does feel like another attempt for Google to strong arm the general public into using Google+, it also raises the barrier to entry to get reviews from your customers.

Zagat Rating System ­– In some cases, you’ll also see the new Zagat rating system on some page.  This is based on a 30-point scoring system.  Your Google+ user reviews rates the business between 0 and 3.  The scores are averaged and multiplied by 10 to show your potential score, up to a maximum of 30.

Keep managing them separately for now.  A Google representative has acknowledged that it isn’t ideal but they are working to consolidate Google+ Business Pages with your new Google+ Local listings.

You can use this form to find out when your pages are combined – http://goo.gl/8apbo

• http://www.portent.com/blog/seo/new-google-plus-local.htm
• http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/05/31/google-local-qs-and-some-as/
• http://www.davidmihm.com/blog/google/plus-review-as-business/
• http://www.davidmihm.com/blog/google/local-plus-rankings/
• http://www.davidmihm.com/blog/google/plus-places-merge-here/
• http://www.smallbusinesssem.com/google-places-marries-google-gives-birth-to-new-google-local-pages/5828/
• http://searchengineland.com/google-places-is-over-company-makes-google-the-center-of-gravity-for-local-search-122770

Introducing Google+ Local: Google Places Meets Google+ is a post by SEO expert Bryan Phelps. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

SEO.com was recently invited to take part in a unique event featuring Daymond John from the popular show ‘Shark Tank’ and hundreds of high school students from around the country. Mr. McCauley, an amazing business teacher from Davis High School in Kaysville, Utah, started tweeting Daymond over a year ago to ask the business celebrity to make a guest appearance via Skype for his Entrepreneurship students.

As busy schedules go, nearly a year later, McCauley and Daymond arranged a hangout on Google+ but took it a step further by inviting hundreds of high school business classes to participate. The team at Google+ graciously came through at the last minute to extend the normal 10 person hangout limit so students around the country could participate.

The 45 minute Q&A session between the successful entrepreneur and aspiring high school students left us with several valuable lessons:

1. Fail, Fail and Fail Again

Unknown to many, Daymond John closed down his clothing brand, FUBU, three times in the early days in the early 1990′s. FUBU later went on to become a major pop culture brand and do millions in sales each year. This story is not uncommon to some of the most famous successful brands and entrepreneurs.

From a recent article on FastMoney.com:

Pinterest is one of the fastest-growing websites in history, but struggled for a long time. Pinterest’s CEO recently said that it had “catastrophically small numbers” in its first year after launch and that if he had listened to popular startup advice he probably would have quit.

James Dyson failed in 5,126 prototypes before perfecting his revolutionary vacuum cleaner. Groupon was put on life support and nearly shut down at one point in its meteoric rise.

The ubiquitous WD-40 lubricant got its name because the first 39 experiments failed. WD-40 literally stands for “Water Displacement–40th Attempt.” If they gave up early on like most of us do, we’d sure have a lot more squeaky hinges in the world.

The key to Daymond succeeding after closing his business multiple times was that he kept hustling and kept selling. Daymond recounted the story about him approaching rappers to wear his shirts in their videos and then he’d take the shirt back and go to the next video set. He did this over and over until 3 years later his brand was major success but very few people knew that for many years, he only had 10 shirts.

2. Know Your Numbers, Know Your Business

To an investor like Daymond, nothing is a quicker turn off than being pitched by an entrepreneur who doesn’t know his numbers. If you’ve ever watched Shark Tank, you’ve likely seen the Sharks tear apart entrepreneurs who come unprepared or dodge the important questions.

Knowing your numbers applies at many levels. As an entrepreneur seeking investment, you should obviously be prepared with numbers regarding sales, pending orders, profit, expenses and market opportunity. The same principle applies as an employee of a company or as an agency offering consulting. Knowing your key numbers and key performance indicators is a valuable trait whether you work at one of the greatest SEO companies in the world or are in the early stages of launching one of the next greatest brands.

3. Analysis Paralysis & Common Sense

One thing that really struck me while listening to Daymond was how much gut feel and common sense play into his businesses and investments versus raw analysis of data and numbers. As mentioned earlier, you need to know your numbers but Daymond recommends avoiding analysis paralysis or over analyzing a situation. Sometimes you just need to dig in and get your hands dirty to learn or determine if an opportunity is good.

Daymond also discussed how the Sharks heavily consider the person when they invest, not just the business opportunity. They know that a given business may not work out but putting your money behind a hard working, smart entrepreneur is the safest bet they can make. Daymond, in particular, looks for a “hungry person with a great idea and a lot of desire”.

4. Born to be an Entrepreneur

Entrepreneurship and innovation is something that’s been on many people’s mind since the passing of Steve Jobs. As one of the world’s most innovative thinkers, Steve Jobs lived Apple’s slogan of “Think Different”.

The following quote from an inspiring video of Steve Jobs gives a very revealing look into his mind and how he sees the world of business and innovation.

When you grow up you tend to get told that the world is the way it is and your life is to just live your life inside the world, try not to bash into the walls to much, try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money but that’s a very limited life.

Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact, and that is, everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you … the minute that you understand that you can poke life … that you can change it, you can mold it … that’s maybe the most important thing. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.

Daymond John echoed these feelings by Steve Jobs during his Google hangout when answering a student’s question about when he knew he was going to be an entrepreneur. Daymond stated that he believes were were all born thinking like entrepreneurs but society teaches us not to be entrepreneurs by correcting us at an early age and telling us how things are supposed to be or how we’ll embarrass ourselves by failing.

5. The Future of Education is Bright

Mr. McCauley of Davis High School is leading the way by utilizing technology and social media to go beyond the text book and provide his students with a cutting edge education. Social media platforms have allowed him and others to reach out and get in front of celebrities and industry experts like Daymond John. With simple and innovative technology like Google+ hangouts, these celebrities and experts can now quickly and effortlessly communicate with students, fans and anyone else interested.

I’d like to commend Mr. McCauley for going above and beyond for his students and hundreds of others that were able to tune in. I also have much respect for Daymond John who willingly took an hour out of his busy schedule to give back to students who regularly tune in to Shark Tank and look to Daymond and others for advice as they become the next wave of entrepreneurs and Sharks.

The Full Daymond John Google+ Hangout

5 Lessons Learned from Shark Tank's Daymond John at Google+ Hangout Event is a post by SEO expert Bryan Phelps. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

SEO.com was recently invited to take part in a unique event featuring Daymond John from the popular show ‘Shark Tank’ and hundreds of high school students from around the country. Mr. McCauley, an amazing business teacher from Davis High School in Kaysville, Utah, started tweeting Daymond over a year ago to ask the business celebrity to make a guest appearance via Skype for his Entrepreneurship students.

As busy schedules go, nearly a year later, McCauley and Daymond arranged a hangout on Google+ but took it a step further by inviting hundreds of high school business classes to participate. The team at Google+ graciously came through at the last minute to extend the normal 10 person hangout limit so students around the country could participate.

The 45 minute Q&A session between the successful entrepreneur and aspiring high school students left us with several valuable lessons:

1. Fail, Fail and Fail Again

Unknown to many, Daymond John closed down his clothing brand, FUBU, three times in the early days in the early 1990′s. FUBU later went on to become a major pop culture brand and do millions in sales each year. This story is not uncommon to some of the most famous successful brands and entrepreneurs.

From a recent article on FastMoney.com:

Pinterest is one of the fastest-growing websites in history, but struggled for a long time. Pinterest’s CEO recently said that it had “catastrophically small numbers” in its first year after launch and that if he had listened to popular startup advice he probably would have quit.

James Dyson failed in 5,126 prototypes before perfecting his revolutionary vacuum cleaner. Groupon was put on life support and nearly shut down at one point in its meteoric rise.

The ubiquitous WD-40 lubricant got its name because the first 39 experiments failed. WD-40 literally stands for “Water Displacement–40th Attempt.” If they gave up early on like most of us do, we’d sure have a lot more squeaky hinges in the world.

The key to Daymond succeeding after closing his business multiple times was that he kept hustling and kept selling. Daymond recounted the story about him approaching rappers to wear his shirts in their videos and then he’d take the shirt back and go to the next video set. He did this over and over until 3 years later his brand was major success but very few people knew that for many years, he only had 10 shirts.

2. Know Your Numbers, Know Your Business

To an investor like Daymond, nothing is a quicker turn off than being pitched by an entrepreneur who doesn’t know his numbers. If you’ve ever watched Shark Tank, you’ve likely seen the Sharks tear apart entrepreneurs who come unprepared or dodge the important questions.

Knowing your numbers applies at many levels. As an entrepreneur seeking investment, you should obviously be prepared with numbers regarding sales, pending orders, profit, expenses and market opportunity. The same principle applies as an employee of a company or as an agency offering consulting. Knowing your key numbers and key performance indicators is a valuable trait whether you work at one of the greatest SEO companies in the world or are in the early stages of launching one of the next greatest brands.

3. Analysis Paralysis & Common Sense

One thing that really struck me while listening to Daymond was how much gut feel and common sense play into his businesses and investments versus raw analysis of data and numbers. As mentioned earlier, you need to know your numbers but Daymond recommends avoiding analysis paralysis or over analyzing a situation. Sometimes you just need to dig in and get your hands dirty to learn or determine if an opportunity is good.

Daymond also discussed how the Sharks heavily consider the person when they invest, not just the business opportunity. They know that a given business may not work out but putting your money behind a hard working, smart entrepreneur is the safest bet they can make. Daymond, in particular, looks for a “hungry person with a great idea and a lot of desire”.

4. Born to be an Entrepreneur

Entrepreneurship and innovation is something that’s been on many people’s mind since the passing of Steve Jobs. As one of the world’s most innovative thinkers, Steve Jobs lived Apple’s slogan of “Think Different”.

The following quote from an inspiring video of Steve Jobs gives a very revealing look into his mind and how he sees the world of business and innovation.

When you grow up you tend to get told that the world is the way it is and your life is to just live your life inside the world, try not to bash into the walls to much, try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money but that’s a very limited life.

Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact, and that is, everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you … the minute that you understand that you can poke life … that you can change it, you can mold it … that’s maybe the most important thing. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.

Daymond John echoed these feelings by Steve Jobs during his Google hangout when answering a student’s question about when he knew he was going to be an entrepreneur. Daymond stated that he believes were were all born thinking like entrepreneurs but society teaches us not to be entrepreneurs by correcting us at an early age and telling us how things are supposed to be or how we’ll embarrass ourselves by failing.

5. The Future of Education is Bright

Mr. McCauley of Davis High School is leading the way by utilizing technology and social media to go beyond the text book and provide his students with a cutting edge education. Social media platforms have allowed him and others to reach out and get in front of celebrities and industry experts like Daymond John. With simple and innovative technology like Google+ hangouts, these celebrities and experts can now quickly and effortlessly communicate with students, fans and anyone else interested.

I’d like to commend Mr. McCauley for going above and beyond for his students and hundreds of others that were able to tune in. I also have much respect for Daymond John who willingly took an hour out of his busy schedule to give back to students who regularly tune in to Shark Tank and look to Daymond and others for advice as they become the next wave of entrepreneurs and Sharks.

The Full Daymond John Google+ Hangout

5 Lessons Learned from Shark Tank’s Daymond John at Google+ Hangout Event is a post by SEO expert Bryan Phelps. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.