The EQ Journal Blog

Optimizing for Google and Google Maps
By Steve Hampton, Guest Contributor, Search Marketing Specialist – BIGLocal.ca

Introduction

Search engine optimization (SEO) is perhaps one of the fastest growing buzz terms in the business community.

Slowly (and I do mean slowly), Canadian businesses are realizing that consumers have, in general, replaced that notorious, bulky 1,000 page yellow directory with a much more efficient search engine when they are researching a product, service or business.

While SEO is a specialized area of expertise, there is a major distinction you need to be aware of if you are looking to “put your business on the map”.

That distinction is that Google has VERY different algorithms for their organic results (their main search engine product) and their local/maps results (“Local Business Results”).

Depending on your business goals, you will need to adapt different strategies to achieve a page-one result on either of Google’s search engines (SERP’s).

Organic SEO Factors

The first distinction is that there are “On-Site SEO” and “Off-Site SEO”.

While there’s no accurate way to tell, experts suggest that approximately 85% of the weighting Google uses to determine its rankings is attributed to Off-Site SEO.

Let’s look at some of the main areas of Off-Site SEO…

One-Way Links: A one-way link is a link to your site from another site, where you do NOT link back to their site.

Google’s culture can be summed up in one-word: Democratic. Google’s algorithm is setup to allow people to decide what’s relevant & what’s important.

Think of a one-way link as a popularity vote. Every time you go to their search engine and perform a search, the algorithm goes out and “asks” the internet to vote on the most relevant sources of information.

But Google doesn’t take every vote at face value. Google also looks at “Who” is casting the vote – and will give priority to the “most popular”., in their own right.

This means, if you want to make your one-way links count, you need to get them from popular websites with high page-rankings (essentially Google’s “Popularity Meter” – the higher the PM, the more weight that link gets).

Two-Way Links: The difference between a one-way link and a two-way link is reciprocation. If you are being linked to by a site in which your website links back to them, this is a two-way link.

Two-way links are important for SEO. However they do not hold the same weight that a one-way link does.

Anchor Text: Having another website link to you is important. Almost as important is how that link is worded. The wording of the link is called “Anchor Text.”

Here’s an example:

Poor Anchor Text: To Visit xyz.com, click here.

Strong Anchor text: If you are in need of a widget, visit xyzwidgets.com – they are the top supplier of widgets.

The difference between the two as you can see is that important keywords (if your business is selling widgets) are anchoring the link in our “Strong” example.

Whenever you are setting up links with partners, ensure that the right keywords are strategically placed within that link.

Click-Through-Rate: Staying with Google’s democratic philosophy, Click-Through-Rate (CTR) percentages are another important factor when their search engine ranks your webpage’s relevancy.

CTR% measures the percentage of people that click on your link. (For example, if 100 people see your link, and 10 click through then your CTR% = 10%.)

Google believes that if a link exists and people click on it at an aggressive rate, then that information must be relevant information that people WANT to read. Furthermore, if Google displays 10 results, and one of them receives significantly more clicks than the rest, then Google will bump up that particular result.

Online Presence: With the anticipated release of Google Caffeine (Google’s codename for their improved search algorithm), your businesses online presence within social media has become an even more important factor being ranked.

Facebook, Twitter, Yelp and others have become important eco-systems to help your business survive.

Diversity of Links: Google also weights the variety of websites that are linking to your site/page. Having lots of links, from lots of different sources is an important off-site SEO factor.

Negative/Spam Techniques: One of the easiest ways to sabotage your business these days is to try to “scam” your way into results. While there are a variety of “black-hat” tricks out there, getting caught doing just one of them (accidental or not) can get your site a lifetime ban in their search engine.

It’s critically important to only take part in ethical SEO practices. This is one major reason why organizations have opted to hire SEO specialists, since it can be easy to have your site barred by accident.

There are several other factors to off-site SEO that have slight effects on rankings. Typically these factors “take care of themselves” if you follow best practices described above.

The other side to organic SEO is on-site SEO best practices.
Let’s take a minute to look at the most important on-site SEO tasks you can use to boost your website ‘s ranking in SERP’s.

Keyword In Body Text: In order for search engines to even consider your web page as relevant, the body of the page (the content) needs to be relevant to the search term a searcher uses. While there’s no magic number in terms of how often the keyword appears on the page, experts agree that 2-3% keyword density is a great place to start.

It has also been shown that content on the top of the page (especially the top-left of the page) is given the most weight.

You can further increase the importance of your keywords by putting them in bold or italics (but if you go overboard with this, you’ll just get yourself black-listed – once-twice is plenty.)

Just like in off-site SEO, negative, or black-hat tactics will get your page penalized instead of ranked, so having the keyword appear 10 or 20% of the time is NOT a best practice.

The best way to ensure your page is relevant is to simply write passionately about the topic, and allow the keywords to find themselves in the copy. When reading over what you’ve written, you may find some practical places to include a keyword, in which case do it. If you follow this formula, your page will be deemed relevant by Google – which is the first step in getting on the top of results.

Other Important Places For The Keyword To Appear:

Along with having your targeted keyword in the body of the page, there are several other places the search engine looks when determining what your web page is about.

Header Tags: These are the titles and sub-titles within your page.

Title Tag: This is the title to the page (E.g. www.YourSite.com/Page-Title.html). Noticed I used a dash to separate each word in the page title. This is the only way you can ensure Google can read each word. For the most part, the algorithm has a hard time deciphering things like www.mysite.com/thisismypagetitle.html

Meta Tags (keyword & description tags): At the top of the page (in your HTML code), there is a spot available for you to include keywords that sum up what the page is about. Keep in mind that Google and other search engines have gone on record to say they no longer use meta tags in ranking pages,. However, many search engines still rely on meta tags, and there’s still no conclusive evidence that Google doesn’t use meta tags in some capacity.

Navigation Links: Nav links are the links that allow people to visit each of the pages on your site. It’s important to at least theme those link titles to your sites content. For example, consider modifying “Contact US” to “Contact the Widget Experts”.

Alt-Tags: As you can imagine, a search engine is unable to “read” pictures/images. That’s why there are alt-tags. An Alt-tag is a description of the image you are showing on the page. Google relies pretty heavily on these alt-tags to determine what the page and image is about. Instead of labelling a picture “Picture of me”, try instead to label it “XYZ Widgets Expert, John Smith”.

Domain Name: The domain name is still used to weight results by a search engine. It may not be quite as important as it was, say, in 2003, but it is still used. In some of the longer tail keywords (key phrases with more than 3 words in it), having the exact key phrase as your domain name is enough to put you in the number one spot! This is pretty rare, and I wouldn’t use it as my number one SEO strategy; however, it is a good thing to do in a well-rounded SEO plan.

The domain name’s age also plays a small role in ranking the site.

On-Site SEO isn’t all about having keywords in the right place. While keywords are essential to having the search engine consider your content in the first place, there are several other on-site factors the search engine algorithm uses to determine your webpage’s ranking in the SERP’s.

Ensure your SEO strategy addresses these areas as well.

In-Page Links: Having lots of links in your copy is a great way to boost your rankings. In case you haven’t noticed, Wikipedia has secured the top spot for literally hundreds of thousands of keywords. If you look at the elements of a Wikipedia page, you’ll see that throughout the body of every page are dozens of links offering users further information on the subject. Try to emulate this best practice in your own web pages.

Account Structure: It’s important that Google’s spider (the program that crawls across the web, indexing everything) can actually find all your pages. This means having a clean, logical account structure throughout your site. You can also help the search engine by submitting a site map that includes links to all your sites content.

URL type: Some of you may be using dynamic URL’s (URL’s that change themselves based on the search term used) in your site. Google’s crawler (spider) doesn’t index these URL’s as often as they used to, because many spammers are setting them up in a way that they have infinite URL’s, which as you can imagine overloads the spider while indexing. It is much better to have static html URL`s (URL`s that stay the same all the time).

Site Updates: If you build a site, and then never update it, you might as well forget about the search engines as a means for generating customers. Search engines look very heavily at how often the site is updated, as well as the amount of content/pages within the site.

Daily updates are ideal; however, at a minimum, you should be updating your site on a weekly basis. This doesn’t necessarily always have to be new pages (although that is best), it could be that you update information you previously posted on your site to freshen it up, or update it based on new developments.

Leaving a site stagnant is the worst thing you can do in SEO (besides getting yourself banned for black-hat tricks).

Web page load time: Speed is an essential part of the “new Internet”. A large reason for Google’s success has been the speed with which it has been able to return results. Google founders, Larry Page & Sergei Brin have been obsessive about load times for their results, and that philosophy has moved into the algorithm’s ranking strategy. We all want a fast experience as an Internet user. Ensure your pages load quickly. Things like java & outside hosted images as well as video can cause slow load times.

Domain Name Length: Having a domain name like, www.mywidgetsarethebestwidgetsintheworld.com is an easy way to have your site ignored (or simply ranked on page 248). Short precise domain names are looked at as professional by search engines, and will at least get you a seat at the table during a keyword ranking.

Domain Name Type: .org .edu & .com are among the best weighted domain names. All things being equal, if a search engine needed to rank mysite.com, mysite.net & mysite.tv – they would likely be ranked in that order.

Server Reliability/Uptime: If the crawler finds that the server returns an error more than 0.2% of the time, your site will be penalized in the rankings. Ensure you are hosting your site on a reliable server that guarantees 99.9% up-time.

Content Uniqueness: Google (and other search engines) rely on engineers who can “cut the fat” out of the indexing process. One way they have managed to do this is by refusing to index pages that have duplicate content. If your page includes content that was copied and pasted from another source, the original source will be indexed as normal, but your page will not.

Amount of Content: For indexing purposes, the more content the better. Having said that, it’s been proven in multiple tests I’ve been a part of, that less content generally means more sales. This means, you have a decision to make when creating a page on your site, which is; do you want to design a page that will sell products/services, or do you want to design a page that is ideal for researching a product or service, for a later purchase.

Mis-Spellings & Grammatical Errors: If your page includes multiple spelling errors, or sentences that don’t make sense, the algorithm will identify them, and penalize your ranking.

Use of “Robot.txt File”: A Robot.txt file is a simple text file that tells the spider what pages you don’t want indexed. While this file may not always be necessary, having the page there shows the search engine you know a thing or two about web site creation, and therefore they will give your site a slight bump in rankings.

Age of site: The age of the site is used in determining the rankings. The reason behind this is that the majority of websites created are abandoned by their owners within the first 6-months. To weed out abandoned sites, Google typically ranks older sites first.

Trust Factors: There are several things Google looks for when determining the trustworthiness of your site. Things such as a privacy policy, terms of service, and badges from eTrust/Hackersafe are important factors for the area of trust.

Popularity of Website: Things such as number of unique visitors, length of time on site, and bounce rate are looked at when determining your site’s popularity.

While this list may look like a pretty exhaustive one, there are a reported 200+ main factors in the Google algorithm! Obviously, when you look at all the sub-sets of those 200 factors, you can be looking at tens of thousands of factors that go into ranking the world’s webpages for each individual keyword searched in search engines.

Having said that, if you can focus on the areas listed above you will have a clear advantage in your market.

Local Business Listing SEO

The algorithms used to determine organic results and the “Local Business Listing” are very different.

Most of the organic results best practices I’ve listed above will go 80% of the way to helping your business being ranked on page one of the Local Business Listing search results (i.e., in Google Maps). Simply by adding the geographic region you want to target in your keyword (e.g. Organic Keyword: Widgets – LBL Keyword: Widgets Ottawa, Ontario), you are there.

But there are several additional, VERY important factors in getting your results ranked on the first page of a Google Map search.

Again, there are both off-site & on-site factors used in determining your LBL ranking.

Off-site factors – Local:

Local Directories: Possibly the single most important factor for being ranked at the top of local results is having a strong presence in local directories. For Canadian businesses, look to be included in the Internet Yellow Pages, Canada411.ca, wcities.com, where.ca, ziplocal.com and yelp.ca. Speculation is that directories published by the Better Business Bureau and your local Chamber of Commerce are also used by Google’s local algorithm; however, there’s no conclusive evidence.

Restaurants, hotels & other tourist related businesses should also look to be included in TripAdvisor, VirtualTourist, IgoUgo & restaurant.ca.

Google Local Business Center: Google has begun creating “Place Pages” where information about your business is listed in a webpage format for users of local business listings. These pages exist for most businesses whether you do anything or not. Business owners are able to claim their place page, and include all the important information about their businesses. An essential first step in optimizing for local results is to claim your company’s places page, and update it until the status shows 100% updated. This means adding images, hours of operation, videos, etc.

Google Local Business Center Reviews: The user reviews section of the Place pages has proven to be a very important factor in ranking local results. There’s some great ways to get customers to review your business through Google including running a contest, or asking them to review it on your in-store computer immediately after helping them with something. You can also give away a free gift if they print off their review and bring it in.

Geographic Location: The dynamic part of local results is that Google will boost or drop your rank based on where you are relative to the searcher’s location (and yes – Google knows where you are when you search on their search engine – at least for most of you).
Local News: Having your business mentioned in a local news story is a great way to boost your local business ranking. A very well known local blog mention can also help.

Paid Search: This is perhaps one of the most controversial subjects; whether or not advertising in paid search (using local keywords) affects your rankings in the LBLs. My own personal research has shown than it does help, but if you search around, you’ll find there`s as much evidence to suggest it does not.

Local Groups & Social Media: The Internet has turned social. Twitter, Facebook, Yelp, Digg & other sites/services are looked at very heavily by search engines when determining local results. They look at where your circle lives geographically, how many people reference your business locally, and several other factors that suggest your local presence is prominent. Make sure to put your business in ALL of these social eco-systems, and remain active within them.

Updated WHOIS Information: If your WHOIS information is from a different geographic region than you are trying to rank for, it will have a negative impact on your LBL. If, however, the owner of your domain name is local to the area you are targeting, make sure the information is not hidden, and is fully updated to correspond to the contact info on your site and on your outside directory listings.

You can use the on-site SEO list for organic ranking to boost your local business listing by simply adding the geographic region to the keywords you’re looking to rank for. Local rankings also include several other important factors that would not be factored into organic rankings.

Here’s a list of the most important on-site SEO factors for local business listings:

Address & Phone Number: If you want to rank well for your geographic region you can’t simply have your contact information on a single page in your web site. It’s essential to have your phone number & address prominently displayed on every page on your site. The most traditional place for your phone number is on the right hand side of your header. Your address can be placed on the bottom of each page.

Also – 800 numbers have been proven to negatively affect your local ranking! Ensure that you have a local number listed.

Keywords to Match LBC Categories: When claiming your Google Local Business Listing, you are able to place your business in up to 5 categories. To boost your ranking within those categories, ensure the name of each category is within your site (without being “spammy”).
Google Map-Widget: Google has an easy to place map widget that allows you to place a map on your site with your address pinned to it. For best results, place this map on every page of your site (typically in the left or right column).

Links to Local Information: If you have the opportunity, place links to local sources of information within the content of your page(s). For example, if you’re talking about widgets and your local newspaper has a great article on the subject, reference & link to it in your page copy.
HCard: Many of you are familiar with VCard’s (Microsoft Outlook’s Virtual Business Card File Format). Perhaps less well known is the HTML version of these, called “HCard’s”. This helps the search engine’s spider find your contact information, as it is formatted in a clear, concise way that the spider recognizes right away.

KML File: A KML file is basically an XML file that is formatted for Google Maps/Earth. It allows you to place custom information in Google Maps/Earth where your business is. You can submit this file as well as include it in the structure of your website.

Conclusion

Canadian businesses, in general, have a lot of work to do to get up to speed in the area of Internet marketing. With a majority of people professing to using search engines exclusively to make purchasing decisions in virtually every vertical, there’s no excuse for prioritizing things like flyer delivery, and telemarketing above search engine marketing.

If while looking over this list you begin to feel overwhelmed, just remember that you don’t need to do everything all at once, and you don’t need to be perfect every time. Keep at it, and if you ever feel overwhelmed just remember that what you are actually doing is improving your customer service. They rely on search engines as their primary source of information, and it’s up to you to ensure they get the information they want.

To Your Success!

By Steve Hampton, search marketing specialist – BIGLocal.ca

BIGLocal is a full service search engine marketing agency based in Canada’s Capital, Ottawa, Ontario. BIGLocal specializes in pay per click search marketing, and guarantees to place your business on the front page of Google & every other major search engine every time a potential customer searches for your product, your service or your business. You can reach BIGLocal by calling (613) 424-3867 or visiting biglocal.ca.