The Google Local Listing has grown in importance more and more in recent time. In many instances, the local 7-pack, consisting on local listings, is appearing at the top of a search results page, above even organic listings. This placement creates huge opportunities for small businesses to gain visibility and traffic on the web.

There are many components that work together to create an optimized, high-ranking listing. One of the key elements of an optimized local listing is the category section Google provides. These categories classify your business according to industry and they can have a profound impact on which searches your listing appears in.

One of the challenges is that it can sometimes be tricky to know how your industry is categorized in the Google Local Business Center.  For example, say you are a lawyer, so you search for lawyer, but you aren’t sure what other synonyms Google might assign to your trade. In order to assist you with discovering the most targeted categories, local search expert Mike Blumenthal has a great tool in beta right now that aggregates all the category options and allows you to see the ones that apply directly to you. Check it out. Google LBC Categories Preview Beta

Simply enter your query in the search box, and a list of all the current Google category options will be on your left, and synonyms to your search term will be displayed on the right.

This tool is very useful to get a quick view of all of the different category choices and to give you new ideas and synonyms you might not have considered before. Utilizing resources like this helps create an optimized listing and achieve that goal of reaching the 7-pack!

Emily Thompson is the Online Marketing Coordinator for Kutenda. Kutenda provides the tools and resources small businesses need to be successful online and grow their business.

*The guest post is by Marita*

Before you simply name a file page1.html, image2.jpg, or some complicated string like a product number, think again. Filenames play a role in SEO, but a good file naming structure also makes it easier for your visitors to save and share links and navigate your website. From a developer’s point of view, having well named files makes it easier to find files and properly structure the hierarchy of the website.

To take advantage of SEO, stay organized, and make it easy for your visitors to enjoy your website, keep the following in mind when creating filenames:

Use keywords in your filenames. Filenames for individual pages become part of the URL and search engines may use the URL to determine relevance in their search results. If you’ve optimized content on a page, then it’s a no-brainer to use the title as the filename, with words separated by hyphens.

The main blogging platforms do this automatically and even Google has recommended to use filenames based on keywords and separated by hyphens. (Hyphens make the URL easier to read by humans and search engines.) You can also try to modify the filename from the title to include variations of a keyword; there may be a difference in how it’s displayed in search results. If you’d like to attract search traffic through image search, be sure to also use your keywords to name your image files, incl. the ALT tag, and the pages they’re displayed on. Image filenames don’t always become part of an URL, depending on your website’s structure, but can still greatly affect usability and SEO of a website.

Use actual words. When web users see links and URLs, they form an idea as to what the page is about and it becomes important to avoid naming files with random methods. For example, if web users are looking for a file about keywords, they are more likely to click on “keywords.html” than they are to click on a file named “200903127789.html”. A good filename is easy to understand and tells visitors what to expect from your webpage.

Avoid the use of special characters. Limit the characters in your filename to lowercase letters a to z, periods, underscores, hyphens and numbers 0 through 9. If you use any other characters, it could cause problems with loading the page. Simply using keywords and avoiding special characters is also beneficial to your SEO efforts. Search engines have been using a combination of URL, title, ALT tags, description and content to find and display results. So taking care to create a useful filenames for your pages and images is an easy way to improve that part of your website’s SEO.

Avoid spaces. For practical purposes using spaces in the filename of your webpage documents is not recommended and usually programs won’t allow it in the first place. Problems arise because the URL will typically be underlined when it is displayed, but it may not be clickable, because the space isn’t recognized as being a part of the URL. In addition, browsers usually require spaces to be encoded as “%20″ or a plus symbol.

Start all of your filenames with lowercase letters. Although the operating system on your computer may not be case sensitive, your web server OS may see things differently. Your computer may interpret “Htmlfile.htm” and “htmlfile.htm” as the same file, whereas a web server would see two separate files. You may also run into trouble using CamelCase (upper and lower case) to name your files.

Shorter is better for filenames. Although you can theoretically use hundreds of characters in your URL, why do it? Keep your filenames to up to about fifty characters: it makes it easier to display them as links, easier to copy and paste (no need for URL shortening), and easier to remember. Having shorter URLs also helps when submitting your URLs to a directory, or aggregator; some will actually have a limit on how many characters your URL may have.

Bottom line: Make it easy for yourself, others working with your website and your visitors and use relevant lowercase keywords separated with hyphens in your pages’ and images’ filenames. Your website won’t only be easy to navigate, share and maintain, but it will also increase traffic to your website.

Marita posts free website tools on RankRaiser.com for anyone interested in designing, marketing and optimizing their own website.

Or maybe you think your website is as perfect as can be - all of your visitors find exactly what they came for.

Regardless of which camp you’re in, your website and blog probably have some form of site search.

Ever take advantage of it using Google Analytics?

If you have site search, but don’t have it set up in your Analytics. It’s relatively easy and you can learn how to do that here.

Once you’ve gathered some data, log in to your Analytics account. Under the Content section, go to Site Search, then Search terms.

If you’re the blogger who needs some inspiration, you’ll hopefully find some here. Maybe you covered the topic in a previous post, but it wasn’t quite what the searcher was looking for. Now you can remedy that.

If you’re in the “my web site is perfect” camp, these keywords might give you a good sense of what people are having trouble finding on your website. Perhaps it’s because the content doesn’t exist (so create it). Maybe the content does exist, but it’s difficult to find (so create a better way to get to it).

Site search terms are a great way to inspire content; but as you can imagine, are also a good way to fix usability issues too.

Nicki Hicks is a Search Engine Marketer at flyte new media, a Web design and Internet Marketing firm in Portland, Maine. Nicki blogs at the Maine SEO Blog, and you can find her on Twitter at @nickihicks

Every affiliate marketing account offers different types of commissions,  order sizes, and may have specific payment thresholds .. so be sure to do your homework

Source: Affiliate Marketing Review Report Card by AceAffiliates.com

After reading a couple of posts on this site and seeing just how worked up people are getting over the whole ‘no-follow’ link business. I thought I would chuck my thoughts into the mixer and try to clear up a few things.

A History

Firstly, the no-follow attribute (it’s not a tag) on links was first introduced back in 2005 by the Big G. They said that if you add rel=”nofollow” to your links then those links “won’t get any credit when we rank websites”. MSN and Yahoo! Quickly jumped onboard and said they would support the new initiative as well.

Even back then there was a level of mis-trust surrounding Google, and so webmasters and SEOs took it upon themselves to test this new ‘no-follow’ theory. Some found that the no-follow attribute did indeed work and sites did not get any power when linked to with no-follow links. Others have since claimed that power is still passed through no-follow links.

There was even speculation over whether Google actually crawled and indexed pages that had only been linked to using no-follow links. Unfortunately, there has never (to the best of knowledge) been extensive research conducted on this topic and certainly no categorical evidence on the matter published on highly-trustworthy sites. Instead, we have been left with much hearsay and speculation about whether no-follow actually works or not.

However, what we have got are indications and hints from the search engines that we can use to piece together some idea of the truth.

Common Sense

Firstly, we can use logic to determine what is in the best interests of the search engines. Spam is a massive problem for them and we know that websites sometimes need to link out to other sites that they don’t necessarily want to pass power to. For example, they might want to warn about a spammy or scammy website, but at the same time not help it rank. Also, many large websites cannot look after every link on the site and so are open to link spam. With this in mind it makes perfect sense for search engines to introduce a method for maintaining clean hyperlinks, but not ‘voting’ for the site being linked to. I’ll also add to this argument that in my experience I have never seen no-follow links pass any power that has gone on to help rankings.

Double-Bluff

There is another argument as well that comes about from Google shooting itself in the foot somewhat. By introducing the no-follow attribute, webmasters and SEOs soon realised that they could use these links to craft the internal power of their sites to make some of their pages more powerful than others (PageRank sculpting). Additionally, some sites starting adopting Black Hole SEO techniques, not linking out to any websites without using no-follow links, thus maintaining all link juice power in the site. The link juice does not leak out, but instead gets recycled internally and arguable increases exponentially, leading to very power websites.

Google obviously did not like the abusing of their very clever link attribute and so Matt Cutts wrote a post about how Google had changed the algorithm so no-follow internal links now wasted link juice. He claimed although no power was passed through them, no-follow links were still including in how many times the power of a page was divided between the links. Incidentally I don’t believe a word of this, but that doesn’t matter, what is more important is what it implied. This move cemented for me that fact that no-follow links do not pass power, otherwise Google would not have bothered telling website owners not to use it.

Crawl & Index?

In terms of whether search engines crawl and index pages that have nothing but no-follow links pointing to them, there are unfortunately not as many clues. However, it is my personally opinion that it does follow those links as Google very nosey and tends to want to know what is going on in every corner of the web. These pages rarely rank though as they have no power to move them up the SERPS. Again, from experience I have seen pages cached that having nothing but no-follow links. Even Google is not definitive on the matter saying “In general, we don’t follow them”, which obviously means that they can and do.

In semi-conclusion then: no-follow links do not pass power, but are crawled and sometimes indexed by Google. I cannot really speak for other the other search engines, but then I’m not sure I care about them.

Duncan is a search specialist who represents a luxury cruises company. Duncan often blogs about internet marking and SEO techniques of past, present and future.

Sure it’s great looking, but who can tell if they can’t find it?

And how about your web site? Are you working hard hard on your web site SEO (search engine optimization) to improve your search engine rankings and conversions, but doing that manually yourself turns out to be too confusing?

There are many online SEO (search engine optimization) applications which can help you analyze and measure your web site’s rankings and conversions potential. Even if nobody knows the exact algorithms that the search engines use, they still can be very helpful if you are not afraid to use your intelligence and common sense.

If you would do a search with search engines to find such kind of applications, which keyphrase would you type in the search engines search box to find them? Please help giving your vote in the poll below.

Web design can be challenging.  For me, the challenge is in not making things too complex and in keeping things simple and clean, which makes the site more user-friendly and a more pleasant experience for visitors.  Here are a few steps to make sure your site is effectively helping you achieve your objectives, while remaining easy to use for your visitors.

Step 1: Keep it simple.

I think it’s tempting, or maybe just our first impulse, to over-complicate things.  Website design is not exempt from that tendency, but if you want to build a site that’s effective (that helps you achieve your goals), simplicity is key.  What is simplicity in web design?  It’s sticking with the basics.  It’s not worrying about being cool or edgy or unique.  I know, we want our websites to stand out, but even though intuitively we might think the opposite is true, simplicity in design, layout, and functionality actually will make them stand out from the crowd.

Step 2: Be painfully obvious.

Another common tendency is to want to name pages, especially navigation links, in a unique way.  Nothing will frustrate your site visitors (or cause them to click away from your site to another more user-friendly one) than making them have to think too much.  If they want to contact you, they’re going to look for the “Contact” link.  If they want to find out more about your products or services, they’re going to look for your “Products and Services” link.  If they want to find out more about you or your company, they’re going to look for your “About” link.  That’s it.  It’s that simple.  Name your pages in an unexpected way will only cause confusion in your site visitors.  It’s going to seem painfully obvious and even boring to you, sure, but you have to ask yourself if you’d prefer to be hip or edgy or if you want your site to be usable and to work for you to meet your objectives.

Important Thing to Note: I’m talking about navigation links here, not the actual full page names.  Those are two separate things.  The links in your navigation should be clear and obvious, but your full page names should be descriptive for search engine optimization purposes.
Step 3: Think in an outline.

Before you dive into building pages and adding content to your site, stop.  Stop and think, “Will this get lost?  Am I building circles and mazes and a sea of pages that lack clear hierarchy?”  You want to think in terms of an obvious outline.

• Home
• About

• • Our Mission
  • Our Team

• • • CEO/Founder

• Services
• Blog
• Contact

Plan out your site in a clear outline.  Do your planning on paper first so that you see the clarity (or lack of) in the hierarchy of your site.  If you dive in and immediately get to work on the home page (our first impulse), you’ll end up with a jumbled mess that’s confusing, both to you and to your site visitors.

Step 4: Don’t overcrowd or clutter.

Sometimes you have to put all the content (images, text/copy, lists, etc.) that you hope to have on a page up before you can see how it’s going to stack up visually.  It’s kind of like arranging a room in your house.  You can’t know how you’re going to position the furniture or how cluttered the room will ultimately feel until you try to put everything into the room.  Once you have everything in there, you can see, “No, it’s too cluttered in here.  I can’t even walk without bumping into things.  Something’s gotta go.”  The same is true with your web pages.  Less is generally more.  You want empty space and room to move around.  Once you have all the content up, expect to cut it by at least 15%.  You want to have enough visual breathing space for the most important things to stand out, and you definitely don’t want to overwhelm your visitors.

Many times, our naturally impulse is to lean toward complexity, and that can be counter-productive in web design.  If you want your site to help you achieve your end goals, you have to keep things simple and usable for your site visitors.

Amber Singleton Riviere is the founder of Upstart Smart, a resource for small business owners, as well as the Rock Your Genius radio show, which focuses on small business and entrepreneurship.  She also runs the Give Back Project, a web design and marketing firm, and writes for websites like Web Worker Daily on topics relevant to small business owners.  You can find out about all of Amber’s work by visiting AmberSingleton.com .

External hyperlinks are great for SEO, but it’s the internal variety that you can manipulate to your heart’s content and optimise for search engines. Given this level of control you have over your own links, are you sure they are working as hard as they can be for you? If they aren’t complying to the advice below, then chances are they are slacking and need to be given 100 push-ups right now!

Keywords in Anchor Text

This might seem like an obvious one for some people, but you would be amazed just how many sites don’t think to include keywords in their internal links. This one of the major factors that search engines look at when trying to determine what a page is all about, so as long as you are not compromising on usability, you should get those keywords in your links. For example, let’s say you have a site offering corporate hospitality that covers all the major sporting events. Rather than link to the Superbowl page with the text “Superbowl”, it would probably be much better for you to use the term “Superbowl hospitality”, or “Superbowl corporate hospitality”. Don’t go crazy though and starting linking to your homepage using the term “corporate hospitality events” or “premium client entertaining” etc, as this will just start to confuse users.

Important Links Moved Up The Source Order

Many people don’t think to move their most important internal links up the order in the source code. Search engines tend to crawl the links at the top of the page first, so it stands to reason that the first elements should be the most important ones. Let’s say for example your category page links appear in the source code below your ‘about us’, ‘contact us’, ‘RSS’, ‘settings’ links etc. Whist these may be important to users, it is unlikely you want to pass power to these pages for ranking purposes and so you can move them down the source order. There is no need to change the look of the page, just use JavaScript to move elements about. Matt Cutts even hints at the fact links found in different parts of a page might be treated differently by Google:

Text Links Above Images

Tying into the idea above, when linking out to the same place twice or more from a single page, always put your most valuable link first in the source order, as this will be one search engines pay attention to. By ‘most valuable’ I mean most search engine friendly, which is often a key-worded text link. This is most often a problem for ecommerce sites as displayed by the product screen shot below.

Here there are 3 links all going to the same product page. First is the image link, second the product title link and third the price also links to the product page. On this occasion the image link appears first in the source code and is likely to be the one that search engines crawl. However, we really want search engines to look at the keywords in the product title text link, so it would be more beneficial to move this above the image link in the source code.

Links Limited to Around 100 Per Page

It is has been stated in the Google Webmaster guidelines for a long time now that you should limited the amount of links (internal or external) to around 100 per page. The reasoning for this suggestion has changed a little however since it first appeared in the guidelines. Originally, Google’s crawlers could only index around 100k of a webpage, which they roughly equated would be around 100 links. However, as Google has become more power they can index far greater amounts of data.

The argument they give for still including the 100 link rule in their suggestions is a usability one. They say that people don’t like pages full of links and it is more ‘user-friendly’ to break the links up into separate pages. There is however clear SEO benefits to keeping the number relatively low as otherwise the link power of the page will be diluted too much. Roughly speaking, the link juice of a page gets divided by the number of links heading out from it. Therefore, if you have 1000 links on page, each of those linked to pages will receive very little (relative) power indeed. It is usually advisable to try and spread links over more pages or better yet categorise them onto strong, stand-alone pages to improve user and search engine friendliness.

Duncan is an online marketing expert at a Sussex-based SEO company. He blogs about topics from social media to link building and content optimisation.

I like to think that I have become a more passive and accepting internet user over the years. Perhaps this is because I no longer have to wait ten minutes to upload an image and web pages load as fast as my brain works (sometimes even faster). I have not however lost my contempt for people trying to get one over on me or make me do things I don’t want to do.

I remember back in the day, the first time I opened a .exe file from a friendly email, only to get a huge phone bill through the post a couple of weeks later saying my computer had been ‘dialling’ out to Delhi every five minutes for the last fortnight. I was soon after introduced to virus and malware protection and coupled with my cable internet connection I again felt safe to roam the streets of the information super highway once again. I think I even reached a state of browsing zen for a couple of days, until I found my first pop-up that is.

These intensely infuriating, invasive creations of Beelzebub get in the way of what I am trying to do and serve only to make me hate the website I am on and the product or service being advertised more than I hate my mother-in-law. I do have pop-up blockers but the tenacious critters still frequently find their way through. For me they fly right in the face (literarily) of what the internet and usability is all about. When I visit a website I expect every part of it to earn its place in my consciousness, and if it doesn’t, then either it is not important or the site has not been built properly. If I want to go to the ‘kitchen accessories’ section of the website I will look around for a link that I interpret to be the right path and follow it, likewise with the DVD and underwear sections respectively. I do not want to be told however that “I MUST CHECK THE BOOK SECTION NOW!!” Or “VISIT THIS VIAGRA SITE….NOW!”

Pop-up ads are not good for website image and do not work for advertisers. But don’t just take my word for it; there are Many reports that show pop-ups are just about the worst thing you can get involved with. There are so many alternative methods for merchants to market their website, and myriad different options that help site owners to earn a few extra bucks. There is no need to encourage people to imbed their fists in their computer screens by popping up, under, sideways or any other way for that matter.

Duncan is an SEO and online marketing expert who represents a Las Vegas holidays company. He believes there are much better ways to promote websites than forcing them down people’s throats.

If you have been in the internet marketing game for any length of time, chances are that you have run up against a highly-ranked Wikipedia page in your search vertical. SEO is no exception.

Not only does Wikipedia have the first two spots, but it also has a “Show more results from the wiki” underneath its listing. Of course, Wikipedia has major domain authority with 82 million inbound links, and it even outranks Google’s own SEO page.

Compared to some of the other pages in the search result, the two Wikipedia pages featured have less external backlinks. As a matter of fact, six of the other listings on the first page have many more inbound links to their pages. Also, listings on the second page of search results have many more inbound links.

It would be practically impossible to replicate Wikipedia’s domain authority. However, what is not difficult to replicate is how Wikipedia wields its authority.  Within every page on Wikipedia where “SEO” or “Search Engine Optimization” is mentioned, it links to its own internal page about the subject.

A site search of Wikipedia (site: Wikipedia.org search engine optimization) produces 62,800 results. Many of these pages link to our top two search results.

Wikipedia does not rely on a huge side or header navigation to give users the ability to drill down to their topic of interest. It only links to itself from within the main content section of the site. Links from the main content sections are much more valuable and pass more authority to the receiving pages than headers or side navigations.

By implementing a similar strategy within your own website or blog, you can boost search rankings without completely depending on offsite link building tactics.

Implementation Tips

The home page is usually the most authoritative page on a site. Linking to important pages from the content section will boost their rankings. Blogs naturally do this with the most recent posts, but most static sites do not use this tactic.

Hide important header and sidebar links from the search engines on the home page of a site with javascript or an iframe since only one link and anchor text will be counted. Now, link to the important pages of your site from inside of the main copy and unlock all of the real authority that your homepage carries.

Automation is obviously the easiest way to use this tactic unless you have millions of users ready to edit your content. I use a plugin that automatically links to a page of my choice every time a keyword is used in the text of my blog. It’s much easier than doing it manually.

Some have said that one drawback to using this tactic is that pages become diluted and users find the links confusing, and may jump out of a conversion funnel. Testing should be done on a case by case scenario; however, it does not seem to have hurt Wikipedia’s user base.

Jason Capshaw is founder of an Atlanta Web Design and SEO services company. He lives with his wife and two children in Hampton, GA.