The recent addition of a dashboard highlighted Google’s commitment to local search and it’s ever increasing importance.

The screenshot below is from a short article I wrote on the adding your business to Local Business center.

It shows a search for the term ‘wedding photographer in Belfast’, with the 10 pack, 10 listings labeled A – J next to a map. Google has decided in their wisdom to cull this down to a 7 pack. The second screenshot below now shows a search for the same term with a 7 pack, 7 listings.

So what difference does this make?

• It’s less cluttered looking
• Getting listed in the 7 pack obviously becomes more competitive

If you had a listing that appeared at number 8 – 10, your listing will now have disappeared and banished from a potentially very profitable position on the front page of Google.

So why has Google made this change?

Unfortunately for organic SEO’s I doubt that Google has decided to reassert the priority of the free, organic and traditional search results that is was built on. Arguably, the reason is that Google is set to introduce Google Local Listings Ads that will offer local pay per placement ads targetted at local business. A less cluttered 7 pack certainly frees up space for these locally targeted ads and at the same time will generate additional revenue for the money making juggernaut that Google is.

Local Listings Ad Video Promotion

So what are Local Listings Ads and how do they work:

• Targetted ads that display when users search for businesses like yours in your area.
• Add your business to Google’s Local Business Center
• Pay a flat fee based on your location and business category
• Receive a full report on the no of clicks and more
• Appear at the top of Google search results and Google Maps
• Free call tracking to include the message ‘This caller brought to you by Google’
• First 30 days free

Local Listing Ads look like a dumbed down version of Pay Per Click, no campaign set up and management, just a fairly straightforward process that most businesses should understand. The simple pay per placement model should also help Google target online competitors such as Yell. A free 1 month trial won’t do the uptake figures any harm either.

For an SEO, a one strand organic listings campaign for a local business just doesn’t and won’t cut the mustard any more. Businesses can’t ignore Pay Per Click and Local Search. Add Local Listing Ads to the mix when it is eventually rolled out here.

Matt Cutt’s talks about the Canonical Link Element in the following video and blogged about it here.

So how does Google treat Canonical Mistakes?

In Matt’s video he mentions that the presence of the Canonical Link Element in the page’s code is a strong hint as to whether or not a url should be indexed or not. If a webmaster accidentally makes a mistake then, Matt says ‘we don’t promise we will abide by this 100%’ and Google reserves the ‘right to do what we think best’ for the user. So if Google thinks there’s been a mistake, that a webmaster has accidentally messed up, the page(s) may still be indexed.

So here’s how the 3 engines treated a Canonical ‘Shoot yourself in the Foot’ Mistake.

• Website with 30 pages of content, the canonical element with http://www.thewebaddress.com/ inserted into a header so that it was on every page of the site.
• Every page had quality and unique content with images. The site had unique titles and meta descriptions.
• There was a standard navigation and good internal linkage.
• The site had links and page rank.

So what happened?

Google clearly didn’t realise that this was a mistake , it only indexed 1 page, the homepage that had the canonical url in place. Google continually crawled the site over a 2-3 month period but only indexed the homepage. Yahoo and Bing indexed all 30 or so pages. After a while I got bored, when I realised Google wasn’t going to figure this out itself and removed the canonical element and the site’s pages got indexed.

If you haven’t signed up for a Local Business Account now’s the time to go ahead and do it. If you’ve already got an account log in and you’ll see a ‘view report’ link. Just click on the link and you’ll see the dashboard.

You’ll notice 2 timeline graphs under the heading Activity. The first timeline relates to the number of Impressions and the second relates to the number of Actions.

Impressions refer to the number of times your business appeared as a search result on Google Search or Google maps irrespective of whether a user clicked through to your website.

Actions refer to how many times users interacted with your listing in the time frame which you can specify. This number includes the amount of times the user clicked more information button, or they clicked through to your site or requested driving directions.

Below the timelines you’ll see a breakdown for the actions.

Below that is the top keyword terms that people used to find your website, along with the amount of impressions.

You can also get the Zip/Post codes where driving direction requests came from.

I’ve blogged about the increasing importance of local search before and this new dashboard only underpins the importance that Google is attaching to local search. Looking at stats from various campaigns that I’m running Local Search certainly drives traffic, and is a quick way to get listed on the front page of Google. Only Pay Per Click is comparable in terms of the speed but it costs.

So in a nutshell, what information does it tell you?

1. What people searched for
2. The number of times the business listing appeared as a result on a Google search or Google Maps search in a given period
3. The number of visits to your site
4. The number of requests for directions to your business and where they came from

What it doesn’t tell you?

It doesn’t tell you the regional terms that people searched for. Did someone search for web design Belfast, Malone Road, Lisburn Road or Northern Ireland.

The dashboard although valuable is pretty basic and easy to understand. No one could accuse it of being over complicated or difficult to understand. It certainly lacks the information that Google Analytics provides.

The dashboard sits on it’s own, maybe it could be integrated into Google Analytics at some stage.

I guess this is aimed at local business owners to attract them to Google’s search products and no doubt entice them into Adwords or at some stage to charge them for a local listing once they see the benefits of it.

It would also be nice to see how many times people click on the reviews link.

Learn more about your Geographic Market

The dashboard can also give you an insight into where your customers come from. If you can see that your customers come from within a certain radius then you can tailor your marketing to that area whether it’s local, regional or national. This might be fairly straightforward for a business such as a pizza takeaway, but for other businesses including my own web design business it can certainly help you decide your geographic market and where to pump the advertising spend based on how far people are prepared to travel for your services.

All in all it’s another valuable reporting tool. Although basic for the most part, no doubt over time it’ll become more powerful, with new features, stats and analytics and blossom like Google Webmaster Tools has.

According to this article on Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nofollow and an old article that I quickly dug up here www.searchenginejournal.com Google won’t index a page through the no follow attribute.

So when I posted a blog comment on a popular no follow blog and decided to enter the new website in the optional website textbox, a few days later the site was indexed in Google and Yahoo. The only link to the site is through the blog which Yahoo site explorer also shows up.

So I guess Google does indeed index no followed links.

Well here’s a before and after case study that might just help you make your mind up. It’s only a short time frame comparison but it was significant so I thought I’d post it.

I recently finished working on a site and while playing about with Google analytics noticed a big difference in bounce rates and some of the other metrics such as time spent on the site. For those of you that don’t know what a bounce, a bounce happens when a visitor leaves a site without visiting any other pages.

High Bounce rates aren’t always a sure fire sign that the content isn’t what the user is looking for. I have one or two personal coding information sites, where the user just comes grabs the code snippet and away they go. For the site in question though, a guesthouse website, the high bounce rate off the homepage was worrying. Users weren’t checking the accommodation and availability pages, nor the local attractions so there was no chance the site would attract bookings.

First of all here’s the stats from Google Analytics.

The stats compare July 6th – July 7th v June 15 – June 16th, Monday and Tuesday.

The stats are quite staggering. Before the redesign the bounce rate was as high as 71%. Most people that visited the site, came and went with the home page being the only page that they viewed before exiting. The time on the site went from 58 seconds to nearly 4 minutes, and pages per visit went from 1 to nearly 7.

The bounce rate went down to 20%, which is a decrease of over 70%. A 20% bounce rate is very good, there’s always going to be a certain percentage that stumble across the site so you’ll never get a 0% rate. Digging down into the stats amazingly no body checked the accomodation page or the availability pages.

Ok so here’s a screenshot of the before and after, and you’ll see the issues straightaway. It doesn’t take a genuis to work this out.

Before Screenshot

After Screenshot

The difference between the two:

• The new design clearly enhances the business, the old colours are just too much
• The new layout is pretty standard, it’s easy to navigate, with the pages labelled well
• The images are now attractive, inviting, good quality with a stunning flash showcase
• Internal linkage is better as opposed to non-existant
• The content is better presented, it’s more readable and scannable and there’s more of it
• There are clear calls to action including the check availability button

I’ve no doubt that the conversion rates and bookings will go up dramatically and that the stats would be fairly similar over a longer period of time. What this says to me is that the investment in a professional looking design is well worth it. Design matters alot.

It’s also important to get the site working before going out and promoting it. All the traffic in the world, and the investment that goes with that whether it’s PPC, SEO, email marketing or offline marketing wouldn’t work on the site the way it was.

It’s also easy for website and business owners to check their stats package, if you have Google Analytics installed even a quick glance at the dashboard will help you determine whether your site is performing or not, you don’t need to be well versed in Google Analytics.

Before Google’s advertising program ‘Adwords’ appeared on the scene, creating a Google friendly website and targeting the free organic listing was the only option. In stepped Adwords, this offered businesses the opportunity for a page 1 ranking in no time at all, albeit a paid option.

(The adwords listings appear in the red boxes, the organic listings in the Google box)

Now Adwords management companies can deliver first page results and plenty offer a great service in doing so.

However over the last couple of years I’ve spoken to quite a few people and clients that have been offered Adwords management and 1st page rankings from companies claiming they are somehow associated with Google, and are authorised Adwords resellers when clearly they aren’t. The sales pitch is misleading and the service that they offer although it sounds like a great deal isn’t quite as good as it seems.

The pitch usually includes:

1. First page on Google permanently over the duration of the contract

2. Unlimited clicks for the traffic that will go through your website

3. 24 hour, 7 days a week listing.

4. Buy in bulk keyword offers

Number 4 is a falsehood, and if you’ve a daily budget then the others are clearly untrue as well.

I was recently speaking with someone who ran a campaign with one of these companies.

He was originally offered 5 keywords for £99 pounds for the 1st month and a small set-up fee of £30. For good measure an additional keyword was thrown in and the set-up fee waived.

The cost of the clicks came out of the £99, which was a nice sweetener. But hold on isn’t there an obvious conflict of interests here? the less clicks you have the more money they make.

The keywords were also very low competition and the number of search also very low.

I had a look at the report and what’s interesting is that atleast 4 of the keywords were pure rubbish, not just long tail keyword but non-existant terms that would never drive more than a couple of people to the site over the course of a year. The 2 major keywords according to Google estimates could be in position 1-3 for 4p, and with only 4 or 5 ads showing for those terms a top 3 placement isn’t going to break the bank. In fact if there was more than a few pounds of traffic through the pay per click adwords I’d be absolutely amazed.

When I had a look at the report, I noticed that nowhere does it mention clicks, it actually mentions impressions!

In the print in the email with the report it states ‘Impressions are the number of people that have actually seen your advert in google.co.uk’.

So when someone does a search on one of those 5/6 keyword terms that counts as an impression even though there’s no click thru to the site. It’s all bull.

With impressions for the month just over 100, even with a click thru rate of 5% that’s 5 clicks. Looking at Google Analytics for the main term and the only one that has a change of driving any traffic at all there was just 5 clicks, and the time spent on the website was minimal.

The report also noted that the terms were exact match, and that extensive keyword research had been conducted (ha ha).

It sounds like a good deal to an unsuspecting client but it’s Limited Adwords without the keyword research, campaign management and accountability.

I understand that for a £99 pound Adwords campaign the company can’t promise the earth, and that they have their costs, but atleast some amount of honesty and visibility might not be too much to ask for. The value the client was getting was also very poor.

You can find a list of authorised Google Adwords Resellers here.

Interestingly when you conduct a search on the name of one of these companies a listing comes up for from Google to ‘use an authorised’ reseller.

Obviously it’s the building blocks rather than a very comprehensive report with all the trade secrets thrown in, but there are plenty of suggestions here for Doon to get to work on.

The site in question is www.kissweddingmovies.com

On-Site

The first set of suggestions are related to On-Site SEO, in simple layman’s terms that’s everything to do with the structure, coding and set up of the site.

Page Titles

The Page Title on the Homepage is very short (you can see the page title highlighted), it’s ‘Wedding Video Northern Ireland’.

I would target 2 keyword terms, I would look for a secondary term that compliments the main term. For instance ‘Wedding Video Northern Ireland, Wedding Videos Northern Ireland’. Note the plural ‘videos’ and the inner term ‘Northern Ireland Wedding Videos’ minus the apostrophe.

Or perhaps another suggestion is ‘Wedding Video Northern Ireland, Wedding Videos – Kiss Wedding Movies’. This includes the plural and also includes the company name. Sure it misses the additional Northern Ireland but it includes the name that has the keyword ‘Wedding’ in it, and is less than the standard 70 characters that Google tends to only display for the page title.

Looking at Doon’s competitors the term DVD/DVDs also appears to be popular terms to bear in mind.

Google displays the page title in it’s returned results and treats it as a very strong indicator of the page’s content so make it unique and align it with the page and the terms you’re targeting.

Overall the page titles need to be better. An easy way to check the current page titles is to do a site: operator search on Google, providing the pages have been indexed.

Most of the pages have at best 3 or 4 keyword titles without a regional qualifier. Most people search for wedding videographers based on an area/region, so the title could be improved upon by adding the region and possibly another synonymous keyword term.

Meta Descriptions

Below is an image of how the Meta descriptions are displayed in Google’s Search Engine Results (SERPS).

These need improving and should be unique for each page particularly for the important pages within your site. As you can see the current homepage Meta description is ‘Wedding Videos Northern Ireland Premier Creative Video Specialist’. It’s very short and uninspiring, and more than likely won’t have as good a click thru rate as it could. I’d make it longer and throw in some of the main popular terms you are targeting. On Google these keywords will then be bolded when a search on that particular keyword is carried out. It’ll then attract the eye of the searcher and improve the click thru rate.

I’d maybe go a couple of sentences that include the main keywords of the page, something like ‘Wedding Video Services by experienced Northern Ireland Videographer Doon Storey….Personalised Wedding Video packages available.

Page Header

Kiss Wedding Videos is the main title on every page and surrounded by the H1 heading tag (The H1 header tag isn’t visible, it’s just the code behind the scenes).

This gives Google an idea of the main theme of the page or at least should do. ‘Kiss Wedding Movies’ isn’t the term that you should be targeting and it shouldn’t be duplicated across every page on the site. My personal preference would be to replace it with an image. I’d then use the H1 tag to be more specific on each page so for the home page have the H1 tag surrounding the text Wedding Video Northern Ireland or Wedding Video with a buffer keyword, and get rid of the H2 tag which is currently surrounding the text Wedding Video Northern Ireland. I’d do this for all the pages and have unique titles specific to the page.

Internal Linkage

The internal linkage could be improved though it’s not bad. Link back to the home page and the main pages throughout your site with keyword rich anchor text. So for the homepage, why not link to it from one or two other important pages with the terms ‘wedding videographer’ or ‘wedding video’. The current funnel to the packages page where the customers will learn what you offer is on the right tracks.

Canonicalisation

There are links both to www.kissweddingvideos.com and kissweddingvideos.com from within the site itself. The URL is indexed in Google not the web page, so although entering www.kissweddingvideos.com and kissweddingvideos.com into the address bar brings up the same web page content, it’s actually 2 different URLs.

Sometimes you might see the same page indexed in Google both for the www and non www version. The best bet is to have this uniform so that the page strength isn’t undermined. Pick a version and stick with it. As the site is new and not well established I’d go for the familiar www, make sure that you list your site with other sites with the www version and that from within the site you link to the www version. Even though the site is indexed in Google without the www, I’d change that as it’s very early days in the site’s history, you can set this up in Google Webmaster Tools (that I touch on briefly below) in the preferred domain section.

Images

All the images on the site should use an alt tag to let Google know what the image is about. If an image is for decoration purposes then just leave the alt tag blank.

That’s enough on-site to be getting on with. Here’s some off-site stuff.

Google Account, Google Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics

Set up a Google Account. You can then set up a Google Webmasters Tools account and Google Analytics account and manage all the accounts under the one console.

The Webmasters Account needs you to verify your site. Once the site has been verified the GWT console will give you a heads up on issues such as duplicate page titles and meta description that you can then address.

It will also inform you of crawl errors, http errors etc.

Looking through the pages listed in Google I came across this one http://kissweddingmovies.com/page2/page2.html. Like many of the listings it just looks like an old page, floating about doing nothing. You can delete this page from Google’s index from within GTW.

Another thing you can do is set the region that the site targets. As Doon’s hosting is American based and the site is a .com, I’d set the region to UK as that’s where your target market is.

You can also install Google Analytics. This will allow you to benchmark the progress you make with your campaign. All the usual are there such as page visits, visitors, keywords, and search engine traffic, referrals etc.

Setting up one or two goals might be for another day, for instance a contact goal might give you some idea over time what keywords etc bring leads. One of the mistakes that I made early on was not tracking all the sales that I made for a couple of years, it was only looking back on this that I realised the error. If I had of known what terms converted, where they came from etc this would have provided valuable information.

Google Local

You need to promote your business on Google local Search and get your site listed on the local business results.

You can read more promoting your business on Google Local Search.

Links

Google is still a links driven search engine. Your site currently has zero links pointing back to it. It’s pretty anonymous and friendless. Your direct competition certainly won’t give you any links, but you may have a small number of business partners that will. You also need to get some authority editorial links preferably from highly trusted sites.

I’d recommend a 4NI listing. The amount of listings you get depends on your budget. You’ll need to invest simple as that if you want to get a good return.

Looking at the bottom of the page 1 results for the term ‘Wedding Video Northern Ireland’ there’s sites listed there with just 30 or so links which isn’t an awful lot. In fact even the higher up listings don’t have that many links to them.

As a small business creating great content that will attract natural links isn’t going to be easy especially when you have a business to run. Provide a great customer service, hang out in a forum or two, like the one I have mentioned below and raise your head above the parapet and you’ll get a number of links over time and more importantly referrals.

PPC

I would run a tight PPC campaign, especially as you won’t be high up in the organic rankings for a while, and keep running it even when you are top of Google providing it’s profitable. Together with your Local Listing you’ll have a 3-pronged strategy that will give you plenty of traffic and boost your online profile.

Pay Per Click can also give you valuable information on your clients, what terms they search for what works etc and you can then use this information to improve your SEO campaign. For example you can find out terms that people are searching for that you have overlooked in your SEO campaign and then take advantage of this, particularly if your competitors have missed these.

Time management is an issue so I’ve left out some of the Social media avenues you could go down etc. that can be quite labour intensive, but joining a forum where your target market and hang out such as http://www.weddingtalkforums.co.uk/ and contributing and building up a network of colleagues as well certainly won’t do you any harm.

I haven’t mentioned anything about client testimonials etc and a whole host of other things but follow these steps above, give the site a bit of time to age, invest, and your site will certainly get traffic. That’s the first part of the battle. Improving the conversion rates is for another day!

Good luck.

No doubt you and your webmaster have drawn up a checklist of things to do before going live with your website.

Well here’s one bit of cautionary advice that doesn’t crop up as much as it might. Make sure you check the history of your domain name.

Buyer beware! before using a domain name as your website address and plastering it all over your company literature, check it’s not a tainted domain name.

The last thing that you want to do is buy an ’second hand’ expired domain that has poor credibility and is actually banned or under some sort of penalty. It’ll be an uphill struggle to get back into Google’s index and to re-establish a site that has was involved in a link exchange scheme, has abused adsense or used other spammy techniques and been ditched by another webmaster.

First thing you should do is check the history of the domain.

1. Run a check on the waybackmachine on Internet Archive, look through the archived pages of the site for anything suspicious or alarming.
2. Do a search on Google, using site:yoursite.com, if the site domain name has expired then it might be natural for it not to rank in Google, but if it’s very recently expired then this might sound warning bells if it doesn’t show up.
3. Check the site’s backlinks in yahoo site explorer to see if it’s got history and a link profile on other sites. Look at the quality of these site and the links.

If you’re stuck with a domain name that’s banned, best thing to do is file a reconsideration request to Google and detail exactly what’s happened. If you’ve not invested in the domain name in terms of company literature and it’s not a must then it might be best to go with a new fresh domain.

Recently I looked at one site that had so much mumbo jumbo automated text on it, coupled with yahoo ads all over the place, and a suspect link profile. Although back in the index after a reconsideration request and under different ownership, months and months later the site is still under some sort of penalty. Some authority links might be necessary to give it some credibility.

Don’t make the same mistake with your domain.

1. If your business is a local business, then when people do a local search using regional terms why not benefit from a listing appearing at the top of Google. Promote your business on Google Local, it’s free!

2. Add your site to 4NI and make sure that you get the best out of a 4NI listing. Choose your copy carefully, add images, and make your listing as enticing as possible. Don’t just slap up a 4 line paragraph of untargeted terms. 4NI dominates the local search landscape and can drive quality traffic to your site. At £200 plus for a search optimised listing it’s certainly not cheap but worth while.

3. Make sure you site is Google friendly. If you want to promote your site on Google then consider hiring a web design company that understands the importance of on-site Search Engine Optimisation, either that or pay heavily later. If your site hasn’t been optimised for Google then get it redone.

4. Make use of Pay Per Click. Pay Per Click has it’s benefits and although it can be expensive it can provide a good return on your investment provided it’s done well. It can also work very well with a targeted SEO and Local Search campaign. 3 pieces of real estate on the front page of Google for your main keyword terms increases your company’s credibility and chances of a lead.

5. Include local regional keywords in your page title, keyword and content. One of the biggest mistakes or missed opportunities that I see time and time again is local business websites leaving out regional terms. If you don’t let Google know that your site is a local pizza restaurant in Belfast, then you’ll struggle to reach your online market.

6. Your website is your 24/7 online shop window. If the average lifespan of a business website is 4 to 5 years then judge your budget accordingly. A £500 website isn’t going to cut the mustard in most sectors. Invest in a great design, it’ll reflect positively on your company image.

7. Create the best content that you can. If you can’t write and have a large enough budget then hire a copywriter. Use the best images you can, offer the best advice you can. Creat the best product your can, offer the best support you can.

8. Besides 4NI, add your site to other local and niche directories that approve listings editorially. These still have value not just with Google but can also bring you targeted visitors.

One such up and coming directory is lookaly.com. Maybe I’ll write a bit more about some of the new local directories in an article I have in the pipeline about the next ‘4NI killer’. When adding a listing make sure to write unique and good descriptions about your company and it’s services, sell your business.

9. Search the top 100 or so listings for your primary keywords, if you can’t get listed in Google for your primary terms then get listed on the sites and directories that are listed. If you have to pay for a listing then so be it. Raise your profile on sites other than yours that you target market visit.

10. Contact the site owners of relevant sites, write a personal email with details of who you are and what you do. Why should they link back to your site, have you great content that their users can benefit from, what’s your angle? Don’t send automated emails to all and sundry.

11. Get links from other sites with keyword rich anchor text. For instance this is my ‘Belfast Web Design Company’ rather than ‘Click Here’. The text used in the first instance is more descriptive anchor text and a stronger indicator to a search engine about the relevancy of the web page.

12. Use video to promote your business. Even I’ve started using video for web marketing. Text works, but video can work even better, it helps raise your profile, personalises your site and connects with your audience. You might want to think about using video on your ‘about us’ page.

13. Use photographs, photographs are another way that help personalise your company. It helps people put a name to a face.

14. Take advantage of sites that let you build an online profile. Create a Linkedin account. At the moment Linkedin offers you the opportunity to have 3 follow links. If anyone wants to make a connection with me on linkedin then email me.

15. Start a testimonial strategy. Ask your clients for reviews. If you’ve offered a good service, product then why not ask your client for a review. Don’t just post them on your site, ask your clients to post them on sites such as Google. Google Local offers your clients the opportunity to post reviews so the more visibility the better. Make sure the reviews are credible and authentic.

16. Participate in forums related to your business. Contribute with valuable replies rather than just one or two lines replies. The more you offer the more you’ll benefit. It takes time but if you add value and become a respected member then the more business you’ll be able to drum up and the more referrals and bigger your network will be. You might even get links back to your site.

17. Use forum signatures, it’s free advertsing. There are plenty of online business forums, check out UKBusinessForums. It even has it’s own N.Ireland section.

18. Use classified sites such as Gumtree. Gumtree offers free business listings and is another great way to promote some businesses. Listings can rank highly in Google.

19. Start a blog. If you have time and enjoy writing create a blog, post news, events, how to’s, lists and advice. Create valuable content, just don’t post any old nonsense. Blogs are a great way to build up your authority in your niche, a way to get backlinks both to your blog and your main site. It also allows you to cast a wide net for search terms in Google that your target audience might use.

20. Blog comment. Contribute to blogs within your industry, build up friendships, add value blog posts, again not just one liners, create controversy, offer opinion, add to the debate.

21. Bookmark your site, make it easy for others to bookmark your site on social bookmarking sites such as delicious.com. If you have a blog then add a plugin such as socialable that makes it easier for your readers to bookmark.

22. Use RSS feeds if you can. Wordpress and other blog formats have a built in RSS feed. People can subscribe to your feeds from one central location such as Google Reader rather than having to visit all the sites they subscribe to individually.

23. Network and build online relationships with people. Engage with others and you’ll get links, referrals, business insights and advice. I’ve certainly learnt a lot from the contributions of other’s within the Irish SEO community including Richard Hearne, Redfly Marketing and Paul.

24. Promote other businesses that you can vouch for and they’ll return the favour.

25. Link with businesses in your niche. Avoid useless and excessive reciprocal linking schemes but swap links with businesses than can benefit your users and that help you build up relationships and referrals from your sector. No need to go overboard and link with your competitors, but if you’re a wedding cake maker then why not link with a wedding videographer

26. Create and use a signature in your email.

27. Create an email marketing campaign. Collect the emails of all your clients, all those you have sold too and periodically send them an email with company updates, product updates, offers. Although I haven’t extensive use, Campaign monitor looks like a great email marketing system.

28. You might want to pick a hosting company that is within your target region. So if you’re targeting the UK, go for a UK hosting company, or a .co.uk domain. If you do go for a .com or .net then you can still set the regional settings to UK in Google Webmaster Tools.

29. Offer a competition, freebie, or free business advice. An excellent example of this recently was local wedding photographer Peter Thomas who ran a competition to win wedding photos and by all accounts there was a tremendous response. I’ve also tried this tactic in a number of different shapes and sizes including offering free membership software from a programming site that I run.

30. Monitor your online reputation, if someone posts a negative comment about you then reply, be polite and address the situation, don’t avoid it and just leave a negative comment that could come up when someone does a search for your company. Be proactive. There’ll always be negative comments, it’s not nice but it’s not the end of the world. Most people can see through negative comments if they don’t have any value and are just a personal attack or someone with nothing better to do.

31. If you’re really brave, then attend events, speak at events and you’ll get reference links back to your site.

Try some of these for starters, invest your time and money and you’ll reap the benefits.

“The more domains I have the more visibility in the search engines I’ll have, and the better it’ll be for my business surely. It’s a win win, happy days.” WRONG!

Unfortunately some people still believe this and are unaware of the dangers. Beware, this approach will create duplicate content issues. Google addresses this issue in it’s guidelines and it’s a no no even if it’s unintentional and you’re not trying to outwit Google.

Here’s the problem – with 3 sites indexed, the individual authority of each site will be lessened and they won’t rank as well as they could or should. Having 3 sites to build links for will split the potential power of the sites and take 3 times as long.

You might also find that Google chooses to index one ‘authority page’ from each of your sites with not every page from every site being listed, and your traffic will be shared between all 3 sites. This is a nightmare scenario and can take alot of time to resolve.

My advice would be to rather than have 3 separate domain names with the same duplicate content, either make sure each site has unique content on it targeted at the particular market place which is probably more work than is needed for small to medium sized businesses or go with the .com particularly if it’s a business that is searched on using regional qualifiers and build up a strong link profile from both Irish and UK sites making sure you include regional qualifiers in page titles and copy.

It would be interesting to here from other webmasters that have targetted both Google.ie and Google.co.uk and whether you’ve gone for a multiple domain name approach and your reasons for and against.