An example of this was on the Littleblackdress.co.uk website I put together an SEO strategy for this website which consisted of carrying out keyword research, competitor analysis on page work and link building and over the months the website achieved some great results from ranking nowhere to achieving first page rankings for some very competitive keywords such as:

• little black dress #1
• LBD #1
• Little black dresses #1
• Black dresses #1

2012 should be an interesting year I don’t know what it will have in store for me but that kind of excites me. I hope I continue to progress in my career and get the chance to work on some fantastic websites

Link building is one of those things in which you either love or hate and when performing manual link building you need to have the ability to find relevant links in the first place.

In this example I will presume that we are trying to find suitable links for the keyword “Van Hire”. To start with we should look for relevant pages and websites with Google we can presume that the most relevant pages will have our keyword in the URL. We should also see if the website we are looking for has any instances of the keyword in any of its own URLS, this can be achieved by doing the following:

Everyone will have their own way of link building and how they go about finding relevant links some people will simply outsource the link building as they find it time consuming and could be a full time job depending of the competiveness of the industry.

Below I have tried to make things a little easier for you by sharing some of the searches I do in Google and other major sites to find the relevant information.

Finding General Directories

van hire + “submit site”
van hire + “submit url”
van hire + “intitle:directory”
van hire + “directory list”
van hire + “inurl:directory”

Finding Relevant Social Media

Twitter Search (van hire)
Twitter Search (Domain Name)
Digg (van hire)
Delicious.com (van hire)
bebo Search (van hire)

Finding News and Press Releases

van hire “press release”
van hire “news release”
van hire “associated press”
van hire “for immediate release”

Viewing Competitions Links

Open Site Explorer
Competitive Link Finder
Link Diagnosis
Majestic SEO

Of course there are many more other methods out there that people use to find relevant links when link building and we all have our favourite tools to compare competitor links and help in the process if you think there is anything I have missed out or should have included feel free to comment.

Back link Checker

This tool will give you the number of back links to your site for both Yahoo and Google a great tool to use when doing an analysis of sites and determining what your competition has compared to you.

Redirect Checker

Another useful tool for when carrying out analysis on a site and if you notice that the page re-directs you to another one this could be a case of re-directing you from an old site to a new one however we can use this tool to make sure the redirect is 301 (Permanently moved) and not a 302 (temporarily moved) as this redirect will not pass any of the page rank over or links over.

Copyscape

As we are all aware duplicate contents can have an effect on your rankings as the Search Engines can penalize sites for duplicate contents Copy-scape is a great tool for checking external duplicate contents on a site.

Google Ad words

A great tool for when carrying out an analysis on a site determining what keywords are best relevant for the site and the amount of traffic the keywords will generate.

Keyword density Tool

This tools  percentages of each are based upon the number of instances of that keyword compared to the other keywords in that column for each keyword paragraph we want the keyword density to be around 3% for every 100 characters.

Code to content ratio

The code to content ratio is the amount of text that appears on the page to the total size of the source code file. The more code that goes into displaying the useful content the less importance a search engine will attribute it and so this is why this is a great tool to use.

Web Developer Tool bar

This is a Firefox plug-in but i highly recommend you install this if you have not already as it provides you the ability to disable JavaScript and CSS as well as checking validation.

Spell list

If you find you self adding contents on to the site without doing this in Microsoft Word first your contents may contain many spelling mistakes this great little spelling tool will check your entire page entered for mistakes and even looks at the spellings in the Meta Structure and ALT tags.

• Natural listings that also have with a Google Local listing will be included underneath the site links
• Users will be able to perform searches of just Google Places via a new link in the left side menu.

So why do we think Google has decided to integrate the local results?

Google add emphasis that they are always trying to make things easier for the user and when carrying out searches. Stats haves shown that approximately 1 in 5 searches performed in the search engines are locality based, such as “Car Wash in Manchester”. I suppose with this demand it has made Google focus more on local results and could be a reason why the local results have been so heavily integrated with in the search results.

Impact of Google Local

I guess with regards to local based search there will be no difference and users will continue to see the same results. Otherwise there will be a major impact:

• Those who are currently optimising for a local-based keywords but are physically based outside that locality, then if Google decides to show places listings, you won’t appear in them or may find it very difficult to rank for those key terms.
• Local businesses that also optimise for local SEO terms will gain a boost in the listings.
• Sites that are listed in local directories will help with ranking high in Places.
• Other sites which write about your business in local terms will also help with ranking high.

Top Tips for Optimising you Google Local Listing

Physical Address

Has to be the most important factor for your Google Places listing. Your website must contain the physical address of your business. This helps Google to determine your area of business and show your listing on the local keyword search.

Contact Options

It has also been said that Google considers your contact option while ranking. A phone number where people can reach you is something of a must and a required field while adding your listing in Google Places.

Keywords in Business Name

You may think this is common sense but can help local search results an example of this would be if you had a toy store called “ken’s”, rather than just using the name of the business try to use keywords like “ken’s Toy Store”. This will help to reassure the search engines that your business is relevant and they should show it.

Google Places Review

Positive reviews and ratings help Google to gain more trust and confidence in your company. If you can help give these reviews a push in the right direction, maybe get clients to write some reviews, this can help increase trust. The more positive reviews your company has, the better.

I’m sure there are many more tips to consider and some more which i may add at a later date…

Conclusion

The impact of Google Local is likely to be different between the different industries. For example those in the restaurant or hotel business whose industry is focused on location these will definitely need to optimise for Google Local in order to help rankings and drive business. Whereas some industries that sell products rather than services may be less affected.

Remember the top tops tips when optimising your own Google Local and look to submit your site to local directories.

Resolving canonical issue

//Non-www to www domain

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [L,R=301]

//Removing the /index.html or php

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9} /index.html
RewriteRule ^index.html$ http://www.domain.com/ [R=301,L]

301 re-directing old url to new url

Redirect 301 /oldurl.php http://www.domain.co.uk/mynewurl.php

Create a custom Error Message

Add the following line of code to your .htaccess file:
ErrorDocument 404 http://www.yourdomain.co.uk/error-page.html
This enables you to create a customized 404 error page, this is the page that appears if browsers go to a page on your site that no longer exists.

Use PHP in a HTML Page
Add the following line of code to your .htaccess file:
AddType application/x-httpd-php .html
If you want to use PHP in .htm files simply change the .html to .htm.