Want your local business to thrive online? There is an abundance of information about how to target local search terms and become an online leader in your local area and niche but it’s easy to experience information overload with all the advice that’s available out there. Here are the 5 essential components of local search that will help you rank and dominate in your local market.

1. Add Geographical Information to Your Page Titles

Make sure to use both your target keyword term and location name in your page titles. This allows search engines to determine easily what your site is about and search engine users are more likely to click on your site if it contains relevant geographical information and keywords.

2. Get Your Business Listed on Prominent Websites Directories

Google Maps, Yahoo Local, and MSN Live Local are all websites where you can have your business listed in order to make it easier for potential customers to find you. By claiming ownership of your business listings on these prominent sites, you allow both search engines and potential customers to get correct information about your business. Sometimes unscrupulous competitors may claim your listing on these sites to undermine you. Make sure you’re the first one to claim your listings in order to build trust between you, the search engines, and potential customers. There are also several local search directories that get significant traffic where you can claim your listings. Click2connect.com and Citysquares.com are examples of local search directories with good traffic.

3. Provide Plenty of Information about Your Business in Your Listings

When search engine users stumble upon your website through clicking on your business listing, you want to be sure that you give them as much information as possible about your service. In addition to including the basics such as your address, contact information, and operation hours give potential customers plenty of reasons why they ought to choose you over your competitors. For example, mention exactly which towns and neighborhoods you service, what credit cards you accept, what your guarantees are, and anything else that is pertinent.

4. Use Your Target Keyword Phrases as Anchor Text in Your Hyperlinks

Link reputation is an integral component of search engine algorithms. When possible, make sure that the links pointing back to your site use your best target keyword phrase and variations of your location as anchor text. Your internal links also contribute to link reputation so be sure to link to pages within your site using good link text. This link text can be used in your site navigation, HTML sitemap, and links within your content.

5. Monitor Reviews about Your Business Online

Thanks to the internet, consumers can submit online reviews of businesses to customer-controlled review sites like Yelp and share their experiences, whether good or bad. This could be highly beneficial to your business if it gets great reviews but it could also hurt you if you get some bad reviews. Monitor the reviews your business receives on a regular basis so you can spot bad reviews when they arise and dispute them if necessary. Sometimes customers don’t always give fair reviews so make that if you do get bad reviews that are unjustified, the potential customers who see them can get both sides of the story at the very least. Using Google Alerts is a convenient way to keep track of what is being said about your business online.

Focus on these 5 strategies in local search to boost your business’ online presence. There are several tactics you can use to increase targeted traffic to your business’ website and improve its ranking but these are some of the most effective ways to give your business a solid footing in local search.

The imminent death of SEO has been a hot topic amongst SEO professionals for quite some time now. Some SEO professionals worry that their careers are in jeopardy since search engines are continually making improvements to their technologies. Search engines are in the process of completely revamping their ranking strategies to fight spammers and improve user experience. For example, Google is currently improving intent and behavior-based search in order to provide more relevant search results. So what does this all mean for the future of SEO? Is the death of SEO an inevitable outcome of the advancement of search engines?

People have been predicting the end of SEO since the very beginning. While it?s certain that things on the SEO front are always changing and that search engines are getting smarter, SEOs will continually adapt to these changes just as they have in the past. As long as search engines list websites without requiring the websites to pay a fee, SEO will exist.

Google?s Improvements and What They Mean for the Future of SEO

In the quest to fight spam and improve user experience, Google is in the process of implementing a series of changes in behavior and intent-based search. Every person who conducts a search for a particular term will have different results based on their location and search history. As a result of these changes, search engine optimization have to switch from only targeting keywords to focus more on increasing traffic and conversions. A possibility is that link building will become far less important in the future of SEO because Google will determine the value of a website based on how visitors engage with it. The ultimate goal of websites will be to provide compelling content that entices visitors to read, share, bookmark, and so on.

Social input through voting is another feature that search engines are tinkering with in order to provide user-controlled rankings. Search engine users might have the chance to vote for sites they like and sites will get ranked based on such votes. The model will be similar what?s seen on social voting sites like Digg and Reddit. Of course, search engines will have to find a way to ensure that votes are made naturally in order to prevent black hat SEOs from fooling the search engine bots.

Google and other search engines are raising the bar in SEO. Initially, this will make it harder for SEO professionals to do their job but the end result is positive. Spammers and black hat SEOs will have more difficulty succeeding in their unscrupulous efforts and search engine users will be provided with content that is more relevant.

Humans, Not Machines

As always, the aim of webmasters and SEO professionals should be to appeal to humans. People spend so much time trying to trick the search engines that they forget who they are ultimately serving: people! Your site should be optimized but your priority should always be to fulfill needs and provide solutions. Considering the direction that SEO is going, human actions and behavior will ultimately determine rankings. Your SEO success depends on your ability to engage people through great content and social media marketing.

In 1999, a professor with the University of Saskatchewan conducted a survey to see which web design elements were the most important to viewers. The four elements that topped the list were site navigation, page layout, content and loading speed. While the internet has evolved beyond our wildest dreams at that time, these four web design elements have remained just as crucial to a good design today as they were a decade ago.

Site organization was the most crucial, according to the original survey, and this is still the most important factor in modern web design. To keep readers on your website for more than a few seconds you must offer a clear and consistent structure to your site. This includes a navigation system that is logically sequenced, with the same icons used throughout the site. You want to make it easy for the reader to find the information that they are looking for.

Page layout not only helps keep the site organization consistent, it is also the design element that makes the page pleasing to the eye. There are many parts to consider in good page layout. Things like color, location of graphics or images and white space composition are a large factor in whether a web design is visually appealing. Your page layout should be similar throughout the site to give your web design a cohesive, professional feel.

Content is king in the internet world – if anything, this is more important today then it was then as there are so many more sites competing for an audience. The content on your page is what keeps the reader on site longer and returning more often. A good web design includes solid, up-to-date information that is presented in a way that will engage the reader. Fresh content is also very important to keep readers coming back to your site. If the content hasn’t changed in years, why would anyone want to return?

The final element that people said was very important to them was in page loading speed. While more people do have high speed connections now compared to ten years ago, there is still a large number of internet surfers who are stuck in dial-up. The more graphics you add to your web design or other bandwidth-hogging elements, the slower the page will load. Most internet surfers don’t have the patience to wait for all those flash intros and java applets so guess what happens? They click the little “x” up in the corner of the page and they’re gone.

Some things never change and these four elements of web design are just as crucial today as they were years ago. A good web design allows the reader to find what they want quickly and easily. The page layout is pleasant to look at and has the same feel to it throughout the site. The content is engaging, informational and updated on a regular basis. All pages load quickly even if the viewer is not using broadband. All of these elements work together in giving the viewer the best experience possible. Isn’t that what good web design is all about?

Online marketing is one of those buzz words that everyone likes to throw around but that very few people truly understand. What does it mean and why is it so important that you master the routes that other companies are taking to online success? Here are three of the more basic and important things that you should be using when you start online marketing your company.

Number 1 - Advertising

The first step of online marketing is effective advertising of your company. If you want to be successful, you need to be sure that you spend a bit of time working to create a name for yourself. This can be done for free or via paid advertising in services like Google or Facebook. However, it is important that you do it no matter what.

The best route to take is to start with a free advertising campaign - working to establish successful SEO for your business across the board. When you’ve done this, you can start showing up in search engines higher and higher for keywords rather than spending hundreds or thousands of dollars getting exposure. However, a good PPC advertising campaign can be a great online marketing tool if you ensure you don’t waste any money in the process. Choose good keywords, don’t waste your dollars by advertising for simple words or in the wrong demographics and always test your ads to ensure they are working as intended.

Number 2 - Branding

The next step to online marketing is through branding. Branding is a process that allows you to get your name and business out there without needing to spend excess money. People will begin to recognize or think of you as they search for your services as a result. Ways to do this include ongoing advertising campaigns as well as use of social media, viral marketing and more. Sites like YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook are becoming more and more successful and popular online marketing tools because they allow you to build up a following of interested parties while spreading your message for free.

Number 3 - Testing

You always need to test your efforts. It does you no good to try out five or six different online marketing methods and then fail to check the stats or test your efforts to see which ones translate to sales and which ones are just wasting money. Use tools like Google Analytics along with split testing and constant revision to check your results and see what truly works.

Ultimately, if you want to create a successful online business, online marketing is a must. Even offline businesses are gaining in large measure from the online marketing methods being used today. However, if you find the methods listed above or the idea of going online with your business too overwhelming, don’t forget how many firms and individuals are out there that can help you develop your marketing plan and create a new business method from scratch. In the end, you’ll have a ton of different ways you can succeed if you know the route to take.

Sales leads for nearly any company in any industry are highly important pieces of how a company will perform. Without good leads, one might never have the opportunity to expand into new territories, grow enough to hire new sales people, or find new avenues of successful operations. It is a vital process to gain sales leads, however it is even more important to ensure those leads are highly targeted in a way that will allow you to weed out wasted phone numbers and email addresses.

The First Step to Targeting Your Leads

The first thing you need to do when you start targeting your sales leads is to create a direct connection between your lead generation and your sales team. Your sales team needs to communicate exactly what you types of leads you are looking for. This can be done by creating criteria that they can follow or a series of questions that can be asked about each lead to weed it down.

Many companies will go so far as to have their sales staff working directly on the leads. However, a better route in this particular situation is to outsource your lead generation to a company that knows exactly what things to look for in a good lead. They will know how to ask questions, what information they need to verify and ultimately what those things translate into when you go to try and capitalize on that lead.

Building on Solid Sales Leads

Once you have acquired a good, targeted set of sales leads, you need to know what you’re going to do with them. This comes into play in multiple fashions. To start, you will need a good process to prioritize leads so that your sales staff knows where to start and how to develop from there. It might take a bit of extra time to figure out how to translate each of the new leads into a viable sales call, but a good script can save you a lot of time. Alternately, outside telemarketing and lead services can help with this, narrowing out bad leads before they ever get to the sales staff.

After you have narrowed down your lists, there are a number of ways to develop a good understanding of what the leads will mean to your business. Look for factors such as the scale of the lead - how big is the business or individual you are dealing with - the long term viability of the lead, and the likelihood that they will pan out.

If you effectively create a system in which you can follow a lead building process for your sales leads and know that your leads will always be the kind that don’t waste yours or your sales staff’s time, you can be sure that when you outsource lead generation or hire on people to grab those leads that you never again need to worry that you’ve wasted excess resources. It may seem a great deal more complicated, but the more thoroughly you put a system like this into place, the better off your lead generation will perform.