I once read an e-book from an internet marketing company that said they created 50 different pages for a local business website.  The idea was to have a targeted page for each town in the coverage area to increase search engine rankings. 

I thought this was a great idea, so I went to work on it immediately.  I mapped out the local towns and created a couple of pages, but soon abandoned the project because it was boring, time-consuming and I was creating ‘hidden pages’ with ‘duplicate content.’ 

But after converting my wife’s property management website to WordPress, I had an alternate strategy.

With WordPress I am able to add a new blog post for each town in our coverage area.  This creates a new page for the search engines to index, with keyword rich URLs.  The content of each post includes zip codes, keywords and links.

This improves our search engine rankings by adding new, relevant content to the site. For smaller, more obscure searches, we are able to dominate the rankings.  If there is a certain area that we want to focus on to get more leads, we can simply write more posts about those particular areas. 

In our case we created Property Management Perspective which is a series of local reports on the towns and neighborhoods in our coverage area.  We give quality insider information on the area and current rental market. 

This strategy can be applied to any type of local business.  The posts should not be hard to write since you already know the area and can give some expert advice.

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After spending a year and a half designing the website for my wife’s small business, I decided to delete the whole thing.

During those 18 months, I learned quite a bit about website design, search engine optimization and lead conversion.  Enough to confidently delete the website and start over with WordPress.

I had originally built the site with WebsiteTonight from Godaddy and although I was very pleased with how the site looked, there were too many advantages to converting it:

• I was able to have the blog and website all on one domain
• WordPress is the best blogging software
• The code for WordPress and frugaltheme is clean, fast and search engine friendly
• The on-page search engine optimization is built in
• I was able to install plugins to improve search rankings, such as All in one SEO Pack, Google XML sitemaps, Google Analytics for WordPress, and Yet another Related Posts
• It is easy to add new content
• Creation of categories and tags to improve search engine rankings
• Installed good-looking web 2.0 contact form for lead conversion
• Ability to interact, leave comments and subscribe to the site

The biggest obstacle is that you do not want your commercial business website to look like a blog.  I decided to go with frugaltheme because it is easily customizable and has a minimalist design.  I was able to create a static homepage and have the actual blog as the 4th page in.  The layout is very simple including a basic description, contact form and testimonials.  Take a look at how it turned out.

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photo by koka sexton

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Wouldn’t it be great if you could go inside the search engine, find out what was determining rankings and immediately move your site to the top? Search engines like Google, MSN or Yahoo! have complicated algorithms that they run to determine the most relevant and authoritative search results.  These algorithms are kept secret and are constantly evolving.

SEOENG solves the mystery of the search engines because it is a transparent search engine.  It has spiders that can crawl your site on demand, but then SEOENG gives you the results of how your market ranking was determined.  SEOENG gives you an inside look as to what the search engine likes or doesn’t like about your site.

The service provides detailed analysis of on-page and off-page optimization.  For on-page optimization you can check your internal link structure, keyword count, duplicate content, metadata and much more.  You can adjust the flow of your internal linking structure to navigate it to your most important pages.  The off-page optimization results show you all of the external links that point to your site and include the details such as anchor text, nofollow, etc.

You used to have to wait until a search engine crawled your site before you could find out if what you were doing was working, and the search engines provided limited data.  With SEOENG you can crawl your site on demand, and get all of the information you need to optimize your site in one report. Search engine marketing professionals and website designers can save time and money by utilizing SEOENG packages.

The actual SEOENG website contains a wealth of knowledge on search engine optimization and includes video tutorials.  I suggest beginners take some time to read through it to get a better grasp of how the search engines work.

Get a free crawl of your website! Enter your URL below:

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If you have gone to all the trouble of writing an article for your business, then you might as well get some mileage out of it. If no one reads what you write, then what is the point?  You have to promote your message, drive traffic to your site and create backlinks.  Here are three tools that can help you promote your content and save you time.

Ping is a free service that makes updating your social networks easy.  You have your own dashboard where you can post to up to 40 different social networks at once.  It takes some time to sign up for all of the networks, but once you are done it is very simple to use.

Su.pr is from stumble upon and when you post a link to it, it automatically updates stumble upon, facebook and twitter. This helps to increase your exposure on the internet and drive traffic to your site.  It also shows the amount of stumbles (impressions) the site receives, the amount of clicks you get and the number of followers on twitter.   Another feature is that it gives you a suggested posting time, letting you know when to post to get the most amount of traffic.  There is also a su.pr wordpress plugin that allows you to host tiny urls on your domain.

Spin Distribute is an article marketing service I have used that has helped improve my search rankings. You write an article and then go through it and put in two or three different options for words.  Example:  The dog went to the [store|park|house].  The spin distribute program will change out the words to create many different versions of your article.  It then automatically distributes your article to hundreds of different article directories.  This is a good way to quickly build a lot of links to your site and avoid duplicating content.

By using these three tools on every article for my wife’s local business, I am able to increase the online presence, build links, increase search rankings and drive traffic.

Photo by Roland

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I know what you are thinking, I’m an accountant, not a writer, or I’m a roofer, not an author. But, your future customers are online seeking information and you must be able to deliver it.  In the Information Age, writing on a blog can be the most effective way to market your business.

Blogs are considered to be more trustworthy than static web pages.  They allow your business to provide useful information and news, become an authority in your field, express personality, build communities and keep your website ranking high on search engines.

Blogs are naturally search engine friendly because they are constantly updated with new content.  They also allow you to incorporate lots of your keywords in the titles, posts, categories and tags.  Readers can participate with comments and build a community around your business through email and RSS subscriptions.

Having a blog does not have to seem like an impossible task.  It is actually free and easy to set up and update.

WordPress and Blogger are the most popular.  You can go to these sites and create an account, pick out a template and you are ready to go.  The hosting is free on these sites but you can buy the domain name at a place like www.GoDaddy.com so you do not have wordpress or blogspot in your url.

Your content can come from helpful tips you have learned from your experience.  Observations and opinions on the state of your current industry,  Links to local news stories, company news, promotions, tips, etc.

Most businesses offer services that people could do themselves, if they have the resources and wanted to invest the time required to learn how to do it.  Usually hiring a professional will save time and money.  For my wife’s property management company, the strategy I employ is to give away the information for free, and then when they choose to hire a professional, they call us. Example- a new real estate investor read our blog and learned how to buy investment property and manage it.  He would comment on the blog and email me questions.  He was enjoying managing his property until his job transferred him out of state and he could no longer effectively manage it.  Who do you think he called to manage his property?

One tactic is to have your domain as your business name, but then set up the blogs with keyword phrases and links pointing to your main site.This works well for building relevant links to your main site and long term branding.

Don’t think taking on multiple blogs will take up all of your time.  You can use Windows Live Writer to post to all of your blogs from one spot.  Just make sure you change each article so that none of them have duplicate content ( a negative in search engine rankings).  Include links to your main site in the content of your posts with strong anchor text.

Blogs are a great way to connect with your clients, become an expert in your field and a resource for information.  Blogs are also a great way to network with other bloggers in your industry in order to generate referrals and traffic to your site.

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