Maintaining a positive web presence for your business is an important part of your search engine marketing strategy. Link building and business listings play an important role in ensuring that local customers can find your products and services online.

You may already have noticed that when you search for your business one the web, there are many directories & search engines that are offering information about your business to your customers. This happens because many sites “scrape” your information from public records, phone book listings, and other websites in order to populate their business directory or search engine. Most of these sites allow you to claim your local business listing so that you can edit it and optimize it, correcting any misinformation and adding descriptions of services and products, photos, and other information your potential customers might be interested in.

Every time you claim a business listing, you are creating an online account requiring a username and password. With hundreds of business directories and local listings available online, keeping track of which directory listings you claim and how to access them is crucial to maintaining an organized web presence.

Often, business owners hire professional local SEO companies to claim, optimize, & maintain their business listings. If you’ve worked with more than one professional, or have had employees claiming your listings for you, trying to figure out which directory listing is already claimed can become confusing.

How to tell if your listing has already been claimed on the top 5 local business listing sites:

Google Places

• Find your Google Places Listing by searching Google Maps and click on your name.
• Look in the top right corner of your Places Page. It should say “Owner-verified listing” if it has been claimed.

Bing

• Search Bing for your business name. How detailed and filled in your business listing appears may indicate that it has been optimized, and therefore, already claimed. Near the bottom, look for this wording: “Change your business listing” and click on this link.
• If it has been claimed, the phrase “This listing has already been claimed” will show up next to your business name.

Yahoo

• Go to Yahoo Local and search for your business name.
• Look at your listing to see if it is correctly filled out.
• If it has not been claimed, it is unlikely that it will have photos and detailed information about your business.
• This wording will be near the top of the Business Overview tab regardless whether your listing is already claimed or not: “Own this business? Enhance your listing.”
• Try to log in to see if the listing shows up in your dashboard.
• Be careful not to create duplicate listings.

Yelp

• Search Yelp.com to see if your business name and information shows up.
• If it does, check to see if the words “Provided by business” show up next to your business descriptions.
• If you find that your business listing has not yet been claimed, you can claim it on Yelp here: https://biz.yelp.com/claiming

Superpages

• Search for your business on superpages.com
• Look to see if the information is accurate
• Look for a yellow box at the bottom of your business listing that states: “Are you the Business Owner?” and has a “Claim My Listing” button. (This will appear even if your listing is already claimed.)
• Follow the process to claim your listing or log in to see if it appears in your dashboard.

Other Local SEO Resources

Here are a couple more ways to see if your business listings have already been claimed:

Getlisted.org is an easy way to double check the status of your business listings. A quick scan will provide you with a free status alert, but be sure your information has been entered correctly.

Yext.com doesn’t let you know if your business listings have been claimed, but it will let you know if they’re listed and how well optimized they are.

CCSEO is pleased to be collaborating with The Fort Collins Digital Workshop on a beginning level SEO class, “Getting Started with SEO for Business”.

The three hour introductory course will give local business owners an overview of SEO fundamentals such as how search engines work, keyword discovery & strategy, global and on-page optimization, link building, and using web analytics to measure results. Workshop attendees will be able to apply what they learn to the planning and implementation of search engine optimization for their own business websites.

Established in 2006 by Stu Crair, The Fort Collins Digital Workshop is a locally-owned, independent computer training center conveniently located in Old Town Fort Collins. The FCDW offers classes on almost all major software programs, desktop applications, business solutions, and advanced computer training concepts. The classes are taught by trained local experts from the Fort Collins area.

As a big proponent of education at all levels, I was pleased and excited when Stu approached me with the idea of teaching this class. CCSEO offered a Local SEO Workshop in the fall of 2010, which was a huge success, since then we’ve been keen to offer more classes and workshops on Local SEO and other topics, but we’ve been so busy it’s been hard to find the time to get things organized.

With this collaboration I’m being given the opportunity to share my expertise in SEO with Fort Collins business owners, while having the FCDW provide the support and framework required for both myself and the students.

If you are interested in attending an SEO class, or any of the other classes that The Fort Collins Digital Workshop provides, you can check out all courses offered at www.fcdigitalworkshop.com

As a local business owner, what web marketing or computer classes would you be interested in taking? Are you the hands on type who likes to have some knowledge of what needs to be done, or are you happy to hire someone and leave it to the experts?

As web marketers and developers we sometimes get too involved in all things web, and it’s a great idea to occasionally step back and view the technologies we are so used to interacting with from a new or different perspective.

Recently, a client was reviewing her newly developed website while using the outdated and no longer supported web browser Internet Explorer 6 (IE6).  Modern web development often uses advanced techniques that will not display correctly in IE6; instead of a nice orderly layout, the header might be completely missing, and among many other problems, the content columns are often found haphazardly placed on the page.  We were happy to quickly resolve the discrepancies of her broken browsing experience by suggesting a browser change to Firefox, and an upgrade for Internet Explorer.

Because modern browsers make it possible for the web to be a more advanced and feature rich place, it’s a good idea to evaluate your web browsing tools and options and make sure your preferred browser is up to snuff and up to date!

Here are the browsers that will provide an optimal browsing experience on today’s web:

• Mozilla Firefox – with an active non-profit development team focused on innovation, as well as a wide variety of useful add-ons, Firefox is a powerful browser.
• Google Chrome - Google’s official browser.  Chrome is fast, free, and has a growing base of add-ons (extensions).
• Internet Explorer 8 or 9 – if you’re a Windows user and you aren’t comfortable installing a 3rd party browser, it’s best to make sure your Internet Explorer is updated to the latest version.
• Safari - if you’re a Mac user and you aren’t comfortable installing a 3rd party browser, it’s best to make sure your Safari browser is updated to the latest version.

If you’re using Firefox and you’d like to take advantage of the ability to install add-ons, below are a few of the extensions we recommend and use every day:

• Update Scanner – regularly scans web pages and alerts the user if changes have been made.
• Rapportive – provides in-depth details about your Gmail contacts inside your inbox.
• Pearl Crescent Page Saver – one of many screen capture extensions, Pearl Crescent covers the basics and works well to capture an entire page as well as just the visible portion.
• PageRank Client – With Google Toolbar no longer supported past Firefox version 4, PageRank Client replaces one of  Google Toolbar’s functions by providing you with a web page’s Google PageRank.
• GBookmarks - similar to the PageRank extension above, GBookmarks replaces a function previously found on the Google Toolbar: access to your Google Bookmarks in the browser menu bar.
• MeasureIt – an invaluable web development tool, MeasureIt allows you to draw a pixel ruler overlay on a web page to determine the width or height of elements on the page.
• Firebug – another invaluable web development tool, FireBug is an incredibly full-featured web development debugging tool which is used in all aspects of web development.
• Copy Pure Text – adds the handy ability to strip formatting off of copied text.

Chrome’s web store also provides MeasureIt and Firebug (Lite version), as well as equally awesome extensions for most of the functions found in the list above.

What are your tips and tricks for a more powerful web browsing experience? What browser extensions could you not live without?  Please let us know your suggestions and favorite browser extensions and tools in the comments section below!

Today, Google is honoring Gumby creator, Art Clokey, with an interactive Google doodle of Gumby and Friends.

Here at CCSEO we are celebrating Mr. Clokey’s life & accomplishments as well as the successful launch of the new official website for Gumby and Friends, Gumbyworld.com, built and search optimized by our team over the last month.  The website was revealed this week as a tribute to Art Clokey, and to celebrate his Birthday with Google and Gumby fans worldwide.

In keeping with CCSEO’s high standards, the GumbyWorld.com website launch focused on search engine friendly and modern website architecture, with a strong effort to improve overall web visibility.

Starting yesterday, when Google began featuring the Gumby doodle in countries that are a day ahead of the U.S., Gumbyworld.com became the center of attention for a global audience. Gumby lovers from Australia, India, Argentina, the Philippines and dozens of other countries have been interacting with the new site and re-engaging with a favorite childhood icon.

A slick salesman gives you a call promising guaranteed leads, a risk-free trial, and a no-hassle setup that will take none of your time as a swamped business owner; is there a downside? what’s the catch? It sounds too good to be true, a promise to setup local business listings for you, build you a free website, and bring in twice the business you currently have within weeks – all for only a few hundred dollars per month. So, is it really a legitimate and good deal?

In today’s world of obsolete phonebooks and increasing reliance on online local business listings, there are an alarming number of fly-by-night local SEO outfits promising huge returns when you pay them a monthly fee to setup and manage your online business listings.

Unfortunately, they are not offering anything special: there really are no complex or secret local search strategies. The reality is, if your business listings are established with consistent information and optimized well from the start, they will be ranking in local search results without paying ongoing monthly costs, and without a 3rd party controlling your online identity.

They promise:
A free, no-hassle website.

The reality:
If you already have a website, it can hurt your existing marketing efforts to have an additional website competing with your existing site. Your potential customers may be confused by the inconsistent representation of your business and won’t know which website to trust. Often, these quick-results salesmen will represent your business with a forwarding phone number and email address that you have no control over, further confusing your online business identity.

If you don’t already have a website, this is the worst possible route you can take in establishing one because the second you are no longer willing to pay the middleman their monthly fee, your website disappears from the web. In an ideal situation, a web developer will never charge you a monthly fee to keep a website online (unless you are specifically paying them for hosting services) and you should always have direct control and ownership of the website.

They promise:
Guaranteed leads.

The reality:
A particular volume of quality leads can never be guaranteed. In their efforts to boost your leads, these black-hat middlemen will often setup numerous fake and misleading listings for the same business to try and rank in a variety of cities and for a variety of terms. This technique is a direct violation of the Google Places guidelines and terms, as well as the terms and guidelines at most other local listing directories. Claiming to run a business with a fake address & forwarding phone number is not a legitimate and sustainable method for establishing trust and history online.

These fake listings will only muddle the details found online for your business, making it harder for the search engines, directories, and your potential customers to know what your legitimate business information is; in the worst case, these black-hat efforts can cause all of your listings to be suspended or penalized for spamming.

In reality, leads will follow naturally as you establish consistent and unchanging business listings that represent your business with the same address, phone number, and other details. There is no long-lasting benefit to creating fake profiles, or using other spam techniques, and in the worst case it can be very detrimental to your rankings and credibility.

They promise:
Ongoing results, as long as you pay them their inflated monthly fees.

The reality:
You may get some results from their efforts, and you may even get sustained results from the listings established by these monthly-fee companies, but the reality is that local listings are generally not something that should cost you monthly, unless you are opting to pay for enhanced listings with a fee. Properly set up free local listings continue to work for your business without any ongoing input or cost.

A legitimate SEO company will only charge you for their services as you need them. Local business listings only require an initial setup and optimization, and maybe an occasional update. If you are working with a reputable company, you won’t be paying a monthly fee for local seo unless you have opted for long-term help establishing new listings at search engines and directories across the web. Make sure that the company you are dealing with is not charging you an ongoing monthly fee just to “maintain” a few listings that are set up and working for you without their help.

They promise:
A risk-free trial.

The reality:
If you try to cancel your arrangement with them at the end of the trial, these companies will often resort to every kind of slimy sales technique in the book to keep you hooked, finally resulting in the nightmare of threatening you, their customer. If you don’t stay on board with them, they threaten to sell your online listings to your competitors. Many people are horrified enough at the thought of surrendering traffic to their competitors that they continue to pay. The company who initially sold you their services with promises of a risk-free trial is now blackmailing you in order to keep you from firing them.

They know that their methods are often not condoned by the search engines and directories, and they know many people will realize that they are paying monthly for something that should have been a one-time cost. In order for their shaky business practices to pay off, they threaten you or make it impossible to cancel your account without asking for a stop payment from your credit card provider.

Summary

Make sure you do your research before hiring an SEO company that will be involved in representing your business online. Your local business listings have an ever-increasing importance in connecting you to your customers; you should make sure that your listings represent your business consistently, honestly, and accurately. With the right legwork, research, and help at the beginning, you can easily manage all of your own listings – and you will always be in control and have access to your listings, even if you decide to stop paying the local SEO company that helped you set them up.

Have you had any problems with black-hat local SEO outfits? What are your experiences? Do you have any other advice for businesses that are just getting started in the realm of local business listings?

Savvy website owners understand the need for web analytics to keep a head count and make sure their services are on target. However, for many website owners the world of web analytics is quite overwhelming. They realize the importance of measuring their web traffic, and pinning down goals and metrics, but don’t know where to start when it comes to reviewing and analyzing the data.

What should you be looking for in your web analytics, and what does it all mean?

There are different ways of viewing your web analytics. One way is by signing up for and implementing the free Google Analytics on your website (learn more by visiting the Google Analytics Product Tour). Most of the following information can be gleaned from any web analytics reporting tool, but in this case I am referencing the information and terminology provided by Google Analytics specifically.

When reviewing your web analytics here are some important things to look at:

1.       Visits - how many visits do you get a day/week/month/quarter/year? If you have more than a year’s worth of data, you can compare your visits this year against last year. This is especially helpful if your traffic is seasonal.

What you would be looking for with data on visits, and on the traffic sources listed below, is growth, an increase in traffic over time, particularly if you have recently invested in marketing or advertising your business.

2.       Traffic  Sources – where is your traffic coming from?

• Direct visits – these are visitors who come directly to you site, either because they have bookmarked your website on their computer, or they typed the website address directly into the browser address bar.
• Referral visits – these are visitors who come via a link to your website from another website or from an email.
• Search Engines
  • Organic (non-paid) visits – these visitors are from the non-paid website listings you see when you do a search on Google, or another search engine. You are most likely to position well in, and get visits from these listings, if your website is search engine friendly and search engine optimized for your target keywords.
  • PPC (Pay-Per-Click) – these visitors click-through from the paid or sponsored results you see when you do a search at the search engines. These listings typically are positioned above the organic results, or as with Google, above and to the right of the organic listings.
  • Local Search visits – these are from people who are in your local area who have done a search for services you offer and found your website via the results at a local search engine such as Google Places (Maps), Yelp or Insider Pages. These results are often accompanied by a map and customer reviews.
  • Image Searches – these visitors might do a search for an image at Google Images or Bing Images and might come across a photo, illustration or graphic from your website. If they click on the image a couple of times they will end up at your website.

When reviewing the traffic from the various traffic sources, the first thing you should pay attention to is how much traffic you are getting from each source. Your first goal when getting familiar with your web analytics is to assess your base lines, the amount of web traffic you ‘usually’ get. Then when you do something to market or advertise your business, you can assess the effectiveness of that investment.

For example, if you decide to set up a Facebook page to promote your business, you should keep an eye on your referral visits, and obviously referrals from Facebook in particular. If you are aggressively promoting your business via Facebook, you would expect to see your overall visits increase, and when you review your specific traffic sources, you should see that your referral visits have increased, and that the main referrer is Facebook.

3.       Top Landing Pages – these are the main pages that visitors land on when they get to your website. The will have arrived there via one of the traffic sources mentioned above. The top landing page is often, although not always, the home page of your website.

A page might be a top landing page because it is optimized for the search engines and ranks for a keyword you are targeting. Alternatively, a top landing page may be a blog post that you have written that is very popular, and has been linked to by other high traffic websites. Which in turn is going to help your post rank well in the search engines.

Your top landing pages tell you a lot about how your website is performing at any given time, and why and how you are getting traffic from the various traffic sources.

4.       Top Content – these are the most popular pages on your website. When reviewing your top content, you can learn a lot about what your visitors are looking at most on your website, and hopefully that reflects both what they are most interested in, and what you want them to look at. If it doesn’t, you should work on making that happen.

Reviewing top content can also identify usability issues. Some of your pages might get more page views because they are more obvious, and visitors are encouraged to click-through to them. This is fine if this is content you want them to see, but if your visitors are not viewing content you consider important then you need to revise elements of your website design.

5.       Goals – In Google Analytics you can set up goals. You do this by tracking pages that you want your visitors to go to when they visit your website. These should be pages that lead to a conversion (a lead or a sale), e.g. a contact page, a newsletter sign up, or the start of a checkout process. Consider especially goal pages further along the conversion path, such as a contact form or newsletter sign-up submission ‘Thank You’ page, or a page confirming the sale of a product.

In Google Analytics, if you have goals in place you can look at which traffic sources your visitors are coming from and how many turn into potential customers (or customers, if an ecommerce site). This can help you understand which marketing efforts give you the best return on investment.

In a later post we will look at search term/keyword data, what you should be looking at, and what metrics you should have in place.

Do you have web analytics for your website? If so which tool or service are you using and how much do you get out of it?

A major ranking factor in Google’s algorithm is link popularity. The search engines assess the quality and quantity of links pointing to your website pages and factor that in when assessing the value of your website and where it should be ranked.

“When Google was founded, one key innovation was PageRank, a technology that determined the “importance” of a webpage by looking at what other pages link to it, as well as other data. Today we use more than 200 signals, including PageRank, to order websites…”  http://www.google.com/about/corporate/company/tech.html

Links to your website are beneficial because they:

1. Drive traffic
2. Increase link popularity, improve Google Page Rank & search engine ranking

However, efforts towards link building should be well thought out, well executed, and legitimate. A badly executed link building campaign will not only be a waste of time and effort, but could also risk your website being penalized by the search engines.

Some points to remember when building links to your website:

1. Build them up slowly and naturally, if you build up too many too quickly it can look suspicious and raise a red flag with the search engines.

2. Check out Google’s guidelines for webmasters on linking & potential penalties. “…some SEOs and webmasters engage in the practice of buying and selling links that pass PageRank, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results.”

• Link schemes –  http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66356
• Paid links – http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66736

3. It’s the quality, not the quantity that counts. The best links are ones from high quality, high PageRank sites with related content. It’s better to have one good link, from a related high PageRank page, than many inconsequential ones.

4. Links from .GOV and .EDU sites are very valuable, however they are not easy to get. .GOV & .EDU sites have always been considered authoritative, and so are highly ranked by the search engines. In turn links from these sites pass on that authority.

5. It’s good to have your target terms in the anchor text for the links (the words that are linking to your site), however overuse and repetitive use of the exact same terms may raise suspicion.

6. If you buy links, it should be transparent that they are paid links (paid advertising).

7. One of the best ways to acquire links is to create great content. Blog’s are a good platform for this, since you can create short, pithy posts on topics you think will interest people.

Regardless of what type of search marketing you are doing (organic, paid, local, or social) Google is always looking for the same things when reviewing a company’s website and online activities:

• Is it good for the user?
• Is it transparent?
• Is it credible?
• Is it authoritative?

The best results will be achieved by consistent and persistent efforts over time, with a primary goal of improving the user experience.

As with climbing a mountain, with link building, and other search marketing activities, it takes time and effort to get results, but as with mountain climbing, if you make a mistake it’s shocking how fast and how far you can fall.

How’s your link building going? Are you actively working on it? Have you gained links by creating great content? I’d love to hear your experiences.

It is all too easy to put a website online, get caught up in the day to day running of the website, and forget about maintenance. Unfortunately, when running a self-hosted website, your maintenance job never really ends. If you ignore software updates and other security and maintenance tasks, you may find your site compromised; you could be unwittingly hosting thousands of spam pages, infecting your visitors with malicious software, be flagged with a warning in Google, or find your entire site deleted.

In order to prevent security breaches, website hijacking, and spamming, it is very important that you or your website manager maintains an attitude of preventative security; while some security hardening should be done during a site’s initial setup, it is very important to stay regularly and continuously vigilant and aware of what is happening on your website & server.

Your regular security routine should include (but not be limited to):

• Off-server backups of your website files and databases (weekly, monthly, or quarterly, depending on how static your content is)
• Installing software updates in packages running on your website (it’s best to do this at least monthly, immediately after a backup)
• Checking your SERPs for unknown or suspicious looking URLs (you may find hidden spam content)
• Checking your website file system for unknown directories or files
• Checking your website’s source code for unknown or hidden content
• Changing your FTP and web hosting administrator passwords at least every 6 months
• Checking your website’s status in webmaster tools through Google, Yahoo, and Bing

Security Hardening

In addition to a good security routine, it is also important to have a few bases covered ahead of time; I recommend everyone read Dr. Neal Krawetz’s “Better Than Nothing Security” blog post series, found on his Hacker Factor Blog. In this blog series, Neal provides very practical and easy to implement security ideas for all webmasters. Neal is a local Fort Collins computer security expert, and his blog is a great resource.

A few additional tips for good security:

• Whenever possible, use trusted networks when connecting to your web server or logging in to manage your website – coffee shop wi-fi is off limits!
• If not on a trusted network (or even if you are), use SFTP to connect to your web server, and make sure you are using an encrypted (https) connection when logging in to any type of website control panel (hosting, WordPress, etc).

By performing some initial security hardening, sticking to a regular security routine, and using good website management security practices, you can rest easy knowing that your website is very unlikely to be hacked or hijacked, and in the event that it is, you have a recent backup ready to restore.

Do you have additional security tips and resources for webmasters? Please let us know about them in the comments!

Internet Marketing, SEO, & Local Search Workshop – Thursday October 21st, 2010

Local search expert David Mihm and GetListed.org are bringing their “Local University” to Denver next week, Thursday October 21st. A natural extension of the hands on Local Search Workshop that we hosted in Fort Collins last month, the GetListed.org event is a half-day workshop focusing on SEO and marketing your business through Local Search services such as Google Places.

This is a great opportunity for Northern Colorado business owners to expand their knowledge and expertise on Internet Marketing, SEO, & Local Search Marketing. The “University” is described as, “an intensive four-hour crash course in Internet marketing that will help you navigate the possibilities for marketing your business on the web.”

Some of the nation’s leading online marketing experts will be presenting at this workshop including Mike Blumenthal, Mary Bowling, & David Mihm. The agenda includes a variety of presentations and Q&A sessions.

We invite you to join CCSEO’s Cecily, Kevin, and Colt at the event, with a special discounted agency price. Please contact us for further information on the workshop, and to sign up with our agency discount.

The Local Search University will take place at the Sheraton Denver Tech Center from 12:30pm to 5:00pm. You can review the website for the full agenda and details.

It seems like these days any Tom, Dick or Harriet can design a website, however all websites are not created equal.

Just because it looks lovely it doesn’t mean it’s going to help you meet your business goals. Your website has to be found, used and enjoyed, if it’s going to generate the leads and sales you’re hoping for.

Let’s say you want to create a new website, or update your current website. You have a logo and a color scheme. You have a pretty good idea of the content you want on the site. You’ve found a web designer who you’re confident will create a lovely looking website for you; you’ve seen their portfolio and they have lots of lovely websites in it.

But before you go ahead with the project, before you sign off on anything, in fact, before you even settle on your web designer, you should find out how they take account of the following:

• Web Standards
• SEO
• Usability
• Metrics

To get an idea of their awareness of these elements of web design and development, here are some useful questions to ask:

1. What programming languages will you be using to build my website, and how will this effect search engine crawlability and indexing, user experience, and download time?
2. How will my website be optimized for the search engines?
3. (If a redesign) How will you make sure that the search engines and users can find my new website pages when the page names change?
4. How will my website be optimized for users? Can I be confident that visitors will have a clear understanding of what my website is about, be able to navigate my site easily, and take the actions I want them to take?
5. How will we measure results after the site is launched?

A good, knowledgeable web designer should be able to not only answer these questions, but also explain them in a way that makes sense to you.

Although elements like SEO, Usability and Metrics are huge subjects on their own, your designer should have a solid understanding of how they relate to web design. They should also have a professional support network to help fill any gaps in knowledge he or she might have, and to whom they can refer you for more specialized services if necessary.

With these concerns addressed, moving forward you can be confident that your website will not only look lovely, but will also more likely become the business asset you are hoping for.

What other knowledge/experience would you expect a web designer to bring to the table for your web development project?

If you are a designer, how do you feel about being involved in these additional aspects of building a website?