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by Jeff Finkelstein

With the global economy struggling, acquiring new customers is top of mind for most organizations.

Did you know that 50-70% of consumer and business purchasers start with a search engine like Google? If your website doesn't appear at the top of a search engine results page (sponsored ads or organic search results), you're losing potential customers to companies that rank higher.

What can you do? Over the next twelve weeks, I'll share with you my top strategies and tactics that can help you acquire new customers via search engine optimization and advertising.

• 1. Local Search Engine Advertising
• 2. Don't Confuse The Search Engines With Graphics
• 3. Title Tags & Why They Matter
• 4. What does a search engine look for?
• 5. Why Sitemaps Are Baby Food For Search Engines
• 6. It's All About Keyword Density
• 7. Naming Your Images for SEO Sucess
• 8. Age & Experience Matter
• 9. Reverse Archeology
• 10. Customize Your Website with Visitor's Search Keywords
• 11. Avoid Industry Jargon
• 12. Measure & Track Your SEO Efforts

1. Local Search Engine Advertising

For businesses that serve specific geographic regions (i.e. Denver, Colorado), you can create search engine ads in Google and Yahoo that only appear to people in your area.

How does this work? A search engine like Google uses a computer's IP address and other information to discover where someone is searching (including city and state).

Why does Google care where a person is located? Google's mission is to give their end users the best search results possible. So, if I need someone to walk my dog in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, it does me little good to receive a paid search result from Arizona. This is a real example — my brother has a petsitting business, and I've used local Google search engine advertising to drive new clients to his organization.

Thus Google (and the others) tries to match search results to the geographic location of the person searching.

How does Google make money? Google gives businesses and organizations the ability to display paid advertisements (sponsored results) on search results pages. These ads are triggered by keywords you choose (more on this in a different strategy).

You don't have to pay for your ad to display; you pay Google only when someone clicks on your ad. The technical term is Cost Per Click (CPC) advertising. The more relevant your ad (more on this later), the less you have to pay for specific keywords, and the higher up you will appear in the sponsored advertising results.

Local Search CPC Ads. In Google Adwords, you can create an advertising campaign that will target someone in a specific city or state. You can even specify a 5, 10 or 25 mile radius from a specific location (like your retail showroom or office). Below your local ad, Google will place the name of your local area (i.e. Denver, Colorado)... making it more likely that someone searching in your area will choose your organization vs. an out-of-town competitor.

Local CPC Ads are usually a more cost effective option than a national search engine advertising campaign. As a general rule of thumb, the more geographically targeted and specific you can be, the less money you'll need to pay to acquire new customers. And make sure you have conversion tracking code placed on your site, so you can measure and track how much you're paying for each new customer via local search engine advertising.

2. Don't Confuse The Search Engines With Graphics

Search engines are really good at reading text. But they're very easily confused. And if Google gets confused when it crawls through your site, you won't rank very high in search results.

Search engines, for example, can't read words that are contained in graphics or flash animation. So if your company's name is only contained in a graphic on your site, this content is ‘invisible' to a search engine. Same thing goes for product or service names.

The root of the problem lies with graphic designers. Graphic designers are really good at building graphics. Don't take this to mean I don't like graphic designers (I employ a bunch of them), but they sometimes don't know how to create SEO-friendly design.

Most websites, however, are designed by graphic designers who are really good at building graphics, and less interested in Search Engine Optimization (SEO). It takes a bit more time to have content placed in text, and use a stylesheet to format it so that a search engine can read it. Especially when it's so easy to create a good looking graphic in Photoshop.

Here's an example of a graphic:

Here's how it could be formatted, instead, using text and a cascading stylesheet (CSS): See the title of this section (above) for a live example.

EMAIL MARKETING: Here's an example of a site that uses all flash (and is invisible to search engines). While it looks pretty to humans, to Google the content is completely invisible. Here's how the site appears to Google in its cache. (You can see that there is no text or content that appears.) Even if you're not worried about organic search positioning, but are doing paid search engine marketing (like Google Adwords), it's important that the content on your site is easily digested by a search engine. Why? Google Adwords ranks the pages on your website, and compares it to your keywords and ad copy. The more relevant Google ranks the text on your site, the less you'll have to pay for a sponsored ad on Google (and the higher your position). In Summary: Don't confuse search engines by keeping your content ‘locked up' in graphics. It's a small little detail in the web design process, but one that will pay dividends for a long, long time with increased search results. 3. Title Tags & Why They Matter When you search in Google, the search results on the next page each start with a blue underlined link. Here's an example: What displays in this blue link is usually what is contained in the title tag of a web page. The keywords you placed in the search box are usually boldfaced in the search results. So, just what is a title tag, and why does it matter for search engine positioning? According to the World Wide Web Consortium, the Title tag was designed to help people "identify the contents of a document." When people view individual web pages out of context (often via search), context-rich page titles help tell the visitor a summary of the page. Instead of a title like "Introduction", which doesn't provide much contextual background, web designers should supply a title such as "Introduction to Medieval Bee-Keeping" instead. Google and other search engines use these rich contextual clues as a way to hone its search results. On a web page, the title tag is part of the HTML code. Here's what the code looks like on Customer Paradigm's site: <title>Customer Paradigm: Website Design, Development, Email Marketing, Content Management, PHP programming</title> Most end users won't see the title tag*. But if you remember back to my email tip about subject lines, the title tag is what a subject line is to an email campaign: It entices the end user to pay attention and open the page to read more.   Top Five Most Common Mistakes for Title Tags: 1. Untitled: When many of the popular programs create a new HTML page, it puts 'Untitled' into the title tag. It's up to the Web designer to change this... and since most users don't see it, sometimes they forget to change it. 2. No Title Tag: Like the "Untitled" tag, another key mistake is simply leaving out the title tag. If you do a view source (Internet Explorer: View —> Source), and the title tag appears like: <title></title> ... then you don't have a title tag. 3. “About” Tag: Another common mistake for title tags is to have the title tag refer to a section of your website. But a title tag that reads, "About" doesn't tell me much about what the company or website is "About." Instead, have it read: <title>Customer Paradigm - About the Company: Website Development & Marketing, Email Deployment, and PHP programming</title> This is sure to get more keywords into the title tag, and if you're searching for a company, you instantly know what they do. 4. No Company Name In Title Tag: We recommend putting your company name at the beginning of the title tag, so that people can quickly see your company's name when they search. 5. Same Title Tag on Multiple Pages: You should have a unique title tag for each page of the site. Why? As each page is unique, you should have a title tag that describes it's unique content. 4. What does a search engine look for? At the end of the day, a search engine is in business to help you find the most relevant results possible when you conduct a search. Search engines make their money by selling relevant advertising to supplement the natural, organic search results. Because a top ranking in Google or another search engine can translate into a great deal of business, it's important to know how search engines determine who gets placed at the top of the list. The two biggest ways search engines rank you are based on: Relevant Content: Search engines are really good at reading text. The more relevant copy you have on your site, the better chance you have getting your page indexed. Search engines love pages that have more than 500 words of text on them.  Why? A page with a lot of content is usually more beneficial to the end user. (Though for every rule like this one, there are many exceptions.)  Adding articles, press releases, detailed information about your products and services all can help quickly increase the amount of relevant content that you have on your site. Inbound Links: The more sites that link to you, the more important your site becomes to search engines. If sites that link to you are very relevant and/or important, those inbound links worth more. And domains that end with .gov, .edu often perform better than .com for inbound links.  It's kind of like a high schoul popularity contest. If the most popular kids all point to you and say that your website is better than anyone elses, in the eyes of the community, your ranking is elevated.   There are many other things as well that affect search engine ranking. I can't go into great detail for the entire list, but even small changes can translate into higher rankings. Title Tags: See last week's email. Page Names: Keywords in page names in crease the relevance of the search and are displayed in a Google search result. Image Names: Putting relevant keywords into image names helps your ranking. Alt Text for Images: If you hover over an image, this is the text that appears; also used by the blind to understand what an image represents. Keyword Density: How often specific keywords appear on a page as a percentage of all of the words on a page. Section Headings: In the HTML code, section headings like H1 or H2 are treated as more important content than the information on the rest of the page. Words contained in links: A link like: "Customer Paradigm offers Web Marketing and Search Engine Optimization Services" can help boost rankings. Clean HTML code: Search engines are easily confused if your websites' code is a mess. How often pages are updated: Search engines like new conent, but also have a bias toward pages that have been up on the web for a long time. Site Map: If you have a site map (and an XML site map as well), it's easier for search engines to crawl through all of the pages of your site. Keywords in your domain name. The age of your domain name: Older domain names are perceived as more relevant than something registered last week. Keywords in subdomains  (i.e. http://email.customerparadigm.com) Keywords in file directory structures  (i.e. http://www.customerparadigm.com/email) 5. Why Sitemaps are Baby Food For Search Engines Just a few years ago, the philosophy about sitemaps went something like this: If your customers need to use a sitemap to find their way around your website, you haven't done your job organizing your content and creating a navigational system that is easy to understand. But sitemaps are now back in favor. Why? It's less about human visitors and more about search engines. What is a sitemap? A sitemap is page that lists all of the other pages on your site, usually in a bulleted list. Here's an example of a sitemap: Click the graphic above to see a live sample of a sitemap page. As I've discussed before, search engines are easily confused. Many pages of a website are often 'hidden' behind tricky menus or drop-down lists. Or, the links to reach a specific page are too deep (i.e. more than a couple of pages down from the home page). A sitemap, linked from the home page of the site, will list every page of your site in one convenient place. When a search engine visits your site map, it's very easy for them to then get a list of every page on your site, and then crawl, digest and include all of your content in their system. We generally recommend having the link to your sitemap on the bottom footer navigation of your site. Click the graphic above to see a live sample sitemap link. But you need to make sure that as your site changes, your sitemap is updated. Otherwise, Google and others may not index the latest pages placed on your site. Our PageDirector system, for example, automatically updates the sitemap each time a page is added, or the name of a page is changed. And even better than an HTML sitemap is an XML sitemap. An XML sitemap is a sitemap that is specifically formatted for search engines like Google. It's a machine-readable version that allows you to specify all of the pages of the site. Click the graphic above to see a live sample of an XML sitemap. Adding an XML sitemap ensures that a site will get indexed much more quickly and more rapidly than not using this method at all. For the new site, God in the Wilderness.com, (a site devoted to my wife's book that will be published by Random House's DoubleDay Religion on April 8, 2008), the XML sitemap allowed the site to be indexed in 3-4 days vs. the usual 3-4 months. (But then again, it's my wife... so of course she gets all of the top-shelf website development stuff.) 6. Keyword Density What is keyword density? It's a percentage, calculated this way: Number of times keyword appears on a page / Total word count on page = Keyword Density Keyword density is usually displayed as a percentage. So, if you have a page that has 100 words on it, and you have a keyword appear 5 times on the page, your page would have a keyword density of 5%.  (5 / 100 = 5%) In a real life example, the search term "personalized URL" has an overall keyword density on this page of 3.05%: Click the graphic above to see a live sample of a keyword page. (15 instances of the keywords / 981 total words on the site = 3.05%) However, not all keywords on a page are treated the same. Keywords in the title tags, page name and section headings are often given higher weight than keywords that appear in the regular content area of the page. Here's how the keywords break down in the different areas of the site: Description: Keywords: Total: Percentage: Title Tag 1 8 25.00% Page Name 1 3 66.00% Linked Text 1 61 3.27% URLs in Links 2 237 1.68% Visible Text 7 627 2.23% Total 15 981 3.05% This keyword term currently has a ranking of #2 in Google:   Click the graphic above to see the rankings. So, how much keyword density is too much? It depends on which study you read, but it's generally best to keep your keyword density between 3-6%. Anything more, and you'll be penalized for trying to spam the search engines. As a general rule of thumb, if the copy of the site makes sense to a human reading it, you should be fine. But if you repeat the same keyword five times in a row (Personalized URL, Personalized URL, etc), then you can be banned from search engines or penalized.

9. Reverse Archeology

Archeology, of course, is the systematic method to uncover artifacts from the past that have been buried or forgotten.

One of our more famous clients is an archeologist who has been labeled a "real life Indiana Jones." He's author of a new book, Ten Discoveries that Rewrote History.

What he and other archeologists do is examine artifacts that were lost and buried, and draw conclusions about how life was lived hundreds or thousands of years ago.

When people search online, it's a lot like sifting through thousands of years of junk and broken pieces of pottery in order to find the one intact tablet that solves your mystery.

If you’re like me, you often see a lot of non-relevant results returned when you do a web search. Google, as good as it is, isn't perfect. You scan down the page, looking for the answer to your question. And then you suddenly see a link to a site that matches exactly what you’re looking for.

Reverse archeology, applied to the Web, is a process that allows you to plant key information for people to find and discover.

The article in the New York Times last weekend was an example of a reporter looking for fun, cool, hip and trendy information about Boulder. I'm not very hip, but my wife is. So when the reporter did a search for something like, "spiritual skiing" in Google, her site came up first in the list.

I tagged along for the hike and interview, squeezed my way into the article, and gained the new label "Web site Guru" by the New York Times.

How does the process of reverse archeology work? Essentially you come up with keywords that your target audience is likely to use in a keyword search, and then you create relevant content on your site. When prospective customers or the press "digs" through the mass of web pages in a Web search, they can find your site quickly and easily.

Reverse archeology is a different type of mindset for generating website content, but one that can be extremely successful.

10. Customize Your Website with Visitor's Search Keywords

Okay... Your site is now optimized for search engines and have you have people coming to the site. Now what?

You want to make the experience as welcoming and easy as possible. Otherwise, a visitor won't be able to find what they're looking for, will get frustrated and then will leave (never to return).

A common problem is that while websites can be optimized for search engines, they aren't always optimized for their human visitors. This week's strategy takes the person's keywords that they used to find your site, and then show them content based on their request.

So, for example, if you search for "personalized URL" in Google, we show up #2 in the results:

If you then click on this link, the flash animation at the top of the site will read, "Searching for personalized url? Click Here or Call            303.499.9318      ."

We do this by taking the search string in a person's browser and dynamically passing that to our system. We can also dynamically insert content on the page, based on these keywords as well.

Does it work? We've measured a 30% increase in people filling out a contact form or calling us since we implemented this on the site a few weeks ago.

11: Avoid Industry Jargon

One of our clients, NewStripe, makes the machines that paint the lines on football and baseball fields.

Within the industry, the machines are known as wet line markers (or dry line markers).

But customers don't often use these terms. Instead, a typical customer might search for:

"Machines to put stripes down on athletic field"
(Newstripe.com is the #2 search result.)

Or, they might search for: "painting stripes on your athletic field" 
(Newstripe.com is the #1 search result.)

Does your site copy and content reflect the language a potential customer will use in a search? If not, a prospective customer will either (a) have to learn the industry lingo in order to find you, or (b) visit your competitor's site. Option B is a lot more likely.

So how can you tell if your site is using too much industry jargon?

1. First, ask your current customers to take a look at your marketing materials and website. It's a great way to engage satisfied customers without trying to sell them anything. Most people are flattered when you ask them for their opinion.

2. Second, ask someone who knows very little about your industry to read through your site, and see if they can figure out what your company does for a living. If they are confused, then it's likely your potential customers will be confused as well.

3. Third, pay attention to how the press covers your industry. Reporters try to communicate broad ideas, and try to cut through esoteric terminology.

12. Measure & Track Your SEO Efforts

How do you know if your search engine optimization is working?

The quick answer is this: You need to measure and track how people come to your site. If someone makes a purchase from the site, or fills out a contact form, you should be keeping track of the search engine queries that they used to get there.

This is information that your website is probably already collecting, but you're likely not using on an individual basis for each person.

When someone comes through our website and fills out a contact form, we are able to track exactly what search terms they used.

We then can do roll-up reporting on our search engine optimization efforts, to know what new leads came in from SEO.

If you're doing Google Adwords or other CPC advertising, it's easy to measure and track the conversions. Google's tracking system makes it easy, as you are paying on a cost per click basis each time someone clicks on your keywords.

However, with a natural search engine program, it can be a little more difficult. What we like to do is track 10-15 top keywords, and see how they change in the search results each month. Then we track and measure what's working (new pages, added content, new inbound links), and try to enhance the results even more.

The issue is that SEO is a zero sum game. If you're not at the top of the rankings, but one of your competitors is instead, you're going to lose out. SEO is a constantly shifting game. What worked last year or last month won't necessarily work next week, as other sites add content and better optimize their sites.

From: http://www.customerparadigm.com/index/383/12-Strategies-for-Effective-Search-Engine-Optimization-SEO-Article.php

For 99% of the projects we take on, a domain is already part of the equation. However, in some circumstances, we've been called on to provice advice for naming a domain, either for a new blog, a company launch or even just a friend's website. Below, I've listed 12 tips I find indispensable when helping people select a great domain name.

1. Brainstorm 5 Top Keywords
   When you first begin your domain name search, it helps to have 5 terms or phrases in mind that best describe the domain you're seeking. Once you have this list, you can start to pair them or add prefixes & suffixes to create good domain ideas. For example, if you're launching a mortgage related domain, you might start with words like "mortage, finance, home equity, interest rate, house payment" then play around until you can find a good match.
2. Make the Domain Unique
   Having your website confused with a popular site already owned by someone else is a recipe for disaster. Thus, I never choose domains that are simply the plural, hyphenated or misspelled version of an already established domain. I still believe that Flickr desperately needs to buy Flicker.com - I hear kids in their 20's tell parents in their 40's and 50's to see photos on Flickr and always envision that traffic going straight to the wrong domain.
3. Only Choose Dot-Com Available Domains
   If you're not concerned with type-in traffic, branding or name recognition, you don't need to worry about this one. However, if you're at all serious about building a successful website over the long-term, you should be worried about all of these elements, and while directing traffic to a .net or .org (as SEOmoz does) is fine, owning and 301'ing the .com is critical. With the exception of the very tech-savvy, most people who use the web still make the automatic assumption that .com is all that's out there - don't make the mistake of locking out or losing traffic to these folks.
4. Make it Easy to Type
   If a domain name requires considerable attention to type correctly, due to spelling, length or the use of un-memorable words or sounds, you've lost a good portion of your branding and marketing value. I've even heard usability folks toute the value of having the letters include easy-to-type letters (which I interpret as avoiding "q," "z," "x," "c," and "p").
5. Make it Easy to Remember
   Remember that word-of-mouth and SERPs dominance marketing (where your domain consistently comes up for industry-related searches) both rely on the ease with which the domain can be called to mind. You don't want to be the company with the terrific website that no one can ever remember to tell their friends about because they can't remember the domain name.
6. Keep the Name as Short as Possible
   Short names are easy to type and easy to remember (the previous two rules). They also allow for more characters in the URL in the SERPs and a better fit on business cards and other offline media.
7. Create and Fulfill Expectations
   When someone hears about your domain name for the first time, they should be able to instantly and accurately guess at the type of content that might be found there. That's why I love domain names like Hotmail.com, CareerBuilder.com, AutoTrader.com and WebMD.com. Domains like Monster.com, Amazon.com and Zillow.com (whom I usually praise) required far more branding because of their un-intuitive names.
8. Avoid Copyright Infringement
   This is a mistake that isn't made too often, but can kill a great domain and a great company when it does. To be sure you're not infringing on anyone's copyright with your site's name, visitcopyright.gov and search before you buy.
9. Set Yourself Apart with a Brand
   Using a unique moniker is a great way to build additional value with your domain name. A "brand" is more than just a combination of words, which is why names like mortgageforyourhome.com or shoesandboots.com aren't as compelling as branded names like bankrate.com or lendingtree.com. SEOmoz itself is a good example - "SEO" does a good job of explaining the industry we're in and creating expectations, while "moz" gives a web association, and an association with being free, open, and community-driven.
10. Reject Hyphens and Numbers
    Both hyphens and numbers make it hard to give your domain name verbally and falls down on being easy to remember or type. I'd suggest not using spelled-out or roman numerals in domains, as both can be confusing and mistaken for the other.
11. Don't Follow the Latest Trends
    Website names that rely on odd mis-spellings (like many Web 2.0 style sites), multiple hyphens (like the SEO-optimized domains of the early 2000's), or uninspiring short adjectives (like "top...x," "best...x," "hot...x") aren't always the best choice. This isn't a hard and fast rule, but in the world of naming conventions in general, if everyone else is doing it, that doesn't mean it's a surefire strategy. Just look at all the people who named their businesses "AAA... x" over the last 50 years to be first in the phone book; how many Fortune 2000's are named "AAA company?"
12. Use an Ajax Domain Selection Tool
    Websites like AJAXWhois and Domjax make it exceptionally easy to determine availability of a domain name - just remember that you don't have to buy through these services. You can find a name you like that's available, then go to your registrar of choice.

SEO, the art and science of ranking well in search engines, is one of those things that is easy to learn but hard to master, so let’s focus on the easy part. You’ve got a website and it’s not ranking in Google so well for whatever search term you are coveting. So what do you do?

Here are some (hopefully) simple things you can do, or even better tell someone else to do, to get your SEO strategy in gear:

1. Figure Out Your Target Audience
Until you know who you are targeting there is not much point in doing SEO. What words are your potential customers searching with when you want to be found? What are different modes are they in when they are searching? Are they ready to buy? Are they just doing research? Are they big spenders or are they cheapskates?

In general pick terms that match up with your service, that you think will convert well (conversion is a another five minute discussion altogether btw) and that have good search volume. To get an idea of search volume use Google’s Adwords Keyword Tool which can be found here:
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Once you come up with your target keyword list…

2. Update Your Page Titles
The page title or “title tag” is perhaps the most important element of SEO. These are the words that appear at the top of your web browser when you are on a page. They are also the words that show up in the blue links in Google.

Put the search terms you are targeting in your page titles. In general keep the titles as brief as possible while at the same time making them appealing to searchers. No easy trick. Put the most important keywords at the beginning of the title. Don’t worry about getting this perfect the first time as these are very easy to change and Google usually reacts to these changes quickly. And if your website developer tells you these are really hard or expensive to change, get a new website developer.

3. Make Each Page Title Unique
It is also important that all of the pages on your site have unique page titles. A quick way to see if you have more than one page with the same title is to do the following search in Google:

site:yoursite.com intitle”the words in the title”

The results of this search will show all of the pages in Google that have these words in the title. Once you identify these problem pages you can update the titles to make them unique.

And make sure you add your city name to the titles as a lot of people search for your service in your city.

It also couldn’t hurt if you added some text to the actual page that uses the keywords you are targeting as well, in both the body of the text and the
h1 tag, which is typically the headline of the page. If you don’t have a page that targets the keywords you are using, add a new page that does.

You also should check the meta descriptions tags of each page to make sure those are unique as well.

4. Add a Few Internal Links
The number of links a page gets from its own site and which pages link to it matters. The home page is the most important on the site and so the pages that are linked to from the home page are also important. Figure out which pages you want to rank the most (and don’t say all of them) and add links from other pages to these pages. Make sure you use relevant keywords in the text of those links. For example if you want to rank the page for “pizza” use the word “pizza” in the text of the links that go to that page. Try not to use the exact same phrases in each link to make it look more “natural”. For example in some of the links use “best pizza” or “man that’s a helluva a pizza”.

5. Add Your Address to Every Page
Ideally every page should have your address and phone number. This is helpful for users but it also reinforces your location to the search engines. If your business has multiple locations then you may want to create a separate page for each location or at least a single page that lists all locations. Make sure you link to these pages from as many pages as possible on the site. It would probably be a good idea to list as many location names as possible on the home page too.

6. Claim Your Profile on Merchant Circle, Google Local Business Center, Yahoo Local, etc.
There are a huge number of yellow pages-like sites that allow you to update your business information for free. These sites get a lot of traffic and tend to rank well. At the least you should go to each one, claim your profile and make sure they are linking to your site. You may be surprised at how much business you can get from these free listings. Here’s of sites that offer a free yellow pages listing:

7. Make a Video
And I am not talking about a multimillion dollar production. Ask your kid to point the camera at you and start talking. Explain your service and try to be charming. Mention your website a lot. Then upload it to YouTube and every other free video site and title the video with your top keywords (e.g. “Best Pizza in Pleasanton”). Make sure your website is linked to from your profile. Then link to these video pages from your site with the keywords in the link text. You will be amazed at how easy it is for these pages to rank for your search terms.

If you want to do something more professional, there are a number of services that can help you including www.spotzer.com, www.mixpo.com,www.spotmixer.com , and www.turnhere.com .

8. Add a Blog To Your Site
A blog is just a simple way to add pages to your website. A good, or even bad, web developer should be able to set up a simple blog for you in a few minutes. If you don’t want it super customized it shouldn’t cost that much. Once it’s up start writing. I am not talking novels or even journalism. I am talking keywords. If you want to rank for “Pizza in Pleasanton” write a blog post called “Pizza in Pleasanton: What’s Cooking Tonight At Joe’s Pizza”. Go tohttp://blogsearch.google.com/ping and add your blog’s URL to Google’s blogsearch engine. Now everytime you write something on the blog it will instantly be added to Google, and each of those posts has a chance of ranking for the term you are targeting.

9. Make Sure You Don’t Have Any Technical Issues
There are a number of technical issues that could be preventing your site from ranking. An easy way to identify them is to sign up your site to Google Webmaster Tools at www.google.com/webmasters/start. By copying a short line of code to your site you can get an idea of some of the common problems that Google is having with it. Google provides you with some detail about the problem. There is not much you yourself can likely do about these problems, but you can at least show them to your website developer or a SEO guy and ask him/her to figure it out.

10. Get Links
Now none of this stuff will work very well if you don’t have any links to your site. The big search engines look at links from other sites as a sign of quality and trust. So you should spend the remainder of your five minutes thinking about what other sites you think you can get links from. Here are some of the obvious ones:
- Chambers of commerce/local business groups
- Local business directories/Local newspaper site
- Friends who have sites (including your kid’s blog)
- Partners/Vendors

There are hundreds of other ways to get links like writing articles for other sites, sending out press releases, adding your business info to social media sites, making a fool of yourself in public, etc.

It’s important to understand that SEO is not a one-time thing just like running a TV ad campaign is not a one-time thing. It’s a marketing tactic like any other. And as more people use the Web to find local services, SEO could become one of the more important components of your marketing plan. So get familiar with it today so you can master it tomorrow.

Ok, so maybe that took more than five minutes, but half the battle of marketing is just getting your attention right?

If you have any more questions about SEO or Pleasanton, but not about proctologists, please drop me a line at localseo @ localseoguide.com

From: http://www.localseoguide.com/how-to-do-local-seo-in-five-minutes-or-so/