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Although the Internet is a global entity, if you are targeting local customers then your traffic should be local. There is no sense in concentrating on global customers if the local community is your city or neighborhood. Therefore, you might be wondering how to go local with SEO on your webpage since Google does not list websites as location specific. There are six primary ways to localize your SEO efforts including:

• Use your location in metatags
• Utilize Google Places and Yahoo Local
• Use your location in keywords
• Become listed in local directories
• Create separate web pages for different locations
• Request testimonials

The first method is to use your location when creating metatags. Since metatags are important to search engines, you should always use your location coupled with keywords. You must also use your location as a keyword as it will appear strange that your tags are stuffed with your location but it cannot be found anywhere in the body text.

Another technique is to utilize Google Places and Yahoo Local. You simply need to register for an account on each and submit information about your business. It will then be included in their listings for a specific location.

As previously stated, an additional effective practice is to use your location in the body of your text through keywords. As a business, many customers will enter the type of business followed by a location. If you simply list the type without the keyword, your business will not appear when customers also enter a location, thus defeating the entire purpose of targeting local consumers.

An extra method is to become listed in local directories. Although you may believe nobody peruses the listings, you would be mistaken. For example, Yellow Pages is one of the first resources people use to search for local businesses that feature a specific product or service.

Another technique is to create separate web pages for all the different locations you plan to target. If you have businesses in many locations, you simple make different pages that are optimized using the location as a keyword. If your business spans many countries, create different websites on different country domain extensions.

Finally, by requesting testimonials from customers on review sites, this will drive additional traffic to your business. Targeting local customers can be difficult at first. However, you must learn what works and what doesn’t. Hopefully the aforementioned list helps you get started to using the best practices with SEO.

This article generalizes the practices undertaken for promotions of companies that give web hosting and domain name services.

Analyzing Market and Researching Competition

Large viewership in the web hosting niche can be misleading. Hence, competitor websites needs to be located in your niche especially those that have active participation in Internet marketing. You can type in any highly relevant query and then get the sites that rank well for it. Once you have the list you need to ‘clean’ it by striking out irrelevant sites. A number of queries can then be used, and sites that rank well in most are taken out for primary consideration.

Keyword Selection

A list of essential keywords should then be in order to know which ones are those that every competitor is vying for. Some keywords are used because of search engine ranking pressure only and not because they relate particularly well for your services. A Firefox plug-in like SeoQuake can give you an estimation of how much competitive a query is.

Keyword efficiency can be determined by using following data and then Microsoft Excel calculates equality factors below with special formulas. This way you can realize the efficiency of a keyword better.

• Keyword positioning
• Traffic pulling power
• Number of searches from Google Keyword Tool with respect to exact and ’phrase’ match
• Number of page views
• Viewing time length
• Bounce rate

When the data is available a graphical representation can be done to highlight the indictors that give most or least conversion alerts.

Earning power of Shared vs. Dedicated Hosting

Generally speaking, Shared Hosting is more profitable for sales dedicated server sale pitches in 200$ of revenue while the same server ‘cutted’ for shared hosting accounts for (~100 x 5$).

Specialized Hosting

It is always better to go for keywords with high-frequency traffic while adding in medium to low-frequency keywords, to generate the bulk of sales. Even if you get good traffic for competitive queries you can sensibly put in low-frequency, long-tailed keywords to make sure you grab most niches easily. It is worth mentioning that it is difficult to promote words like “hosting” and “web hosting” because of extremely high competition which makes them sell right from top-20.

Getting Links

SEO techniques are largely based on

• Keyword research
• Optimization of texts and meta tags
• Using correct ‘anchors’ to add backlinks

Hosting sites carry a huge list of backlinks. One wonders how they are able to get hold of so many backlinks, thriving on comments and reviews cannot be the only way to generate such a long list. The major techniques used to achieve so many backlinks are:

• Link Exchange
• Link buying
• Generating links through affiliate program

Search Traffic Conversion

It is generally assumed that USA and Western European countries are going to have more customers who can go for online transaction, owing to the countries’ stable economy (compared to developing countries).

Finally, make sure your pricing is competitive. Have a tabular presentation of competitors’ prices and services and promote yourself where you can make it a better option for your client companies.

To acquire genuine rankings in major search engines, it is important for websites to contain inbound links. This is due to the fact that search engines look for a metric to determine how pages rank against one another. They are looking for some indication of quality or approval from other sites that one webpage is more important than another and thus should be ranked higher.

To build links there are five updated methods:

• Utilize a blog
• Write how-to articles
• Post to Facebook
• Post to Twitter
• Utilize bookmarking sites

By developing your own blog and consistently writing posts for it, you can link back from your blog to your site. To be effective, you must develop your links to the blog and the content must be genuine. Honest product reviews are a great way to create an authentic link. Also, promote the blog on social media sites.

Another method is to search for websites that offer advice to readers about specific issues related to your products. Write how-to articles that relate to using the products you sell with a link back to your site at the end. Also, you should contact bloggers that have blogs related to the products you sell and ask them to accept a product review for their blogs. Since this is relevant content they will usually accommodate.

Social media websites like Facebook, Twitter, and bookmarking sites are an excellent resource to building links. On your Facebook page, you should have a link to your website. Also, by posting product reviews you will reach a much wider audience. Additionally, sharing links will help drive traffic to your site.

Furthermore, utilizing Twitter will help your website be seen on other sites. Google scours the internet looking for quality blog posts, links and content. If a URL is constantly tweeted by various people Google will see that link as being acceptable. Also, posting your link on these networking sites will return incoming links.

Finally, utilize bookmarking sites for all of your website’s content, videos, articles and product reviews. Since there are hundreds of social bookmarking sites, you can pair your bookmarks with others in the industry that will help add links.

With technology constantly evolving it is important to learn how to reach as many potential customers as possible utilizing these advancements. Blogs, article writing and social networking sites are currently the craze and should be utilized to acquire links and drive traffic.

Long tail keywords are an excellent method of generating traffic to your website. Unfortunately, they are difficult to research. Those searching for shorter keywords will most certainly run across longer terms. As the short tailed phrase improves its search engine ranking, traffic will increase. It is possible to gauge your SEO success on the effect of longer keywords that increase traffic before a shorter term hits the first page of a search engine.

The Google Keyword Tool

In the case of targeting Google visitors, the Google Keyword Tool will help you generate a list of variants pertinent to your primary phrase. Then utilize a Tag Cloud to discover which phrases fit best into your keyword mix. Tag Clouds tend to make recurrent phrases appear larger thus giving you a quick snapshot of the most utilized keywords. There are plenty of Tag Cloud generators available online for free.

The Tag Cloud

Another method of understanding your current traffic is to create a Tag Cloud by exporting your Analytics keywords in groups of 500. You will be surprised at the high frequency of words used to drive visitors to your site. Then make adjustments to those keywords that are the highest frequency or reduce the total number of keywords used. Therefore, you are creating a list of targeted keywords.

Eliminate Low Quality Traffic

Most individuals do not even consider eliminating free traffic. However, these visitors are of lower quality with a high bounce rate. Therefore, this can result in a negative long-term effect on your rankings by diluting your value within the targeted industry. You want highly target visitors that are actually interested in your product of service.

Learn what is working

In either of these approaches, the traffic volume for each phrase is not measured. As an alternative, the objective is to learn which other keywords are appearing in the search engine results as well as among the actual traffic. Even through a quick review of the keywords, you should be able to determine new opportunities for improved optimization and content development.

Each of these methods is a great way to learn the keywords that are working and those that are not. Once this is discovered, you can eliminate those that are not performing well thus driving poor quality traffic to your website. It is always important to optimize your keywords for quality, relevant traffic that will actually be interested in your product or service.

Microsoft’s fairly new search engine, Bing, has drawn a great deal of attention from the SEO industry since its release. This is because Bing is expected to cut a sizable share from Google. Although this is not the first time a major player has stepped into the ring with Google, Bing appears to be different from other search engines, which is a major strength.

When using Bing, the most common first impression is that the search engine is different. There are plenty of graphical ruffles to please the eye and disguise irrelevant algorithms. Although this may have been the case with other search engines in the past, Bing is different. When you search for a specific term, Bing responds with relevant results. This is fairly rare among most current search engines.

The results are tremendously precise but different from Google’s results. Consequently, whether you search with Bing or with Google you will receive relevant results that are completely different. This proves Bing’s algorithm differs from Google’s. Therefore, it is important to pinpoint the difference between the two algorithms.

Since Bing is still quite new, there are no exact methods of optimizing your site for Bing. However, there are a few bullet points that must be taken into consideration including:

• Page rank matters less
• Bing is more Flash-friendly
• Inbound anchor text is significant
• Fresh content matters less
• Bing focuses on the authority of the site
• Backlinks are less important
• Link spamming does not help
• Onpage factors are more important

Page rank is one of the most important aspects of the Google algorithm. On Bing it is normal to conduct a search on a competitive keyword and see a few PR2’s on the first page. This is next to impossible on Google. Also, Bing loves Flash websites. Therefore, optimizing a website using Flash could significantly help your traffic. Additionally, the anchor text of inbound links is much more important than the quality of inbound links.

Furthermore, freshly written content is not as vital to Bing as it is to Google. This could be due to conservatism or perhaps Bing cannot index sites quickly. Bing also focuses more on the authority of the site which is not good news for smaller websites and blogs. This indicates searches favor older and larger sites. Additionally, backlinks are not nearly as important to the algorithm as they are to Google. At this time, it is unclear if nofollow is important to Bing.

Link spamming will not help you in Bing. Since the quality and quantity are of less importance to Bing, link spamming with have little effect. The final point is a highly debated, controversial idea; that onpage factors matter more to Bing than Google. At this point, it appears Bing values them much more.

These guidelines should help you optimize your website according to the requirements of Bing. Although Bing is still a large mystery to the SEO community, most of these pointers have been proven by professionals.