pilkster.com

Although I’m not active in SEO anymore I’m often asked by local business owners for SEO and SEM advice. It seems that every family in Australia has some kind of ‘Mom & Pop’ business – a milk bar (corner store), cafe, nursery, clothes shop, laundrette etc. and wants to know about the Best Local SEO Companies.

Although the hyper-niche local markets might at first seem like a lot of work for small return they don’t have to be. Actually it can be quite an easy and enjoyable experience building the online presence of a local business and building them a ‘brand’. The rise of social media has made this job a whole lot easier. Here are some recommendations for quickly and cheaply building a local following.

Firstly, a Facebook page. I recommend the Facebook page over a ‘proper’ website or even wordpress blog because:

1. Everyone uses Facebook. If you’re going to reach and engage a person, FB is the place to do it.
2. Quick and easy setup (like five minutes or pay some guy on fiverr.com to do it for you)
3. Easy to administer by the local business owner (everyone knows how to use FB, right?)
4. Engagement – once you’ve hooked a customer as a fan on Facebook it’s easy to engage with them.

If you have some time and money to spend Facebook PPC can tightly target a demographic (if your business sells wedding dresses then target people recently engaged) and the cost per click can be amazingly low when you’re targeting a small geographical area. This works super well for local gyms, personal trainers, local speed dating events etc etc. Easy and cheap, less hassle that Google AdWords for sure.

There’s a whole heap of things you can do with Facebook pages to gain ‘likes’, lots of plugins and scripts available to (for example) unlock a printable discount coupon when your visitor ‘likes’ the page.

Encourage the business owner to take charge of the page and publish an item of news daily or weekly (example: our local bar has different specials each day of the week – locals night, $10 parmie and pot, live music on Sunday arvo, cheap cocktail Friday). Don’t overdo it with the news and publishing though, you’ll just annoy people and be seen as spamming.

This certainly saves the local business owner a lot of cost (domains, hosting, web designer etc etc) and hassle and can provide so much more value to both the business and the community.

There’s been much speculation since 26th February (the Google ‘Farmer’ update and also my birthday!) about the value of SEO in the modern web. My own experience is that some of my sites are seeing less traffic… but some are also seeing more. I’m probably typical of the middle-of-the-road small webmaster – from what I’ve read most people have had experiences similar to mine.

The key to gaining valuble traffic is (now more than ever) good quality content that provides value to the visitor. Ignoring SEO if you have a good quality site is like leaving money on the table – SEO is certainly still relevant and will continue to be for some time. Google appear to be weeding out lazy SEO’s – in fact the nickname of the update (farmer) suggests that the update has hit the AdSense content farms the hardest… leaving those of us with higher quality websites with more traffic to share.

If you have a website but don’t find the time for SEO why not consider hiring a full service company such as seo kansas city ? Even having a simple site review to make sure that you’re not blocking spiders from indexing your content, duplicating your own content, or linking out to unsuitable domains is well worthwhile.

The internal name at Google for the ‘farmer’ update is ‘Panda’… Google have gone as far as making comment (analysis on SearchEngineJournal). Notes include:

1. Avoid duplicate content
2. Clean up your spelling
3. Check your analytics – high bounce rate, low time on page etc. are key indicators of low quality content
4. High Ad-to-Content ratio

All in all this update is certainly going to make life more difficult for the content farms such as Associated Content et al however it may prove to be a good thing for publishers of quality content.

Port Forwarding is really useful for home users. I wanted ports forwarded through my router to improve my utorrent/p2p connection and allow remote desktop sessions from locations outside my LAN (ie anywhere on the internet).

I had been struggling to set up my router; I had found useful information on portforward.com and was considering using the PFconfig application which they sell for $29.95, however I had read several reviews and although the software seems OK the backup support (for if the software cannot solve your problem) was reviewed as poor.

From a comment I read on a review I found a link to PCWinTech who offer a free tool which does basically the same as PFconfig. I downloaded the tool and followed the steps and still no forwarded ports

I noticed that the forums were active, and that Shane (the forum admin) was offering one-on-one help for free. I dropped a note in the forum, and the very same day Shane contacted me to help fix the problem. We spoke first on the forum, and then by MSN. Shane directed me to download teamviewer and took control of my computer whilst I watched. Shane logged in to the router and located the problem; the router firewall was blocking traffic from the internet to my LAN.

Shane asked for nothing in return for his help; I would like to say a big thanks to him, and to his wife who wanted him to go to bed as it was 11pm!

Approx 50 domains for sale, all approaching one year old. Useful for clickbank review sites. Mostly at godaddy.

Domain only for sale; no files/backups to be supplied. You’re welcome to grab the text off the sites.

Minimal traffic.

If you don’t buy then I’m going to allow them to expire.

See the original auction here:

http://flippa.com/auctions/57484/50-Review-Sites-Package-Deal

Domains $15 each; $12 each if you buy 5; $10 each if you buy 10 or more.

For those of you who need to see stats go here.

Mostly In life I’ve been lucky enough to be in one of two situations:

• Plenty of time but no money
• Plenty of money but no time

I’ve recently realised that building a house and getting married means I have no time and no money hence I’ve got to sell some stuff. Many of you Reading this will know me and know some of the stuff I’ve got (online and off). Feel free to make me an offer if it’s something you like.

One thing I have more of than I will ever have time to develop is domains and websites. I’m a bit of web kleptomaniac… buying websites and domains is so much more fun than selling them. As I’m working offline these days I don’t have time to do any development (I struggle to keep up with maintenance) so watch out and grab yourself a bargain.

I’m going to start small and sell some of my low value stuff. As there is a lack of a decent web marketplace I will be selling the really cheap stuff on digitalpoint (no cost, but probably loads of hassle) and other stuff on sitepoint/flippa (expensive fees, especially as they offer nearly no service).

I figure I will probably list stuff here on my blog for a couple of days before posting on the marketplace to give people I know chance to snipe stuff.