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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.

Following on from yesterday’s post I came across Shady’s view on dofollow via a drunken thread at DP.

My new friend Ruben was asking about DoFollow promotion. I was about to email him back, but decided to turn the email into a blog post instead.

What is DoFollow promotion?

Over the last couple of years blogs have grown in popularity. Spammers latched on to the fact that when adding a comment to a blog post they could add their link to the comment. Search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN count incoming links to websites and use these to determine which sites rank highly in their search results. To combat the problem of spam ‘nofollow’ links were introduced – search engines (supposedly) give no weight to these links. Most blogging systems and software (including my favorite, WordPress) now default to using nofollow links in comments. Many other sites with user generated/modifiable content also use nofollow links (eg Wikipedia).

More recently people in the know on the net have got a bit ticked off with Google’s double standards – they request webmasters to build sites for visitors without consideration for search engines, but also promote the nofollow tag (and a whole host of other stuff that I could rant on about all day, but it is 30′ and sunny outside & I want to go surfing). These people in the know have started the dofollow movement, where they properly moderate their blogs/sites and manually reject spam. If you make a valid comment on a blog post why should you not have a link to your site (which is probably related anyway?)

What does DoFollow mean to me?

If you have a website & you want some relevant inbound links you can find dofollow blogs on a similar topic, read them, and leave your comments. This will encorage the owner of the blog and the blogs readership to notice your website/blog, and also provide inbound links to your website that will be noticed by search engines. Search engines are actually quite clever these days (even with all their failings) and they will notice that your site/blog is aligned with the topic of the sites that link to you.

OK, great – where can I find some DoFollow blogs?

• CommentHunt.com
• DofollowBlogs.com
• Comment Kahuna
• DP forums

Don’t forget that the directory, search engines and software listed above aren’t perfect – you need to check the sites yourself once you have found them. Download a plugin for your browser like SEO for Firefox. This has a useful function that highlights nofollow links (the ones we don’t want!) You can see in the image below that Shoemoney’s name is highlighted red – it is a nofollow link, and I am not giving him any link love. Sorry Shoe, here you go.

Awesome – so howsabout an example?

Sheesh, I’m too good to you guys. Hope the weather stays good.

Step 1: I go to commenthunt.com & type in ‘SEO’ as my search term (lets just pretend that I’m trying to find a linky for this blog) . Top of the list is good old DaveN, another northern monkey with a passion for campervans.

Step 2: I hop over to DaveN’s site and find a blog post relevant to my site:

Step 3: I fill in the comment form, being careful to make my comment relevant and to leave my URL and name (name will become anchor text for your linky, you might want to consider this) :

Step 4: Hit ‘Submit Comment’, and there she is.

Note that on many blogs your comment will not appear until *after* it has been approved by the blog owner.

Any other related stuff?

Search the internet for yourself, fool! Oh, OK, Andy Beard’s post is a good place to start.

Watchout WordPress users, the BlackHats are coming!!

As you may or may not know I have several friends who are involved in BlackHat SEO and they have been showing particular interest in the progress of Themey, my WordPress theme site. I had a little think about the potential for WP in the blackhat arena, and the things that can be done with it are very worrysome. The potential includes (but is in no way limited to):

• Using your domain, server and IP address to send bulk email.
• Using your server and IP address to spam other bloggers with comment and trackback spam promoting their latest PPC campaign (Pills, Porn and Casino).
• Using your site to pass PageRank (PR) to their PPC site.

If you are interested in the way that spammers could use your site for evil you can find more details (including an example site showing a method of user-agent based PR spam) in my Security Vulnerability post at Themey.