Hot answers tagged local-seo
9
Be sure you use the <address> HTML tag and place your address in it. If you don't want to use your home address use a PO Box or a UPS store address (be sure to have a box there). Place it in the footer of your website and on your contact page.
Also, add your business to Google Places.
8
In the accepted answer of this question SEO implications of hosting a UK-based site on an EC2 instance based in Ireland you have link pointing to usefull resources and answers to your question http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/03/working-with-multi-regional-websites.html
Ih this page, I think you have your answer
Dealing with duplicate ...
6
After claiming your listing with Google Places as well as Bing, and BOTW local listings. I start with the local citation finder. This shows where your top local competitors are promoting their website http://www.whitespark.ca/tools/local-citation-finder/ and will give you a good idea of where to promote locally.
Also depending on the industry Yelp can be a ...
4
I would suggest utilizing a 301 redirect to a new subdomain location. Subdirectories aren't handled as well from an SEO perspective, and it also diminishes the geo-focus of a site.
I say this based off of practice, lest you wonder.
Another question is where the hosting is occurring for the international domains? Do you have them hosted in those countries ...
4
I can't tell you what the consequences of this will be for sure but I think you can do this and reasonably manage your rankings if you follow best practices.
If possible do a 301 redirect from the old URLs to the new URLs. This means for each and every page. This will let the search engines, and users, know the page has moved and let them know the location ...
4
I've found that the best way to get neutral results is to use chrome's incognito function (tools menu > incognito window).
An incognito window doesn't have a cache, cookies or anything else attached to it at the start of a session, and anything added during a session is deleted at the end.
4
It's very tough to rank in Google's local search results for place names where you are not physically located. Typically the strategy is to steps is to boost your traditional SEO presence, or to move your business location. Here are some steps that you can take to outrank the competition, as wel as some good descriptions of the problem.
Create unique ...
4
The idea of the rel="alternate" hreflang="xx-XX", as I understand it, is ultimately to stop duplicate (or near duplicate) content that is intended for discrete regions from competing with itself or being actively penalised as duplicate content.
So the specification of alternates won't stop them from showing in search in regions that aren't targeted (or ...
4
First of all, Alexa rank is more about traffic than your content. More traffic = higher rank.
From an SEO standpoint, copying another sites content is never a good idea. Even if you 'spin' the article like you mentioned by changing around certain words or re-ordering things Google will often pick up on this as 'duplicate content' and it will negatively ...
3
You need to make a separate VirtualHost for each port, like so:
#assuming you have this in your config
NameVirtualHost *:8000
NameVirtualHost *:8001
NameVirtualHost *:8002
NameVirtualHost *:8003 # (...)
Listen 8000
Listen 8001
Listen 8002
Listen 8003 # (...)
Then each VirtualHost looks like this:
<VirtualHost *:8000>
ServerName localhost
...
3
You can't reliably and effectively block a specific region from viewing a website. The way the Internet works there is no definitive way to say a visitor is from a specific geographic location. The best you can do is to use Geolocation to try to determine their location and then ban them if they meet a predetermined criteria. Unfortunately this is not ...
3
Get listed in Google Places
Make sure you use the correct keywords in your places listing
Make sure you choose every possible relevant category for your business in your listing - most business should have at least 3, but larger stores may have dozens.
Put the city, state of your location into your page titles
Put your address and phone number at the bottom ...
3
As long as you aren't doing anything deceptive you will not be penalized.
However, you will probably not gain much if any benefits from Google. Especially if the page becomes so long Google doesn't parse it all. The only situation where it could be helpful to SEO is if you have a specific brand keyword where you are the definitive #1 result and someone ...
2
SEO is quite a complex issue and your boss has just picked up on 1 element. Having the target town in the Domain name will help but that's not the whole story by any means. If his plan is to point all these domains at a single site then his thinking is flawed as the sites will appear to google as duplicated content and all the sites would suffer. The other ...
2
You can tell your boss that buying all of those domains won't do any good. Your approach, which can also be accomplished using subdirectories instead of subdomains, would be a more practical solution.
2
There's a lot more to SEO than a Google Places listing or number of pages in a website. There are at least 200 ranking factors and they vary in importance.
The site that is outranking you probably has better quality links then you do. Quantity of backlinks is irrelevant. Quality is what matters. Not to mention you don't know how many backlinks they really ...
2
Ranking well for "Irrigation Services" doesn't do you any good if the user is in California. You're definitely out to target a specific geographic location and should concentrate your efforts on that. Geolocation is definitely something Google has started doing and will be working to improve but you should give them every clue as to where you are located and ...
2
You could host the website in another country and/or on a different countries domain name -- that might at least discourage Google from including it in local or "UK search". There's no way of keeping the site from just West Midlands however.
The geo-blocking suggestions above are probably your best bet but they can suffer from both false positives and ...
2
Some web hosting companies provide RIPE IP Failover blocks. It allows you to choose the geolocation of each IP block: IE, FR, DE, ES, EN, PL and so on (all IP Failover blocks route to your server). Thus you'll improve the SEO of your projects in major search engines.
Then no need to have a website URL like
www.mywebsite.com/ie/home
...
2
A lot of it is logic: for example, if people search for cheap web hosting, then they are probably looking to buy web hosting. The word cheap implies that they are looking to buy something, because cheap is a price and when people are searching for a price then they probably are searching for a product, and when people search for a product they usually want ...
2
Probably not since Google allows it and you can manage multiple accounts from one Google+ account both business and personal. Google places migrated to Google plus not too long ago. Have you searched Google specifically to see which of the pages is linked to Google maps in search results? Whichever is showing up in map listings (local listings) at the top of ...
2
I wouldn't worry too much about duplicating your own content across different language versions (even different English versions) — especially if you are making some changes to it.
Search Engines are smart enough to know, quoting Google on duplicate content and international sites:
Websites that provide content for different regions and in different
...
2
rel="alternate" is intended for exactly this purpose, so I'd go with that. So, for example, mark the .com with hreflang="en" – generic English – and of course hreflang="en-GB" for .co.uk, which should mean that English search outside the UK gets the .com.
The only drawback is that it's Google only, but in UK, US etc. that's over 90% of search so likely ...
2
Citations
Citations is ultimately the only word you need to know when it comes to local search rankings, the more businesses and websites that mention your site with things like telephone number and address the more credibility your business has in your local area.
Accuracy of Data
Your worst enemy is the accuracy of your data, you want as many sites ...
2
I've seen posts from Google stating that they don't appreciate these list very much and that it is borderline keyword stuffing.
That being said, I would certainly recommend that anybody who creates a website for a company that does home delivery or home service include the names of towns and zip codes on the website. The "massive lists" approach is OK, ...
1
You can use the canonical tag to tell the search engines that it is the same content, but on a different URL
Also consider using the source tag
1
A good way to determine the differences in what search engines see as important between "normal" SEO and Local SEO can be found by comparing the following articles:
SEO Ranking Factors from SEOMoz
Local Ranking Factors from David Mihm
1
While those steps are the most common there is more that can be done depending on the client and what they want out of a local SEO campaign. I've negotiated with local websites lower ad rates for my clients, managed their Groupon campaigns, AdWords campaigns etc.
Local businesses need local exposure, so running ad campaigns on local sites, facebook ads ...
1
I am sure others will be along with more comprehensive answers, but I'm firmly of the view that a single domain should be used for the site, with any secondary domains redirected not just resolving to the same server.
This also applies to non-www and www aliases
This way, you only have one set of incoming links, and one set of SEO scores/pagerank
As to ...
1
If I do that, will I sill keep the place on the first page in search for "balloon decorations"? Should I leave (balloon decorations) in meta tags?
Possibly, possibly not! The problem with any SEO change is you can make it better for the term you work on but could have negative effects for other terms (even terms you are not aware you are ranking highly for)
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