Search Engine Placement

One of the ways you can help yourself get better search engine placement is through building your trust with Google. In Google’s effort to keep spam out of the search results they give special emphasis when you have links from the following sites.

1. The Better Business Bureau. To most this is common sense. But when the search engines see that you are listed with the better business bureau, they believe your probably not a spammer. So get listed with the better business bureau in your area.
2. Hacker safe. This company does server side checks to make sure your site hasn’t been hacked. Although expensive, and only recommending for medium to large businesses, having the logo and link on your site has been shown to increase trust with Google.
3. Links from other respected sites. In general, it is great if you can get links from major membership sites and other highly respected sites such as your local university, your chamber of commerce, etc.

We’ve just added another entry to our collection of SEO tools. The Google PageRank Checker is designed to check the Google PageRank and Alexa Rating of not just one, but multiple websites. Enter a list of website domains (separated by commas) and compare their respective rankings.

For those of you unfamiliar with Google PageRank and Alexa…

• Google PageRank is a measure of link popularity for a given website. Google rates the quantity and quality of a website’s backlinks on a scale of 0 to 10, with 10 being the best. Only massive websites like Google and Adobe receive a 10.
• Alexa Traffic Rankings is essentially a measure of how popular a website is. The lower the number, the more popular the site is. That’s the abbreviated version anyway. If you really want the long version, check out Alexa’s explanation.

Although the internet started out as a way to reach people all across the world, reaching people in your local area and community is also important.

Many businesses these days are concerned just with getting their products bought all over the world, but can advertising to your local customers also help businesses? The question is should businesses use local search engine optimization along with regular SEO?

The obvious answer for some businesses would be yes. If the business serves only one specific geographical area or region, then local SEO is one of the first things to do get put in place.

But even if you’re not based in operations that are strictly localized, having your business optimized in the local search engines can be a positive experience. Local SEO can be used to expand the number of relevant keywords for your company. These keywords will relate to the location of your operations. These will get you rankings for more terms than those that are related directly to your business.