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9. Create a Mobile version of your website.

Mobile is the “next Big Thing” and creating a mobile version is free and easy on sites like Zinadoo and Mobeezo.

You can also get mobile apps built for a few hundred quid. This can be used as a viral and social media tool, used to get numerous links from great ranking sites like a link from Apple if you build an iphone app.

Next, use sites like : Foursquare, Gowalla, Twitter Places, Loopt, MyTown, BrightKite and Facebook. You could use tools like TwitResponse to set up auto Twits for a month in advance using a basic spreadsheet.

10. Optimise for Local Search

If you have a brick and mortar shop or an office where you trade and don’t already know this, you must be hiding. Local search is the easiest way to smash the top spots, and will soon take on even more power.

Top tips here are;

● Put your address and phone number on the site and in the meta tags. Do not use 800, 0800. 0945 etc. numbers.

● Add yourself to Google Maps

● Add yourself to Bing Local and Yahoo Local

● Don’t use URL redirects on your homepage

● Be sure your whois information is showing the correct address and phone number. It does not matter whether or not you paid extra to ‘hide’ your information, Google is a Registrar and can get to it.

● Add the geo-tag to your coding.

<META NAME=”geo.position” CONTENT=”latitude; longitude”>

<META NAME=”geo.placename” CONTENT=”Place Name”>

<META NAME=”geo.region” CONTENT=”Country Subdivision Code”>

e.g.

<META NAME=”geo.position” CONTENT=”49.2;-123.4″>

or

<META NAME=”geo.position” CONTENT=”49.2;-123.4″>

<META NAME=”geo.placename” CONTENT=”London, Ontario”>

<META NAME=”geo.region” CONTENT=”CA-ON”>

● Spend a couple hours submitting yourself to business directories. A few quid is worth the link alone and Google uses many of these directories. Good ones are;

○ GetListed.org

○ Yelp

○ Hotfrog

○ Superpages

○ InsiderPages

○ Citysquares

○ Mojopages

○ Google Places

○ Business-directory-uk.co.uk

○ Thompson local

○ Yahoo Local Merchant

○ Ask Business Search

 

● If you have more than one location, add a landing page or even a website for each. If you have an established website use subdomains as explained in tip #4

●

Set geographic targeting in Google Webmaster Tools

● Get local links. Sponsor a local kids sports team and give incentives for facebook links for a free pizza night or offer an auction item for a charity event that is web-based

● Upload a dozen pics with keywords and descriptions that target your area to Picaso and Flickr and geo-tag them. Link to these from your site.

● Google Local Business offers the option of including videos in your business listing.Since Google bought YouTube, now you can include links to your YouTube videos and tag them with your target keywords/phrases/location which not only improves your rankings on Google Local Business but will also help visitors searching on your keywords come across you in the organic search results as Google typically displays video results on the first page.

11. RSS Feeds for Building Free Links

You create RSS feeds to supply information on site updates, increase traffic to your site and place links in your content that will be republished and provide free links back to your site. Using the scraping technique mentioned above, Black Hat SEO’s would search out RSS feeds and build a data base with the content for future use, spin the content and reuse it or just republish the content. In all cases they would insert their own links. They build programs or plug-ins (such as the Word Press All-In-One SEO plug-in) and these will take any chosen word or phrase and search through the content and when found change the code to make it a link to their chosen site. There are many other ways this can be used but you get the basic idea.

The neat thing here is that they need to do this automatically for speed and being able to make rolling URL’s and websites quick enough to beat the spam-bots for a few weeks for this technique to pay off. Because of this most don’t have the time to clean everything up properly, so your links remain.

Publishing the URL of your RSS feed on the many different sites that list these (I.e. FeedBurner) will insure a nice number scrapers posting your links to their sites.

I guess the first criticism of this would be that they will put you on Viagra sites – well even if they do I haven’t seen this particular method draw penalties when I messed around with it. But remember – I don’t condone or endorse….blah, blah, blah.

Here are some simple steps to get started with RSS:

• Set up a FeedBurner account to allow your feed to be consumed by others.

• Share your feed on your various social networking profiles. Many social networking sites have the ability to consume and display your RSS feed to your friends, followers, and fans.

• Submit it to multiple RSS submission directories (do a search for RSS submission for some options).

• Here’s a starter list for you of where to submit your RSS feeds through;

http://www.feedmil.com/addfeed.jsp

http://www.feedest.com

http://www.feedlisting.com/submit.php

http://www.feedgy.com/Submit.aspx

http://www.feedlisting.com/submit.php

http://www.feedbees.com/add.php

http://rssmountain.com/submit_anonym.php

http://www.feedsee.com/submit.html

http://feedfury.com/submit

http://www.rssmicro.com/FeedRank/?Fe…com%2frss.aspx

http://www.millionrss.com/add-my-feed.php

http://www.rss-network.com

http://www.goldenfeed.com/AddFeed.aspx

http://www.rssmad.com/index.php

http://www.feedbomb.com/

http://www.plazoo.com

12. Use Social Bookmarking & Social Media

I first talked about social bookmarking and how it could be used as a tool 5 years ago when I was at a gaming conference and someone asked me what could be done to improve their rankings just a spot or two. In the Gaming industry top positions for ‘Hollywood’ keywords like Poker and Bingo within the top 10 results can be significant. One position in the top 3 results can result in the difference between 6 figure ROI’s and 7 figure ROI’s.

Based on the graph below showing click through rates in relation to the top 10 ranking positions, the difference between the 3rd and 4th positions is 2.44%. The number of global searches for Poker is 24,900,00. Based on what we know, 2.44% click-through difference between the 3rd and 4th position, this ONE SPOT could equal over £600,000 per month or over 7 million per annum.

The difference between the next 2 spots is over 20% less because if you are not in the top 3 you are not in Google’s syndication network which includes everyone from AOL, iWon, Ask and Netscape, to dozens of other top search engines. And this isn’t PPC or paid results, these are their organic results.

 

So I understood why someone might be concerned over one position…

 

What I recommended from this point was scrutinised (especially at the SMX and SES conferences with primarily SEO’s in attendance and other SEO’s on panels. So I proved myself by taking the top 10 results for poker (this was on Google.nl because I was in Amsterdam) and there was a ‘kicker’ listing, which is what I call this;

I targeted someone that was below the target site and wasn’t a competitor. In this case it was Pokerlistings.nl. I used Onlywire, a mass submission social bookmarking site to submit Pokerlistings.nl. There are 100 times as many sites and tools like this now available that submit a chosen page or site through multiple venues such as Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, Blogger, etc. Back then I used Onlywire. The entire process took 10 minutes and that was all I did.

By the next day the target site (the guy in the audience) was ranking a position higher.

 

I remember practically getting chastised at SMX Advanced for “teaching blackhat techniques” and even took criticism from a couple of forums I moderate like GPWA and SEO Chat.

At the end of the day Google themselves have created a toolbar plugin that allows simultaneous submission to GTalk. Twitter, Facebook and various other social bookmarking sites. At that time though the critics said it was ‘grey’

Social Bookmarking can improve your rankings. Five years ago it lasted 30-45 days, now its a week at best and involves LSI and a few other factors. Its just one of the things any good SEO will be including in his/her arsenal.

There are lots of companies and software that do this. Some will even ping the page or automatically submit it through article directories and post it to WordPress blogs and Phpbb forums. I use these for saving time. Some think its grey hat SEO but if I were a normal person that wanted to put something out to the public without the hours or days of work required, I would use tools like this.

Google, Yahoo and Bing all have plugins for their toolbar which allows you to submit to multiple venues.Use these tools under strict control as they are easily abused and can cause more harm than good.

Facebook and Twitter are examples of Social Media and it has been stated by Google that they are now using this as a significant ranking element. I always assumed that they did because what better set of un-engineered data on a mass level could you possibly find?

 

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Search Engine Optimisation, SEO Tools, Social Media Marketing, Top SEO Tips