Targeted Local Search Engine Optimisation

One of the key elements to Internet and Online marketing is identifying your target market. Who are they, how old are they and most importantly where are they located? With the advent of more advanced geo-location software systems being used by Google we are now able to target very specific markets with our online marketing campaigns. The first step in this process is to write down and identify your market with the 3 questions I have listed above. Once you have done that then you should consider the following and address them in order to hone in on your target search engines and then consequently your target market.

I will use the example of a Web Designer and Developer in Melbourne, Australia.

1. The website should be hosted in the country and if possible the city in which you plan on targeting with your online marketing strategy.

2. The website should have on page search engine optimisation which is tailored towards the region - country - city. So, in other words these three elements, if they are identified as the target market, should be mentioned in titles, keywords, meta tags, content, on page titles, links etc within the website.

3. Any controllable external links to the website should have a sprinkling of the region - country - city within them, without over doing it.

4. The website should have a fully qualified domain name. In this case .com.au

5. The website should be listed in the regional Google search index. You can go to your local search engine and simply register and request for the googlebot to scan your website. If you host within the region and/or you have a fully qualified domain name then you should get listed within the regional index anyway but registering will triply ensure.

6. Sign up for Google Webmaster Tools and then go to Tools->Set Geographic Location. Some sites target users for a particular geographic location. For example, a site may target all users within a specific country, or it may target only those users who reside within a very small geographic area within that country. Using this feature allows you to further refine your target your market.

7. Have a regional specific phone number. For example, for website design in Australia it would be 1300 880 841.

8. Get listed in local online directories.

9. Use a Google map that shows your business location. This will ensure that your regional association is further enhanced within the search engines.

Once you have done all of these things then your website should be fully targeted towards your identified target market. Now you just need to make your site interesting, make it sell and get it developed properly in order to do this.

Reasons To Ignore Toolbar Pagerank Updates

There seems to be this hysteria around Google and its Toolbar updates. Maybe it relates to webmasters and web designers thinking that once Google make this fabled toolbar update that their website will magically jump up in the SERP's. Well I cannot say this clearly enough but if this is what you believe then you will be sadly disappointed. Google just don't work this way.

I see many, many articles, posts and blog comments by interested onlookers and self-declared SEO experts about the upcoming, and according to some people, well overdue, toolbar pagerank update. I have one quote I would like to share with you, from Matt Cutts who is one of the head Google Search Engineers, "Toolbar Pagerank updates are a non-event at Google". The main reason Matt says this is because pagerank is updated constantly and the toolbar pagerank is only a snapshot of the real pagerank. So this being the case once the snapshot of the real page rank is taken and assigned to the toolbar database it will have no affect on how Google actually view or rank the website in the SERP's. Fretting and stressing about where the toolbar pagerank update has gone is pointless because your web page already has a pagerank assigned to it, you just can't see a little green bar. It's just so teasing by Google isn't it!!

So, what should we do now that we have decided that checking your toolbar pagerank and those terribly inaccurate pagerank predictors is a waste of our time?

Well, find some good articles on SEO. Read them. Find more. Read them. Absorb as much information as you can about SEO and online marketing. Read about the website language your website is coded in. A common language nowadays is PHP. Research keywords and how to find good keyword phrases. Take a proactive approach and make some modifications to your site that you now know are correct SEO techniques.

If you have already got web pages in the SERP's then look for where you have 2 pages with 1 indented and maybe make some small modifications to the page that is the indented result and experiment with it a little. Keep a diary of your changes so that if you need to trace back to what changes you made you can. If they get a positive result then you can apply the exact same changes across other pages or if they are negative in the SERP's then you can start again from where you were before.

Give at least a week or two in-between making changes so that you can know exactly what affect your change had in the SERP's. Make only one change per page so that you can monitor that particular change vs. SERP's rankings.