The author presents two external links in the article, one to the NY Attorney General’s press release on the matter and the other to RealSelf.com, the site where Lifestyle Lift posted the fake reviews.  There also are three internal links to the Times’ Topic pages on Andrew Cuomo, Amazon.com & Yelp.com. These are the pages that the company uses to try and rank for search queries related to these subjects.

So how come there are zero links to Lifestyle Lift’s site?  The company is clearly the main subject of the piece and the providing the link would definitely help flesh out the story for readers. NYT.com does not tag their external links as “nofollow” therefore they are capable of passing a considerable amount of pagerank.

One, that one being me, can only conclude that the writer and/or the editor was making a judgement call to withhold providing Lifestyle Lift with any SEO benefit perhaps because they had been naughty.  Doesn’t seem very objective to me.

Just caught this article in the NYTimes about how Attorney General Andrew Cuomo had fined Lifestyle Lift, a cosmetic surgery company, $300,000 for ordering its employees to write fake reviews of its face-lift procedure on sites like RealSelf.

Let’s put aside the ethics of faking reviews for a minute and reflect on how effective a strategy this was for Lifestyle Lift:

Pros:
They probably didn’t factor this in, but because they got caught, their site is now generating a lot of links.  Variations of “facelift” or “cosmetic surgery” are not hugely expensive to buy ($5-$10 CPC), but I guess if they could translate those links into some page one rankings it could easily be worth $300K.

Cons:
Page one of Google for “lifestyle lift” is already littered with results about this story.  My bet is unless they do some reputation management SEO these aren’t going away anytime soon.  So even if they do rank on page one for some great terms, sooner or later a prospective patient is going to Google them, see this story and likely bail.  Hmm, something like this could tank their whole business pretty quickly.  Maybe it wasn’t worth the page one rankings?

It’s too bad Lifestyle Lift went down this route, but it’s understandable.  There probably was a lot of negative word of mouth about them already in the cosmetic surgery communities.  Here’s the first thing I saw after I clicked on the third SERP result for “lifestyle lift” - “Lifestyle lift for jowls, turkey neck - unsure if it was worth it”

While it’s hard to overcome a bad product or service, perhaps if they had consulted with a knowledgable SEO/Reputation Management pro at least they could have come up with an alternate strategy that would not have cost so much, or if it had, at least it would have had a better ROI.  Some tips for Lifestyle Lift in the future:

1. SEO your site!  At least update your title tags with some good keywords.  Hell update your whole site.  It’s a bit of a tired, hard-to-read thing as is.  If you can’t control what people are saying about you online at least try to get some traffic for valuable keywords and bypass them.

2. Participate in social media without faking it.  If Ms. Turkey Neck is not saying nice things address her concerns.  Maybe you need to redo her turkey neck.  I guarantee if you turn her turkey neck into a swan neck, she will be your loudest supporter in these communities.  And what would that cost you?  My guess is the margins on turkey necks, among other things, are pretty fat.

3. Work with a reputation management pro who can help you move a lot of those pesky little negative links off of page one.

4. Better yet, give your customers reasons to say nice things about you online.

Even if you don’t have a problem with the ethics of fake reviews, they do often violate the terms of service of the reviews website.  And as Lifestyle Lift discovered, that little fact can cost you.  So next time you are thinking it might be a good idea to post some fake reviews of your business on the Web, remember you might be blowing all the cash you saved up to fix your damn turkey neck.

For more points of view on turkey-neckgate:

Unethical Customer Reviews Can Cost You Big - Search Influence

Plastic Surgery Co Settles With NYS Over False Reviews - Blumenthal’s Blog

BTW - banana peel, fire hydrant & pigeon?  Subliminal messages?

Greg Sterling thinks this is interesting because it will help CitySearch come up with ideas that it never could do on its own.  This is probably true, but if I were a gambling man I would buy Zynga poker chips and bet there’s more to it than that.

As part of the contest, qualified contestants “will receive a link to download the developer kit so you can start building your prototype.”

Now please correct me if I am wrong, but if you’re CitySearch would you spend time building a SDK just for a contest?  Doesn’t seem like a very good use of company resources if you ask me.  So what’s really going on here?

As I mentioned in my previous post about Yellow Pages APIs, I think the next big innovation in local search is going to come as the publishers that control all of the yellow pages listings data release that data via APIs and let the volcano vaporizer users come up with cool applications that sit on top of that data.  Right now I think the majority of Web marketers don’t have much of a clue as to the value of local search traffic.  Clicks for DUI attorneys are certainly worth more than those for ring tones and acai berries.  But if the data is suddenly easily available and new sites start cropping up that appear to be making $, you will start to see even more local search sites than we have now.  This will make for a very crowded field, but if you’re the data publisher and your ads are riding along with the data, you may not care who ranks #1 in Google, as long as the ad clicks belong to you.

So my suspicion is this whole Sidewalk contest thing is merely a Trojan Horse for CitySearch to ease into the listings API strategy.  I would not be surprised that upon the announcment/launch of the winner, IAC announces that now anybody can build their own local guide app.  And that would be a pretty cool announcement.

As anyone who has had a conversation with me about Web-based local search knows, I generally think all players in the IYP world have done a fairly poor job of creating a truly innovative user interface to help me accomplish my local search tasks in a way that is easy, useful and satisfying.  As anyone who has had a conversation with me about mobile local search knows, I generally think there are too many apps trying to solve different pieces of the puzzle (Yelp, YellowPages.com, Google Voice Search, etc.) and as a user I think I just want one.

The first thing that struck me about Geodelic’s service was the design.  If you think UrbanSpoon had a cool design, I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised by Geodelic.  The thing is smooth.  I think that’s best word for it.  Smooth.

Beyond design, the concept as I understood it, is to start the experience by providing the user’s current location information and then allowing the user to explore from there.  One of the example’s I recall is the idea of being in a maternity ward. The service knows you are in a maternity ward and can prompt you to provide assistance for all the things you might want to find related to being in a marternity ward (diapers, nearest pharmacy, a cigar to pass around maybe?, etc.).  It wasn’t exactly rocket science, but it was useful.

While there are several local mobile search apps (e.g. Where) that have baked in a lot of other niche local services like Yelp Reviews, GasBuddy, OpenTable, ServiceMagic, etc., it seems like Geodelic’s ambition is for these services to be presented to you in a more relevant, contextual fashion.

While I didn’t spend enough time with the service to say that they have achieved this, I did see how the UI was interesting enough to make me want to give the service a try.  And at this point in local mobile search, that’s good enough.

I really don’t want to have to use multiple apps to find what I am looking for.  If Geodelic solves this problem, they will truly become “my precious”.

Geodelic’s Sherpa service will be coming soon to the new T-Mobile Android phone.

I then did the same search on Google and found these results:

Not sure exactly how I would leverage this into a smart local marketing campaign, but if I were trying to be an information resource for a city, I would make sure that I was tweeting about these types of events.  As more people start to search Twitter for this kind of stuff, it could become a great way to connect with potential customers and help them get to know your brand.

A little test: Austin Veterinarians & Chicago Hardwood

Local Search Summit is on July 17th, 2009 at the JW Marriot in San Francisco, CA.  Admission is $495.

Read the official announcement.

And here’s the agenda

And here’s how to get tix

Hat’s off to Steve for making this crazy idea of his a reality.

With the launch of Bing I was curious to see how much traffic it would drive to my clients’ sites.  So I dug into Google Analytics and pulled out the following data for ten sites of varying sizes (Note to Google Analytics team: please put Bing.com referrals in the Search Engines report instead of the Referring Sites report):

Bing Accounted for 5% of All Search Engine Visits
Not bad for the new kid on the block.

Bing Has Improved MS’ Share By About 2%
MSN & Live are still sending a bit of traffic to these sites.  If you bundle their referrals in with the Bing referrals and then compare them to all MS referrals from Monday May 18th, it appears that total MS share of search engine referrals has gone up 2.3% - I left out the data for one of the sites as we fixed a pretty glaring SEO issue that caused a dramatic jump in MS traffic.

Does Bing Have a Brand Preference Algorithm?
The sites that saw the most dramatic growth were “branded” local media sites (e.g TV stations, newspapers, etc.).  I asked one of Bing’s product managers whether Bing had it’s own version of Google’s brand preference algorithm (I am at the Microsoft Search Summit this week).  He speculated that these sites most likely saw big lifts because Bing has increased the presence of local news links throughout the experience.

Of course these first few weeks of Bingness (trying to work it into the vocabulary for you Microsoft) are more indicative of sampling and MS’ marketing push, so it’s all still up in the air, but I would say based on day one that Bing is well-Bung.

At least for one search…

Update: This is not intended for local business sites (e.g. a local mattress retailer), but rather for local directories and similar sites

A boutique hotel chain, Broughton Hospitality, is promoting a “digital detox” called “Retweet With Broughton”.  They’ll give you 30% off a stay at one of their hotels if you hand over your IPhone, Blackberry, etc. when you check in.

I imagine some of the people I follow whose avatars appear regularly in my Twitter timeline might find this package enticing, if they could handle the withdrawal symptoms.

I could see this strategy working for restaurants and other places where all of us annoying mobile tweeters tend to congregate.

More on the promotion here.

1. Claiming Your Local Business Listing: 4.42
2. Citations From Major Data Providers + IYP Portals: 4.10
3. Associating Local Business With Proper Categories: 4.00
4. Product/Service Keyword in Local Business Listing Title: 3.56
5. General Importance of Off-Page/Off-Listing Criteria: 3.50
6. Positive Ratings Associated With Your Local Business Listing: 3.34
7. Volume of Customer Reviews Associated With Your Local Business Listing: 3.34
8. General Importance of Customer Reviews: 3.27
9. General Importance of On-Page Criteria: 2.98
10. Including Full Address on Website Contact Page: 2.86
11. Proximity of Address to City Centroid: 2.85
12. Quality of Inbound Links to Website: 2.82
13. Hyperlocal/Traditional Web Crawl Citations: 2.80
14. Product/Service Keywords in Local Business Listing Description: 2.77
15. Location Keywords in Inbound Links to Website: 2.71
16. Customer Reviews Left Directly at the Search Engine: 2.65
17. Location Keyword in Local Business Listing Title: 2.50
18. Product/Service Keywords in Inbound Links to Website: 2.45
19. Including City + State In Most/All Website Title Tags: 2.42
20. Customer Reviews Left on Third-Party Websites: 2.30

And the award for worst offending factor goes to…Multiple Local Business Listings With The Same Address: -2.02

Check it all out here

SEO, the art and science of ranking well in search engines, is one of those things that is easy to learn but hard to master, so let’s focus on the easy part. You’ve got a website and it’s not ranking in Google so well for whatever search term you are coveting. So what do you do?

Here are some (hopefully) simple things you can do, or even better tell someone else to do, to get your SEO strategy in gear:

1. Figure Out Your Target Audience
Until you know who you are targeting there is not much point in doing SEO. What words are your potential customers searching with when you want to be found? What are different modes are they in when they are searching? Are they ready to buy? Are they just doing research? Are they big spenders or are they cheapskates?

In general pick terms that match up with your service, that you think will convert well (conversion is a another five minute discussion altogether btw) and that have good search volume. To get an idea of search volume use Google’s Adwords Keyword Tool which can be found here:
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Once you come up with your target keyword list…

2. Update Your Page Titles
The page title or “title tag” is perhaps the most important element of SEO. These are the words that appear at the top of your web browser when you are on a page. They are also the words that show up in the blue links in Google.

Put the search terms you are targeting in your page titles. In general keep the titles as brief as possible while at the same time making them appealing to searchers. No easy trick. Put the most important keywords at the beginning of the title. Don’t worry about getting this perfect the first time as these are very easy to change and Google usually reacts to these changes quickly. And if your website developer tells you these are really hard or expensive to change, get a new website developer.

3. Make Each Page Title Unique
It is also important that all of the pages on your site have unique page titles. A quick way to see if you have more than one page with the same title is to do the following search in Google:

site:yoursite.com intitle”the words in the title”

The results of this search will show all of the pages in Google that have these words in the title. Once you identify these problem pages you can update the titles to make them unique.

And make sure you add your city name to the titles as a lot of people search for your service in your city.

It also couldn’t hurt if you added some text to the actual page that uses the keywords you are targeting as well, in both the body of the text and the
h1 tag, which is typically the headline of the page. If you don’t have a page that targets the keywords you are using, add a new page that does.

You also should check the meta descriptions tags of each page to make sure those are unique as well.

4. Add a Few Internal Links
The number of links a page gets from its own site and which pages link to it matters. The home page is the most important on the site and so the pages that are linked to from the home page are also important. Figure out which pages you want to rank the most (and don’t say all of them) and add links from other pages to these pages. Make sure you use relevant keywords in the text of those links. For example if you want to rank the page for “pizza” use the word “pizza” in the text of the links that go to that page. Try not to use the exact same phrases in each link to make it look more “natural”. For example in some of the links use “best pizza” or “man that’s a helluva a pizza”.

5. Add Your Address to Every Page
Ideally every page should have your address and phone number. This is helpful for users but it also reinforces your location to the search engines. If your business has multiple locations then you may want to create a separate page for each location or at least a single page that lists all locations. Make sure you link to these pages from as many pages as possible on the site. It would probably be a good idea to list as many location names as possible on the home page too.

6. Claim Your Profile on Merchant Circle, Google Local Business Center, Yahoo Local, etc.
There are a huge number of yellow pages-like sites that allow you to update your business information for free. These sites get a lot of traffic and tend to rank well. At the least you should go to each one, claim your profile and make sure they are linking to your site. You may be surprised at how much business you can get from these free listings. Here’s of sites that offer a free yellow pages listing:

7. Make a Video
And I am not talking about a multimillion dollar production. Ask your kid to point the camera at you and start talking. Explain your service and try to be charming. Mention your website a lot. Then upload it to YouTube and every other free video site and title the video with your top keywords (e.g. “Best Pizza in Pleasanton”). Make sure your website is linked to from your profile. Then link to these video pages from your site with the keywords in the link text. You will be amazed at how easy it is for these pages to rank for your search terms.

If you want to do something more professional, there are a number of services that can help you including www.spotzer.com, www.mixpo.com, www.spotmixer.com , and www.turnhere.com .

8. Add a Blog To Your Site
A blog is just a simple way to add pages to your website. A good, or even bad, web developer should be able to set up a simple blog for you in a few minutes. If you don’t want it super customized it shouldn’t cost that much. Once it’s up start writing. I am not talking novels or even journalism. I am talking keywords. If you want to rank for “Pizza in Pleasanton” write a blog post called “Pizza in Pleasanton: What’s Cooking Tonight At Joe’s Pizza”. Go to http://blogsearch.google.com/ping and add your blog’s URL to Google’s blogsearch engine. Now everytime you write something on the blog it will instantly be added to Google, and each of those posts has a chance of ranking for the term you are targeting.

9. Make Sure You Don’t Have Any Technical Issues
There are a number of technical issues that could be preventing your site from ranking. An easy way to identify them is to sign up your site to Google Webmaster Tools at www.google.com/webmasters/start. By copying a short line of code to your site you can get an idea of some of the common problems that Google is having with it. Google provides you with some detail about the problem. There is not much you yourself can likely do about these problems, but you can at least show them to your website developer or a SEO guy and ask him/her to figure it out.

10. Get Links
Now none of this stuff will work very well if you don’t have any links to your site. The big search engines look at links from other sites as a sign of quality and trust. So you should spend the remainder of your five minutes thinking about what other sites you think you can get links from. Here are some of the obvious ones:
- Chambers of commerce/local business groups
- Local business directories/Local newspaper site
- Friends who have sites (including your kid’s blog)
- Partners/Vendors

There are hundreds of other ways to get links like writing articles for other sites, sending out press releases, adding your business info to social media sites, making a fool of yourself in public, etc.

It’s important to understand that SEO is not a one-time thing just like running a TV ad campaign is not a one-time thing. It’s a marketing tactic like any other. And as more people use the Web to find local services, SEO could become one of the more important components of your marketing plan. So get familiar with it today so you can master it tomorrow.

Ok, so maybe that took more than five minutes, but half the battle of marketing is just getting your attention right?

If you have any more questions about SEO or Pleasanton, but not about proctologists, please drop me a line at localseo @ localseoguide.com.

You know I really should have written this post on HCards & SEO, but Michael Wolf Gray (oops) needs less sleep than I do. It’s a very fine overview of why using the HCard format on your website is probably a “rainy-day project” at best.

For the uninitiated, or understandably uninterested, the HCard is a way to add “structured data” to your site, meaning you define things like addresses and phone numbers in the code. In theory this makes it easy for robots to understand what your pages are all about without and could become quite useful as location aware browsers and the like try to figure out what’s going on.

I have not yet seen the use of HCard make a noticeable difference for SEO, except that it does make it a bit easier for SkyNet to become aware and destroy all of civilization in a ball of fire.

Here’s Michael’s actionable points summary:

* Put only one address on a page if possible
* For multiple locations give each location thier own address
* Try to match domain registration address information with on site information
* Make hCard formatting a rainy day project in the near future

But you should really read the whole post.

I don’t see local results appear for “david”, “robert” or “emma” but I do see a three-pack for “suzanne”.