Guess what? Your physical location is now just as important in the online world. As more and more potential customers turn to local search engines like Google, your physical location plays a greater role in your business potential.

Google’s local search algorithm gives very strong preference to sites that are located near the city center. You can usually find this point by searching Google maps for “Cityname, State” and seeing where it places the pointer. While Google’s algorithm is still developing (and will surely change in the future), the distance between your business and the city center plays a major role in where your business will appear in Google Local search rankings.

To witness this effect, search for something like “restaurant cityname, state” and you will typically see a listing of ten restaurants within a city, in a circular pattern around the city center. As you go through the results page, you will see that the business listings tend to fall further and further from the city center.

While other factors like customer reviews and online mentions of your business do play a role and can help you leapfrog other businesses in the local rankings, having a physical location near the city center gives you a big head start over the competition.

What does this mean? It means that SEO and local search engines are factors that you will not be able to ignore for long. As more users turn to search engines, your offline business will need a savvy online presence to survive.

Well I know that somebody out there is searching for tanning in Baltimore, they’re just not doing it in the right Meta engine or through the right ISP.

This presents a big problem for local businesses that have to choose between targeting different regional keywords on their site.

How Do I Decide Which Location Keywords to Target?

If you’re an acupuncturist in Rockville, MD, how do you choose between targeting “acupuncture washington dc” and “acupuncture maryland”? Should you go after “acupuncture rockville md” or would it make more sense to target “acupuncture bethesda”?

Or maybe people are searching at the county level and “montgomery county acupuncture” would make the most sense.

Let’s try an example in Keyword Discovery. This first search is for “rockville md acupuncture”:

These results don’t tell us much. This is supposed to represent all traffic in Keyword Discovery’s database for the last 12 months. Does that mean that nobody searched for “rockville md acupuncture” in the last year? Color me skeptical.

Let’s try Bethesda, a suburb of Washington, DC:

More results, but this data is still useless. We need something more accurate.

Using Google AdWords to Measure Keyword Traffic

If you want real, accurate search data, try using Google AdWords. This is a technique that I learned from the SEOmoz’s Keyword Research Guide (premium membership required) and it works perfectly for local keyword research.

Here it is, in 10 easy steps:

1. Select your topical keywords. Let’s take the example of acupuncture and add another related term that people might search for–acupressure.

2. Make a list of all the regional keywords that might be used by someone in your area looking for a local acupuncturist. So if you’re based in Rockville, MD, you might choose:

• Rockville
• Bethesda
• Washington DC
• Maryland
• Southern Maryland
• Southern MD

Depending on your budget, you can expand that list to more local areas. Are people searching more for “acupuncture in bethesda” or “acupuncture in bethesda md”? Keep it relavant; the further afield you go, the more difficult it will be to rank and to actually convince a customer to make the trip.

On the other hand, if you have a hunch that customers are searching within a particular area, this is the time to test it out. Money spent on AdWords now could save you hours of time ranking number 1 for a search query that nobody ever uses.

3. Combine the topical keywords with the location keywords. Use a tool like Keyword Lizard to make a list of the various keyword combinations.

4. Set up an AdWords campaign for your research. You can put all the keywords in one AdGroup or you can group them by location. It’s not a big deal because at this point we’re more concerned about the impressions than the actual click-through rate.

5. Enter all the keyword combinations from Step 3 as exact matches (they should go in brackets).

6. Set the cost-per-click (CPC) high enough that your ads will show. This will depend on how competitive your niche is. You want to set it high enough that your ads will be showing on ALL of the searches during the testing period–this will give you the most accurate data.

7. Set the daily budget high enough that your ad budget will not be met. If the campaign reaches its spending limit early in the day, then you won’t get accurate data.

Note: This keyword research technique may require a significant investment up front, depending on how long you let the ad campaign run. How much you’re willing to spend depends on the expected ROI of a top ranking. My opinion is that the insights you gain will be worth the money invested up front.

If you’re going to spend dozens of hours or thousands of dollars optimizing your site for your target keywords, you want to make sure that there’s a payoff. Ranking for a keyword location will be a waste of time and money if nobody searches on that keyword combination!

8. Make sure you uncheck the Content Network box in the Settings page of your AdWords campaign.

9. Wait a day and tweak if necessary. If you’re spending too much then you may have to cut your research short. On a positive note, the money you’re spending will be bringing in traffic to your site, so make sure the ad is sending visitors to a decent landing page with some information about your business and a way to contact you.

10. Collect the data and analyze. Ideally you would run this test for at least a month to get a meaningful sample size. The actual search volume for a given keyword will be the number of impressions listed in the AdWords interface.

Once you have your data, you can see which locations perform the best and target your website accordingly, taking into account traffic volume, competition, and relevancy.

I like it from a link-building standpoint because they let you link out to sites you own with the anchor text of your choosing–good for promoting other sites that are linked to your name, like your LinkedIn profile or your business.

From a reputation management perspective, it’s helpful because you control the content and you can push it up in the rankings with some concentrated link building. We’ll have to wait and see how it does in search results, but this is the kind of site you look for when you’re trying to push friendly sites to the top of the rankings for your name.

It’s a free site but they offer premium services for $4.95 a month, which includes paid search placement for keywords related to your name, the ability to edit your META description, and a few other nice options.

Unfortunately, learning about blogging never led me to learn more about Search Engine Optimization (SEO), because if I had, I probably would’ve been a much more successful real estate agent! As this article from Search Engine Land points out, many real estate agents are shifting their advertising efforts from traditional media to online media.

As more and more real estate agents and brokers begin to compete for paid search terms using pay-per-click (PPC) engines like Google AdWords and Yahoo’s Overture, popular keywords will be bid way up–especially in the most competitive markets.

So what’s an agent to do?

One option is to join a larger brokerage that can afford the big advertising dollars and hope that the traffic to your broker’s website trickles down into clients for yourself. I emphasize the word trickle–you’re not going to make a lot this way if you’re competing with 150 other agents in your brokerage.

Another possibility is to create your own website and drive traffic through AdWords. Like I said before, this is going to be increasingly expensive.

The third online strategy is to build your own website and get it ranked organically. I definitely wouldn’t say that it’s going to be easy to get on the first page of the Google results for keyword phrases like “my city real estate agent,” but the potential payoff is tremendous.

If I were still a real estate agent, my first priority in marketing would be organic search engine optimization. Why? My gut tells me that most agents and brokers will begin their online marketing efforts with PPC and online classified advertising. Most will not be looking at organic SEO as an option until their other online efforts fail or the idea of SEO becomes more mainstream.

The agents who move now and get established early in the search engine results will have a huge advantage. Google loves websites that have had good, trusted links for a long time.

The agents that start building quality incoming links and creating quality content related to their markets will have a big head start on agents who are entering three, six, or twelve months from now. Age is a big part of search engine authority, so the older your site and the older your backlinks, the better foundation you will have when every other real estate agent learns about SEO.

A strong SEO/link-building strategy combined with blogging to create fresh content and establish expertise will pay big dividends for real estate agents who are in it for the long haul.

Hey, that strategy will pay big dividends for just about any freelancer or small business owner!

It’s becoming more and more important for “older” people to understand new technologies like Facebook and social networking. If you’re clueless about technology, the younger workers you hire will see it immediately. And they’re not going to respect you if you’re clueless.

Think about this… with your computer skills, would you be able to get an entry-level job in your field today? If the answer is no, then you should be thinking about how you can improve (and not be replaced).

All you have to do is sign up for a Yahoo account and edit your public profile.

You’re allowed up to four links from your profile (no anchor text allowed).

Ok, so they’re not from the main Yahoo domain, but they aren’t nofollow’ed either. I wanted to check the authority of profiles.yahoo.com and it redirects to members.yahoo.com, which is a domain with PR7 .

Merry Christmas!

How does one go about removing slanderous websites from Google results?

My friend has been having trouble in interviews as potential employers have ” Googled ” his name and found slanderous information about him. All this info is completely false
Who in Google should be contacted in order to remove these results from the results page?

I answered with something similar to this:

1. If the sites are posting slanderous information, then there may be cause for a lawsuit. I don’t recommend this because it’s expensive and even if you win, your name will now appear in stories/documents related to the lawsuit.

In the era of search engines, lawsuits have a great potential to damage your reputation, because news and court documents about the lawsuit will most likely have a high authority and rank well for your name. You can’t always avoid being sued, but you should think twice about suing someone else. What’s it going to look like on the SERPs?

2. You can buy the offending sites and shut them down.

This could be really expensive, depending on the source of the offending information. Unless you’re Rupert Murdoch, you’re not going to buy the New York Times for printing a nasty article about you. But what if it’s a smaller blog? Or a message board?

You may be able to pay the owner to remove the offending information or you may be able to buy him out. Of course, this could also backfire–you don’t want to replace one bad reference to you with a result that says “Joe Jerkface tries to bribe site that called him a jerk.” Bad times.

3. The best way to improve your SERP reputation is probably to push the offending sites down in the search engine results by pushing more friendly sites up in the rankings. This method may be cheaper if you can do it yourself, or more expensive if you’re going to hire someone to do it for you.

I recommend getting a confidentiality agreement from whomever you hire. And remember that it may take months to show results, if you’re creating new pages that are going to rank above the offending result. It will take even longer if you’re trying to outrank a highly trusted site like a newspaper or your local courthouse.

But it’s probably worth it if you want to work (or date!) in the future.

So we were speculating that this time around, the paradigm shift will be to more web-based TV shows, or WebTV. Then I saw this piece from link building guru Debra Mastaler:

16% [of survey respondents] said they’ll watch more original content on the Internet as a way to keep themselves entertained during the strike.

The OTX only surveyed 3100 people for this opinion poll but still…… 496 of them said they’ll go online for original content. The fact they KNOW to go online means they’re already aware it’s there and will just do more of it. Don’t let the statistic fool you, that little drop in the bucket represents a huge possibility if you think about the millions of people with Internet access.

I think web TV is going to be huge–really huge–and that TV as we know it will look completely different in ten years or so. But as of now, there’s not a whole lot out there in terms of quality web TV–I loved Ze Frank and then there’s lesser known, but absolutely hilarious comedies like The Bu and The Burg, so I think the potential is tremendous.

It’s just a matter of time…the lowered cost of marketing and distribution through the internet will change TV forever (although I think that it won’t really hit its prime until the professionals join the amateurs).

It’s a good way to do a cursory check of the keywords used in links to a site, either to see how a competitor is getting linked, or to take stock of weaknesses in your current anchor text.

The only issue I have is that on one of my computers, I get an error message when I try to use the tool. I’m not sure what the issue is; maybe conflicting extensions in Firefox? Either way, it’s very useful.