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Place Search is rolling out in more than 40 different languages this week, offering enhanced functionality for users and increased visibility for millions of local businesses. A search query for sushi in Chicago, for instance, will yield the familiar Google Map marked with red pins, but will also contain more relevant information than previous searches and often as many as 40 links related to individual restaurants on a single results page.

The new information is presented clearly and can be easily digested by users to make quick and easy comparisons, saving an average of two seconds per search during the testing phase. Place Search results will also appear automatically when Google’s technology predicts the user is looking for local information, but there will be a new link for Places on the left-hand panel of the standard search page to activate the local search feature.

There are more than 50 million locations in Google’s Place Search database, which places it high among the multitude of local information services provided by Foursquare, Yelp, Facebook, Gowalla and many others.

Website Magazine

It was then that I realised that I was looking at it all wrong. Most businesses like yours have a website already. Not much point teaching you how it could be better when you don’t have any traffic to test it on. A business needs to learn how to increase traffic first then they can improve their website.

So… in my course, I’m going to teach people how to get traffic, how to increase conversions then how to improve customer contact to complete the circle. I hope that this new approach will help you to increase your profits more quickly.

Traffic is the key to success online.

Don’t believe anyone who tells you otherwise. If you break it down to the bare essentials, you can have the best website in the world but if you have no traffic, you’re wasting your time. But, if you have loads of traffic, you can quickly test and improve your website to get sales.

If you can’t seem to get that traffic, give us a call on 07 3102 8312 and we’ll get it for you

If you can releate your product or service to what’s happening at the Commonwealth Games, you could bring yourself a flood of traffic. You can also use this with press releases.  Here’s some example titles:

• Our plumbers could fix the athlete’s toilets in the Commonwealth Games village.
• Sale on Athletic Skins just like our Commonwealth Games athletes wear.
• Cheap flights to the Commonwealth Games in India.
• Send a message to our Commonwealth Games athletes for only 2c a minute.

The possibilities are endless. Now some people might say I’m stretching the relationship a little bit but that’s advertising. When everyone’s eyes are focused on a topic, take advantage of it.

Haven’t you ever noticed that you never saw a car like your new one until you bought it? Now it seems like everyone is driving one!

You can use this technique everyday if you want or pick a theme for the month and work it into all of your marketing. If you’re using a blog, it will get indexed quickly so you can get your message out quicker meaning you can change with the current hot topics.

Good Luck!

These are bits of code that you can enter into the search engines to find websites on which you can post a comment and a link back to your own site. Some of the hardest places to get a backlink is on EDU or ORG sites but there is still some out there that you can dig up.

Here is an example of a code. You need to copy and paste it into Google as it is written. Replace the ADD YOUR KEYWORD with your own make keyword phrase.

In this case the code searches for .org blogs that allow you post a comment. Of course you can include your link in your signature for the comment so you get a link back.

site:.org inurl:blog “post a comment” -”comments closed” -”you
must be logged in” “ADD YOUR KEYWORD”

Different parts of the code mean different things to the search engines.

site: – must only have .com in site URL

“post a comment” – must have these words on web page

-”comments closed” – must NOT have comments closed on page

inurl – must have the word Blog in the URL e.g. dotcomaholic.com/blog/page.htm

There are heaps of different codes you can use. All you need to do is have a search through Google to find some. Once you have used the code to find some sites, go there, make a comment or build a profile and add your link when you do.

If you use Firefox as your browser, you can download SEOQuake which is a little plugin that brings up information about each search engine search result. It also allows you to click and order the results so that they highest PR sites show up first.

High PR sites are better to build links on than low PR sites.

Good luck finding new places to build links!

For many businesses, there is no better way to get to their clients yet for others it seems useless. It normally isn’t useless when I sit down with them and look at who they are trying to reach and what other internet based tools they could be using.

A website is only one tool that you can use to market yourself online. Email, social media, blogging, pay per click advertising and media advertising are some others.

It’s often the case that businesses who say the internet is a useless form of advertising for them just haven’t had good search engine rankings in keywords that bring traffic or they have poorly converting site. These sort of things can be quickly fixed so don’t let them cost you sales.

I have seen businesses from mechanics to architects to artists to commercial equipment hire companies benifit from a well ranked website. In fact, I’m yet to find a business that can’t increase it sales by being online.

To be honest, the businesses that seem to have the hardest time are the internet only businesses like people who sell info products etc online. I think this is mainly because they always try to compete with the whole world whereas a business has a defined geographic area that they want to show up in.

This gives a real world business a distinct advantage in the search engines. Not only can they localise their advertising but they can also take advantage of Google Places to show up on the local search map.

So why advertise your business online?

Because, in many cases,  you can target your perfect client better, its cheaper than many other forms of advertising, you can track it much better and you can direct your spending towards advertising that actually brings the people you want to sell to.

If you write an article for your website and then decide that you would like to also submit it to a range of article directories to build some backlinks, you should try to avoid using exactly the same article.

Google has no official duplicate content penalty but they do say:

Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar. Mostly, this is not deceptive in origin.

Duplicate content on a site is not grounds for action on that site unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results.

What we do know is that they often give the highest search engine rankings to the one they “find” first. If the article directory gets indexed before your site, you will get less recognition from Google than they do This isn’t good.

So how do you fix this problem?

The obvious way is to rewrite the article so that you submit a slightly different version to each site you add it to. I believe that around 30% different is the minimum amount of changes you need to apply for Google to see each as a different text.

The issue is that it takes heaps of time to rewrite an article 5 to 10 times!

Article Spinning Software

One way to get around this is to use an article spinner. Article spinning software basically speeds up the rewriting by finding synonyms for you to choose from. When you “spin” the article, the software randomly chooses one of the synonyms you choose and uses that instead of the original word.

It then outputs an original version of your article for you to save or copy and paste. Obviously you have to work your way through your original article and choose a lot of words but it is quite fast to do that using article spinning software.

You can also setup nested choices so that the software can choose not just replacement words but replacement sentences or paragraphs

There are a range of software around that do this but some are better than others. I prefer to use Best Spinner but there is some new web based products coming online presently.

I think that watching the video below will show you more effectively how it all works. The main to to remember is that every time that you press spin after you do the setup, you get a new article that you can then post to each different article directory or blog etc.

BTW if you would like this software, you can own it for only $7 to try it out. Yep, ablsolutely excellent value

Click here to try the best spinner on your articles.

I’m often asked the “If you were me, what would you do?” question about optimising a businesses site for a whole city or state. It’s a big question and most people won’t do what I tell them to do because it is a heap of work. That said, anything worth doing will take a heap of work, money or time.

So here’s what I would do:

1. Make a list of every suburb in the city.

2. Make a list of all the main keywords that you want to found for in each of those suburbs,

3. Combine the suburbs with the keywords e.g.

• dog training Mudgeeraba
• dog walking Mudgeeraba
• dog trainer Mudgeeraba
• dog walker Mudgeeraba
• dog training Southport
• dog walking Southport
• dog trainer Southport
• dog walker Southport, etc

4. Write a page for your site for each one of these keyword phrases using the phrase in the page name, page title, page headline and in the text as well.

5. Ensure that each page is at least 40% original from all the other pages you write.

6. Add the pages into your site.

It sounds so simple doesn’t it yet most people will never take this extra step.

When working my way through some audios from Ryan Deiss this week about running membership sites, I was listening to Tim speaking about his site and the things he does to build traffic.

He mentioned his videos so I thought I would have a look. Now you might not be a fan of guns but put that aside and watch the first couple of minutes.

Take a note of the way he lets you get into the video then introduces the fact sheets for the product he’s talking about to draw you back to the website (about 2.11 in)

This is not just a random mention.

You’ll note that Tim uses photos of the sheets etc to encourage you to go to the site. What a brilliant way to keep people interested in what you have to offer and get them onto your mailing list!

You’ll also notice the slide at the end of the video reinforcing the free downlaod and drawing you back to his website.

Another area that most people miss is the opportunity to put a link in the description of the video. If you look below the video player, you will see where Tim has done this quite effectively.

Fix your YouTube

So now, go back and have a look at your videos and decide whether maybe you could insert something similar into yours and get those extra visitors who find you through YouTube back to your website.

When small business start marketing themselves online, most believe that they’re playing on a level playing field. This is so far from the truth that it’s not funny. You’re not just competing with the guy down the road that sells a similar product. You’re competing, in some cases, with the whole world but you don’t know it.

Small Business Competition

Internet marketers from all round the world are competing for the traffic that you’re trying to get. You might think someone in England wouldn’t be interested in being found in your local area but what you don’t realise is that the local directory might not be owned by someone local. The websites advertising tourist attractions or accommodation might be based in India or North America.  Not only are they trying to get your traffic, they’re trying to get every local businesses traffic and then they’ll probably turn around and offer to sell those visitors to you.

Serious Internet marketers will compete in almost any niche market.  Because their business is 100% online, they can spend every waking minute working on traffic generation. Where you are proud of your 10 page site, they will build  a 100,000 page website to compete against you across a vast range of keyword searches.

Yes, I said 100,000 page website!

One of the key things that serious marketers do that small business don’t,  is set up a web of websites some of which are specifically designed to grab as much traffic as they can even if that means that Google burns them. This means that they get dropped from Google’s rankings. An Internet marketer may build 50 or more sites like this just to target your niche. They will be linked through a series of feeder sides to their main website, the one that you might see competing directly against you in the Google results. If a site does get burnt, they just build more to replace it.

This web of linked sites all direct traffic back to the main site which is protected. When I say protected, I mean that the site has everything done legally and properly so that it gives  Google no reason to drop it. All of the linked sites are set up across a range of servers all around the world, quite often under different names, so that there is no obvious link back to the owners of the protected site.

So now you can see why I say it’s an uneven playing field for small business online. It doesn’t mean you can’t get good rankings for organic traffic in Google and the other search engines. It does mean that you might like to think a little bigger and keep an eye on what the people around you are doing to steal the traffic from your small business.