Would you like a free page one listing on Google?

Is your website listed in the Google local search results?

For small businesses, especially those that rely heavily on local trading, it is important to ensure that your website is included in the Google Local Search results. Local Search offers a primary opportunity for your website to be found by potential customers, searching specifically for a local business. Local Search should be top of the list of priorities for any small business marketing strategy.

If you are not familiar with Local Search, try searching for “carpet cleaning tunbridge wells” in Google. You will see that ten local search results appear at the top of the page. Similar results are also available on Yahoo. Google are in the process of expanding their Local Search results from ten to hundreds of businesses. Instead of just plotting the first ten search results on the map, Google will soon be including hundreds of other businesses across the map using small red circles. This enhancement has already been rolled out in the USA.

Local Search offers a fantastic opportunity of securing a page one listing on Google and best of all it is free. If you are a local business without a Local Search listing, now is the time to get included!

Local Search offers page one exposure quickly.

Unlike organic search results which can take a long time to achieve a decent ranking, Local Search can provide you with a page one listing very quickly. You will need to register your business with Google Maps in order to get listed. Once your business has been accepted you will start to benefit from the major exposure to potential local customers immediately. As this service is completely free it offers a cheaper alternative to traditional local advertising methods.

Local Search offers detailed business listings.

Local Search listings allow you to include far more information about your business than standard search results. These detailed local listings make it easier for customers to choose your business for their needs.

A similar free Local Search listing is also available on Yahoo.

To learn more about Search Engine Promotion visit our main website or view our range of Search Engine Optimisation Articles on our Blog.

More and more people are beginning to understand that search engines are unable to recognise graphics, images and flash files contained on a web page. Text is the only element of a web page that Google and other search engines can reliably index. Therefore ‘text is king’ and plays a huge part in the relevance and ranking of search results.

However, if you are struggling to create web pages that contain unique content, do not be tempted to copy sections from other parts of your site, as search engines will recognise this as duplicate content. Even worse, do not be tempted to produce an exact copy of your website, hosted on a different domain, in the hope that this will increase your chances of achieving a high ranking.

Why does Google care about Duplicate Content?

Google and other search engines include a Duplicate Content clause in their editorial guidleines. This clause states that they will not list a web page or website that contains substantially the same content as another site. This is perfectly reasonable from Googles perspective, as there users would not be impressed with search results that simply produced a list of duplicated sites. Duplicate content occurs when two websites display identical or very similar content on any number of web pages. Duplicated sites are particularly prevalent in the MLM industry where typically a company will duplicate a website thousands of times for use by their individual distributors.

Does Google penalise sites with Duplicate Content?

Unless Google believes that the duplicate content has been created as a deliberate attempt to manipulate search engine rankings, it is unlikely that your site will be banned from the search results. However Google will only list one version of a web page or website. The version that is listed will normally be the version with the most authority in terms of link popularity. This tends to be the earliest version that was published.

The Google Webmaster Blog provides information on a range of methods webmasters can use to proactively address duplicate content issues. However, the best advice would be to keep your website free of duplicate content as far as possible.

To learn more about Web Page Optimisation visit our main website or view our range of Search Engine Optimisation Articles on our Blog.

An XML sitemap file that is resident on your server will help Google and other search engines to index your site more easily. This type of sitemap should not be confused with the more common static page type sitemap, which can be added to a website and viewed through a browser. This type of sitemap is designed to help the user navigate your site rather than the search engine.

It is important that you provide as many ways as possible for search engines to index your site and adding an XML Sitemap will help to improve your Website Promotion efforts.

Google has launched a new tool, which uses different ways to identify your web page URL’s and will automatically create an XML Sitemap file.

Called the Google Sitemap Generator, it uses your web server’s traffic, its log files, or the files found on the server to quickly find the page URLs on your site.

Google Webmaster Trend Analyst John Mueller explains “that while most Sitemap generators either crawl websites or list the files on a server, Google have created a different kind of Sitemap generator that uses several ways to find URLs on your website and then allows you to automatically create and maintain different kinds of Sitemap files”.

Once Google Sitemap Generator has collected the URLs, it can create the following Sitemap files for you:

• XML Sitemaps for Web Search according to the sitemaps.org standard

• Mobile Sitemaps for mobile-friendly websites

• Code Search Sitemaps for source code that you make available to users

According to Mueller “sending the URLs to the right Sitemap files is simple thanks to the web-based administration console. This console gives you access to various features that make administration a piece of cake while maintaining a high level of security by default”.

You can learn more about this new tool by reading John’s article in full on the Webmaster Central Blog.

Once Google has found your website it will return on a regular basis to search for new or updated content. The frequency of visits will depend on various factors, such the size of your website (measured in number of pages), your Google Page Rank score (Google will visit higher ranked sites more frequently) and how often your site is updated with new content.

When the Google robot visits your site what does it see?

The Google robot does not see web pages as you can see them in your browser. Google cannot see colours, graphics or images including Flash generated images and movies. The Google robot can only see text, which it will extract from your web page HTML code. It is important therefore that the HTML code of your web pages contains everything in the right place, so that the Google robot can find all the relevant information to save in their database.

A single web page has many elements that can be understood by the Google robot. The most important elements where Google will look for information includes your Title Tag, Description Tag, (this will be used as the basis for the description used by Google in the search results), Keywords Tag, Headline Tags, Image Tags, Link Text and of course the main body text. These elements must contain the keyword(s) you wish to target and must be in the right keyword density, in order to achieve high rankings on Google.

It is important to ensure that Google is able to navigate through all of your internal web pages.

It is important to ensure that the structure of your individual web pages are Google friendly. It is also important to ensure that Google is able to navigate through the entire structure of your website and is able to move from page to page. The internal link structure of your website is vitally important and your site should contain easy to follow text links to every page that you want Google to see.

If your website is poorly designed or if it does not link to all of your internal pages, then the Google robot will skip these pages. If your website has been designed in Flash or if you place most of your web page content in images, then the Google robot will be unable to see your content.

It is important to make it as easy as possible for the Google robot to index your web pages in order to achieve the best possible rankings.

To learn more about Web Page Optimisation visit our main website or view our range of Search Engine Optimisation Articles.

At long last I have decided to “bite the bullet” and enter the world of blogging with the launch of this blog, dedicated to providing Professional Seo tips and website promotion information.

It is my aim to provide high quality posts covering a wide range of online marketing topics such as keyword research, meta tags, search engine optimisation (SEO), link popularity, directory submissions, social bookmarking, banner advertising and much more. Obviously these posts will be built up over time.

Why not browse my blog now! If you are new to Website Promotion and internet marketing, or maybe a seasoned webmaster, you will find something to interest you. It is my intention to provide you with regular hot news topics together with informative and professional seo and internet marketing tips, that will help you to develop your website and make it a success.

You will already find a range of useful articles on my blog which will be added to on a regular basis.

Sign up to my RSS Feed or Email Subcription and receive automatic notification of the regular updates to this blog.